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Well, user traffic has returned to normal, but we also have to consider that it’s just traffic. Some of that traffic is also a bunch of people talking about Reddit, protesting, etc.
That being said, I don’t think Reddit will die from this, but it doesn’t need to in order for the Fediverse to succeed. All it needs is to push enough people onto federated services and kickstart it, just like Twitter did with Mastodon. We aren’t going to all switch overnight, it will be a gradual process.
Honestly, I haven’t seen as big of a push for redditors to move elsewhere.
It feels like Plan A was to protest the changes and when that plan didn’t work, there was no Plan B in sight. I saw someone suggesting that perhaps, at this point, it would be best to consider moving to another platform but the reality is that outside ModCoord I didn’t really see a coordinated effort to do that.
While everyone is likely to suffer in the long-run in terms of the quality of content, outside of losing access to some very cool apps the biggest victims of the whole ordeal have been the mods actually standing up to Reddit’s tyrannical behavior.
Reddit is beyond redemption, but for many people reddit is home and the plan now seems to be to comply with the orders and try to keep what semblance of normalcy and power each mod has rather than realizing that the point at which their votes, voices and free labor matter is over.
My own reddit traffic has dropped right off since I discovered Lemmy. For now this place has the feel of the early internet: democratic, distributed and friendly. It really makes clear how repugnant Reddit has become.
It really does have that feel!
As someone who was around back then, being in the fediverse actually makes me feel young and lighthearted again.
I hadn’t fully realised quite how soul-sucking the corporate web 2.0 was until now I’m completely off it.
Same for me. Lemmy still has some rough edges but even the apps that are available now are really good as they are. Improvements are happening at amazing speed. What we currently have is quite good in my opinion and this is the worst it will ever be, as we’ll have improvements on top of improvements, most apps and lemmy itself are open source, I believe that soon, instead of us feature pairing with reddit, it will be them trying to chase us up.
What’s nice to me is that I’m not replying to this on Lemmy. I’m able to use my preferred UI (Kbin) and interact with the same content as everyone else, connecting more people together. It makes it feel more collaborative.
Me: Here, take my upvote!
Kbin: What am I supposed to do with this??
(But seriously, you’re right, it’s awesome)
Upvoting on Mlem on Lemmy.world!
I noticed the same thing about Mastodon vs Twitter. When I visited Twitter I would come away angry. (This was true both pre and post Elon.) When I visited Mastodon I would come away happier and with some interesting ideas. The tone is totally different. I chalk it up to the absence of engagement-maximizing algorithms, which tend to select for toxicity because that’s what gets people to spend the most time on the site.
This is a good point. Because even websites which replaced others, oftentimes the older one is still there. Like even Digg still alive after Reddit got more popular. Some people say Tumblr’s dead but its really not especially for specific interests like games. The success of you isnt based on the failure of someone else, and its important to remember and not become cross because reddit still has users. Especially its been only like 10 days and a lot have already gone onto other sites.
The success of you isnt based on the failure of someone else
Totally agree. Also, that’s just a great wholesome motto for life in general tbh hahah.
We should focus on building the community we want and people will come.
I like to put this simply as, “Put your energy where you want it to go”
Reddit has given us an incredible head start with the way they handled the API changes.
The people who understood what that meant and decided not to stand for it are the people who came here first. Should be an excellent foundation.
Beautifully said.
Ok, those places are still “alive”, but have you actually gone to them lately? Digg is literally run by an ad bot who creates 99% of posts. You have to search down the list for a post that actually has comments. And of the comments that exist, it looks like a Facebook conversation with a few people, one of which is likely a bot.
Users are the content creators, whether through posts or comments. Pissing off a large portion of them will just leave the ones that don’t care about content, they just want something…anything…delivered to them endlessly. If the good users abandon the site, then Reddit will slowly turn into Digg, a link aggregator run by bots serving SEO content to users that contribute nothing more than “nice picture!”. And that’s really sad when you consider what the place once was…just like it’s sad to see Digg now.
I’m not angry with Reddit because it will survive. I’m angry with Reddit because of what I’ve lost at the hands of management that turned their backs on me. While their are alternatives that cover some of what I’ve lost, I know I’ll never get back some of it.
Digg didn’t “die” from a single change. It bled users over the course of multiple changes. The size of the waves was based on how many users were affected. The big wave was when they redesigned the whole interface.
I don’t think Reddit is done changing, so we’ll see where things go. I know that eventually they’ll kill off the old interface, and that will lose a large portion of users as well.
If some of the 3rd party app devs convert their reddit apps to fediverse apps, that will really get the ball rolling
Sync is coming!
Me too. I used relay for years. It was my favorite of the apps.
I know. I really want Relay.
Me too. I used relay for years, it was my favorite of all the apps
Exactly. People also forget that reddit didn’t spring up overnight, and the great digg migration wasn’t a one-time en masse thing either. It was a slow bleed for 2~3 years even after digg’s v4 redesign. Those that stayed on digg turned it into one huge circlejerk about how reddit sucked and it would never take off, and people would end up back on digg eventually … EXACTLY like what is happening on reddit now. It will take time for Feddi to grow, but it will as long as dedicated users stick around and create interesting content
Indeed. These days on any social media, there’s a critical threshold for user generated content creation. Different for every platform and as social media expectations change over time. I think the fediverse has a real shot at sustainable growth thanks to Twitter and Reddit enshittification. Being able to see new content daily or even hourly as a measure of critical mass seems to have been reached here and it’s beautiful to witness!
Lemmy has been around for 4 years compared to Reddit’s 18. Compare Lemmy’s current state to 2009 Reddit for a somewhat more accurate look.
A lot of that traffic is people googling something and finding the answer on reddit and then getting on with their lives. it will probably be that way for quite a while.
I hate that I’m still adding to Reddit traffic but every once and a while I still do (search item) + Reddit because it’s still better than just googling something and getting 100 terrible SEO articles about a topic.
For example. I wanted to look for DIY dog toys. I got hundreds of results with crappy clickbait, and ridden websites. Did +Reddit and got some great results.
Once I can do +Lemmy and get decent results my traffic will fall hard… I guess I gotta be part of that change, offering threads of my own with information I know. But it just seems homeless some days.
I’m only using Reddit to check in on things until the 1st.
Don’t know about you all, but I will continue to check reddit until Sync for reddit stops working. On July 1st, if it’s no longer working, reddit is gone.
I used to use reddit many times a day and now at most once a day… I use https://old.reddit.com
Just patch it with revanced to work for the foreseeable future. That’s what I’m planning to do.
How would that make it work after the loss of API access?
You provide your own API access key, so instead of using the developer’s API access key you use your own, which as long as you stay under the request limit lets you use it with free tier. You still lose all access to NSFW content though.
Oh, that’s a pretty cool workaround. Thanks!
I deleted everything and I’ve not been on for weeks now. Good riddance!
Check that they didn’t un-delete your comment. It happends to me and I had to delete everything again 🤬
I’ve manually edited a bunch of my comments. I haven’t deleted them yet. I hope it’s more permanent.
I’m very curious how this is going to play out. This mostly concerns the core userbase, as in mods and the people who are the most active on Reddit. If a significant portion of those wanders off (or is straight up banned), I could see the platform desolate slowly and painfully.
I mean, they lose content and moderation. I would be very surprised if they can replace the volunteers and still maintain the quality of the moderation.
My guess is that Reddit loses about 5% of traffic by shutting off API access. It isn’t great, but it isn’t bad either. Spez treats it as a win.
Mod burnout becomes a big thing in a year, with many major subs starting to lock threads and blanket ban harder as the more experienced mods leave and the new set isn’t really prepared to handle the workload. A lot of the best of this new block are going to be alt-right, and you’ll slowly see subs become more friendly to alt-right views. Mod abuse gets a lot worse.
As the entire site becomes r/conservative, expect the fights that happened with r/The_Donald to be worse and make the site more unusable. This will probably drive off more users as “everything is political”. Reddit won’t keep its promises on building better mod toolkits, and a lot of LBGT groups leave for other sites.
As the website starts to see a shrinking user base and still hasn’t made money, either Spez or a successor goes full Twitter Musk and cuts staff to the bone in hopes of trying to keep some revenue.
Good observation about how enshittification tends to come with a drift to the far right. At the moment one of the refreshing things about Lemmy is that you can have a discussion in peace without all those people piling in. I hope this can last.
Enshitification doesn’t happen over night. It might be months before the needle moves. Platforms die because users seek alternatives, but everyone has a different threshold for when they decide to jump ship. Most people just are not paying attention and will only leave when they experience the shit of Enshitification first hand.
And that hasn’t happened on Reddit. Yet…
July 1st will probably bring another bunch of people across.
I left reddit when the subs blacked out. My wife is a RIF user, but has continued to use it. She’s said she’s leaving when RIF stops working. I bet a bunch of users will leave when “reddit” stops working.
Twitter had to kill 3rd party apps twice in order for the mastodon migration to happen. First they did it in 2011 and then again after Elon bought the company.
I imagine a true Twitter > Mastodon level migration away from Reddit won’t happen yet. But once they inevitably dump old.reddit.com, it might.
I also think reddit is still the overwhelmingly greatest source of human-written information and discussion on the planet. That will take a while to replace.
I have tried googling for things without adding on “reddit” these past two weeks, and it’s… not good.
Try a different search engine, like kagi. It’s paid but it’s worth it.
Idk their example search for “python exceptions” has the #14 link for Ruby exceptions, #15 for C++ exceptions, #17 for Make exceptions (no mention of the word python in this one).
It seems like many of the links at this point have zero mentions of the word “python” at all. Why are people paying for this?
Idk why you’re seeing that, I’m not.
Anyway their focus is quality over quantity. The first 13 results should have given you whatever you needed. There’s always junk at the end of searches.
I did not consider that, thanks for the perspective.
Oh, man, I’m sure the traffic is up… It took me FOREVER to delete all my comments and posts across 18 accounts. That 5 second lockout on API calls is a total bitch!
I also wonder how much of the traffic is people archiving Reddit. I’ve been running it almost continuously for about a week.
Not to mention all the journalists scouring the site for stories and onlookers checking out the dumpster fire.
I will believe it when I see it. Keep drifting racers
I’m not surprised, but you can’t forget that a lot of people on reddit don’t really post or comment a lot. I myself was one of them, I’m way more active here than I ever was on reddit though.
Same.
I feel like the people here are way more open for discourse, which makes it a lot less scary to voice your thoughts.
Still haven’t posted anything though, I’m not a conversation starter, but rather a participant. XD
The reddit hivemind would do that to you
Yeah but you’re also also not contributing to the horde of data that they can sell to the AI companies. So your account isn’t useful to them.
They are boasting now but they know they’re done for.
I can’t imagine this stock price is going to be anyway near what they wanted to be when the IPO comes in. Assuming it now happens at all.
On Reddit if you post anything opposite the hive mind it goes off the rails. If they are talking turkey for thanksgiving and you post ham, the reaction was that as if you murdered their only child.
Here people just ask questions and converse like they normally would in the real world.
The boar’s head in hand bring I,
Bedeck’d with bays and rosemary.
I pray you, my masters, be merry
Quot estis in convivio
Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes DominoI credit my 12 years on reddit with my ability to create airtight defenses towards anything in my daily life.
I’m going to continue using rif until it shuts down at the end of the month but there’s no way I’m downloading their shitty app. I have a feeling a lot of people are in the same boat.
Pretty much same for me tbh. I’ll have to see when it actually happens. But I’ve been in Lemmy since this all started. And it’s clear the content has grown here substantially. To the point where I can scroll and scroll like in reddit. It wasn’t like that the first time I got here.
Same here. I’ll check out the Fediverse first then go to reddit if I still need to waste time. No point in quitting early. The protests clearly failed so might as well just accept that.
Hopefully their numbers drop dramatically next month.
Indeed
Similar for me, but with Relay. I absolutely refuse to use the shitshow that is the official app. And honestly, I’ve been actively choosing to use Reddit less and less.
Yeah. I’m on vacation anyways, with me minimal cell coverage, so it’s been pretty easy, but I’ve popped in a handful of times. but, there’s no way I’m installing their client. None. I don’t have Facebook, or Twitters clients, I’ll be damned if Im installing reddit.
Enjoying the last week of Apollo, greatest app of all time!
RIP Apollo :-( Reddit died for me when they killed it
Sync >> Apollo
Sync isn’t on iOS, is it?
The people who continue to say “I’m just on Reddit because ___ but as soon as ___ I’m out” were\are honestly part of the problem.
I’ve reduced my usage to ~3 subreddits also specifically to do with living in Japan. There’s just nowhere else with this info or discussion and people are just not presently interested in moving over here. I mostly lurk (between two reddit accounts (I nuked my online presence because of a stalker and took most of a year off all social media), I had something like 13 years on reddit and maybe 20 submissions), so it’s not like I’m producing alluring content on those places.
I also don’t use facebook, meta, instagram, twitter, tiktok, etc. which further reduces any interaction I might have.
EDIT: also having to deal with government, legal, visa, etc. things are not fun when little to none is in English (and that which is in English is out-of-date) and a lot of the characters and grammar are not in the standard set. Living and working in another language and culture is also not without its own difficulties and having people to talk to is important. For further info on just the language, 2 sets of characters containing roughly ~50 symbols each are required (not hard), and then you need at least ~2100 Sino-Japanese characters (kanji) just to be able to read a newspaper. That doesn’t include a lot of jargon used in legal, medical, and other things. I wonder if my downvoter /u/Veraxus has ever had deal with anything like this. I can speak conversational Japanese, know a lot of IT jargon, and can somewhat read Japanese and it’s still very difficult at times.
and a lot of the characters and grammar are not in the standard set
What do you mean by “standard set”?
Good question! “Standard” In terms of characters refer to the 常用漢字 which are the -er- “basic” 2160ish (I will try to remember to update with the exact figure; it was expanded in the last 5-10 years) kanji that are the basis to be considered “literate”.
To look at it a bit different for Americans (which is the only basis I have; other counties even within English differ), one could think of reading at an X-grade level. Many publications can be around 5th-grade level (though this comes with its own can of worms).
In English, we have 26 letters of the alphabet. I guess we could call it 52 differentiation lower- and upper-case. We could also double that to 104 for cursive. If we’re feeling generous, we could add a couple of shorthand signs (such as an & that is more shorthand).
Now, for japanese, in addition to those 104ish, you now have to learn at least 2160ish Chinese characters (and, if you’re japanese, all the latin alphabet as described above, but this isn’t applicable to those of use whom are native English speakers looking to learn Japanese).
And, until here, we’re only talking about the squiggles used to represent sounds. After this, we actually get into things like vocabulary and grammar and registers ( think something like manners.
It’s cool man. I’m still gonna use reddit for a few niche communities too. Only to lurk though.
The important thing is continuing to build things over here, and hopefully it won’t be too long until we can start some Japanese communities, along with everything else people are missing.
I don’t think most people understand the protests. I had to explain it to two people who use the platform.
The amount of content I’m seeing over here these days lets me know that despite whatever the numbers tell you reddit lost sizeable amounts of community members and content producers. What these statistics hide is the massive dent in reddits free labor pool of mods that are likely done with the platform.
Lemmy has beyond exceeded my expectations of quantity and quality of content. I will pass by reddit occasionally but its become clear that the Fediverse concept can actually work. It has issues that need to be solved, but the minds behind it are very smart and motivated to find a way to make it keep working. The rate of PR’s getting merged into lemmy 0.18 are wild.
Yea, same. Really liking the content and friendly atmosphere over here. Looking increasingly viable as a replacement, especially if you believe in quality over quantity.
The rate of PR’s getting merged into lemmy 0.18 are wild.
don’t piss of open-source developers
Yeah I’d much rather be here watching it grow than on Reddit watching it die
Very good way to put.
A ton of current content is produced by spam bots. As I understand it, the new changes will also affect these bots, so curious to see what will happen.
Somehow I doubt the actual spambots have applied for a developer API key. They’ll be fine.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they had, actually.
Still, a spam bot can just use the free license - they won’t make nearly as much api requests as a proper app would.
The ones that make 60 posts per account per hour are easy to detect no matter how they post.
That’s fine. I’m sure the passive masses will show back up.
The real problem is content creators and such are or have already left. And well, I’m here, as are all of you!
Passive consumers are a massive force, and will go where the wind blows. But they actively do little. And, about them… Who cares?
I don’t think the content creators really left significantly, but the sentiment to users has certainly changed. This was never going to kill reddit, and was never gonna be a long term problem for them - for that the former mod and activist for r/jailbait was correct. But it creates negative user sentiment, which will make it easier to move people, or even make people just less excited to use the platform in the long term.
I don’t think this applies to just people who support the protest either. People who just wanted to see their content and got mad at mods for shutting down subs now have more negative sentiment to the moderators and the users who may or may not support the protests.
This is a W in my books, as I never liked corporate ownership of people having conversations, which is expressly Reddit’s sole product. Maybe a few hundred people will use the site less this week than last. Maybe an additional few hundred come the API changes, but the next controversy Reddit has will move more. And it’ll snowball, just like Twitter’s seen, and the content will change to reflect the worst who decide to stay and support reddit through it all.
But it creates negative user sentiment, which will make it easier to move people, or even make people just less excited to use the platform in the long term.
To add, it’s not nothing that lemmy and kbin have grown as much as they have. This has introduced many to the concept of the fediverse at all, or at least to those two names, and they’re more likely to switch after they’ve heard about it a couple times, or after it grows a bit more, or once reddit pisses them off even by just some toxic mod doing dumb shit and making them say “fuck this site, I’m going to that alternative I heard about.”
I guess what I’m getting at is this is effective marketing even if we don’t make the sale today. Like Hank during Grillstraveganza, you provide quality information and let the customer make up their own mind, and your sales will come in at the end of the month. We don’t need all those fancy Jo-Jack tricks to make an immediate sale, we can bide our time like Hank.
This is expected but I think we’ll see be seeing more “lower quality” submissions.
