I guess it’s self explanatory but I keep seeing all this stuff about how everyone is moving from Reddit to lemmy and I’m wondering if anyone knows if that’s really what’s happening. If you have numbers that’s even better.
Thanks!
It depends on what you mean by “mass exodus”.
There has been a mass exodus, in the sense that a mass of people have exited the site and moved elsewhere in a very short period of time. There has not been one, in the sense that the majority of users have left the site.
I get that the people most affected by changes may want to feel like literally everyone and their dog pulled up stakes to follow them. That they’d want that sense of solidarity, and the feeling that they’re giving a proper “Fuck you” to the people that ruined their good time. And I get that people who are just exploring new spaces want to feel like they’re choosing the “winning” side.
But that isn’t the way these things work.
Habits are sticky. Familiar spaces are sticky. Most people do not like change, and will coats to momentum for as long as that momentum exists. They’re not going to migrate until Reddit is completely crumbling.
And maybe we don’t want them to.
This space is not ready for 50 million people. The moderation tools aren’t there yet. The infrastructure to keep them from just jumping on a single server isn’t there yet. The tools and documentation to help people easily set up new instances are still new and being stress tested.
The goal of killing a billion dollar company, or three of them even, isn’t within reach. That’s not a thing that happens overnight. But this is the ground work for taking on that task.
The first thing people need before they can even consider leaving is a viable alternative, and that’s what we’re making here by being active, and interesting.
Well said, thank you.
As someone who is still on reddit and other mainstream sites as well as fediverse, here are my impressions.
There is definitely a frustration around the enshitefication of most of the major platforms, which is causing users to seek out alternatives to these sites. A lot of this has translated into increased traffic and membership on fediverse sites like Lemmy and Mastodon, but the reality is the situation still hasn’t gotten bad enough for most general users to abandon the platforms entirely, or they stick around because despite everything, they are still the platforms with the most reach, and are still easy to use for most users.
Mastodon seems to have waves of activity based on the latest major fuckup by Elon Musk, but because of the learning curb and the differences in how Mastodon works, combined with the lack of user activity compared to twitter, most users don’t stick around. Meanwhile, Bluesky is advertising itself as twitter pre enshitefication, and Threads is promising a userbase comparable to twitter without it being ran by Musk, which to a more casual person may seems more appealing. Fediverse is more appealing to people like you and me because we’re nerds. Like we are interested in the technology, and want to dive into it to create the web experience we want. That’s not going to appeal to the average user though.
There are weeks where I spend most of my time online on kbin and mastodon, and if I go by word and news posted, it would seem like reddit and twitter are on their final ropes, everyone is rushing to the fediverse, and we are about to enter another wild west period of the internet. But then I go back to reddit, and most of the communities I was apart of still seem as active as they have ever been. Most people I followed on twitter still post regularly with similar amounts of likes, retweets and comments, and most content creators will still point people towards these platforms for further engagement.
One space I have seen a major shift in is the LGBTQ community. There is definitely a diminishing of activity on major platforms mostly because the recent enshitefications have made these platforms more hostile places. Fediverse is a popular alternative for these communities, which is probably why you see a large amount of queer users within the fediverse. A lot of tech communities have also flocked to the fediverse and other communities because these spaces attract a lot of tech savy nerds, and are a great place to find fellow techies who know what you’re talking about.
Overall, There is definitely a shift in how people use the internet and how they interact in Social media. The echochambers within the fediverse though would make it seem like it is bigger than it actually is. I would say we are seeing the dawn of the expansion of the internet, where instead of everything being centralized on 4 or 5 major sites, there will be a number of smaller sites that host their own communities. It probably won’t be anywhere near as decentralized as the pre youtube and facebook era of the internet, but you’ll at least have other places to go to when you get sick of a site, but still want to find like minded people to discuss your interests with.
My opinion is that if you give a shit about how and where you spend your time, you will not support a platform run by and inhabited by dickheads.
Vote with your feet, or thumbs in this case.
I wouldn’t call it a mass exodus, it’s more like a slow and gradual exodus that has started and will keep on happening as Reddit will continue to burn itself down
Not a mass exodus. Call it a brain drain, if you will. The churn includes those who posted or were moderators. Since those who stayed are directly or indirectly supporting practices that most of us find unacceptable, Reddit will probably forever have that sour taste. It will gradually turn into a pale reminder of what it once was, and it will lose its spark. The sheer volume, quality, and length of posts in the Fediverse is indicative of new user profiles. I am so glad I took the plunge!
Not a mass exodus. Call it a brain drain, if you will. The churn includes those who posted or were moderators.
That’s key, it’s quality over quantity. Those who put a lot into Reddit were also going to be those disproportionately hit by the API changes. Enough of them make the jump and it degrades the quality of Reddit and his a big effect on Lemmy and the alternatives. By the next time Reddit messes up, and they will, the next batch of escapees will find a much more fleshed out set of alternatives, which will make leaving there and staying here easier. Rinse, wash and repeat.
We’ll never get the absolute numbers Reddit has but that’s the kind of aim of a corporate entity that wants to grab as many eyeballs as possible so they can mine the data and serve ads. That’s not what the Fediverse is about. All it really needs is the critical mass of people to make it viable and I think we’re already there.
By the next time Reddit messes up, and they will, the next batch of escapees will find a much more fleshed out set of alternatives, which will make leaving there and staying here easier. Rinse, wash and repeat.
I don’t think that even matters from a business point of view. Even if people aren’t leaving, the problem is that Reddit is not a place new people see as valuable after all the bad press. If they don’t grow, they fail.
Much better choice of words - and as the intelligent conversation and content creation shifts services, eventually there will be a tipping point.
No, it’s not a mass exodus.
Doesn’t matter if it’s a mass exodus. If we want to use that word: It’s not like all of Egypt left Egypt because of the Pharaoh…this is still a good place to be in. Away from the pettiness I see in the main media.
I don’t care I like it here, fuck that place
My sentiment exactly
Reddit has been dying for a while.
Subreddits like AskScience, that it was famous for, are now shells of what they were because the real scientists who put serious time into that subreddit decided they were done wasting that time. This situation is at least a year old, it predates the protest.
You can see this same dynamic across the site. Places that were once vibrant are slowing down, the flood of posts becoming a trickle. Bots are making most of the posts on big subs. Smaller subs that used to hop with human posts are where you can see the truth. It’s not normal for a sub with 500k subscribers to see 10 posts in a week. You see that more often, now.
The truth is that Reddit was always small potatoes. It feels like a big deal when you’re there, but it’s not. The real user numbers are on TikTok, and Instagram, who each have up to a billion users depending on where you get a number. Reddit is barely there, as social media rankings go. There are people with more views on a YouTube video than Reddit has users. Reddit is an also-ran social media site. It’s really not a competitor. It’s just easy to steal from, because text.
Reddit has long had a bad reputation as a shitty, toxic place. Habitual Redditors don’t know this, not really, you have to talk to outsiders. People aren’t that interested in coming to Reddit, they just want answers to their Google searches. It’s not a recipe for growth.
Now the true power users, who provide those answers, are moving away from both Reddit and Google, speaking of a company who best watch its step. A lot of people are starting to talk about Google search the way they talked about Reddit search, which never did get good.
Reddit doesn’t have that far to fall, is what I’m saying. There isn’t a mass exodus, though. You’re seeing a late spasm from a steady tide that has been going out for years. 10 years is a looooong fuckin time for a social platform to be around, they start to rot after the first or second year. Reddit has been rotten for some time.
I see a lot of people, here, and elsewhere, trying to act dismissive about the protests, or about how important the moderators were, but the site’s entire business model depended on hundreds, even thousands of people doing a ton of real labor for absolutely free. If they’ve decided to take an “everyone’s replaceable” attitude and treat volunteers like employees, they’ll pay. It’ll be their IPO sagging down to a couple dollars as they limp to bankruptcy, or purchase, but they’ll pay. I swear I’ll have to buy a couple shares as a collectible.
I’m putting it down as yet another well-earned reminder that you have no business building anything that matters to you on a platform that other people own, it is worth the five minutes a day that it takes to post on it, and no more.
Do not make a job of it, ever, unless that job pays you and pays you so well that people think that you’re really a stripper and your job title is just a cover story. “Social Media Manager”, gotta be code for OF, bro.
That’s how much money you should be making doing labor for a multimillion-dollar corporation. It was fuckin Conde Nast for a hot minute. If the boss can just take your mod and your community away, then you only ever worked there, for free. You were never building a community, you were building their property, for free. You have to stop doing that, and you have to stop presenting it as a virtuous act, unless some fundamental things change.
If you’re going to put a lot of work in for your own reasons, then you owe it to yourself to do it under your own control, or not at all.
I see an opportunity on the Fediverse to start from the old model of internetting and jump off to something new that just looks old, where it makes sense to put that work in, but for now it is what it is.
Reddit still lives, like Theoden cobwebbed in his throne, but nobody will come and banish Wormtongue. It’s still gonna take years for that old man to die.
Fuckin Yahoo isn’t anywhere close to dead. Neither is Digg. Well, maybe Digg.
The thing we North Americans are always a bit too arrogant about is if Reddit somehow gets big in India, or Brazil, then they don’t need us, and we’ll never know because we don’t speak the language. So it’s gonna take time for Reddit to fuck that up, they got options.
But don’t be too dismissive about the idea of “mass exodus”. Digg lost most of its userbase, literally overnight, and it was because of shitty ads. If the only app you can use now is the app that sucks and serves lots of shitty ads in your face, that will do it. People aren’t that habitual. It is very, very easy to leave a social site.
I quit TikTok over one shitty post that was my last straw, you just delete the app and forget about it. Yet TikTok is social media heroin. Reddit is a bunch of dudes yelling about shit that isn’t worth yelling about. It is much easier to quit. The phone app era means once you delete, it’s gone, and it helps to break the cycle. It can and probably will happen, 90% of the remaining users will drop it like it’s covered in bedbugs, they just have to stick huge unskippable ads in everyone’s face, and they’re fucked.
I just don’t think that is going to make the splash you’d expect.
But no, no mass exodus, not yet. I’d keep the popcorn bowl close by if I were you, though. I will not put it past them to turn an IPO into a fail state.
Not sure what subs you visit but this is not at all representative of my experience. Subs are as busy as they’ve ever been, so much so I hardly bother commenting to just disappear into the noise.
I think the idea of all the content as their property is what’s fucked up to begin with. Legally, now, that would arguably be the case, but that shouldn’t be the case. It’s a body of knowledge constructed by millions of people and the legal system’s attitude should be that Reddit the company can fuck off if they just want to exploit it. Their role is to facilitate and foster that platform, not to seek the biggest payday that can get out of it. Same as the many people running Lemmy instances now. Law’s basis is in benefit to humanity and what’s happening with these corporate social media platforms does not benefit humanity.
Mass exodus?
Nope.
Howevir, Lemmy has reached the critical mass of users and is usable. In parallel some active users left reddit, and many sub reddits relies on a handful of active users who post and comment, even one of them leaving here is impacting the life of these subs
Since I’m forced to use the official app, the subs I mod are going to shit. The hidden tools and cluttered interface impose a real challenge to properly investigate reported posts and users.
So now I just do the bare bare minimum and basically flip a coin when wondering to remove stuff. And boy oh boy it already shows.
Lemmy has exploded in popularity over the last few weeks, that is the mass exodus that most people are talking about.
It currently feels like a big discord where we might actually get to know the names of some people we interact with - in 12 years on Reddit I don’t think I ever remembered a particular person besides maybe a couple hyper posting mods.
That was the joy of forums back in the day.
If lemmy makes the icons a bit bigger it’ll really be a throwback. It’s easier to remember icons than it is names.
I don’t see how Lemmy is any different than Reddit in this situation though. Is it simply hecause it is smaller that you think people will get to know each other more?
I have fond memories of being part of a car forum years back and actually meeting some of the guys from that community. We had garage days where we’d meet up at one of the people’s houses amd work on our cars there. We’d have a c4uise night and then hit up a local restaurant. It really helped foster a community spirit.
That was an impossibility on Reddit.
I unfortunately don’t think that would be feasible on Lemmy either.
You’re probably right but I’m banking on instances providing a more neighbourly experience since Local is still mainly for the people who have accounts with that instance.
I’m excited for us all to be real people again
I miss forums so much. I was part of one for probably 10 years that only had a couple dozen regular posters (with a couple thousand members in total). We all knew each other. I even got invited to one guy’s wedding. Another guy lived semi-close to me and went over to his house a couple times and met his wife and kids. These mega sites we have now don’t have that kind of community.
Maybe it’s because I was on RIF that I didn’t make these icon connections
That said it’s going to be like 10000 active users vs reddits millions so people will bump into each other more often.
Also man how disheartening was it when you had a good response to a good AskReddit but you were reply number 75,000 and you knew no one would ever see it?
I literally just came across your post on Hot and thought hey I recognize that name so maybe names will work.
Not me. I think even on Lemmy, my neurodivergent brain will have forgotten your name by the time I’m done writing this comment. Farewell, @[email protected]: every one of the five seconds I knew you was a goddamn honor.
Oh and if people are also going elsewhere, where else are people going? (ie not lemmy)
If not lemmy, they are probably going to Mastodon, as it is an open source Twitter alternative.
That makes sense. Thanks!
Some are going to Tildes, although they remain invite only
Oh I hadn’t heard of Tildes. I’ll have to poke around and see what it’s all about. Thanks!
There’s kbin, which is similar to lemmy, but not the same. They’ve picked up a decent number of users.
There’s others too, but none that have really boomed the way lemmy and kbin have.
Fwiw, if you go to most of the more casual subs, particularly the meme/image based ones, probably won’t notice the lost users from reddit because most of those were already swamped with reposts via bots and karma whores. But if you were into the useful side of reddit, there’s a difference in quality and tone. A shit ton of the exodus was not only power users, but mods.
As much shit as mods get, they really are what keeps any forum from devolving into chaos and stupidity. It doesn’t matter how “power mad” people think they are, what matters is that they put the time in to keep a given forum in a reliable state. The reliability is what left with the exodus.
Moderating a forum is a skill, not an inborn talent. It takes time to develop, and by the time the mods lost from there are replaced, and they get up to speed, it’s months at least before they can start rebuilding the culture of a given forum. Even an experienced mod can take weeks to months to adapt to the culture of a given forum, assuming they don’t make the mistake of trying to force a change.
Reddit straight up killed a lot of tools as well. The bot defense bot is essentially dead. That isn’t something that can be replaced in the time the folks running it have given before they pull the plug all the way. Toolbox is alive, but lost the lead developer, and if it goes, moderating there becomes a major pain in the ass. I still keep an eye on a small handful of subs that aren’t duplicated in some form elsewhere, via things like geddit and stealth, that are having major bot issues, and they aren’t really mainstream. I can’t imagine what the big subs are like in that regard now.
Reddit isn’t going to “die”, not soon. But, as often has been said when this comes up, the reddit we knew and loved is already dead. It’s gone, and not coming back.
If people say lemmy, I just mentally include kbin. Because by and large they don’t realise people on kbin are reading and replying to their comments and probably don’t realise it’s not all just lemmy. It’s just see lemmy as threadiverse for most purposes.
I doubt a “mass exodus”, most people probably stayed and it will take time before there’s a mass exodus from the platform. As apparent as it is to many of us that Reddit has gone to shit, for the vast majority of users, they just saw it as another meme-able moment, just another one of those reddit dramas that flares up and dies down eventually in time fort he next trend to hit.
For them though, maybe it’s died down already and it’s back to business as usual, maybe not, but the casual users aren’t going to see the true effects for some time I think. As a lack of moderation, a lack of content, an increase in bots, spam, and extremism start to take hold on the platform, users will start to realize that something is not quite right, it’s not the same reddit it used to be. They’ll start to get an inkling of what we’ve already seen and maybe at that point they’ll start branching out to Lemmy or some other platform. This may cause Reddit, the company, to start acting out in desperation to try to keep users from leaving and/or protect its potential profits, which may in turn cause a feedback loop wherein more users leave and Reddit gets stupider and stupider (similar to what we’re currently seeing with Twitter). It’ll be awhile before there’s a true mass exodus from the site.
I’m not catholic so technically
