I wonder if this will have any effect on Reddit’s metrics? The blackout had almost no effect, and certainly no lasting effect. But this might.
Not that I care, though. Lemmy is active enough nowadays, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to continue growing now.
Reddit’s metrics are ad sales. And I think the impact here is going to be slower, and take longer.
Twitter’s fall has been faster because existing competitors like Facebook and Instagram can take some of their users, Mastadon takes another chunk, and Substack launched their Twitter clone Notes already. Not to mention Bluesky’s expanding public beta. If you liked Twitter and want that experience somewhere else, you’ve got good options.
Reddit has no real competitor. There’s stuff like Hacker News, but their community is small and extremely toxic. Nothing else comes close. Until there’s a true Reddit competitor, their demise will be slow and could be easily turned around.
You and I are of course on Lemmy. But lets be real, Lemmy isn’t a competitor to reddit. As I write this comment there are 3 users online in this community. And given how there’s already a huge amount of in-fighting and defederating amoung different Lemmy instances, this will never really take off.
Regular people don’t want to sign up for a service and only to have it suddenly become much less useful overnight because they failed some purity test they didn’t even know they were taking.
I’m mainly talking about metrics with more immediate impact, such as new posts and comments: https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
I know this won’t impact Reddit’s business line immediately, but it will eventually, and I’d be surprised if they weren’t paying attention.
Re: competition, I agree Lemmy isn’t going to absorb all of Reddit right away. But it might make a dent. Also, some Redditors might abandon Reddit in favor of other social networks, or even give up on this activity altogether.
There’s stuff like Hacker News, but their community is small and extremely toxic.
WTF? HN is one of the best communities. What exactly is “toxic” about it?
WTF? HN is one of the best communities. What exactly is “toxic” about it?
Their years long harrasment campaign against one of the main developers on OpenGL because she’s trans, and the project lead for AsahiLinux because he stood up for her come to mind. I’m interested in graphics stacks (because I’m bad at it myself) and you basically can’t discuss OpenGL there because they hate Alyssa Rosenzweig for existing.
There’s a reason why lots of people block them entirely and that HN doesn’t respect those blocks basically tells you all you need to know.
Re: competition, I agree Lemmy isn’t going to absorb all of Reddit right away. But it might make a dent.
This won’t happen. As soon as any one instance of Lemmy grows other instances will just defederate it (like so many Mastodon instances wanted to do with mastodon.social) and kill whatever growth there is.
I don’t mind that Lemmy will remain small. It’s fine by me, but anyone expecting Reddit to ever notice Lemmy is kidding themselves.