Yeah. I don’t expect Reddit to necessarily collapse immediately, or Lemmy to replace Reddit for all Reddit users. I’m just happy if Lemmy becomes at least a medium-sized social network. That means that it would have moved from a niche platform into a large enough ecosystem to sustain itself, and become a viable alternative to Reddit, like you said.
With a huge platform like Reddit, the impact of the current events might not be instantly obvious. But with everything going on recently with Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Lemmy, and even Threads, I think it’s clear that there’s some kind of transformation of the social media landscape going on. But how long it will take, and what the end result will look like, is anybody’s guess. Maybe it’s the fall of the old giants and a rise of new, more democratic platforms. Maybe the giants keep standing, but significantly weakened, with a bunch of new, smaller, more open platforms becoming real alternatives. Or maybe it’s something else.
Be it as it may, I’m glad that the status quo is being shaken up a bit.
I’d be happy if Lemmy becomes like what Reddit was when it started and never grew beyond that. I don’t need tons of clickbait outrage trash to doomscroll though every day.
The only thing I really miss from Reddit is a few of the smaller, niche subreddits that had small but active userbases. But that will come with time as the Lemmy userbase grows.
This. Some of the users in my favorite niche communities have migrated over, but overall, it’s still a bit of a ghost town compared to the same niches on Reddit.
Reddit was at its best when you stuck to the smaller subs where people were primarily positive and cheering on newbies, which really makes for active, welcoming communities that I truly miss. Having a bigger user base in those smaller communities is invaluable, because having a place to come and get advice from people who’ve been around the block is way different than the blank canvas you find in the same communities on Lemmy. My personal favorites were subs that specialized in “you like this? Have you tried that?”-type threads, and one of the coolest community norms I ever saw was in r/doommetal, where instead of blacklisting bands that got posted too often, they had the “Green List,” and anyone who posted anything from the Green List was cheered on and inundated by suggestions for more bands similar to the OP.
I found many of my favorite small bands and content creators in subs like r/doommetal, r/OSR, and r/boardgames, and the amount of good advice I got in subs like r/professors, r/luthier, and r/chempros is impossible to overstate.
I’ll miss my reddit niches, and I just hope the Lemmy niches eventually grow up to be a real replacement for those communities.
