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!
I seriously doubt reddit has seen any significant drop in traffic or unique visitors. Looking back at some of the subs I frequented, they’re all business as usual. The mods all backed down the second that they had their mod status threatened, as expected. Almost all of the users I saw that said they were leaving on July 1 when their 3rd party app stopped working are still there.
I deleted my account and moved here, as clearly a lot of people did, but it’s a drop in the ocean and that’s not even to say that the people that moved here have stopped using reddit.
I consider it a win nontheless, people like me or you, who were actively engaged on reddit and did “what felt right” (deleting comments and leaving reddit) are probably the kind of people that might make for good conversation and good content (be it links to cool stuff, art, or just rants).
We might get some “bad apples” (trolls, botters, and such), but all in all, I see it as a far healthier alternative to grow gradually from a core of users that was either here from the start, or that moved to the Fediverse to take back a bit of the “old web” feel, where people come together to share cool stuff and ideas.
RIP Aaron Swartz, we’ll keep the old reddit spirit here on Lemmy.
I can say that since Joey shut down my reddit use has dropped 95% at least. I hardly looked at reddit on the computer unless I was searching for an answer to something. I tried the reddit app, it runs like ass on my phone so I’m pretty much done spending time on that site unless I’ve googled something and the answer is in a reddit thread.
I used RedReader which got an exemption, so it still works. So I still use it because I enjoy talking to people on Reddit despite the bad behaviour from the admins, and they don’t make any money off me so who cares. The day I’ll leave is the day they force me to use their unusable app (and when your non-tech buddy tells you he uses Reddit in desktop mode on mobile Firefox, you know it’s bad)
I’ve been using both services as there’s way more news and discussion on Reddit but Lemmy is improving rapidly. I do think Reddit has shot themselves in the foot by restricting NSFW subs to logged in / official app only though. I honestly expected this would result in a ton of content moving to Lemmy but that doesn’t seem to have been the case so far.
I think Lemmy’s biggest issue is community discovery on federated instances. Lots of active communities don’t show up unless explicitly requested on your own instance, and that’s going to confuse a lot of new users.
