There was also DIGG. There were several large aggregators, but they all made changes that lead to mass exoduses to reddit. Back in the day there were sites like SomethingAwful, EBaumsWorld that served up memes and entertainment before we had purpose-built aggregation tools. Eventually reddit will make way for something else (and already has to some degree with its shedding of users to Lemmy).
Lemmy is a drop in the bucket compared to Reddit by any metric you want to use. It’s not even close.
But yeah, eventually Reddit will be replaced. Facebook is going through that transition now, and we’ll see how well they can retain users with Threads and Instagram.
I never made a claim that Lemmy was even remotely comparable to reddit in size. Just stating that reddit users fled to here, when reddit made staggering changes affecting many.
for the past 4 years reddit (and most other community activities across the web) has already bled to fb groups. any google result of reddit content are on average 4-7 years old now, marking the date of when things began to change. the blackout was the beginning of the end though and there is no way they will recover now that the api is for all intents and purposes in permanent lockdown.
I don’t use Google, but I get plenty of DDG results in the past year, and I’ve been exclusively on Lemmy since before the API change. The older posts have a lot of deletions, but the newer posts are generally pretty free of them, and it seems to be business as usual. Reddit is locking down their site for search, but they’ll probably do for others what they did for Google and license it out for either AI or traditional search.
So from what I can see, Reddit weathered the “exodus.” In fact, since their IPO, the stock has approximately tripled.
If something takes down Reddit, it’s not going to be a community solution like Lemmy, it’ll be another for-profit corporate entity. Look at the Twitter/X “exodus,” they seem to be flocking to Blue Sky and Threads, not Mastodon. There’s a good chance that whatever comes next will be worse in all the ways that we came to Lemmy to avoid.
i mean, since when did stock value reflect reality lol.
and while anecdotal, the few times i’ve been exposed to fresh reddit content the top comments have been ai.
regardless,
people were already migrating to mastodon.social en masse with millions of signups within the first week aka the first attempted exodus from twitter upon musks acquisition, but the mastodon team then blocked new signups to mastodon.social arguing that it will be better for federation if all these new users signed up with other servers which triggered the whole “servers are too complicated” articles all over the web followed by the journalists complaining about reblogging and mastodon devs saying it’s not a feature they want to add. of course the hype died down fast when the two things necessary for continued growth through critical mass was actively prevented by the dev team.
this isn’t the first time mastodon devs has acted against their own best interest. when facebook shut down their free internet service in india mastodon had a massive surge of users and instead of capitalizing on it they went on a witch hunt to shut down any official government users “to protect their users free speech”.
the exodus from reddit had a similar problem; there was a shit ton of people condemning lemmy and pushing people towards kbin by slandering the lemmy team. kbin wasn’t ready and the developer dropped out early on so it basically acted to split the community and push people back towards reddit, because “who wants to be on a service developed and maintained by russian sympathizers”.
it sure seems like a lot of people are determined to make sure the fediverse does not succeed, including the devs themselves. just look at how many on fucking lemmy is promoting bluesky over mastodon. and it wouldn’t shock me if all this nonsense will die down in a few weeks too. like turning off a switch. just like all the political misinformation during every election.
Stock prices represent the market’s expectation of future growth, not current valuation. Since the IPO, I’ve seen a lot more news articles referencing Reddit posts directly.
And when I go to Reddit, I only really see AI spam on posts with little engagement, on popular posts, they’re pretty far down the list.
The problems you’re talking about are a symptom of the larger reason federation won’t take over: larger orgs offer a much more consistent experience. With Lemmy, for example, each instance responded to the huge influx of new users in different ways:
close off new registrations and defederate (e.g. beehaw)
require an application
some other kind of rate limiting
And when we had an awkward update roll out, some stayed behind and some upgraded, which nearly completely broke federation.
This highlights the independent nature of the platform (probably the reason you and I like it), as well as the reason it won’t ever really work for the average user. Regular users have a pretty low tolerance for changes and service disruption, and the federated nature of Lemmy nearly guarantees both. Some instance admins will lose interest and stop paying for hosting, other admins will be late on important updates, and instances will go down and the admin may not fix it for a few days or even weeks. Look at the uproar when Reddit goes down for an hour, Lemmy isn’t anywhere near that level of long term reliability.
it sure seems like a lot of people are determined to make sure the fediverse does not succeed, including the devs themselves
I don’t think anyone is sabotaging the fediverse, it’s just the nature of a loose coalition of FOSS enthusiasts that all have different priorities. That’s not a bad thing, but it is why the fediverse will remain a niche thing.
There was also DIGG. There were several large aggregators, but they all made changes that lead to mass exoduses to reddit. Back in the day there were sites like SomethingAwful, EBaumsWorld that served up memes and entertainment before we had purpose-built aggregation tools. Eventually reddit will make way for something else (and already has to some degree with its shedding of users to Lemmy).
Lemmy is a drop in the bucket compared to Reddit by any metric you want to use. It’s not even close.
But yeah, eventually Reddit will be replaced. Facebook is going through that transition now, and we’ll see how well they can retain users with Threads and Instagram.
I never made a claim that Lemmy was even remotely comparable to reddit in size. Just stating that reddit users fled to here, when reddit made staggering changes affecting many.
It’s a blip, a pretty insignificant one at that.
It’ll probably eventually happen, but I doubt Lemmy will be a significant part of it. But who knows, maybe I’m wrong.
for the past 4 years reddit (and most other community activities across the web) has already bled to fb groups. any google result of reddit content are on average 4-7 years old now, marking the date of when things began to change. the blackout was the beginning of the end though and there is no way they will recover now that the api is for all intents and purposes in permanent lockdown.
I don’t use Google, but I get plenty of DDG results in the past year, and I’ve been exclusively on Lemmy since before the API change. The older posts have a lot of deletions, but the newer posts are generally pretty free of them, and it seems to be business as usual. Reddit is locking down their site for search, but they’ll probably do for others what they did for Google and license it out for either AI or traditional search.
So from what I can see, Reddit weathered the “exodus.” In fact, since their IPO, the stock has approximately tripled.
If something takes down Reddit, it’s not going to be a community solution like Lemmy, it’ll be another for-profit corporate entity. Look at the Twitter/X “exodus,” they seem to be flocking to Blue Sky and Threads, not Mastodon. There’s a good chance that whatever comes next will be worse in all the ways that we came to Lemmy to avoid.
i mean, since when did stock value reflect reality lol.
and while anecdotal, the few times i’ve been exposed to fresh reddit content the top comments have been ai.
regardless, people were already migrating to mastodon.social en masse with millions of signups within the first week aka the first attempted exodus from twitter upon musks acquisition, but the mastodon team then blocked new signups to mastodon.social arguing that it will be better for federation if all these new users signed up with other servers which triggered the whole “servers are too complicated” articles all over the web followed by the journalists complaining about reblogging and mastodon devs saying it’s not a feature they want to add. of course the hype died down fast when the two things necessary for continued growth through critical mass was actively prevented by the dev team.
this isn’t the first time mastodon devs has acted against their own best interest. when facebook shut down their free internet service in india mastodon had a massive surge of users and instead of capitalizing on it they went on a witch hunt to shut down any official government users “to protect their users free speech”.
the exodus from reddit had a similar problem; there was a shit ton of people condemning lemmy and pushing people towards kbin by slandering the lemmy team. kbin wasn’t ready and the developer dropped out early on so it basically acted to split the community and push people back towards reddit, because “who wants to be on a service developed and maintained by russian sympathizers”.
it sure seems like a lot of people are determined to make sure the fediverse does not succeed, including the devs themselves. just look at how many on fucking lemmy is promoting bluesky over mastodon. and it wouldn’t shock me if all this nonsense will die down in a few weeks too. like turning off a switch. just like all the political misinformation during every election.
Stock prices represent the market’s expectation of future growth, not current valuation. Since the IPO, I’ve seen a lot more news articles referencing Reddit posts directly.
And when I go to Reddit, I only really see AI spam on posts with little engagement, on popular posts, they’re pretty far down the list.
The problems you’re talking about are a symptom of the larger reason federation won’t take over: larger orgs offer a much more consistent experience. With Lemmy, for example, each instance responded to the huge influx of new users in different ways:
And when we had an awkward update roll out, some stayed behind and some upgraded, which nearly completely broke federation.
This highlights the independent nature of the platform (probably the reason you and I like it), as well as the reason it won’t ever really work for the average user. Regular users have a pretty low tolerance for changes and service disruption, and the federated nature of Lemmy nearly guarantees both. Some instance admins will lose interest and stop paying for hosting, other admins will be late on important updates, and instances will go down and the admin may not fix it for a few days or even weeks. Look at the uproar when Reddit goes down for an hour, Lemmy isn’t anywhere near that level of long term reliability.
I don’t think anyone is sabotaging the fediverse, it’s just the nature of a loose coalition of FOSS enthusiasts that all have different priorities. That’s not a bad thing, but it is why the fediverse will remain a niche thing.