How do you feel about the massive influx of users?
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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I am also part of the influx, but I'm worried that this is going to be a short lived thing and people are going to go back to reddit.
Realistically, there is no reddit to go back to. After the company goes public, Reddit as we knew it, will cease to exist.
The shareholders will want to be make maximum profit. This means that ads are going to be everywhere. They are going to outsource hosting services to horrible companies, in order to cut down hosting costs like video hosting and image hosting. Features that existed in 3rd party apps are going to be paid features in the official app/webapp, etc.
Reddit is gone. It's lost. It will not be there as you knew it to go back to. It's now a case of where to next and for the time being, lemmy and feddiverse looks the best.
I think the concept of "enshittification" will become more apparent to more users. Younger people, who are more technically literate, and have seen social media rise and fall I think will be more willing to adopt platforms like Lemmy. Reddit was a "place for weirdos" for a long time until the general public noticed it and began to post comments and posts to YouTube/Instagram/Twitter. Lemmy just needs time.
One thing I always like to say to people, is "The internet was cooler when your parents didn't understand how it worked." I think the concept of Lemmy appeals to and will start to appeal to a lot of people soon.
Jokes on you because middle-aged people are the children of the people who built the internet.
Source: I am middle-aged and also 25 years younger than Tim Berners-Lee
sidenote, i really love that "enshittification" has more or less become the proper term for this
Yeah Cory Doctorow really nailed it with that article.
I look forward to the announcement by Merriam-Webster.
AKA The profit motive
Same. That one article changed the lexicon for a lot of people.
All that may be true but that doesn't mean there's enough people who are motivated enough to put effort into a reddit alternative -- all the reddit design updates suck for the informed user but the whole point of the updates is to keep the much, much larger casual audience hooked, and it's yet to be seen if a reddit alternative is viable today without the casual audience. Hopefully there's some good signs over the next few days when the blackout gets rolling
if we pull a critical mass of those that create and consume quality content, organic effects begin to compete with entrenchment. if not, I am ok-ish with that too. if I have to exepriece the world burning down around me, I would prefer to do so in better company than reddit.
It's very unlikely that Lemmy will ever be as big as Reddit, but this influx might have it reach a tipping point where it can start to grow users organically.
Indeed, for this kind of service users attract users. I've been checking in on Lemmy periodically for years and the content just wasn't there (for me). But now, with plenty more users, I'm seeing a lot more value in spending more time here.
Yep same here, I'm hoping this is the watershed moment for Lemmy and I can start spending more on here and eventually stop using reddit (or be forced to when they take away my third party app). I don't generally create much content, but like participating in the community via comments, so it's hard to be a force for change when nothing is getting posted and no one is commenting.
Unlikely. Why do you say that? Wasn't reddit once small?