Reddit Migration

A quarter of all subreddits are still private or restricted (can't post in them). This includes ones like /r/music or /r/programming. Of the 6 30+ million subscriber subreddits, only 3 have returned to normalcy. One is restricted, two others are in john oliver mode. The developers of Minecraft have officially abandoned Reddit as a platform, and advertisers are still pulling out as well.

This is still a developing migration. There are new active users on the threadiverse that weren't there before. The threadiverse has reached a form of critical mass where if people stick around, they can still have an enjoyable social experience without revisiting Reddit. If Reddit continues to exist, that's fine, I guess. I can't control what other people do. The important thing to me is that things that aren't Reddit are becoming viable in ways they were not before. We don't rely on this tech company anymore, we rely on ourselves.

Further, I predict that while traffic is stabilizing back to pre-protest days, that quality will continue to decline. It's not going to be instant that Reddit dies. It's a slow, steady, crawl into the grave for them

Does it? I hadn't noticed, I haven't been over there in quite a while.

"I don't know how to use reddit. does that mean the protest was a failure?"

The other thing to keep in mind is that looks can be deceiving. Reddit has had over half a month to clean up things like r/all from the fallout of the protests.

But my guess is, if you ask someone at reddit if it's now gone back to normal, well, https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/112071/Reddit-protest-plunges-user-engagement-site-activity-and-ad-portal & https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/86420/Six-verified-Reddit-employees-discussing-the-current-atmosphere-at-the

Thinks seem to be picking up in the Threadiverse, so something definitely changed. It's nowhere near Reddit levels of activity but getting better. Personally, my 12 year account is now gone which is significant for me.

i would not have found this federated alternative if not for the protest.

i, for one, am glad to not have to put up with the ever increasing ads, the constant "install reddit app" popup, the crappy "new" interface (vs the "old".. which i continued to use)...

Remains to be seen how the post June 30 impact to mobile apps and the mod community shapes up. But the drive to further monetize the platform for the IPO is the writing on the wall afaiac.

Yes, the federated user base is still in its infancy.. but quality over quantity :)

100k active users at Lemmy don't think the same.

I don’t know. I’m here, I’m happy about that, and there are more people making this place better by the week. So as far as I’m concerned, it was a huge success. Reddit can be Reddit.

I don't mean to toot my own horn too much, but it went exactly as I expected. Reddit is a huge business, it was never going to let a bunch of volunteers dictate its policies and business practices. And people are apathetic sheep, so an effective boycott was not in the cards either.

That said, it remains to be seen whether or not the protest was a failure. If nothing else, it motivated a ton of people to seek out alternatives, and those alternatives are getting better, in no small part due to the influx of new users, while Reddit is all but certain to continue getting worse. Digg suffered a sudden drop in popularity following its disastrous redesign, but it kept limping along for years afterward. Did Spez win this battle or did he doom his company? We'll see in five years or so.

No. It seeded the fediverse. More will come tomorrow when the app stops working.

Reddit went from an untouchable site without any competition to something that needs to appease users or risk sending them to competition.

I view the protest as a shot across the bow. The warning about how much impact the changes are going to cause if Reddit doesn't back off. Reddit management has gone with "damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead". It is the next round that is going to indicate whether mods and users are really ready to bail.

Nope. The bot problem is insane over there. See here: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/499424

I've also read that many threads in Reddit are being kept active by Large Language Model (e.g. ChatGPT)-based bots pretending to be users to give a sense of normality

Well, I'm reading and writing about it on kbin and haven't been back to reddit since, so the protests were 100% effective on me. I've had to learn that if I'm in an abusive relationship there's no point trying to get the abuser to change. I have to make sure I'm not under their control anymore. So on that front the protests were the push I needed to leave and find a better community. 100% success :)

The actual connection data says that's an illusion.