I honestly can't say about the influx. Since I'm part of it.
But man....
This does feel like home.
I was already loving Mastodon.
Honestly, the real question is:
What took us soo long....
I was lurking on Lemmy for a long time now read only mode, not signed up, but never had the urge to actually making an account.
I try not to have so many feeds where I'm active at once, to try and better manage the time I spend on this feeds.
Twitter and Reddit were the ones I engaged the most
Twitter became Mastodon and Reddit became Lemmy on that matter, so that I can focus on being active and helpful whenever possible.
So, what took me so long...?
Definitely something I will be asking myself for a while, since so far the experience here have something that reddit just don't. The quality over quantity aspect.
Finally...
Thanks for having me here, I hope I can contribute the best I can to maintain Lemmy awesome as it is. I don't post or reply like a madman, but I like to participate on constructive discussion every now and then.
what took us so long
"Inertia is a property of matter" -Bill Nye the Science guy
What I mean by that is that it takes a force to move a large mass. People behave in much the same way. It takes a push to get people to move in large numbers from one place to another. I personally have been philosophically very pro-fediverse ever since I heard about it, but I was waiting for it to reach a critical mass before really switching over.
That, and for Lemmy specifically, its history of being a tankie forum. Without the Reddit refugee migration, if you joined Lemmy as a single user, you would be alone among communists and eventually get bullied into leaving. Already in 2020-2021, Fediverse users knew about Lemmy, but they avoided promoting it because of its userbase. This Reddit situation provided the push to get many normal users over to Lemmy at once to drown out the communist users.
I went from Digg to Reddit and now I'm looking for a new home. I'm really liking what I'm seeing here!
I just joined Lemmy because someone on reddit mentioned in it a comment on a thread regarding the blackout. It's kind of cool getting into a community while it's still relatively small. I'm excited to see how things grow.
I hopped over here permanently tonight. Uninstalled boost on my phone, and I made Lemmy.ml my homepage. Reddit is just too depressing right now to keep it as my default.
I’m a reddit refugee, Apollo was my most loved and most used app for years. I was really disappointed about this situation, but after checking out Lemmy, I’m starting to feel really excited about this. I like what I see so far and I think there is a lot of potential, and it is kind of fun to be here now while communities are still smaller. Onwards an upwards! I’m also checking out the beta for the iOS app Mlem, more work to be done but also good potential here. I’ve also been doing iOS dev work for about a decade so maybe I’ll see if I can help contribute to that project in some way.
It makes me hopeful for the future. Enthusiasts priming the pump for people embracing a more sustainable and less exploitative business model to organize the Internet. Instead of putting all the information on a big centralized locked down platform we share the load and costs between instances.
I love what is happening now, it is pretty much the biggest display of resistance against big tech I've ever seen in my life by a long shot. I've seen most of the internet gradually decay to a shadow of its former self so this is a return to form and a switch to a better model in the long run.
People are finally adopting the Fediverse and if the adoption rates keep up we might start going mainstream with all the advantages and disadvantages, but it will be alright since Lemmy is both federated and FLOSS. Lemmy is a Rust-based, AGPLv3 platform and that means it will be protected against corruption in the foreseable future, I hope.
EDIT: Over 30% of Reddit already went dark!
It’s close to 50 % now. You can watch the realtime stream here - https://reddark.untone.uk/
I'm a new user but I'd love to see this place explode in popularity!
I'm not one of the new users but I'm happy because the Lemmyverse feels much more alive now compared to a year ago. ☺️
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.
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.
sidenote, i really love that "enshittification" has more or less become the proper term for this
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.
I would love for the federated model to become a gold standard for how successful platforms ought to be run.
the reddit blackout is for like two days i expect that 90% of them will stick to the two days and business as usual afterwards. their bottom line is to continue running mods of their communities, even if they acknowledge that was is going on with reddit is bad. they shouldnt have announced a scheduled, limited blackout.
i expect some fringe communities to come here and stay but it will always be business as usual on reddit
therefore Lemmy needs to have a reason for people to stick around, communities offering something that isnt otherwise available, even just a refreshing change of community culture
Honestly it'll probably be closer to 99.999% of users will stick around Reddit. The largest Lemmy instance is smaller than the smallest subreddit I follow and I suspect that's probably the case for most people.
Here's what will happen... Reddit blackout starts, people come to Lemmy, 8 out of 10 are confused by the way things work and bail instantly. 2 out of 10 might stick around, try to sign up, but everyone hammers the top 3-4 instances and they have a bad first impression. A few days later everyone is back at Reddit and Lemmy is right back where it was a month ago.
I hope I'm wrong, but I doubt I will be.
I think that there will be people who remain on Lemmy permanently. This group will remain small, and insignificant. But hopefully there will be enough people to prop the instances up with content. At which point Lemmy will begin to grow slowly; this slow growth imo is the most important. But yeah alot of people will go back to Reddit and forget all about Lemmy. And that's ok.
Small
Insignificant
I see you've been talking to my ex
this is the most redditish comment I've seen so far.
remains to be seen if that's a good thing or not, but I did chuckle over the familiar joke
Hope people have patience and stick with it. I have no interest in going back to reddit.
A little bit worried. I am a recent migrator myself so this may a bit hypocritical, but I feel a lot of people will want to "redditize" here, just like how people tried with mastodon a couple months ago or (in a larger level), how people want Linux to become "another Windows".
These are not replicas, Lemmy doesn't work like Reddit, neither does it try to be, and that is by design, not a flaw. Things work differently, over and under the rug, and I think users should be entitled to doing some small effort to readjusting and have an open mind.
I'm all for UI/UX improvements, like most community projects, the front design part is more of an afterthought, and in that matter Lemmy has a lot to improve, but always keeping in mind what it is aiming to be.
For example, I am thinking in working on some simple browser extension to rearrange the UI in a way similar to Reddit's (nothing fancy, the upvote/downvote and collapse buttons locations, simple things). Maybe even some redirecting magic so if you open a link to another instance's community, it instead opens it in your current one, so you can still interact without having to go to your instance and search this one.
If anything, as a FOSS and federated content advocate, I wish this project nothing but the best so that one day we can escape the clutches of greedy companies.
Lemmy doesn’t work like Reddit
Does it not? I'm not feeling much difference from an end user POV
12 years Reddit refugee here:
So far the concept is VERY promising but it still does all feel a bit wonky. Signing up was a headache and took me hours, sign in still sometimes work sometimes not.. A huge of development will be required to get lemmy where it needs to be to really compete with Reddit, but so far, I'm very hopeful and happy!
As a new person… no commit. Other than I feel obligated to not lurk after reading the plea to not lurk from other posr.
I like it, but I am part of the massive influx of users so I am admittedly biased.
Tried Lemmy a couple months ago and tbh it felt dead, love this new influx just hope new communities keep popping up
I am excited by the prospect of new communities and not excited fo reddit groupthink
I've been hoping for a shift to decentralized social platforms for ages, so I really hope that's the direction things are heading.
I think the Redditors joining Lemmy will certainly change the culture, both for the better and for the worse. Comments got pretty toxic on Reddit while I feel like the toxic comments on Lemmy were rare.
BUT, that could be a sample size thing. I'm curious to see if the ratio of toxic comments per active user would have been the same.
More people = more problems I am certain but this is a social network and without people it will fail. We must all make an effort to be the change that we want to see in the world.
I don't foresee a problem in the immediate future aside from higher server load, but in terms of culture, only people who believe in a new social network will be willing to join.
In 5 years however when this is a great place to be, a large number of people will join who don't respect the legacy. The departure from Digg to Reddit felt like this too, I hope that the federation aspect will ensure this is longer lived.
remember... federation is your friend. federation gives you the freedeom to change house (instance) and/or look for better communities on any other federated instance from your own instance.
As part of that massive influx, I'm excited!
I've known about Lemmy and Tild.es for some time, but both just seemed so immature. I figured I'd give Lemmy a solid chance to show support for the blackout and because I'm likely to quit Reddit entirely if they don't reverse course (I may quit regardless), and I'm happy to say that this doesn't feel like a downgrade much.
There are plenty of communities for what I'm looking for, so I'm not giving up a lot switching to Lemmy. I'm going to give it a solid chance over the next week or two and do my best to contribute, and if I'm liking it still after that point, I may be able to contribute dev resources (maybe I'll help out with a mobile app or something).
Anyway, I'm excited to be part of this community!
As (another) reddit refugee, in order to compete with reddit, Lemmy needs to invest in its mobile apps, and make other servers easier to access.
I am one of those influx.
I'm realllllly just hoping we don't choke the "main" instances completely to death before the lemmy backend can have some developer hours dumped into it to support better per-instance horizontal scaling.
What caused that spike around October 2022?
Maybe people who moved from twitter to mastadon and learned more about federation
I'm happy about it, of course I might be a bit biased as I only came over yesterday.
This place is super nice and chill
I'm really digging Beehaw their lqbtq+ space is super welcoming
Every time I hear ding, it warms my heart. 😁
Whilst I’m somewhat sad to be here (Reddit has eaten up a significant portion of my time over the past 10+ years), I’m happy to be learning new things and exploring a new way of doing things.
Given the timeouts and load issues I've had on lemmy.ml today... Mildly concerned.
I'm part of the problem though, and really hopeful it goes well! Seems like the solution to the Giant Network problem we see at Reddit, Twitter, FB, etc
I hope that lemmy makes it but I don't think that it will be easy because:
Guys, what are you on about.
It's very clear that Lemmy is dead on arrival.
Don't you see it?
/s
Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
