I’d love to see some stats on reddit engagement now. Anecdotally, I logged in just to look at my usual subreddits (the ones that are open) and they seem dead.
I checked a few days ago, and almost all subs I frequented look as before. Maybe a little less content than before, but even midsized ones have more engagement than my whole Lemmy feed.
So I saw this on mastodon … and it’s a little weird, perhaps not unlike the cultures that migrants develop in their new homes.
There’s a tendency, I think, to overestimate how bad the “old” platform has become since “we” left. In reality, it’s not nearly that bad, if any different at all, and those of us not inclined toward this overestimation go and check the old platform from time to time and get confused as to where all of this “hellscape deadness” is.
I think we can all imagine to some extent why this might happen. But I’m writing this just in case it’s healthy to point out that it need not happen, and that the thing that’s actually changed, though you might not know if you’ve arrived here recently, is this place, which is a whole new thing!
A story I think of along these lines is what Steve Jobs did when he went back to Apple in the late 90s. Back then Apple thought they had to beat Microsoft to win. Thing is the company was close to dying with huge debts etc and were never going to do that (still haven’t come close today). But they were so enamoured with their past to the point of having a museum of all of their old products. Jobs had the museum removed, told everyone that for Apple to win it has to stop thinking about Microsoft because they’ll never be destroyed, instead Apple had to win by doing its own thing, and then, super contraversially for the time, had Bill Gates invest a bunch of money into Apple and appear on the big screen during a keynote to rather audible “boos”.
It doesn’t matter what Reddit’s doing or whether they’re doing well. It matters if we’re doing well … as cheesy as that might sound.
It matters, because smaller communities don’t exist here. I try my best to fill !folkmetal@discuss.tchncs.de and !crpg@discuss.tchncs.de, and I simply gave up on /r/malazan, but those communities (and others) are already small on Reddit.
Medium, tech-affine subs like homeassistant and selfhosted were fine to move. Game-specific (outside of AAA) subs and niche-subs are simply dead, the average gamer won’t use something as complicated as Lemmy, and niche-subs are too small. Hell, not even the 4X community exists here, leave alone a sub for any specific 4X. There’s a Strategy community for stuff including 4X: No posts in weeks. It’s sad.
It’s also why I will stay on Reddit for the forseeable future. Lemmy will be my main home, but the users are on Reddit.
I doubt it made a dent. 250k doesn’t even register on the map of 100m active users.
It does if those 250k are the ones submitting/creating content.
Are they though? I didn’t submit posts on reddit. Looking at the front page of lemmy it’s missing a lot of the topics and subjects reddit posts about.
I’m not trying to be a downer, I think 250k is great and it’s enough to make lemmy 100% replace reddit for me. But I don’t think it dents reddit. I talked to my friends and they barely noticed anything except the blackout. I go on reddit all the same communities are still posting and commenting as normal. But saying that when I looked at reddit I realized how much garbage is posted there compared to lemmy.
I don’t think lemmy is still growing. I might be wrong but this graph https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
is trending down and i’ve seen a lot of smaller magazines/communities that haven’t had any posts for 1-2weeks by now.
I try to help that problem at little but i doubt lemmy&kbin has >100k active users right now.I think that’s normal. People will try out Lemmy but if they notice that the communities they frequent doesn’t have a lot of content they’ll just leave back to reddit.
We can hope for organic growth but it’ll take a long time (especially with how big reddit is)
They might be using some smoothing, because all lines are noise-free. and the last point might just be an artifact. It looks like a constant growth
According to the graph it accounts for active users within the last 30 days. 30Days ago the reddit strike started and an influx of people started posting. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people haven’t been here since. There was a lot of performance and other issues with lemmy&kbin at that time.
There is also always a flurry of people trying out accounts in multiple instances whenever there’s a migration wave, so not only are we seeing people who dipped a toe in only to leave, or go back to Reddit, but we’re seeing the effect of people understanding how the ecosystem works better and settling into a single active account.
