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Lemmy enjoys growth as developers pivot from Reddit amid API charging controversy
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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Lemmy
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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 use RSS to get feeds for subs that are not active in lemmy.
Many posts are dog shit level now. Either looking for help or just garbage.
Check out r/lemmino lol.
Yep. I feel like all of the high-value like high-quality posters are now here or elsewhere and are done with reddit. I used to post a ton on reddit, even across multiple accounts. Now I just post here. lol
Oh RSS feed is a good idea. The only sub I still check is r/Genshin_Impact_Leaks xd
Edit: Anyone knows a better free web-based RSS reader than Feedly? It kept sending me to its paid service for trying to sub to a Reddit feed, until I subbed to it via SiftRSS D:
Ive been using FreshRSS for years. You can either selfhost it or use one of the public instances.
Thanks, I'll check that one out too :)
EDIT: Sorry, I missed the "web based". Today I'm incredibly distracted.
Feeder is pretty good if you use Android.
No worries, but I'm a diehard PC user xd
I might end up going with an open-source desktop app in the end, both Fluent Reader and Raven Reader look good.
I self host FreshRSS & RSS-Bridge in Docker and view everything in Fluent Reader (Linux), FeedMe (Android), and Read You (Android). I absolutely love it!
A fellow leaks enjoyer, hi there! It's also the only community on Reddit I still check as well. Excited for Fontaine?
Sound like you two need to get on the sources and start a Lemmy community.
I'd be terrible as a mod, but I might be up to preprare the posts when I hit my vacation in a few weeks.
Also, there's already a community, but with low traction right now.
Yeah, the issue is that the whole sub is just screenshots and videos of leakers' Telegram, Discord and Twitter channels. I don't have free capacity for trawling through these kind of feeds, checking for reliability, etc. 😅
Same for me, with family and full-time work, but I can probably set up a bot during vacation to check for these sources. If I set it up to just check for stuff every two hours or so I don't think I'll hit any kind of rate limit.
I'm moderately excited, looking forward to exploring the new landscape, but aside of Lyney, I don't particularly want to pull for any of the characters. (Maaaybe Wriothesley, depending on his personality and kit.)
I'll get Furina since collecting archons is a safe bet. Aside from her I'm still evaluating who I really want (possibly Arlechinno, Navia and Neuvillete).
I'm much more interested in the lore and hoping hoyo finally starts moving the celestia/abyss plot forward big time. It's about time we see some real big stuff to happen.
hosting freshrss locally and just tested that it can subscribe to reddit no problems (although I don't want to) - their cloud instances should work : https://www.freshrss.org/cloud-providers.html
I have been using CommaFeed for years. I'm not a huge fan of the most current design, but overall it works well.
thanks, I'll check it out :)
If Lemmy supported images in it's RSS feeds I'd never leave my client.
Its open-source, so it wouldn't be impossible to add images. Probably pretty trivial actually. Might be a good first PR
The bots won't stop. And probably have increased. So it'll be tough to see without slices we'll never get
That's the punchline that makes me chuckle when I read how "little impact" the protests and migration have had.
Here's a little secret: Reddit mods can't know for sure which accounts are bots. They can suspect, but they're no easy, reliable proof. Reddit admins, though, know exactly which accounts are bots — they just prefer keeping that info to themselves.
For me, that triggers a great big "Hmmmm".
And they'll never differentiate them. If their investors know how much of their traffic was just bots they'd divest immediately
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.
I get where you're coming from ... but I'm inclined to push back on this. I don't think it's sad. Reddit has many users on it and lemmy has substantially fewer. Not every interest is going to be covered by the amount of people here. It's just a reality right now.
However convenient it is to have everything on one platform or one place, I think it's important to recognise how much of a weapon or shield that is for big-social monopoly companies. A fractured and more open or diverse internet is, IMO, a good thing. It's also less convenient and staying in contact with people only on reddit makes sense. But that drop in convenience is worth it, IMO, and I don't think it's sad.
Just do what you can on Lemmy for now and wait for the users to make their way over. It will take a couple years but as long as the quality here is better, people will slowly but steadily make the transition. And it won't be hard to beat out reddit in user experience, we all know how far they have fallen and it's only getting worse after they IPO.
This is the exact sort of thinking maegul was attempting to debunk..
Not really, I already knew reddit was shit before I left. I just didn't know of any alternative. I'm also not suggesting that our success is reliant on reddit's failure.
I'm in full agreement with him, reddit hasn't changed much at all, but Lemmy has reminded us that there could be something much better again.
I don't think he was debunking the idea that reddit might eventually fall, but rather that they would fall overnight, as some people here like to imply. Also worth mentioning that Microsoft and Apple are generational tech companies while reddit is a social media platform that's much more susceptible to rapid decline.
Fair enough, I get that. For me personally, reddit seemed to get worse starting over 7 years ago, so by now I felt the experience was significantly worse than previous eras of reddit, even in smaller subs.
But as much as I loved some BBS forums, I'd have to say Reddit was definitely better than them, so yea early 2010s reddit was probably the most fun I've had. Until now.
My experience too. So often reddit would just attract a toxic or at least unattractive culture that would kill conversation and make threads unreadable. It seemed to get worse over time, though I didn't get serious about measuring that. Doesn't of course mean that there wasn't plenty of good stuff there or still isn't, but it, in recent times, felt diluted.
Not that I'm any sort of gospel to be taken seriously or anything ... not really, my point was about focusing on this place doing well rather than focusing on reddit losing or dying, in part because Reddit may not die any time soon. Or it might but not pass all of its users onto the fediverse. But yea ... if the quality of people, culture and, slowly but surely, features, not least of which being the whole FOSS, non-profit decentralised freedom thing, people will surely come just as they have with mastodon.
Rock and stone with us. !drg@lemmy.world
Love the pep talk, and the sentiment behind it.
I loved Reddit, spent at least an hour a day there and often much more, but I'm loving the Lemmy too. In many ways it's better, and one of those ways is that it's so much smaller — a much higher ratio of thought vs tired memes and dumb jokes and slick burns.
I'm wondering how much of that is bots.
Reddit is trying to build up to an IPO, so it's not far-fetched to think that Steve Huffman would have seen the exodus coming, and supplemented traffic with bots so the drop in engagement didn't seem so precipitous.
I think the thing that is going to suffer most is comment quality. Unfortunately (or for Huffman, fortunately), it's not really something that can be quantified.
I think we will see a slow decline until the platform is basically walking dead. It'll function, and maybe there will even be apparent engagement, but the quality will be nothing like it was before this whole debacle.
I went to some threads on Reddit yesterday. Bloody hell there a lot of shit to wade through before getting to anything useful. It might be more engagement, but the amount of low-effort garbage comments turned me around really quick.
I made the mistake of reading comments on one thread (I moved here full time) on r/Iamatotalpieceofshit about landlords.
It's turned into a capitalistic hell hole, not only some of the horrible comments you read but also just need to look at the way the votes go, I felt disgusted tbh.
They bootlick way more than they admit they do.
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.
This is it though, of my subreddits that are open, it's just complete trash being posted and a few comments (and even less meaningful comments).
I think that which 250k migrated will eventually end up making quite a significant dent. It isn't the technophobic lurkers that make up the Lemmy early adopters.
It's only about 50k active. The rest are all bots.
Wish someone would create a bot to copy r/HyruleEngineering to the community here.
You can request that on lemmit.online if I remeber the name of the instance correctly
My local area sub is still pretty active, but I did notice that in the other subreddit the comments section is a lot more sparse.