I’ll be directing all of my users in Sync to lemmy.world tomorrow.

Not gonna be a sudden exodus.

More that Reddit’s entered a slow death spiral. Redditors will start seeing an upsurge in toxicity, since mods will have left, been replaced with stooges, had their tools taken away, and most of the good mods will have abandoned ship.

Some may come here. Some may move on to Discord or other social media. Some will stick it out on Reddit, but notice that bots and trolls are taking over, whatever moderators are left can’t or won’t keep up, and the admins are seemingly asleep at the switch.

In a few months, discourse there will have assumed Youtube quality, with bots shouting down human discourse, and trolls scaring anyone remotely normal away. They’ll limp along like that for years.

Like Twitter.

Nobody knows the future, but speaking as an instance admin, the ideal scenario would be a continued steady growth and not a huge sudden influx 😅

I think the influx will be on the 1st. People are gonna try to fire up reddit on their fav app, it won’t work, and a good number of them will do something else.

A portion of those will look for alternatives. Most of those people will probably end up here. I don’t think it’s going to be a gigantic number or anything, due to how many “gates” there are to go through, but I’m expecting the biggest single-day increase so far.

I dunno, but the fact that I’m browsing a post with 118 comments using a skin that looks a lot like Apollo tells that things are going in a good direction.

It all comes down to mobile UI. Most of most peoples web usage is on mobile phones, occasionally a tablet, rarely sitting at a desk with a laptop or desktop computer.

The reason 3rd Party apps is such a sticking point for Reddit users is because the “factory” options are shite. Both the new and old web interfaces are garbage compared to the factory app, which is also garbage compared with any third party app.

The Steve Jobs Sweet Solution of WebApps was flawed. Twitteriffic and other pioneering mobile Smartphone apps proved that. Proprietary Apps with no alternative destroy intrinsic value of a platform to users. Facebook.app and YouTube.app prove that.

It depends. From what I understood, moderation on Reddit will become really hard after this. So the site will go down in user experience on content, worse than it is now. That’s outside of the 3rd party apps like Apollo no longer working but will have a negative impact. It sounded like some mods would just walk away than deal with not having robot spam bots to help, which it is volunteer. That could spur on further churn, again, because quality suffers.

I removed my Reddit apps and don’t plan to go back. Having said that, the tech here is still in its infancy. I see bugs daily, the native app version of this experience is not super adoptable by a mass market yet, but it can all improve with time and more bodies interested here.

Long term, this broad concept of decentralization seems to be populous. I think people don’t understand it yet, when they show up it’s rough, and there’s alternatives. But that will all continue to change in the coming months.

I think it really depends on how real the 1% rule of the internet is.

TBH I believe that 90% of mobile users uses the official app. Maybe they don’t know about 3PA, or simply just don’t bother. 3PA might be “for power users/advanced users” to them. All they want from Reddit is just the laugh (and porn probably) when doom scrolling. Not to mention because there is an official app, it’ll be the first result when searching “Reddit” on the app/play store. Most of the time people will just go for the first/official one. This whole API/protest thing will just be another Reddit drama for them and they just don’t care.

However, I believe that this whole thing affects those 1% users the most. For mobile users (of the 1%), I believe most of them are using 3PA. As the official is just too bad. For everyone else (of the 1%), if they care (even just a little bit) about Reddit, they will be greatly disappointed with how Reddit handles the whole situation. They will either have left already, or will be leaving soon. Which then the question will be, to where?

Obviously, users tends to go to wherever places that has the most interesting content to them. If enough 1% users left Reddit, migrated to Kbin/Lemmy, and continued to create content over here, I think those 99% users will eventually migrate as well - especially:

1. The content are created by the same 1% users, so the content will be similar to what they consumed back when they were on Reddit.

2. Reddit is full of repost bots, which hopefully should be more obvious when no new contents are being created anymore.

There’s also another possible but quite pessimistic possibility:
Some of those 99% users became the new 1% users, and began creating content with the redesigned UI/official app.
*Puts on tinfoil hat* Which is what Reddit wants - to kick out the “old”, power/advanced users (users who can and will protest/rebel, in essence), making Reddit into another generic social media platform. With everything under the complete control of Reddit, not its users.

Some will.

Not sure how big a number that some will be though.

For people that use 3rd party apps, suddenly they won’t work. They’ll try the Reddit app, some won’t be happy when they see how it looks and some of those will look at alternatives.

Quite possibly some users have already heard about something called Lemmy, but haven’t been bothered to leave Reddit. If their app stops working, that might be enough to make them take a look.

There will be a bit of a surge. It won’t suddenly be millions.

I already switched over. But I guess majority of 3rd party app users are still waiting for the last moment.

Reddit is gigantic, and while Fediversal alternatives are gaining users rapidly there’s a long ways to go.

A useful way to look at it is, we don’t have to defeat Reddit. We’re creating a community as an alternative. Reddit hasn’t lost a large number users when judged as a percentage of their base, but many of the people who are leaving are the ones who see where it’s going, and are the power users, the knowledgeable people, the cool people. The ones who make Reddit a place worth being.

It’s the same with Twitter. A lot of Twitter and Reddit users just keep their heads down and use the service, as it goes to hell around them. A lot of people join social media sites because it’s where other people are, or it’s where their friends are. People who joined when social media finally broke the internet away from being mostly the domain of the technically inclined. Even now, a lot of people mostly use it for streaming. These people may not leave Twitter or Reddit ever, because they really don’t care about it. But the people who were big internet users, or would have been were old enough in the late 90s or early 2000s, those are the kinds of people that Reddit, and Twitter, are losing.

Now, there are a lot of people on Twitter who I’d have thought have jumped ship by now, but to many people admin decisions feel like they have only a theoretical impact unless it affects their experience, or themselves, directly. The best thing that can be done is just keep on being awesome, and make cool posts that can’t be found elsewhere. Once a community gets a reputation for that, people will come naturally.

Reddit started to rate limit 3rd party apps already. At least that was the message I got using sync yesterday. Now I’m here. At least some people will come.

I imagine there will be a big uptick in the number of new users but it won’t be a huge wave, not initially. Human nature being what it is, users will switch to the official app, mods will try and muddle through with a more limited toolbox and, slowly, the wheels will fall off as people find that the user experience has been degraded, leading to a fairly steady flow of people moving over (and a decent number moving on as Lemmy likely isn’t ready for primetime just yet). I think what will be key is whether the most experienced moderators and most active posters make the jump - without them the site is a hollow shell as it is largely built on their disproportionate contribution. That might speed up Reddit’s downfall.

The best thing we can do is make their landing as soft as possible.

• Make sure there are welcome posts in each instances main communities.
• Keep an eye on Reddit for people asking how to make the move.
• Keep an eye on the relevant communities here for anyone struggling.
• Get equivalents to the subs set up.
• List these on sub.rehab and similar directories.
• Don’t panic! Perhaps this should have gone first.

The average user would not know about lemmy without a reddit post linking and explaining. It’s what got me here.

There will be an influx. Not- nearly like the influx over the last week or two though.

But, I would expect a small bump.