Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to become a member of the community, theres a reasonable amount of subs (or whatever the other word for em is) that fit my interests, enough linux content and shitposting for my liking, and the overall random posts made by people equally fed up with Leddit. (also i admit i used reddit a little cus there was this post on the fedora sub showing how to fix a sound issue i been having after a recent update)

  •  HeadPlug   ( @HeadPlug@beehaw.org ) 
    link
    fedilink
    English
    611 months ago

    I just got approved here, but have been on Mastodon for a couple of months. Mastodon signup was a lot glitzier, and yet I still couldn’t convert my friend, who was like “I don’t understand, what do you mean it’s like email? >_<”. I don’t have high hope for Lemmy atm…

    I think Reddit will backpedal and renegotiate with users/devs down the line, once the initial backlash has died down, and they have lowered everyone’s threshold of what they would consider a “victory”. Things like Lemmy will act as a sword of Damocles/safe harbour for the next time they screw up, sure, and that’s a good thing. But I doubt Lemmy will explode in popularity, even if some 3rd party Reddit clients are discussing adding Lemmy support to sort of rugpull Reddit, and that’s for 3 reasons(imo):

    1. The hosting costs will be exorbitant for all those new users, considering
    2. Lemmy will be stuck in the exact same boat as Reddit re:all those unpaying users, except now there’s no ads either. Donations are the honourable business model, but a couple thousand well-meaning people with disposable income can’t properly finance a popular platform.
    3. Even if the Lemmy community solves the above 2 problems, you still have the deciding moment of the “let’s jump ship today” user tidal wave, which will make or break such a migration happening. Closest thing I can think of is the WhatsApp Privacy Policy shenanigans in '21. Melon Husk said “Use Signal” - a fine suggestion, tbh - but Signal wasn’t ready for this, and so their servers crashed and burned during the tidal wave, while for-profit Telegram just paid for more servers and thus converted the refugees into users.