Reddit

the recent purges this year alone was a pretty big exodus too. once they add in facebook level verification/account, facial recognition i think it might cause another exodus.

Porn. It’s going to be when they get rid of porn.

The murder of "old"

It's coming

I found the fediverse through the API fiasco. I fully migrated over here when they started mass banning. I got caught up in the ban wave; though I'm fairly certain they had their eye on me for a while since I was a very prolific bot flagger and I told everyone exactly why the bots are so bad on that platform (hint: Reddit is complicit and so are the admins).

From what I'm hearing, likely one of the next big exoduses might be when Reddit decides to kill old.reddit. Everyone and their grandma goes on about it being the last good thing that remains and if they kill it they're gonna leave forever etc etc.

I suppose we'll see if they have the chops to actually leave that shithole.

I think most of the people who are going to leave have left. Its no longer a matter of an exodus because the people who are there now aren't the kind of people who can build a place like Reddit. Those people, we, the people, have left.

So the "next big exodus" is really about there being a newer/ better place to go for the same experience.

I used to think it would be the death of Old Reddit, but sadly they started that recently-ish and I've seen almost no pushback against it.

The issue is that they have a brain and are taking the slow approach, where they gradually strip away features and introduce interoperability hurdles to turn Old Reddit into the objectively worse choice so people make the switch to Shreddit of their own free will.

It started when they removed Private Messaging and made Chat, the replacement, exclusive to Shreddit. Notifications were also planned to become exclusive to Shreddit (try staying on top of replies without notifications), but new ones are still showing up in the direct messages archive for me.
Then they removed any indication of a subreddit's size from Old Reddit (but replaced the subscriber count with an active users count on Shreddit). So if you want to know which of two subreddits on the same topic is bigger, you need Shreddit for that comparison. Then there's the new wiki system which iirc is not backwards compatible to Old Reddit.

Just like this, more and more features are turned into Shreddit exclusives, until there'll be nothing left to use Old Reddit for. Yet people don't seem particularly bothered by it.

Killing old reddit will probably purge most of the last remaining people even slightly worth a damn from the site.

There have been mass bannings recently

Some AI or something that banned anyone it thought may have had an account in the past

One sub I'm active in lost almost 60% of its members overnight

Well, they seem to be shadowbanning legitimate users all the time, and leaving the bots. Every post has dozens or hundreds of incoherent replies.

And now they also added some weird translation feature on new reddit, so if you're on old reddit you start seeing posts and comments in every language with no way to easily translate it.

unforced? I'm sure it will be unique and hilarious as usual.

forced? governments around the world want social media platforms to be able to identify users and anonymity is a core aspect of reddit. the second they require a way to link your account with your person they will see a similar exodus, unfortunately it will have about the same impact as the API drama because the majority of people don't fucking care.

From what I gather – I deleted my very active account there promptly with the end of Apollo support and would never have ended up on Lemmy without u/spez; I'd say "thanks u/spez", but I'll stick with "fuck u/spez" – from Reddit "from the outside", those who are still there are impossible to get away. Reddit is destroying third-party apps and the official app is shit? Who cares! Reddit is only usable on a mobile web browser with great difficulty? So what? Reddit is flogging all user data to AI companies? Oh, someone probably has my data anyway.

If Elon Musk buys Reddit tomorrow (for whatever reason he'd want to) and obliges all users to buy two new Teslas, they'll probably accept it without a murmur. They've all long since become jaded. Fortunately, Aaron Swartz no longer has to witness this crap.

I don't think there's going to be another "mass exodus" again. There are people who said that they were going to leave reddit and actually did. Then there are those who said the same but didn't. Those people will never leave until the site shuts down or they're dead. I mean there's not much more Reddit can do to drive people away unless they go on a massive subreddit ban wave on things that shouldn't be banned. or they introduce a subscription plan where you have to pay to "unlock" the site and can view as much content as you want. Even then people WILL pay for that.

But even with the plethora of bots, reposts, karma farming, and power tripping mods people still stick around.

They have AI automatically banning a lot of long-term users for very odd and flimsy reasons, the appeals process is nonexistent, and the bans are permanent. Meanwhile, the site is being overrun with bots. Obviously, bots have been on the platform for a long time, but there’s been a definite uptick recently.

If they keep throwing out their real users and letting bots generate everything, people are going to exit Reddit, if for no other reason than they’re just kicked out.

So tangentially to the post, I guess the implied question is: when will Lemmy see another explosion in its userbase.

And to that...I don't know.

I've been trying to get away from reddit for a while and the problem with Lemmy is two fold

1. Very minor: it requires me to unblock cloudflare when I'm using noscript

2. More major, I still don't have an intuitive understanding of how lemmy works. On reddit if I was interested in knitting, going to old.reddit.com/r/knitting would be a good starting point.

I'm still confused about multiple instances, why bifurcate the community (are there multiple instances of knitting communities on lemmy?).

I (perhaps foolishly) consider myself slightly above average in terms of tech literacy; if I'm this confuse I do wonder how are others going to fare.

Have fedi numbers moved much since over the last year?

It is more active but feels like mostly the regulars

I think it will take time , I personally tried to move when the api changed. But now am actively changing after Reddit getting shittier by the day. Last update they introduced games on the official app. Doesn’t make any sense. The feed they keep pushing on you sucks and honestly the content itself is worse nowadays. They have years of users content that is still a huge boost, but with time more and more users will get fed up with these tactics. If Lemmy continues on growing steadily it will eventually replace it