Lemmy has quite a few negatives. It's small, highly fragmented, obscure to newcomers, and still has a vitriolic commenters, even in the more serious groups. And it doesn't have any PR/marketing. It's not going to take off.
It will be a slow descent for reddit, but if you take the "rule" of social media that splits content creators/active participants/lurkers as 1/9/90%, and if we assume that a substantial amount of the 1% is moving away from reddit, then it stands to reason that the other 99% will end up following the creators.
Yeah, network effects are still at play, but there is already a critical mass of people on Lemmy that want it to work. I find myself posting a lot more than I ever did on reddit (or even here) because I look at it as tending a garden.
> It will be a slow descent for reddit, but if you take the "rule" of social media that splits content creators/active participants/lurkers as 1/9/90%, and if we assume that a substantial amount of the 1% is moving away from reddit, then it stands to reason that the other 99% will end up following the creators.
In the domains of programming, suggesting that many of the 1% have moved away from Reddit, that is extremely optimistic... though that may be my visibility into fragmentation of communities across Lemmy.
From what I've seen, the content that has taken off on Lemmy tends to be the lower effort "ask Lemmy", memes, and similar.
Instances on beehaw tend to be more thriving, but this may also be a function of more active moderation... which is one of those things that people rail about being unfair and Stack Overflow over moderates (that's another thread).
The people who left Reddit appear to mostly be moderators who have gotten tired of moderating rather than people who are creating content / posts / commenting on Reddit.
https://programming.dev/c/cs_career_questions
290 subscribers, most recent question was 8 days ago.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/
1M subscribers (yes, bots, inactive and all), 25th oldest question was 9 hours ago.
There was a surge a few weeks ago (especially as people hit private subs) - but it hasn't been sustained.
I am not sure that one would claim that content creators are there rather than people copying content from various porn and making it accessible.
Do the graphs on that page suggest a substantial increase in the rate of content being submitted to Lemmy instances in the past year?
Memes and jokes are fine... if that's what you are after. I'll note that my /r/all page is devoid of most of them as the reddit subs that I'm on tend to not be as meme saturated.
If you are after deeper discussions of programming topics or hobbies, Lemmy doesn't seem to show the sustained growth or content being added that provides for interesting reading. https://startrek.website is probably the exception to this as they've maintained a rather focused set of communities and so it is easier to find content that isn't memes.
I haven't been able to find an equivalent of /r/DIY, /r/boardgames, /r/soloboardgaming, /r/books, /r/factorio (and its set of subs) on Lemmy.
If one wants to claim that the content creators of /r/memes have mostly left and gone to Lemmy... ok. I'm not as familiar with that subculture. If you want to say that the content creators of /r/books have left and gone to Lemmy - I have seen no indication of that happening.
My point is that we can not expect that the migration of people will happen in clusters of specific interests, they will instead reflect the average redditor.
> I haven't been able to find an equivalent of /r/DIY, /r/boardgames, /r/soloboardgaming, /r/books, /r/factorio
If the content creators of Reddit aren't posting in lemmy instances, is there a strong case for the following assertion:
> and if we assume that a substantial amount of the 1% is moving away from reddit, then it stands to reason that the other 99% will end up following the creators.
Unless it is a reddit sub, where a mod has shut it down (and the community hasn't moved to another tangent reddit sub), I'm just not seeing a reduction in engagement on Reddit by the people who post.
The field of dreams approach for creating communities on Lemmy doesn't seem to be the most effective way at creating communities - especially if you, the person creating the /c/, aren't creating original content for it (long form posts) and actively working on discoverability of the /c/ (cross posting as appropriate).
Creating or gathering a community is a lot more work than just creating a /c/.
My claim is still that the people who left Reddit because of the latest mess were (a) not content creators themselves, or (b) looking for a reason to leave.
For group (a), this resulted in some subs getting made private and the communities on reddit readjusted to tangent ones.
For group (b), while a loss was not a significant one. On a casual sub that I moderate (and thus have access to stats for), I only see the number of unique users grow since January (the official iOS client use is 3x larger than Android, and 10x larger any of the other sources). The number of monthly active unique users for a middling activity cat sub is 36,000 (compare all of Lemmy at 69,000 monthly active users). I haven't seen any indication of a reduction in the posting of the 1% of content creators on Reddit in any of the subs that I moderate, nor anecdotally, any of the subs that I visit.
> Creating or gathering a community is a lot more work than just creating a /c/.
Completely agree. The point is, who will be creating new communities on reddit after all this?
> the people who left Reddit (...) were not content creators themselves
Like I said, it is an assumption. If the content creators are not leaving (or at least looking for alternatives) then I'm really sorry for them and their audience.
69,828 Monthly Active Users is not what I would call a take off of something which will conquer the world, beat the capital and liberate the world from the evil of their control. It just this years hyped nerdspace. For example, it seems even significant smaller than this space here.
That sounds to me a lot like early Reddit. Or 4chan, for that matter.
But to be fair I like my communities small, obscure, slightly unfriendly and without PR. Every good community I've liked had a phase of being nice to newcomers who were trying to fit and being hostile to those who weren't, so maybe there's something to it.
