No Stupid Questions

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

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.

It won’t be instant, but quite a few 3PA users will find it incredibly difficult (maybe even impossible) to make the switch to the official app; it’s just that bad. Hell, I can’t imagine using Reddit without the crutch Apollo provided.

The only thing we can do is wait and see. It's only three days from now. My personal belief is that there is definitely going to be an influx of new users, but that number won't be too big or unmanageable.

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 many are simply not doing anything until they have to. Once their app quits working, they'll make a change at that time. Of course not everyone uses Mobile. Personally I don't use mobile much for internet access, mainly desktop browser. In that case I could keep using Reddit same as before, but I don't want to.

So the question is what portion of Reddit users are on mobile, how many will relent to the Reddit app, how many will quit using Reddit altogether, how many will look for an alternative, and finally how many will land on Lemmy or Kbin. Could be a lot, could be not many. We'll find out pretty soon here.

For those that do come this way they'll have a transition phase. There's a lot that's different here and takes some getting used to. Also the lack of certain features may result in some angst. There's bugs too. They fixed some stuff with 0.18.0, but searching for and subscribing to communities is giving me fits now.

Doubt it. Most people who use a 3rd party app should be aware of the API changes already. If they are interested in the alternatives they would have tried by now.

People who are still unaware of what's going on even after the blackouts, would probably just download the official app.

I find it hard to believe that the average or even above average user will make the effort to switch.

Not really impossible if said users "dopamine fix" gets cut off. Which may happen (or not, depending of how intense it is.)

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.

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.

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.

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

But, I would expect a small bump.

I expect the biggest wave has already passed. People who cared about Reddit's behavior saw the writing on the wall three weeks ago and have had time to switch. Lemmy's growth will continue at a slower rate as late adopters make the switch over the next few months. The modest barriers to entry will deter a huge number of casual users, who will either stay on Reddit (most likely IMO) or find other things to do with their time.

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.

Not as many as you would think. I work in a technical field and most people had no idea there was a protest going on. They also didn’t even know of alternative mobile apps. Most didn’t care and just used the official app. There may be a slight bump, but nothing significant.

I think it depends in part on whether there are some good, short (!) tutorials on how to use Lemmy on Reddit.

People who just want to continue to browse content will be deterred from walls of text with technical details about the Fediverse and how Lemmy works. It should really be a step-by-step instruction... ideally offering a few instances to choose from at the start. So that the few biggest instances don't break down from the influx and people leave again.

From my experience with unexperienced users, they will drop Lemmy like hot potatoes when they run into the first problem or broken down server.

I might be alone, but I don't want or need a huge amount of users. I'd rather discuss the subjects I want to talk about with a smaller group of users. It would be nice to have some familiarity in the comments as well. On the big subreddits, your comment was practically guaranteed to be lost in the sea of thousands of comments unless you were the first to comment, or had bots upvoting you. If I want my comments to be lost, I'll comment on a Tiktok video.

1. Less than you wish for.
2. But enough to cause some trouble.
3. And Reddit management will deny it, because their messaging is primarily marketing for investors, not an attempt to accurately describe the world.

The Fediverse is still growing and a lot of people aren’t going to want to be there during the growing pains. More likely I suspect there will be a bit of a bump that first week after everything shuts down and then it will even out. We will likely see a slow, but steady organic growth in users over the next few months as users post more content.

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.

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

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

I really enjoy the idea of open source, so earlier today I started thinking isn't that the direction the reddit community should take? Couple of minutes and a search later i found Lemmy and thought it was the coolest concept ever. I may not be most reddit users, but the actions reddit have taken certainly got me here. Lack of apps on ios may be problematic as i don't think most users will think of using web apps (or whatever they're called)

I would imagine that most of the influx already happened and most people who care should be here (in the threadiverse) already. That is unless:

1. unpurged accounts becoming [deleted] makes it more apparent those who left, and the scale/news of it
2. quality drops like a rock due to mods and users who have left (also because of those who stay behind)
3. the admins keep digging further
4. there is a sizable chunk of people who for whatever reason haven't paid attention to the situation for a month, or haven't decided on an instance

I would say something about continuing mod protests, but I think if they're not here already they are probably are just mad that it's happening and wouldn't switch.

In any case I cannot see any of these causing an influx on the 30th or even on any timescale shorter than a week.

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’ve been thinking that too. Most of the users who care enough probably have heard of the whole thing by now and prepared for it in whatever way makes sense for them. I think the very small number that are left using third-party apps care little enough to either reluctantly move to the official Reddit app (that’s what I used to use, I didn’t even know there were other apps), or they might even care little enough that they’ll just stop browsing Reddit altogether because their interest in it doesn’t match the effort they’d have to do to adapt to the new world in any way.

I think there will be some highly-motivated enough individuals who might have been living under a rock, and we’ll have a little bump, but probably not very big.