While I don’t expect there’s going to be any meaningful impact on Reddit once the dust settles, I do think this will bring a lot of new users to the Fediverse.
Reddit losing a few hundred thousand users is a drop in a bucket given their user base, but it is a significant boost for us.
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This is going to work like the Mastodon migrations. It will come in waves as Reddit does more and more shitty stuff.
Most likely, and this works well because it allows time for server capacity to grow and for wrinkles to get ironed out gradually. Fediverse would have a hard time absorbing millions of people all at once, but a gradual trickle of users allows things to grow organically.
Fediverse does not need to have million of users. Fediverse only need enough users to mature the technology and ecosystem.
I completely agree, the total number of users isn’t really that important. The three things that count are having enough users to generate interesting content, developers who can develop the ecosystem, and people hosting instances. As long as these three things can be done sustainably then the Fediverse will be around indefinitely, and will likely outlast all the existing commercial platforms.
Too much rapid growth can also be a negative because it can disrupt the existing culture and normalize negative behaviors on mainstream platforms. When the growth is gradual then new people are more likely to adjust to the existing community norms.
New users is not a good metric. Many people will create accounts just to check it out even if they dont stay.
I’ve made multiple Lemmy accounts on different servers.sure, but it’s still an indicator of growth and some percentage of users does stay active
I think things will probably slow down a bit again after the initial euphoria is over, but yes, I think this has brought a lot of attention to Fediverse alternatives.
That’s a good thing, and after slowing down instance admins can focus on improving the experience for existing users.
Reddit blackouts were the kick the Fediverse needed to reach a critical mass. Fediverse sites are already starting to appear in Google search and join-lemmy.org is the third result when you look up “lemmy”.
I’m seeing it the same way. We got a critical mass of not just users, but smart internet types.
However the platform is still very raw. After the migration slows, it’s actually beneficial to have some time for the devs to patch things up to a level more suitable for normies.
Then, with a solid core community and a functioning UX, we can begin to aggressively advertise the Fediverse via coordinated campaigns. It’s not going to happen overnight but there’s a clear path laid out before us.
The same happened with the migration to Reddit from Digg. It wasn’t all overnight, some people switched early as Reddit got more users, and for a while people used both, etc.
But I think things are in a pretty good state (especially if 0.18 fixes some of the UI issues), I see no reason to go back to Reddit.
Mainly that as more of the contributors and technical users switch to Lemmy, there’s less of what you’d want to see on Reddit anyway. This is exactly what happened to Digg over 6 months or so.
The individual instances doesn’t really matter. What is actually shown in the picture is that fediverse grew by 200k users.
It actually does matter for the individual instances because the amount of content and interactions grows regardless which server users join because servers federate with each other. This is a fundamentally different dynamic from commercial walled gardens where each platform competes for users with every other.
