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.

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.

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 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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I would imagine most people planning to head here already have accounts, activity will no doubt go up though.

As the weeks go on though more will find this place and I’m sure there will be more surges to come.