Obviously a few years ago, the API changes caused the reddit community mods to strike, and caused a mass-blackout of most reddit core communities. Eventually Reddit removed a handful of mod teams on some notable subreddits and caused the rest to chicken-out. But it did birth the Fediverse properly.
I suspect Reddit will make another step at some point which causes another comparable exodus. This time, if they do, the Fediverse is far better developed to handle it. What do you imagine it might be?
The murder of “old”
It’s coming
Porn. It’s going to be when they get rid of porn.
I don’t think they will anymore. porn has become such a high traffic item that they’ve worked with sex workers on reddit to set up a system that accommodates them as much as possible while taking “non-US friendly” traffic offsite.
I know they’re likely to go full fash but this is a way bigger meal ticket than it used to be the last time they tried to scrub all porn (which they did, don’t let them bullshit you)
That’s basically why I’m there
I have a few fans who really like what I create
It’ll be when they cave to ID verification to access the porn. Whoever doesn’t jump ship then will then do so once the porn gets banned completely.
Either way, where the porn goes, so goes the traffic. VHS, DVD, the internet/streaming. All major shifts in traffic were porn related.
Or force something ai related.
Do … do we have porn?
I mean, there are NSFW instances. They’re often defederated, as often there are laws and procedures you have to follow when “distributing” porn - and when federated, “your” instance would mirror their content, which can be a headache for an instance admin. Try e.g. lemmynsfw
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.
Yah, I agree with this one. I only now visit old.Reddit.com. If it’s gone, I can’t imagine scrolling through the shitty UI that’s left.
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.
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
Got perma’d from Reddit by their AI bot on a Rule 1, I’ve appealed it but it hasn’t been reviewed and we’re steadily approaching 2 months since my appeal submission.
It’s either a deliberate attempt to silence certain people and opinions, or a rogue AI bot that they don’t want to rollback in order to save face. Either or, fuck Reddit and fuck Spez
Might be a tactic to get people to lose old historic accounts and start new ones. A good way to bump up the numbers is to ban an account but don’t delete the account, and just let it just sit there. Then the banned person is forced to create a new account if they want back in again.
A common theme I read from banned accounts is that they can’t get in again yet no one said the account was deleted … and the assumption is that the user just gave up the account and restarted a new one.
My account was 15 years old, even had a reply from the famed Keanu Reeves on one of my comments! However, I can sign in to my account, I just can’t comment, upvote, downvote, or post.
I attempted to make a new account but that one got banned as well because they attached the ban to my IP and electronic signatures - which… seems excessive to me hut okay.
My appeal was rejected within 24 hours
It’s easy to make new accounts though if you just use a different browser
I waited a month before making an alt so as to “not break any further rules”. When I did, I used a different browser at a different IP of account creation than the ones that got banned, and it literally got banned in 24 hours.
I’ve had them banned after a few hours, and after a few weeks (I think someone who didn’t like me snitched)
Current one’s a few days old and going strong
Godspeed to ya then lol, maybe I’ll do a cache clear and redownload the apps if I get the itch to participate again.
Download a new browser that you haven’t used before onto a pc, don’t import any bookmarks or anything
Set up an account and let it sit for a while, participate in subs that you normally wouldn’t, things like knitting subs etc. for me,
Be patient
Eventually uninstall and reinstall the app on your phone if so inclined
Don’t link anything to the profile like a social media platform
Appreciate the tips! I’ll give that a shot.
My suspicion is that they’re gearing up down-the-line to convert to an AI moderating system entirely, and they’ll start taking away specific large subreddits from moderators to be managed by AI.
Man fuck the mods and the “super”mods, but tbh, fuck AI more.
Have fedi numbers moved much since over the last year?
It is more active but feels like mostly the regulars
Sadly they romoved long time based statistics for specific softwares but the fediverse at least grew for the last 2 years steadily.
Over the last months something happend because a lot youned and left in a short time
https://fedidb.com/stats
Lemmy specific:
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
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Very minor: it requires me to unblock cloudflare when I’m using noscript
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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.
It won’t, most likely. Old users are rather going offline than migrating. And the federated nature of lemmy and having to deal with censorhappy instance admins and dying instances keep communities lose members each time when forced to migrate.
dying instances keep communities lose members each time when forced to migrate.
[email protected] is the heir of the lemm.ee version, and is now more active that the old one used to be
As far as I know, lemm.ee was the only notable instance that was shut down - and I believe most communities on there successfully migrated to a mixture of piefed.social, lemmy.zip and a smattering of others.
Yes, our community has had the bad luck of having had to move three times. Shedding members each time. The last move was due to the sudden shutdown of lemm.ee.
Oh collapse. I also had to move, and rebuilt well enough.
btw about your cloudflare issue, its only on lemmy.world and not other instances. try another one
I’m still confused about multiple instances, why bifurcate the community (are there multiple instances of knitting communities on lemmy?).
To prevent the centralisation of power into a single instance. If Lemmy.world was the only instance and the owners and admins would have full power. Because the fediverse is centralised, if the instance goes bad - or some moderators on communities there go bad, they can be replaced on another instance.
(are there multiple instances of knitting communities on lemmy?).
Yes, but none of them are active.
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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.
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.
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.
To be clear by “exodus”, I don’t mean the destruction of the platform - but simply enough that would swell the Fediverse.
I don’t mean the destruction of the platform
The platform has already been killed by u/spez. All that’s left are scorched ruins. Why would those who live in scorched ruins ever move out? No, those who did not leave will probably remain there now.
(Marginal observation: Among those who are still there, there are an astonishing number who, just a few years ago, wrote that they would never return to Reddit and would delete their accounts forever…)
I think that is happening actively since probably January this year.
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.
My old account got hacked, its history wiped and is now hawking cryptoscams. I’ve reported it long ago, but the admins don’t give a shit.
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.
The single community I’m still visiting (read-only) on old.reddit has recently dried up to tumbleweed territory. I could stop going there overnight, and not miss a thing.
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.
Due to the pressure’s and scrutiny they have been receiving from the current administration, I bet their next solution will be: a LLM that will monitor users, mark them as “subversive elements”, Generate a dossier on them (cause LLMs always tell the truth), then auto reports them to the FBI.
