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Lemmy enjoys growth as developers pivot from Reddit amid API charging controversy
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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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I'd love to see some stats on reddit engagement now. Anecdotally, I logged in just to look at my usual subreddits (the ones that are open) and they seem dead.
I use RSS to get feeds for subs that are not active in lemmy.
Many posts are dog shit level now. Either looking for help or just garbage.
Check out r/lemmino lol.
Oh RSS feed is a good idea. The only sub I still check is r/Genshin_Impact_Leaks xd
Edit: Anyone knows a better free web-based RSS reader than Feedly? It kept sending me to its paid service for trying to sub to a Reddit feed, until I subbed to it via SiftRSS D:
Ive been using FreshRSS for years. You can either selfhost it or use one of the public instances.
Thanks, I'll check that one out too :)
Thanks, I'll check that one out too :)
EDIT: Sorry, I missed the "web based". Today I'm incredibly distracted.
Feeder is pretty good if you use Android.
No worries, but I'm a diehard PC user xd
I might end up going with an open-source desktop app in the end, both Fluent Reader and Raven Reader look good.
No worries, but I'm a diehard PC user xd
I might end up going with an open-source desktop app in the end, both Fluent Reader and Raven Reader look good.
I self host FreshRSS & RSS-Bridge in Docker and view everything in Fluent Reader (Linux), FeedMe (Android), and Read You (Android). I absolutely love it!
I tried out Fluent Reader (Windows) yesterday, but it was a bit buggy and lacked some necessary features, so I'm testing NewsBlur for now. The free version is kinda limited, but I love the training feature, and in general it feels the most user-friendly out of the 4-5 services/apps I tried yesterday.
hosting freshrss locally and just tested that it can subscribe to reddit no problems (although I don't want to) - their cloud instances should work : https://www.freshrss.org/cloud-providers.html
thanks, I'll check it out! I'd probably go with one of their cloud instances, as self-hosting is a pain with my skill level.
thanks, I'll check it out! I'd probably go with one of their cloud instances, as self-hosting is a pain with my skill level.
I have been using CommaFeed for years. I'm not a huge fan of the most current design, but overall it works well.
thanks, I'll check it out :)
Inoreader
thanks!
thanks!
The bots won't stop. And probably have increased. So it'll be tough to see without slices we'll never get
That's the punchline that makes me chuckle when I read how "little impact" the protests and migration have had.
Here's a little secret: Reddit mods can't know for sure which accounts are bots. They can suspect, but they're no easy, reliable proof. Reddit admins, though, know exactly which accounts are bots — they just prefer keeping that info to themselves.
For me, that triggers a great big "Hmmmm".
And they'll never differentiate them. If their investors know how much of their traffic was just bots they'd divest immediately
I'm wondering how much of that is bots.
Reddit is trying to build up to an IPO, so it's not far-fetched to think that Steve Huffman would have seen the exodus coming, and supplemented traffic with bots so the drop in engagement didn't seem so precipitous.
I think the thing that is going to suffer most is comment quality. Unfortunately (or for Huffman, fortunately), it's not really something that can be quantified.
I think we will see a slow decline until the platform is basically walking dead. It'll function, and maybe there will even be apparent engagement, but the quality will be nothing like it was before this whole debacle.
So I saw this on mastodon ... and it's a little weird, perhaps not unlike the cultures that migrants develop in their new homes.
There's a tendency, I think, to overestimate how bad the "old" platform has become since "we" left. In reality, it's not nearly that bad, if any different at all, and those of us not inclined toward this overestimation go and check the old platform from time to time and get confused as to where all of this "hellscape deadness" is.
I think we can all imagine to some extent why this might happen. But I'm writing this just in case it's healthy to point out that it need not happen, and that the thing that's actually changed, though you might not know if you've arrived here recently, is this place, which is a whole new thing!
A story I think of along these lines is what Steve Jobs did when he went back to Apple in the late 90s. Back then Apple thought they had to beat Microsoft to win. Thing is the company was close to dying with huge debts etc and were never going to do that (still haven't come close today). But they were so enamoured with their past to the point of having a museum of all of their old products. Jobs had the museum removed, told everyone that for Apple to win it has to stop thinking about Microsoft because they'll never be destroyed, instead Apple had to win by doing its own thing, and then, super contraversially for the time, had Bill Gates invest a bunch of money into Apple and appear on the big screen during a keynote to rather audible "boos".
It doesn't matter what Reddit's doing or whether they're doing well. It matters if we're doing well ... as cheesy as that might sound.
Rock and stone with us. !drg@lemmy.world
Love the pep talk, and the sentiment behind it.
I loved Reddit, spent at least an hour a day there and often much more, but I'm loving the Lemmy too. In many ways it's better, and one of those ways is that it's so much smaller — a much higher ratio of thought vs tired memes and dumb jokes and slick burns.
I went to some threads on Reddit yesterday. Bloody hell there a lot of shit to wade through before getting to anything useful. It might be more engagement, but the amount of low-effort garbage comments turned me around really quick.
Yeah mate you found one good comment. How much shit did you read before you found it? These comments are highlighted because they’re the exception. I’m not interested in wading through tons upon tons of “this” and “came here to say this” and “you win the internet sir” before I find a good comment on quantum physics.
Yeah mate you found one good comment. How much shit did you read before you found it? These comments are highlighted because they’re the exception. I’m not interested in wading through tons upon tons of “this” and “came here to say this” and “you win the internet sir” before I find a good comment on quantum physics.
I don’t think you’re a shill. There a plenty of normal people on Reddit, enjoying the content like before. While I despise Spez, I can’t discount that they have created a product that people want to use.
But there are also plenty of people who, like me, saw a decline in the average quality of content over the last x number of years. A move to the lowest common denominator. Comments like your example were more frequent years ago relative to today.
Lemmy feels like Reddit when I joined 11-ish years ago. That’s why I’m here now.
Edit: for what it’s worth, I also didn’t go to the default subs. I spent a long time curating to my tastes and hobbies, to the point where I even blocked /r/All from Apollo so I didn’t have to see the day-to-day shit. But it didn’t help. My hobbies deteriorated into memes and low-effort shit every day.
I went to some threads on Reddit yesterday. Bloody hell there a lot of shit to wade through before getting to anything useful. It might be more engagement, but the amount of low-effort garbage comments turned me around really quick.
I doubt it made a dent. 250k doesn't even register on the map of 100m active users.
I think that which 250k migrated will eventually end up making quite a significant dent. It isn't the technophobic lurkers that make up the Lemmy early adopters.
It does if those 250k are the ones submitting/creating content.
Are they though? I didn't submit posts on reddit. Looking at the front page of lemmy it's missing a lot of the topics and subjects reddit posts about.
I'm not trying to be a downer, I think 250k is great and it's enough to make lemmy 100% replace reddit for me. But I don't think it dents reddit. I talked to my friends and they barely noticed anything except the blackout. I go on reddit all the same communities are still posting and commenting as normal. But saying that when I looked at reddit I realized how much garbage is posted there compared to lemmy.
This is it though, of my subreddits that are open, it's just complete trash being posted and a few comments (and even less meaningful comments).
It's only about 50k active. The rest are all bots.
Basically this. I guess the people leaving Reddit are evened out by simply rounding the resulting values before rendering them into a graph.
Wish someone would create a bot to copy r/HyruleEngineering to the community here.
You can request that on lemmit.online if I remeber the name of the instance correctly
My local area sub is still pretty active, but I did notice that in the other subreddit the comments section is a lot more sparse.
They are probably confused about how to use an app that behaves like an ad carousel