this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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The reddit exodus is comparatively very small. Tens of thousands of users, many of which will not stick around. Reddit has millions of users (hundreds of millions?). They barely notice.
The thing with these sites is that only a tiny proportion of users create content. For Reddit it's even worse, since they also need subreddit moderators, essentially employees working for free. So, tens of thousands of users leaving will definitely have an impact since in this case it's old power users who make content, and mods. Will the site "die"? Nope, we'll see it working for a long, long time, but will be a shadow of what it used to be, for example i remember the Obama AMA and many similar high-profile ones, that's not gonna happen anymore or will be reduced greatly.
Wait for after 1 Juli if they don't reverse the decision they made. Right now the mods and users believe they can change this madness, but when the go through with it, many more will leave, especially mods and the og users that contribute most content.
There is no way that the Lemmy network can handle millions of users. The big instances are struggling with tens of thousands. I believe many will leave and reddit will become worse because of it, but it's not going to die, it's going to turn into facebook.
No without mods reddit is basically dead. Thats their own system and fault...
And i think the instances need more capacity to support the traffic, but its not impossible. i also hope that at least some of the people coming here start new instances.
Reddit has slowly replaced mods in large subs with employees. And you vastly overestimate the willingness of the average user to put up with quirks of new platforms like Lemmy.
For Lemmy to support the 430 million monthly active users that reddit has - this is currently, in my opinion, impossible. The largest lemmy server has tens of thousands of users, and is running on the most powerful server that VPS provider OVH offers. The lead developer knows that there are big performance improvements needed in the code and has been working on it for some time, but it will be years before the lemmy network can handle even a few million active users, in my opinion.
They can replace who they want in general, but they never cover the thousands of niche and middle sized subs and thats a money issue, they can't suddenly materialize thousand employees to moderate some subs. And the medium and small subs actually draw most non bot traffic. Also its estimated that reddit massively inflates user numbers, especially on their "default subs"
Current lemmy supporting hundred millions is absolutely utopian, but its in active development, there would be a way, but i would be very surprised when more than 5% of reddit users would suddenly end up here, lemmy needs to grow healthy and not from one day to the next by a Exponent, that's a fact. But i don't think it would take years, more users draw more attention, wich leads to more devs helping to improve the quality.
(oh and i kinda don't care about the "average users" i care about the top 5% of reddit that contribute 50% of the content and 99% of the mod work)
As long as it is an exodus of enough interesting users. Lemmy needs roughly the number of users appearing now to make posts frequent enough. But still the lack of communities needs more.