Reddit was nothing but an unused digg clone untill digg screwed themselves so everyone just moved over.
ColeSloth
joined 2 years ago
The user base on Lemmy is 40k to 60k. It's held there for the past year. Lemmy did get a big increase compared to the sub 10k a few years ago, but a total of 50k users is still miniscule by comparison.
If digg opened up api calls (no idea what they're at on this right now) and has better implementation for keeping out bots with fewer ads; all the sheep will enjoy being a part of a mass exodus.
It was less bad on digg around 2010 or so when everyone bailed from there to reddit, than what reddit currently is right now.
It's still stupid easy to make an account and create a sub. I've been on the internet since no one owned a cell phone and a modem gave you less than 3KB\s speeds. I've watched a lot of .coms that seemed unstoppable become worthless in a manner of a few months. If a few million people decide to head over to digg, the other 40 million will happily follow. It will be fun for them to do. It happening is anyone's guess.
There was a time when aol owned the internet, dogpile was the greatest search engine, Yahoo was the defacto email provider, Craigslist was the only and best way to make local sales, and MySpace was where you put yourself up at on the internet.
That's pretty nonsensical logic.
By that logic, reddit never would have been a thing, because they didn't have the content or the users, because they were all on digg.
No one migrated en masse to Lemmy because making an account here is too much work for someone to just hop on over and check out.
It wiped and all is new. I made my same email and user name I had there from like 20 years ago. I was a bit sad it didn't say I had been on there since like 2005. I don't plan on using the account much, but I'd be damned if some bot or something took my old user name before I got it.
Digg screwed up by doing what reddit had done starting a few years back, while there was an easy and available alternative to go over to.
Now digg is the easy alternative to go over to, but it won't work as well. At least not for long. The people who own digg are venture capitalist firms. It's sole existence is to monetize the hell out of the platform.
Meanwhile, Lemmy treads water with a bit too few members because the learning curve is a bit steeper to get started.
Being owned by venture capitalists is pretty much an assurance that they'll turn it to shit as much as they can get away with. The entire reason people abandoned digg for reddit in the first place was because it was selling out to ad space and shill accounts and manipulation. The venture capitalists will want big returns on their investments.
You know what? I like it, and I'ma start doing it.
It keeps getting worse, too. The nineties wasn't that long ago. I swear.
I put Linux mint on my 2016 laptop. It runs great.
I felt I was being pretty specific about "the most popular". If the most popular instance is dead, we got problems.
view more: next ›
You can browse digg and reddit without an account.
I agree with some quality over quantity, but we really need a bigger base than 50k to get more people on. With only 50k there's pretty much no user base for any instances\topics that aren't very popular.
For instance, there's no user base for an instance about yo-yo's here. But reddit is so big that \throwers has a subscriber count as large as the entire user base of Lemmy. We don't need 50,000,000 people here, but having a couple million would make a world of difference.