If it's like mastodon, most people will get bored and move back to reddit. Lemmy will grow marginally, and be more ready for the next stress test.
There will be other reddit outrages after the ipo, and lemmy will be more ready for migration. Repeat. Hopefully there's a critical mass one day, but there's no guarantee.
In my view this isn't the end of Reddit, but it is the beginning of the end. This situation will probably pass, but the lemmy devs and instance owners have already gotten useful feedback about how to handle situations like this, and what kinds of things would help lemmy and the fediverse grow. The next time something like this happens (and there will be a next time) they'll be just that little bit more ready.
Although for me specifically, I don't actually care too much if Reddit dies. I'm happy as long as there's a community here. The best thing that seems to be coming out of this situation so far is that many subreddits are now getting lemmy community analogs for people to move to.
I want reddit to die. It had its day, and what we have now is a poor reflection on what it was and what it's supposed to be. Change is a good thing, it leads to improvement and making things better.
I think you're going to know by one metric. Quality of content over the next ~3 - 6 months. Whether subs stay or go is one thing, that's been part of Reddit for the 12 years I used it. What would get folks to leave is when the communities they are interested in aren't supplying content.
So if you lose some lurkers, that's not gonna matter because they didn't post anyways. If you start losing power users, who regularly feed your community content, what's going to drive you to stick around? If you ask me, I think the fact we are even having this conversation means Reddit is losing in this equation.
We already tried to move to Voat in 2015 and it... didn't turn out very well...
I think if the Apollo dev actually releases an Apollo-based app for Lemmy then we might get a chance.
Voat was always going to be a cesspool because of the actual reason they were migrating in the first place. A bunch of hate subs got banned and the kind of people who would be upset enough to boycott that are shit heads so it was inevitable.
Meanwhile, as the subs are down there are people attempting to replicate them here.
So if you like Dadjokes, hop over to DadJokes
I don't think a consensus alternative is necessarily required. It might be best for the masses to be split amongst the many alternatives giving each one an opportunity to grow, improve and potentially rise up as a result of this event. I for one will not be using Reddit at all except for very specific sources of information which I will probably just scrape and store offline anyway.
I also like the concept of fediverse instances being local, meaning the internet is becoming truly more physically decentralized with local home based servers providing a base for local user registration and content creation/consumption. This has the potential for users to start 'filtering' their online experience to content created by the people in their local communities versus just a vast pool of global users.
I'm not sure I'm on board with joining a local instance. I live in a very conservative and religious country and I don't want to feel the need to censor myself on any community out of fear of having the instance admin ban my account because of differing beliefs. I'm sure it would work better for some than global instances, but I'm afraid they'd be prone to conformity and even nationalism.
Reddit was never going to just shut down overnight, but it's more or less done for me (barring some sudden change with the API stuff, but even then I'd make an effort to use it less). I'll keep my account around and might occasionally go to it to look up specific things or visit more niche communities that don't have much of a presence here or on other alternatives yet, but I'm done with just generally browsing reddit or providing any content for them. I'm enjoying it here and hope the boost in activity allows for continued growth and filling out of communities for more specific topics.
I'm in the same boat. I mainly used Reddit to get into new hobbies and currently it's cycling. The amount of new posts on there is staggering and I've learned a ton over the past year. I'll be unsubbing from most subreddits and using it as a tool for specific subjects. For community building, discussions, and news I think I've found a new home in Lemmy. Hopefully I can contribute and help nieche communities grow so I can leave altogether.
I can actually see plenty of people and communities permanently migrating over to Lemmy instances. Some are actually creating their very own federated Lemmy instances.
So now, for those who created their own instances, there will be no more censoring and imposing from a higher organization.
I don't see why to not use Fediverse, Mastodon apps are great already, and Lemmy apps are getting updated and improved as we speak.
Yes, the web front-end still needs work, and yes, Lemmy still lacks in some features, but that is being worked on as we speak, and I believe that some of the users migrating over, are devs, that will actually help to improve Lemmy, which is Open Source. So, if there's a feature you'd like Lemmy to have, just open a Pull Request!
The communities you love are made of people, and people will go to someplace better. When googleplus ended, it was a mess in the initial migration. But soon people agreed to stick to better places, and the communities survived. Reddit is just a venue that used to be nice to hang out with friends and now is turning into a shopping center. It's annoying to change venues, but real friends will stick togheter.
I don't think that Reddit is going down, but i have seen users that post regularly on Reddit closing down their accounts and joining Lemmy, this will snowball into more joining Lemmy because the quality of post will eventually go down on Reddit and go up on Lemmy, this is just speculations and have a really lose base.
I think this will just lead to reddit becoming more mainstream - not in a good way but in the way facebook did. This already happened in the past thanks to marketing pushes and most of the bigger subs are really crappy at this point.
So in the long term, reddit might die due to the quality of the content becoming worse. But for now investors might be happy.
I feel like I'm going to stop posting/commenting on Reddit, although I will still visit it (using old.reddit.com with uBlock Origin) to look at certain questions etc.