Technology

Tbh, Lemmy is much more difficult to get into. I wouldn't be here if I wasn't somewhat dogmatically against reddit's shenanigans. My buddy who uses the official app doesn't really care about any of this stuff. Even I feel a bit alienated by Lemmy because it feels so dominated by tech workers. Your average meme-enjoyer is going to see multiple instances, buggy apps, none of their favorite communities and they're going to bounce off it. I like Lemmy but we need to be realistic about how palatable it is.

I'll tell you why I haven't deleted reddit -- aside from tech-heavy discussion here (Linux, Reddit, tech generally, that sort of thing), there isn't a fediverse equivalent to things like the sports or food subreddits I follow.

I agree iscussions on lemmy are higher-quality and friendlier, for sure. But for a lot of the things I use reddit for they just don't really exist here yet.

I really like the fediverse, I'm on kbin and it feels like old reddit did, before it experienced its own Eternal September. The hardest part of switching over was deciding which instance to sign up for an account on, had to try some different servers before I settled on this one.

I’m kind of surprised more redditors haven’t jumped ship.

I had a bunch of alt accounts, for different purposes that I didn't want cross referenced (no need for my career-oriented alts to be associated with my political views or details about my family life or personal relationships), and then I just kept enforcing that principle of least privilege to segmenting my different hobbies and interests into different accounts. Third party apps made it easy, so I just kept doing that.

So now that I no longer use a third party app, it was a natural time to delete a bunch of old accounts. Lemmy provides enough of an alternate for any technology-related discussion, and I have confidence that the discussions about food, sports, entertainment, parenting, etc., will eventually reach near parity with reddit. For now, though, I keep my career-focused account to browse lawyer-related subreddits (including the private /r/lawyers), and my city-focused account to participate in discussions about my city, because I don't think lemmy will be there for quite some time. Of course, now that I no longer look at reddit from a mobile device, I basically only use RES+old.reddit whenever I happen to be on my personal laptop (which is relatively rare these days).

Yeah I think this is purely them doing the bare minimum to look like they want to communicate while at the same time doing nothing. See also: app developers who tried to work with Reddit that Reddit absolutely ignored.

This is a shallow PR stunt that anyone familiar with the situation will see through. Its only meant to be seen by investors who only know what's going on with Reddit from reading Forbes and Bloomberg

Which one is better for the IPO: listening to the community or listening to the money. Reddit are absolutely going to milk every dollar they can from this abusive relationship they have with mods and users.

Honestly it's amazing they even stayed around at all even before the site itself started fucking around. They start shit as a hobby, probably not even imagining it blowing up and becoming popular. Dealing with all the garbage and bullshit people on the internet have to offer. Then again, that's thinking they made the community to have discussions; not control them.

I get that the tin pot dictator narrative is popular wrt subreddit mods, but it really isn't a useful model for understanding people's behaviour.

Fear of change, denial of loss, and sunk cost are all much more powerful tools for understanding.

This is such a cynical take. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of moderators do care about their subreddits or else they wouldn't be volunteering their free time. The allure of the power to remove some random person's post on the Internet, or to ban them just so they return with another account, pales in comparison to the thrill of watching your community grow and people having fun because of it. And it's not this weird selfish, hey-look-at-me-I'm-so-successful kind of thrill, it's like you joined this thing because you are interested it and now all these other people who are also interested in it are there talking about it. That's what's cool, you set off to make this place where people can talk about this thing that you think is cool and you get to watch it grow and be successful over time. Some of these communities have been around for over a decade, so, people have invested time and effort into them for over a decade.

Moving to elsewhere isn't really as easy as people make it out to be. At the moment "moving communities" means fracturing your community as there is no unified approach to doing this.

The operative word being "unified" which is next to impossible to achieve. If you get all mods to agree you will have a hard time reaching all your users. This in itself presents the biggest roadblock, ideally you'd close up shop and redirect users to the new platform. Reddit will most certainly not allow this, their approach to protesting subreddits that were not even aiming to migrate made that abundantly clear.

So this means that, at the very least, you are looking at splitting your community over platforms. This is far from a unified approach.

This isn't even touching on the lack of viable long term platforms out there. I'd love for people to move to Lemmy. But realistically speaking Lemmy is very immature, instance owners are confronted with new bugs every day, not to mention the costs of hosting an instance. That also ignores the piss poor state the moderation tooling is in on Lemmy. The same is true for many of the possible other "alternatives".
All the new attention these platforms have gotten also means they are getting much more attention from developers. So things might change in the future for the better, in fact I am counting on it. But that isn't the current state of the fediverse. Currently most of the fediverse, specifically Lemmy is still very much in a late Alpha maybe early Beta state as far as software stability and feature completeness goes.

And, yes, the situation on reddit is degrading and this latest round of things has accelerated something that has been going on for a while. But at the same time Reddit is the platform that has been around for a decade and where the currenty community is. Picking that up and moving elsewhere is difficult and sometimes next to impossible. I mean we haven't even talked about discoverability of communities for regular users.

Lemmy (or any fediverse platform) isn't exactly straightforward to figure out and start participating in. If you can even find the community you are looking for. Reddit also hosts a lot of support communities, who benefit from reddit generally speaking having a low barrier of entry. Many of those wouldn't be able to be as accessible for the groups they are targeting on other platforms.

Then why are they even still there?

Sunk cost fallacy or misplaced hope are other options outside of Napoleon complex.

It's easy to look at this from the lens of people just wanting power, but maybe it's something akin to the grief, honest grief, I felt about leaving Reddit because I had been there so long as just a user. I can't imagine how it would feel to give up control over something that I had created and curated for many years knowing that it was going to be destroyed. 

"Sorry, but we are monetizing ~~our~~ your content now"

Fixed that for you.

At this point, even if they backpedaled completely - even if they fired spez - it's far too little and far too late. Third party apps are gone. The trust is gone. Folks like me deleted their content and their accounts. There is no going back.