Scaled sorting is gonna be huge I think. Really looking forward to that

People like to think that they've made some far-reaching change with what little actually happened. The painful truth is: they didn't. There wasn't a big hit to the userbase, most people on Reddit already hated moderators and didn't give a shit if they got removed, and overall people caved far too quickly (how many people folded instantly when their internet moderator position was threatened? (I say this as someone who was one of those moderators that flat out quit everything and nuked my account rather than continuing to toil for free for a corporation that hates me)).

The actually important thing that was accomplished by the protesting was platforms like Lemmy getting enough of a userbase boost to become stable - in the future, Lemmy and others may be able to act as viable alternatives to Reddit, because there's already a community here (however small). Reddit will continue to enshittify, and people will continue to leave in small numbers that may escalate to big numbers if they commit a truly massive fuckup. The more heavy Reddit users (read: more invested, not necessarily more active) are small in number compared to the vast majority who lurk, don't give a shit about any ongoing meta-drama, and don't particularly care about any changes to the UI or browsing experience as long as they can still get an endless feed of memes.

Even if it hurts to realize this, it's important to make sure people get this message beat into their skulls so that we aren't stuck with a bunch of Redditors (derogatory) with over-inflated egos that think Reddit will bend over backward to appease them, then cave as soon as they receive literally any pushback from the corporation running the site.

It has the employee keycard for this level of the dungeon

The ancient trials redefined for the modern age

Any PR statement that includes the words "we hear you" can be safely ignored

How many of those people are still gonna be using the site though?

It doesn't matter how loud you scream if you won't actually do anything about it.

Fantastic idea, but did they need to use plastic packaging?

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Probably not yet.

Reddit has over a decade of content on it, from a much bigger userbase.

This is true, but there are good reasons it's shaking out this way:

• Lemmy.world has had some of the most open signups compared to other major instances

• Discovery of communities across instances is a little harder, specifically natural discovery instead of directly searching

• It is easier to just tell incoming users to sign on to the instance your community is hosted on because you know it's safe and they won't ever be locked out by defederation

I think the rise of more topic-specfiic instances like ttrpg.network will help spread the load out.

I don't need Lemmy to compete with or kill Reddit. All I wanted was any one platform to get enough of an influx of users to be self-sustaining even after the outrage started to die down, which appears to have been successful.

I doubt we will see any big dent in numbers so soon, if at all. The brutal honest truth is that most users of Reddit are casual lurkers who just want a content feed and do not care about anything else. This is why subreddits protested as they did, interrupting the content feed with blackouts and extremely niche rules.

What may actually happen is that a lot of the content creators leave, which will decrease the quality of the site in the long term and maybe push out the casual user when the content gets bad enough. This is not something easily quantifiable, so we'll just have to wait and see.

But personally, I'm ok even if reddit isn't toppled. Now that I've stopped using it, I have no stake in the matter anymore.