I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
I noticed a significant shift in the conversation, I think a lot of people left
Reddit has somewhere north of 100 million MAU. Lemmy has somewhere in the realm of 50k MAU, or 0.05% of Reddit. Even factoring in PieFed, etc., we’re talking about a drop in the bucket for Reddit.
A lot of people came to Lemmy, by Lemmy standards, but almost nobody left Reddit, by Reddit standards. The case can be made that our 0.05% are the the best 0.05% of Reddit, but it’s still teeny tiny. 99.9% of users just bent over and shouted “Yes Spez!”
Edit: this article includes active user estimates each quarter, and the numbers continually seem to be going up.
That article doesn’t attempt to differentiate between human users and bots.
Also, Reddit has gotten significantly more ban-happy since then, which is almost certainly creating a chilling effect on discussions there.
It doesn’t take a lot of that to cause a shift in conversations.
Even if 90% of Reddit’s MAUs are bots, Lemmy would still be <1% of Reddit’s human userbase.
They are getting paid on their active users for advertising and investors. I would guess the active humans involved is >1% of them.
Active users that post and comment matter much more than the total number though. Lemmy of course is much smaller, but it certainly has attracted a decent portion of reddit’s “active” users
Thanks for the explainer, I see what you mean