Lemmy.world has grown by about 66.6% since reddit's API shutdown
Lemmy.world grew from about 51k users when third-party reddit apps started to shut down to about 84.8k users at the time of this post.
Definitely felt some growing pains in the past few days, but it's great to see the platform more active now that things have become more stable.
So, welcome reddit expats!
You are viewing a single comment
Seems like they aren’t handling the load well.
There's an inevitable adaptation and learning period for everyone, including smaller instances, but I think we should really be emphasizing the decentralization aspects of the Fediverse. Ruud and others are doing all they can to keep up, but everyone trying to consolidate onto lemmy.world isn't great for anyone and only leads to even greater cost and technical pressures.
Someone suggested that we should use this to find instances nearer to us. I did that and it has been running a lot smoother on my end apart from the occasional loading issues on subs in Lemmy.world.
There's definitely some getting used to for new immigrants like us from Reddit. The nature of Fediverse forces us to give up on the concept of "karma" and be ready to hop from one instance to another at any given time. The good thing is we'll be seeing much fewer karma-farming bots, which I assume would be an even much bigger issue on Reddit now that so many of the genuine users have left. Shitty mods, rampant bots, subs going dark/NSFW. What a shitshow.
Honestly, one of the largest problems with the current instance system is the lack of an ability to either export an account or link accounts between several instances. Once those types of features are added, I think Lemmy will be a lot more tolerable to new users.
If you think this is bad, you should have seen Reddit when the Digg migration happened.
Tell me about this "Digg." It sounds so familiar, but I don't think I actually ever used anything called Digg.
Digg.com was a link aggregate site that predated Reddit, and was more attractive to users based solely upon its relatively sleek UI.
After some years of success, Digg made several changes: obfuscation of up votes and removing down votes, and a new UI to match the reduced features. As a result the majority of the Digg user base and content creator sphere migrated to Reddit.
This resultant swell in Reddits userbase led to app creators brisging the gaps between reddits relatively brutalistic UI and the experience sought by laymen (i.e. non programmers crowd). As you have seen the decision to alienate third party applications has led to a new backlash against Reddit.
A lot of this sounds familiar.
I just wonder of this is actually going to have a similar effect. Controversial decision but I'm pretty used to seeing companies get away with shitty choices.
IMO, what reddit has done is much worse than what digg did but their user base is also significantly larger than digg's was. I hope that reddit will see a hit but I expect they will survive this.
I do wonder how many content creators and moderators they are losing though. It she's likely that content creators and moderators were probably more reliant on third party apps than general users.
Potentially. Though Reddit claims that the vast majority (like 90+%) used the official app. Of course, if such was true then you'd expect they wouldn't pull the rug out from under everyone.
I can believe a majority used the official up. Maybe even a supermajority. 80% maybe.
But throwing a fit over 1-10% of your user base and doubling down when that low percentage doesn't agree? I dunno.
It's a big enough number that made them want to kill the third-party apps but it's small enough that they felt they could survive the backlash.
I guess time will tell. Personally, I wouldn't continue moderating without third party apps given the lack of tools. I hadn't moderated anything in a while but the third party tools were always so much better when I did moderate things.