this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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The blackout probably won't result in Reddit failing, but he has to realize that if he keeps this up, it's only going to take some aspiring programmers/designers some time to develop more Reddit alternatives, and when one of them becomes viable, down goes Reddit.
That's the thing. Reddit will live on for quite some time, but enough damage has been done to position alternatives as the better choice.
I personally think it will be a combination of all these fediverse sites.
Imagine having your own personal site connected to Lemmy, Kbin, and everyone else's personal sites.
It's pretty incredible.
That does sound quite exciting when you put it that way. (Also yay, this is my first post!)
Welcome aboard!
Oh oh! I too just arrived
Welcome friends! Make yourselves at home.
I honestly don't think people need to sell Lemmy like this.
The vast majority of users are not going to care at all about the fediverse. They just want a site that works like Reddit, and lemmy will give that to them. Personally, I think that within the next year or so, one or two instances are going to become the predominant ones and eventually close themselves off from the rest to better control the content.
I don't think they will close themselves off. I think we will see three 'levels' of instance. The big core instances (a handful) which have dedicated teams running everything (might be volunteer, might be staff), a fairly large smattering of small instances ran by corps (the fedverse is a social media platform after all), as well smaller groups of like-minded people (eg beehaw or lemmygrad), and lastly the hobbyist who want to self host.
I don't think 99.9% of people care about the extra depth of Lemmy, or anything else like this. In fact the extra layer of complexity makes me think nothing like Lemmy will replace Reddit because people don't want to put in the extra effort to learn about instances and federation.
I'll be shocked if any instance hits a million people in the next few years
Any instance hitting one million is unlikely, on the mere grounds of trying to make one super instance is kind of the opposite of the goal of federation. The winning would be reaching a million members between all instances.
To a "normal" user, a Lemmy (or any federated) instance is just another Reddit-like site.
If a user signs up and see content in their feed, why do they need to care about federation?
The federated system gives "normal" users the content they want, and "technical" users the ability to self-host and connect to other federated servers.
I think a handful of popular federated instances will see the majority of Reddit emigrants who don't need/care to know about how federation works.
It seems to me that you've done the math...
undefined> I personally think it will be a combination of all these fediverse sites.
Good point. I think that It'll be the combination of these things that'll hurt them the most...
Just put a > before the text to quote it, just like reddit. I dunno why it sticks "undefined" in there like that.
This situation won't kill reddit, but it is quite capable of killing reddit's supremacy.
Oh, reddit's still going to be around for a long time, and I don't think reddit clones were and are any real threat to reddit (See Voat, or any of the crypto based reddit clones). However, Lemmy is different in that federation is a revolutionary change to the reddit format just as nested comments on reddit is a revolutionary change to traditional internet forums.
So, a likely scenario is that high effort content creators are going away first, leaving the average user who only notice the content getting worse and worse until they leave too, and the dreg will get more and more concentrated as more regular people leave, which lead to worse content, turning it into a death spiral.
Uh, Reddit hardly created the idea of nested comments. You can go back to usenet or Prodigy/Compuserve in the 90s and find nested conversations. Slashdot did it, Daily Kos did it, shit, even the old school VN Boards did it.
Unless I misunderstand your point?
I do think reddit was the one that popularized it though, maybe it would be more accurate to say "combination of nested comments and vote based instead of time based sorting"?
I mean, here's a Slashdot thread from 2005 (https://web.archive.org/web/20020923232012/http://slashdot.org/articles/02/09/10/0517248.shtml?tid=134) from archive.org showing not only voting, but nested comments.
Slashdot's "voting" was a little less direct and focused on using what it called "moderation" to keep content on the site relevant. I found the write-up, still pretty much unchanged, here.
Here's a 2004 thread article from kos with straight up reddit-like voting, not only showing the cumulative score but the # of votes, too.
Reddit was founded in 2005.
One could make the argument that Reddit successfully leveraged it to attract the traffic away from Fark and Digg at the time. They weren't just a place to get away from Diggs changes, they were a better place.
Threaded forums go back to the late 90's.
Yep, it's going to be the new Facebook soon
I think we're talking on it right now. The nerds and early adopters are already here. The community and open source technology will grow organically until we start drawing the attention of the masses because the experience is better. It's just going to take a few more years of enshitification, just like Digg.
He's more concerned the investors are going to fire him.
Reddit will go on, as Digg also did, this is not a fairy tale. But it will definitely suffer, Iโm doubtful if even the IPO will happen (or what kind of valuation they could get)