lol nah Reddit can fail. Just like Tumblr, and Digg, and MySpace, and LiveJournal, and GeoCities, and the list goes on. Reddit relies on volunteer work to provide its content, and just like when Digg tried to do almost the same thing, the community will move on. It always does. It has since the 80s and will until the extinction of humanity or the collapse of civilization.

Let it fail.

Facebook rebranded to Meta and burned $13 billion on the "metaverse" to stay relevant. So, Facebook doesn't seem to think that Facebook will be around forever. Reddit does have critical mass, which is an advantage for them. There's no denying that. But, it's their advantage to waste by being overly aggressive and greedy, which they seem to be happy to do.

As for Google searches, it might be less that Reddit is so valuable for search and more that Google has become so bad at providing good search results that Reddit became the go between. There's a lot of very specific knowledge on Reddit, but there's also a lot of redirects from Reddit comments to outside sources that have the info that a Google search should be able to provide. I don't know if Google has the will to fix that problem though. If Reddit can "get back to normal" and continue being Google's sidekick, Google might be happy to return to the status quo. But, once a company like Reddit adopts the policy that "the beatings will continue until morale improves," it's hard to imagine how they can get back to "normal."

I'm okay with lemmy getting just enough traction to bring in the best users without being "popular"

Facebook may not have failed, but it's a shell of the platform that it was. Twitter is on the way to that status, Tumblr did it to their users and it's happened time after time. The little bit I've browsed the front page of reddit in the last little bit there's been a noticeable drop in post and comment quality.

I know there's a few reddit archive projects, and it may be worth looking into a project that could scrape the html and present the info without it being Reddit.

Too big to fail doesn't mean it's too big to decline.

I don't think reddit is going anywhere as a company and a platform, for a while at least. But that doesn't mean it can't lose a good share of it's users to competitors.

I don't think the comparison with Facebook is a valid one though. Primarily because Facebook is a "true" social media platform. You have your friends and family on it which creates a very strong network effect.

Reddit on the other hand is primarily a content aggregation platform. I don't need to convince my friends and family to switch from it.

Additionally, Facebook is a lot more successful than Reddit financially. They make disproportionately more money per user due to having very targeted advertising. They own other platforms like Instagram and whatsapp. Unlike reddit, Facebook doesn't need to concern itself with having financial troubles.

A better comparison would be tumbler, which was quite big and while it still exists, it's a shell of its former self.

Digg had critical mass. It went down in flames.

It doesn't take bajillions of users to generate enough content to form a reasonable alternative.

Niche subreddits will be hard to recreate though unfortunately, but plenty of time to grow. And long-term, federated seems like a good model so that once these communities are rebuilt they aren't at the mercy a company who's main concern is short-term profits.

Digg still exists even if it's a shell of its former self. Tumbler imploded and moved to Twitter, which is trying its damnedest to destroy itself too. They don't disappear, they just slowly become irrelevant.

Reddit will still exist, but the content will continue to dry out. Sanitized for advertising and low effort for consumption. The thousands of small self contained communities that really drove the site will slowly die off. Subs that relied on outside moderating tools to ensure quality content will give up and move on.

As small hobby subs find new places to take residence I would absolutely believe reddit will become less relevant.

This is the most level-headed take. Reddit is going to continue to slog along with or without my account, with or without Lemmy's 53k active users. Anyone who thinks this protest is going to sink them entirely is naive.

However, they may stagger along as an enshittified website that has lost it's spirit and never meaningfully grows again. Reddit is still better than any other alternative at this point in time, but Reddit is not by my estimation going to improve again. It's all downhill. So I'm doing my part and trying to work to build community elsewhere.

We don't need 50MM users to reach a mass where the content is fresh and engaging all the time. Probably a fraction of that would be. Lemmy's userbase is double Squabbles and there is already a noticeable difference in content.

Yes, reddit will always retain some user base and they might even continue to grow. But the quality will be worse. Just like Facebook and other social media platforms, there will be users that simply don't care enough to look for alternatives. I really hope that it will be a downward spiral for them. Too many (contributing) core users leaving, moderation getting worse and spammers and karma farmers reducing the quality of posts to a point where it's just too cumbersome to scroll through all the crap to find a worthy post. I think that reddit either reverses its decision or that it will slowly fade into meaninglessness....