Ask Lemmy

Yes, because it has lost some of its most passionate users. The only effect will be a subtle drop in quality to the site, though, which will be completely unnoticeable to the average user.

Just the fact that you can browse Lemmy without seeing advertisements is really nice.

Still, the systems depends on the will of individuals to maintain servers and it’s a bit scary to know that an instance could be gone in an instant if the maintainer doesn’t want to pay for electricity anymore.

No, and I (honestly) don't care either. A nice sum of users is better than a bunch of users that are (at most) "rotten apples" willing to denigrate everything and everyone.

I doubt there's been enough people moving to create an impact. I used to visit Reddit multiple times a day but now it's once a week if at all. When I have looked all my old subs look no different really.

Long ago I posted on Reddit that publicly traded companies are the plague for our society as they are pushing to the eternal growth at the expense of their users.

I do agree that privately held companies are also looking for profit but the difference is that they are not subject to the immense pressure to exponentially grow.

And now the Reddit IPO comes to prove just that. I am fairly confident that if not for this IPO Reddit wouldn't try so hard to push those changes and would still thrive.

But at the end of the day, I am happy that it helped me to discover Lemmy and this debacle is why I am here and not there.

For sure the quantity of posts is the same, but the quality has gone down.

You can just feel it all over. My frontpage has little to no good topics anymore. I used to peruse for at least 30 mins easily losing myself. I barely get 5 now before getting irritated with the low effort material.

I mean I try to go on reddit and the content just isn't what I am looking for. I know this is true for all of you. I know the internet is changing and fediverse things are the future. I am glad to be off the mainstream stuff and digging around in the weeds with folks who might give me a ride hitchhiking. I like to think of it like all the reddit traffic are people who would never give you a ride if you had your thumb out, but the people here would be the types that are more willing to take that risk and make a new friend. Overwhelmingly, hitchhikers will not hurt you and everyone has a great time. Dispelling the fear we live with is what this is all about too.

Profit wise, absolutely not. However, they are probably losing their most technical users. Generally the ones that have some sort of tech background or knowledge and see through their BS, and who are also much more likely to support open source alternatives (and third party apps) and have an easier time figuring out the fediverse. Maybe they care about that, maybe they don't (probably don't).

Ribbit

Absolutely. Of course, normie subs like local cities and very well established niche subs aren't going anywhere, but the large subs, for instance r/Canada, have turned into complete shit shows. There are way more bots on reddit now too.

Lemmy right now is too.. well not clumsy exactly, but it does feel vague with all these seperate iterations like .world or .ml and they are seperate and require seperate logins etc so that’s not handy at all. People are used to ease of use, this is where (for now) Reddit remains king.

I honestly rarely if ever posted on Reddit. I just had an account and used a third party app to keep up to date with some tech stuff. But their behavior so revolted me that I came here and actually got involved being on Lemmy.

While I doubt they ever made any money off the crowd that left (cos let's be honest, we know about ad-blockers, etc.), if the most active users left, their content will suffer, and hence the website's general attractiveness probably also will.

There are small subreddits that are definitively private now. But only very small ones.

The cool kids have left the building and moved on to building the next thing.

The right-wing troll posters have gotten bolder and more prominent in subs I used to visit that's for sure. They used to get heavily downvoted and people used to rebut their garbage, but much less so now.