I’ve seen many comments and posts regarding the API fiasco on Reddit, with the claim that there will be a huge influx of users when that happens. I’m all for it, but I find it hard to believe that the average or even above average user will make the effort to switch.
I’ll be directing all of my users in Sync to lemmy.world tomorrow.
Wow this is actually the dev of Sync! Guys this is big! Thank you, this will be huge, hope it her dev will follow.
Very exciting! And Sync for Lemmy is even more exciting! Question, do you plan on adding Kbin support in the future? Maybe when their API is released?
He has said he plans to support kbin in the future. But he is working on a MVP minimum viable product right now to get something that works out asap and then start addressing things like kbin support down the road. He just needs time and the support of the community. You can follow the project at !lemmy.world/c/syncforlemmy (hopefully I did that right…)
king
just curious…
how many users would that be?
roughly
It’s had over a million downloads and 70k reviews. So, a few.
Gotta be at least 5. Minimum!
I’m one of them and I’m here now! Only 4 more to go… but seriously I hope there’s a ton more to follow.
I’m so excited for you! Sorry Reddit just disregarded third party app developers like you guys were nothing, absolutely disgraceful. Without your app, my SO & I have no desire to browse the site for fun anymore. Thanks for aiding in hours of fun for us!
Loved sync, hope that the Apollo dev does this too.
Nobody knows the future, but speaking as an instance admin, the ideal scenario would be a continued steady growth and not a huge sudden influx 😅
I think it is great here on Lemmy but tbh, the content is limited. My enjoyment here is partly watching it develop. Im like 1 week in and I can see it growing day by day. I don’t think that is what most eventual users want to experience. They want it all set up with the party in full swing.
I love the conversations here. It’s just normal people talking. No amateur comedians at the top of threads with their crappy jokes. It’s so nice.
It honestly took me a moment to get used to such a high percentage of civil discourse.
I love it here too. I’m finding that im connecting with people, getting into your head reading your words and it’s nice. Watching the whole process is pretty awesome. Definitely not the average users expectations, im sure.
I also don’t miss the ragebait and troll posts, those can stay on reddit.
Yes this is like Reddit was back 10-16 years ago when I joined. Much better discussions here than Reddit now. I’m honestly pretty happy where everything is already, I’d like to take the growth nice and slow so that we can stay in the good zone longer. Both digg and Reddit were too banal for me towards the end.
I like that I am talking to real people, not potential comment reposter bots. Feels less like a psyops experiment and more like actual engagement.
Thank you for your service. Would you be interested in testing my modern UI theme for Lemmy on your instance? It works with Lemmy 0.17 and 0.18.0. You can get the CSS files from the releases page.
Hey! I have had a few questions about themes. At this point, I am asking users to apply non-mainlined themes through userscripts - I am wary of taking on extra responsibilities in maintaining compatibility for additional themes. Sorry about that!
But all themes that get added to the main lemmy-ui repo will always be available out of the box on lemm.ee as well. The repo is open to contributions, so you could have a look at that option if that’s something you’re interested in.
I already made a proposal to improve the default theme, but my issue was closed without any response from the developers. The required changes were small on purpose and should be easy to implement for anyone already familiar with the code. So it seems that UI is not a priority to Lemmy developers. That’s why I had to develop my addon, which I then also turned into a theme. I hope that one day Lemmy instances will start using some kind of modern theme (doesn’t have to be mine), so that my addon is no longer needed.
My theme is just a small amount of styles applied on top of the default litely and darkly themes, which should make maintenance easier. Unlike an addon, a theme doesn’t need to support multiple versions of Lemmy at the same time, so we could simplify it even more. Lemmy 0.18 uses CSS variables now, so that also makes things easier.
Something needs to be done about Lemmy’s outdated UI and I’m not sure if the current approach of developing multiple userscripts and addons is efficient. I understand if you think this might cause too much work for you though.
I already made a proposal to improve the default theme, but my issue was closed without any response from the developers.
You’re misinterpreting what happened there - the issue was not closed to shut it down, it was actually converted into a discussion to make it easier to track: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/discussions/1503
It wasn’t exactly one specific issue that could be fixed, it was a longer discussion with a bunch of branches. For such things, the discussions format is much more usable.
So it seems that UI is not a priority to Lemmy developers.
I just want to point out that there has been a massive amount of UI improvements in 0.18 and 0.18.1 (just take a look at all the changes by @jsit for example: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Ajsit+). In addition, new themes are being created directly for the lemmy-ui repo as well, for example: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1682
I don’t know the developer’s exact intentions, but my issue was a specific, easy to implement proposal. It wasn’t meant to be a discussion.
There have been UI improvements, but the design is still outdated. The theme you linked to is also not a modern design. What we need the most is an improved default theme, so that everyone could enjoy an easy to read website.
I think the influx will be on the 1st. People are gonna try to fire up reddit on their fav app, it won’t work, and a good number of them will do something else.
A portion of those will look for alternatives. Most of those people will probably end up here. I don’t think it’s going to be a gigantic number or anything, due to how many “gates” there are to go through, but I’m expecting the biggest single-day increase so far.
I agree. Reddit has been trying to sweep all this under the rug, and as pathetically transparent as their efforts are they have worked well enough that a lot of “casual” users probably have no idea what’s coming. When the 1st rolls around and they suddenly can’t use Reddit (as far as they know it) then quite a few will be looking for somewhere else to go.
I mean a lot of them will probably just grab the official Reddit app, but 30 minutes using that ad-infested garbage pile may dissuade them from sticking with it.
They can sweep whatever they want wherever they want to sweep it to. That doesn’t cure early-stage internet cancer.
Unfortunately, filthy casuals tend to grin and bare early-stage cancer on the internet. I dare say most of us who cared have already made the switch with the minority choosing to hang on as long as possible with the more tech-savvy casuals coming over in the first few days of third-party apps getting killed.
And at least the dev of Sync will or has already rolled out an update to explain why the app isn’t working anymore and that Sync for Lemmy is on development.
There’s no better advertisement, really.
It depends. From what I understood, moderation on Reddit will become really hard after this. So the site will go down in user experience on content, worse than it is now. That’s outside of the 3rd party apps like Apollo no longer working but will have a negative impact. It sounded like some mods would just walk away than deal with not having robot spam bots to help, which it is volunteer. That could spur on further churn, again, because quality suffers.
I removed my Reddit apps and don’t plan to go back. Having said that, the tech here is still in its infancy. I see bugs daily, the native app version of this experience is not super adoptable by a mass market yet, but it can all improve with time and more bodies interested here.
Long term, this broad concept of decentralization seems to be populous. I think people don’t understand it yet, when they show up it’s rough, and there’s alternatives. But that will all continue to change in the coming months.
NSFW content (posts, profiles, and subs) will also not be available via the app, so moderators and users won’t be able to see any, which will also make moderation more difficult.
It’s unclear whether the official app will be affected, or whether Reddit has a secret API that will exempt it from those restrictions, similar to how they implement the other functions.
Not gonna be a sudden exodus.
More that Reddit’s entered a slow death spiral. Redditors will start seeing an upsurge in toxicity, since mods will have left, been replaced with stooges, had their tools taken away, and most of the good mods will have abandoned ship.
Some may come here. Some may move on to Discord or other social media. Some will stick it out on Reddit, but notice that bots and trolls are taking over, whatever moderators are left can’t or won’t keep up, and the admins are seemingly asleep at the switch.
In a few months, discourse there will have assumed Youtube quality, with bots shouting down human discourse, and trolls scaring anyone remotely normal away. They’ll limp along like that for years.
Like Twitter.
And eventually it’ll end up like 4Chan, only technically still existing.
I might be alone, but I don’t want or need a huge amount of users. I’d rather discuss the subjects I want to talk about with a smaller group of users. It would be nice to have some familiarity in the comments as well. On the big subreddits, your comment was practically guaranteed to be lost in the sea of thousands of comments unless you were the first to comment, or had bots upvoting you. If I want my comments to be lost, I’ll comment on a Tiktok video.
It’ll be just like Reddit, if you want to avoid the huge mega popular communities you absolutely can. And the smaller more specific communities that you want to interact with won’t have the annoying traffic you’re talking about.
I imagine there will be a big uptick in the number of new users but it won’t be a huge wave, not initially. Human nature being what it is, users will switch to the official app, mods will try and muddle through with a more limited toolbox and, slowly, the wheels will fall off as people find that the user experience has been degraded, leading to a fairly steady flow of people moving over (and a decent number moving on as Lemmy likely isn’t ready for primetime just yet). I think what will be key is whether the most experienced moderators and most active posters make the jump - without them the site is a hollow shell as it is largely built on their disproportionate contribution. That might speed up Reddit’s downfall.
The best thing we can do is make their landing as soft as possible.
- Make sure there are welcome posts in each instances main communities.
- Keep an eye on Reddit for people asking how to make the move.
- Keep an eye on the relevant communities here for anyone struggling.
- Get equivalents to the subs set up.
- List these on sub.rehab and similar directories.
- Don’t panic! Perhaps this should have gone first.
a guide on how to use Lemmy would also be nice. I’m a former reddit user and I still haven’t figured out how to edit comments or block users.
I’ll look around for a decent guide or two but, in the web interface, click the three vertical dots on the right under the post.
yeah I think the apps just aren’t there yet. I used connect for lemmy and today I’ve installed lemming which has the edit and block functions but looks clunky. can’t have it all I suppose.
They’re coming but the fact that Jerboa is sending out error pop-ups if the instance isn’t running Lemmy 18.0 isn’t going to help.
I think it really depends on how real the 1% rule of the internet is.
TBH I believe that 90% of mobile users uses the official app. Maybe they don’t know about 3PA, or simply just don’t bother. 3PA might be “for power users/advanced users” to them. All they want from Reddit is just the laugh (and porn probably) when doom scrolling. Not to mention because there is an official app, it’ll be the first result when searching “Reddit” on the app/play store. Most of the time people will just go for the first/official one. This whole API/protest thing will just be another Reddit drama for them and they just don’t care.
However, I believe that this whole thing affects those 1% users the most. For mobile users (of the 1%), I believe most of them are using 3PA. As the official is just too bad. For everyone else (of the 1%), if they care (even just a little bit) about Reddit, they will be greatly disappointed with how Reddit handles the whole situation. They will either have left already, or will be leaving soon. Which then the question will be, to where?
Obviously, users tends to go to wherever places that has the most interesting content to them. If enough 1% users left Reddit, migrated to Kbin/Lemmy, and continued to create content over here, I think those 99% users will eventually migrate as well - especially:
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The content are created by the same 1% users, so the content will be similar to what they consumed back when they were on Reddit.
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Reddit is full of repost bots, which hopefully should be more obvious when no new contents are being created anymore.
There’s also another possible but quite pessimistic possibility:
Some of those 99% users became the new 1% users, and began creating content with the redesigned UI/official app.
*Puts on tinfoil hat* Which is what Reddit wants - to kick out the “old”, power/advanced users (users who can and will protest/rebel, in essence), making Reddit into another generic social media platform. With everything under the complete control of Reddit, not its users.-
Some will.
Not sure how big a number that some will be though.
For people that use 3rd party apps, suddenly they won’t work. They’ll try the Reddit app, some won’t be happy when they see how it looks and some of those will look at alternatives.
Quite possibly some users have already heard about something called Lemmy, but haven’t been bothered to leave Reddit. If their app stops working, that might be enough to make them take a look.
There will be a bit of a surge. It won’t suddenly be millions.
The average user would not know about lemmy without a reddit post linking and explaining. It’s what got me here.
The only thing we can do is wait and see. It’s only three days from now. My personal belief is that there is definitely going to be an influx of new users, but that number won’t be too big or unmanageable.
Doubt it. Most people who use a 3rd party app should be aware of the API changes already. If they are interested in the alternatives they would have tried by now.
People who are still unaware of what’s going on even after the blackouts, would probably just download the official app.
Perhaps. Or they are biding their time until the blackout then will actively be looking for an alternative.
I’m on here obviously, but still using Reddit until Relay croaks. After that I’m not going to violently l completely quit reddit but without being able to use Relay I’ll be using it a lot less, not as a regular contributor. It’ll be like how often I use Facebook now compared to how I used it a few years ago.
I wonder. I started with a kbin account, no made an account here. I removed all my Reddit accounts but one; waiting to see what happens on the 30th. I don’t use it anymore, but am waiting nonetheless to see what happens, on Reddit and elsewhere. Alternatives still need a toooon of work to be usable by the masses. Please someone provide us with some good UX. I have a feeling that people who were gonna leave already left, the rest just started using the app or simply using the web version. I’m not gonna lie, whilst I’m here, I don’t find the “need” / fomo to visit. I don’t know if it’s the content, the curation or the UI; but something takes getting used to that’s for sure.
I don’t find the “need” / fomo to visit
I wouldn’t say that’s a bad thing. Reddit is purposefully designed to hold your attention, just like every other corporate social media platform. They have a monetary incentive to do so. Lemmy doesn’t, and hopefully never will.
They’re trying to design it to hold attention now, but back in the day reddit was designed like shit but people still used it a ton. I agree with you, just think that corporate social media isn’t always good at what they claim to do (retain eyeballs)
It won’t be instant, but quite a few 3PA users will find it incredibly difficult (maybe even impossible) to make the switch to the official app; it’s just that bad. Hell, I can’t imagine using Reddit without the crutch Apollo provided.
- Less than you wish for.
- But enough to cause some trouble.
- And Reddit management will deny it, because their messaging is primarily marketing for investors, not an attempt to accurately describe the world.
