The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
If Reddit won, why have Lemmy and Kbin’s userbases grown so steeply since June? Why has the quality of Reddit’s content plummeted terribly? Why is /r/place just one endless ocean of “fuck spez”?
Reddit only “won” in the same way that Florida “won” against illegal immigrants and is now facing a massive workforce shortage in essential industries.
Reddit may not be dead yet, but it’s mortally wounded already. It’s bleeding out and will be dead in every way that matters soon.
Unfortunately, steeply here doesn’t really capture the size disparity between Lemmy and Reddit. Lemmy has 60k active monthly users. Reddit has 450 million active monthly users. We have a looong way to go before we can really compete. But we just have to keep pushing. Now that we exist and have a sustainable userbase, the next time Reddit does something idiotic we’ll be here to attract disgruntled users. Something good that we can be doing is showing up to the threads on Reddit about the terrible things Reddit does and advertising Lemmy to people.
the thing is we need to hit the critical mass where there’s enough posts and comments that it’s not dead and there’s a reason to come back at least daily. I’d say lemmy just hit that point for me very recently and I imagine that if I still had a reddit account I’d be 50/50. I expect exponential growth from here on out, with more users enabling more people to want to join and that further enhances the system