I decided to take a peek at Reddit to see what kind of activity is happening, a good handful of the subreddits I am subscribed to are still super active with posts and commenters.

There's quite a few news articles on the front page regarding Spez and the blackouts, I am surprised those articles are even still up for people to see.

The comment section is filled with people saying how they should just kick the mods out of the dark Reddit's and take over, ofcourse these posts are heavily upvoted...

Perhaps there is some AI activity going on, I mean it's kind of easy to do in this day and age. You just prompt an army of AI bots to defend Reddit, and try to keep users engaged.

I am so happy I found Lemmy, and I am so happy that there is a comfortable level of activity. Sure it's only a small fraction of what Reddit is activity wise, but it's so much more hearty and welcoming.

Reddit has just turned into one big toxic mess. Lemmy reminds me of what Reddit used to be 10 years ago.

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[–] JDPoZ@lemmy.world 75 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This may just an old interwebz man talking, but I'd say "Don't worry."

It's not a 1:1, but this is similar to what happened with Digg in the mid 2000s. I was there. I migrated from there to Reddit - specifically because Digg had decided to ignore its vocal user base and fundamentally change what the site was.

It ultimately resulted in this : this

[–] nivenkos@lemmy.world 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Worth noting that the main migration happened in 2007 and start of 2008, but look how it managed to drag on for another 4 years before really dying.

I think the same will happen here - like there'll be a lot of users on Reddit still, but it'll be heavily corporate controlled and moderated, and most comments will be on the level of "Putin small pp" etc.

[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I suspect that some of the main subreddits - funny, aww, and pics, for example - could be populated entirely by bots and a lot of people would still browse through them. If you're just idling through looking for a little dopamine, then r/aww and r/pics are kind of like instagram or tiktok. From Reddit's perspective, those are the important subs, where the smaller ones where you can find good discussion and insightful answers don't get enough views to serve enough ads to affect their bottom line.

[–] overzeetop@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

Those subs could just be replaced with random bot reposts from the last decade. Actually, I think that’s most of the content already. Tho r/pics going full Sexy John Oliver today was hilarious. I even broke my personal embargo to go and vote for the SJO format (and to do a daily re-delete of any of my comments which might have been restored).

[–] MetricExpansion@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

Wow, I didn’t realize the Reddit to Digg migration was so drawn out. Do we know how big the initial migration to Reddit actually was in terms of user count? It seems like Lemmy/Kbin are seeded with a few tens of thousands of users, and I wonder how it compares.

[–] oldmate@aussie.zone 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The main migration was actually in 2010 after the v4 redesign. Digg wasn't dying in 2007-2009, it was one of the hottest websites on the internet.

[–] nivenkos@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm something happened in 2008-2009 though, as it was when I migrated and I remember loads of people were doing it at the same time.

It might have just been Reddit having a cleaner, more direct interface, and a better community.

[–] oldmate@aussie.zone 6 points 1 year ago

The site started to go downhill around that period because of power users and some started to move to reddit, but it was still pretty niche.

I stayed on digg until v4, then I moved with the masses over to reddit. They lost over 30% of their users that month!

[–] Fizz 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

The scale is so much larger now. Reddit could lose 1m users and its a blip.

[–] Ech@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit's actual daily users only equates to about half that number. While an interesting metric, Google search rates don't equate to users. Heck, my searching for that information contributed to that and I didn't click through to Reddit once.

[–] LawnMooser@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

That is a good point, today internet is mainstream, and heavily indexed websites are much more reliant on such type of interactions than forums and social media were when digg was big, so reddit has a comparatively huge influx of click from google searches alone. However, that might change as they are making the web inferface worse and worse to redirect the traffic towards the app. If reddit becomes app-centric, i don't kno what may change given how it is so reliant on google searches.___

[–] Lanfordr@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Not if the redditors that leave are the ones that do the majority of the moderating and quality posting. If the quality goes way down, people will look elsewhere. Also, I have a feeling we'll see a much bigger migration once the third party apps all die on the 30th.

[–] Fizz 11 points 1 year ago

Thats true. I am continuing to keep using reddit to spread awareness of Lemmy so that people know it exists.

[–] Sir_mittens2@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

Iam not to use. Before I left reddit. Most of it was just reposted tiktoks and just general low quality posts on the big subreddits already

[–] x3i@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

Well, "unfortunately" some of them will stay up since they are classified as open-source and non-profit by reddit. So, while I'm glad that these projects live on, it will certainly soften the blow for Reddit on 30th.