No Stupid Questions

It all comes down to mobile UI. Most of most peoples web usage is on mobile phones, occasionally a tablet, rarely sitting at a desk with a laptop or desktop computer.

The reason 3rd Party apps is such a sticking point for Reddit users is because the “factory” options are shite. Both the new and old web interfaces are garbage compared to the factory app, which is also garbage compared with any third party app.

The Steve Jobs Sweet Solution of WebApps was flawed. Twitteriffic and other pioneering mobile Smartphone apps proved that. Proprietary Apps with no alternative destroy intrinsic value of a platform to users. Facebook.app and YouTube.app prove that.

I was an average user, I think. And was on the mobile web version not any app. But came over here when the subs went dark and wouldn't say it took effort. If they block NSFW except on the native Reddit app, maybe yes there will be an exodus. The native app makes my head hurt, it's truly awful and not easy to navigate.

The Fediverse is still growing and a lot of people aren’t going to want to be there during the growing pains. More likely I suspect there will be a bit of a bump that first week after everything shuts down and then it will even out. We will likely see a slow, but steady organic growth in users over the next few months as users post more content.

There will be a good size wave. The big wave is coming when Reddit sells out and forced to get rid of old reddit which is less profitable than its horrible standard interface.

As much as I'm enjoying Lemmy, I don't see the vast majority of Reddit users making the switch to anything. Mastodon, Lemmy, and kbin are far too obscure, and most people use Reddit for pino and memes. People just aren't very technologically inclined and Reddit satisfies the dopamine fix for most regular visitors.

Possibly, if 3rd party apps go dark and that's all some people were waiting on. I assume a good chunk of people already started looking for alternatives around 6/12 when the blackout started, so I doubt it'll be a huge bump. Anyone looking for alternatives after the 30th are the ones who may not even be that serious about it or don't care about the protest, so they're just as likely to just move over to the "official" Reddit app (formerly a 3rd party app itself called Alien Blue), just as Reddit intended.

I was already planning on deleting my comments/posts/accounts on 6/30 if Reddit didn't back down, and given that their behavior has gotten even worse I'm not seeing any reason to back down from that. Hell, at this point, even if they backed down on the API thing, just their behavior since 6/12 has shown me that I don't really want to have anything to do with that site anymore.

Reddit is gigantic, and while Fediversal alternatives are gaining users rapidly there's a long ways to go.

A useful way to look at it is, we don't have to defeat Reddit. We're creating a community as an alternative. Reddit hasn't lost a large number users when judged as a percentage of their base, but many of the people who are leaving are the ones who see where it's going, and are the power users, the knowledgeable people, the cool people. The ones who make Reddit a place worth being.

It's the same with Twitter. A lot of Twitter and Reddit users just keep their heads down and use the service, as it goes to hell around them. A lot of people join social media sites because it's where other people are, or it's where their friends are. People who joined when social media finally broke the internet away from being mostly the domain of the technically inclined. Even now, a lot of people mostly use it for streaming. These people may not leave Twitter or Reddit ever, because they really don't care about it. But the people who were big internet users, or would have been were old enough in the late 90s or early 2000s, those are the kinds of people that Reddit, and Twitter, are losing.

Now, there are a lot of people on Twitter who I'd have thought have jumped ship by now, but to many people admin decisions feel like they have only a theoretical impact unless it affects their experience, or themselves, directly. The best thing that can be done is just keep on being awesome, and make cool posts that can't be found elsewhere. Once a community gets a reputation for that, people will come naturally.

I already switched over. But I guess majority of 3rd party app users are still waiting for the last moment.

@Crylos if even half of a single percentage of Reddit users come over, that would be a staggering number of new users.

Maybe a bit but it won’t be a tsunami, most Redditors don’t care about the Reddit backend or mods or api changes. Don’t forget we’re just a vocal minority.

I really enjoy the idea of open source, so earlier today I started thinking isn't that the direction the reddit community should take? Couple of minutes and a search later i found Lemmy and thought it was the coolest concept ever. I may not be most reddit users, but the actions reddit have taken certainly got me here. Lack of apps on ios may be problematic as i don't think most users will think of using web apps (or whatever they're called)

That can mean bad things for the servers and people who administrate them. I believe most of them isn't prepared for high traffic spike - even though Lemmy is fairly lightweight, huge amount of new user would mean de facto DDoS.

I’ve been thinking that too. Most of the users who care enough probably have heard of the whole thing by now and prepared for it in whatever way makes sense for them. I think the very small number that are left using third-party apps care little enough to either reluctantly move to the official Reddit app (that’s what I used to use, I didn’t even know there were other apps), or they might even care little enough that they’ll just stop browsing Reddit altogether because their interest in it doesn’t match the effort they’d have to do to adapt to the new world in any way.

I think there will be some highly-motivated enough individuals who might have been living under a rock, and we’ll have a little bump, but probably not very big.

No. There are good things to look at on Reddit, and effectively nothing around here. This place is incredibly barren and will continue to be unless creative people show up to populate it... which they won't when it's a nightmare just to get an upvote to stick,

For what it's worth I deleted my Reddit accounts and Apollo the day that Christian Selig announced Apollo would shut down on the 30th. No clue how many people will follow suit but it stands to reason that if I did others will as well. I think it'll probably be fewer refugees than some are expecting. I don't think it'll be like the Digg migration