A related contributing factor: as instances gain users, more federated content is showing up in all, so new users don’t have to jump through hoops to find it.
Would anyone find it helpful if I wrote a simple bot that pulls Reddit RSS and pops a little bit of top content for various subreddits into community posts here? I can't tell if that would be useful or spammy.
I mean, the poor Webcomics community has exactly one post, while there's a deluge of good content out there waiting to be linked to.
Respectfuly, please don't. One of the reasons I started going on reddit a decade ago and one of the reasons I come here is to find content that other people, with either similar or distinct tastes, find interesting, and talk about it. To automate or defer to a machine, however technically interesting it might be for the creator, defeats the purpose of a social network. I abandoned many subs on reddit and have abandoned Facebook and Instagram because they are no longer human. Advertisers and a machine decide what you see. Barely tolerate YouTube but they're honest and it has never been about following people and more like browsing TV channels.
I think my point is, if I wanted an RSS feed, I would setup an RSS feed.
I'm not sure, if most of the posts are just links to reddit, it could push people away. If it's just like the actual image it could work. It'd probably be better to just do it manually for communities you're personally interested in.
Good hints, but these events likely were not very relevant.
While Lemmy gained almost 200,000 new users in the last two days, the active users increased by less than 3,000, just about the same as pretty much every two-day period recently. So pretty much all of those new users are inactive. That's not hordes of Redditors coming over and exploring Lemmy, that's hordes of bot and sleeper accounts being created.
I think most are still figuring out how this all works. I barely did anything the first couple days too. Its a bit confusing at first and takes some time for people to find their place.
I found out today that Sync for Reddit developer, LJ, is making an app for Lemmy, so I made an account here. (I've been on Kbin since the strike started.)
I love this because more people will comment. A majority of my time on Reddit was reading through comments and hearing all of people’s interesting takes and learning random information. The daily increase is fun to watch especially since I’m not the one maintaining the servers!
yeah it's important that people post and comment. lurking is only good once there's a critical mass of content and engagement to sustain that kind of passive browsing. i hope new users will understand it's early days on this platform and content has to come from somewhere!
To make a long story short...
Reddit's doing a DEEPLY UNPOPULAR API change that effectively wipes out 3rd party tools and clients, which sparked site-wide protests. Reddit's CEO is now having a pretty public meltdown and threatening moderators partaking in said protests. Lemmy popped up in a good number of discussions on Reddit in regards to the situation. Queue the start of a mass-exodus of Reddit users and mods to Lemmy
It's going to take a lot of bots to compare to the amount of bots and sock puppets on Reddit. At the very least we're comparing apples to apples by including them in the "members" counts.
There was also just a huge dump of mods off some big subs, and a post about it on Lemmy with a link...I had been thinking about coming here specifically when I left Reddit, and the mod dump coupled with the link was the perfect opportunity, probably not just for me
Also yay, my first ever comment on my new news platform
This also was the realization point for me that was the last straw for me. It was a hard struggle not opening Apollo first thing in the morning and all throughout the day for the first time in such a long time. But now I do my best to avoid touching anything on reddit at all.
has there been some particularly recent? It seems that the protest is slowly dying with sped not willing to budge and seems to be winning, unfortunatelly.
For me it was the total fuckery of the reddit owners. I quit twitter. I've put zuckbook on read only. I can do without reddit too. The internet needs to be de-oligarched.
I have signed up to so many communities on here with the hope that once Lemmy gets bigger, I can leave the ones I don't actually want to be involved in. I also posted my first-ever meme. Let's contribute to make this a reddit alternative!
When Digg put business above users and reddit growth exploded it (reddit) wasn't a great "alternative" at that time either. But at that time they were putting users first. Isn't that what makes this (lemmy) a great alternative?
I personally jumped ship because of the API pricing changes of Reddit.
I don't even use third party apps. It's just that I can't give an entity my business when they treat folks who volunteer to make their platform better like that.
I may give them a try. If I did have a learning disability or sight issues, I would have tried third party apps though (Reddit's app support of screen readers sucks).
Personally, especially given that context and that the third party apps have better moderation tools too, I think it's very important to allow people to use third party apps, if the first party sucks.
So that is why it was important to me to take a stand on that too.
Same here, I'm a software dev for a living and it resonated differently/pissed me off hearing about the API pricing changes and what happened with Apollo's developer
I am the opposite.
I had a Reddit login for years but never used it. When I found out about Apollo, I gave it another go and it quickly became my Number 1 Internet time sink.
With Apollo no longer functional, Reddit (for me) is no longer functional.
The fuckery was just the icing on the cake to force me to delete my account.
That's why I took a stand even though I didn't use Apollo myself. I think people having a choice of what third-party apps they want to use is important regardless if I use it myself. I stand with you on that.
Not a Reddit clone, but I’ve also been spending time on substack. Even with not paying there is still a decent amount of content, especially on the Russian Ukrainian war.
If you've been here for a month or more, you're a first adopter and the true heroes of our cause. You take up what makes no sense to -- what is untested and will likely be a waste of time.
These people then tell the early adopters, which is what you are if you've been here for a couple weeks.
Once we got on board, we told all our friends who join, and then the whole thing keeps snowballing.
Of course, Lemmy really has Reddit to thank for making us all balk enough to take a look at fediverse stuff. Mastodon really didn't do it for me when I checked on it a couple years ago, but this is awesome and totally makes sense.
Playing around with Pleroma now so I can follow users here!
not that surprising really - many, MANY people are fed up with centralized link aggregation/social media/reddit in general & the fediverse is an excellent option
I'm not that optimistic. I think MANY people are fed up with this particular case of a centralized site being annoying, but do not really care about anything other than getting their dopamine fix, and will happily jump into sack with next big social media site, centralized or not. Most people just don't care.
This is probably just the first big wave. The biggest will be when the apps themselves actually shut down - fence sitters will then have to make a choice to download the official app or try an alternative and I think a lot of people will be curious to see if the grass is greener.
For me, LJ Dawson, the Dev of Sync for Reddit posted that he is making a Lemmy app. I was planning on leaving Reddit at the end of June, so I signed up! I'm extremely happy to be here!
In my opinion, the output of the disastrous Zoom meeting with the moderators & community of /r/Blind .
Reddit leadership made it clear that they have nothing but contempt for their users. They essentially refused to answer essential questions for the disabled Reddit community.
I guess Spez thinks nobody will care as long as they get their fill of GIFs and pics? I have no idea. I'm not closing out my account, but whatever reddit intended to sell to me, I'm not buying it.
I'm not closing my reddit account either, I feel like I should but a part of me just wants to hold on to it for some reason. I'm certainly open to deleting it in the future though.
This is not the way. By using Reddit you are essentially giving money to the shareholders. You are fattening the rich. It is pathetic. Stop using reddit, fullstop.
You are here on Lemmy. Help the community instead of trying to redirect traffic back to reddit...
People that have ~1 week of ping time (as yours truly) are finally getting to their todo list item of checking alternatives to Reddit and making an account and first posts :)
Gotta fully transition, I knew I'd be tempted so I just deleted it on the 12th and came here. Jerboa is getting updates constantly and it seems to be pretty solid.
Loving the smaller community though my niche subs are incredibly small here. I'm trying to contribute mostly there.
I've been thinking about joining for the last few weeks. The reason I did today was because the developer of my favorite app (sync) announced they would be releasing a lemmy version
It looks like it's only a day old and it has 11k users. There isn't any content on it either. There are a few instances like that, you can see them here: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy. They all have low MAU, 10k or so users, and low Status Count.
Quite a few are showing about 10k new users in the past day or so. Probably they're small instances without bot protection or instances made to support bots.
Someone mentioned it on a Reddit post about mods so I'm giving it a go. Stopped Twitter a while back and don't use Facebook. I like the concept of aggregated content around topics I'm interested in just not by evil companies.
I'm unsure. The number of users jumped tremendously, but the number of active users increased in a smoothly continuous manner. So did a whole lot of people sign up but not actually post or comment on anything? The number of Lemmy posts actually declined slightly that day.
This is my first post, I just signed up. I was on reddit from the early days. I liked it then a lot more. This has that feel. I also like that it is open source - hopefully that will bring more developers.
I'm an old reddit account, I switch when the blackout happened. I'm getting use to things here. I have removed my shortcuts to reddit syc replaced it with Jerboa.
I like it here, is there all my subs. Nop. But It feels fresh like reddit before.
Also the syc dev might start working on a lemmy app.
Seems like reddit just fresher. Not clogged up with all the bullshit. Also I feel like I'm on the ground level of a reddit competitor that seems to be protected from corporate bullshit.
No idea myself but we have to remember that not all the users that come try this will stay, so I anticipate once the Reddit nonsense blows over the community will shrink a bit.
I am going to stay, but I was "lemmy curious" before the reddit business.
You could've always done this, infinity has always been open source. However using this just means that you and others will be paying reddits ridiculous pricing for their own api access JUST to use infinity. Which iirc is gonna be around $25 a month per user depending on amount of use. Everytime you open that app itll be charging you for data..
This seems popular to some users now but I don't see it going over to well when the bill comes due. Id rather take my chances going all in on Lemmy and helping support an instance with a community. Decentralization ftw.
I already know which this has been always possible, but an user published how to do not so much time ago. If you have unlimited plan data, like most people, that fact wouldn't be a concern so please don't spread misinformation just to scare people into not using Reddit anymore. The API use is free to regular users and with their limitation reasonable for just one user. And if not were of that way, which highly doubt it, would charged to the ISP then or no problems if you have unlimited data plan, or limitate their data usage with apps with a bunch of open source tools which allow that.
And all of that which has solutions, only in case that this you said about 25$ would be charged for the current free API 100 request per minute, would be true, and I didn't saw any official announce of Reddit. They plan to enter in stock market soon, I highly believe that they will not start to charge 25$ to every users by the use fo the current free API of 100 request per minutes, that would be so much having in count the last polemic with their abusive practicals, and people would be in a massive exodus, even higher than current happening now with a lot of people comming to Lemmy, which is great and I love that fact. They have to care about for their users, because the users decisions as a colective affects to their inversors, and they will take care about them more, we already saw it...
I came too because off the newest anti user behavior of reddits CEO and Admins. Made an Account on feddit.de and now have access to all Communities in the Fediverse.
I was using Infinity for reddit most of the past years and would not switch back to the awful reddit default Android App.
The official lemmy App is not perfect. But all ready good enough to be used with mostly no bigger issues. Mostly lacking in some features compared to infinity.
It likely is spam/bot accounts. Multiple admins of instances with open reg have commented/posted about having to fight bot sign-ups the past few days. The only fix that helped (they said) was to enable captcha. There's a git issue on the lemmy project mentioning that they are removing captcha, so the admins are particularly worried about that...
It's definitely mostly bots. There's over 1 million accounts over all the instances now. I think out of a prediction maybe somewhere between 200k-400k are actual users. The rest is just bots plumping up those numbers.
Wanted to ditch Reddit following all the nonsense around their API changes, but still wanted Reddit-esque news aggregation + discussions from somewhere.
Googling for alternatives initially led me to Beehaw, but they don't have the sufficiently granular niche communities I wanted. Searching for communities I wanted to subscribe to led me here, and after refreshing myself on how the fediverse worked I realised I should just create a login here instead. So far, so good!
All good - I was aware of that and had originally planned to create a login at Beehaw and subscribe from there accordingly. But I didn't create one there since their signup process is also a bit more involved; they want you to explain why you're signing up.
Fair enough, but 1) I'm mostly a lurker so probably wouldn't be able to actively contribute to their ideals and 2) I figured if most of the communities I want to sub to are available here I should probably start with my initial login here :D
I think it'll be a while before we have another one website to rule them all. I've actually not minded splitting my time up again between a few websites.
Soon we will look back amazed at these growing little numbers. They're growing quickly but I expect it to grow by one or two more orders of magnitude over the coming months!
Could be, reddit might go out with a whimper instead of a bang. A war of attrition from thread to thread, sub to sub. Slowly they'll lose a base of people who don't take it personally until it hits their favorite sub.
All it takes is one viable alternative, and thats the key.
I'm really hoping this can become that viable alternative. I'm not of fan of social media in general and I miss the old Usenet groups from back in the early 90s before it all became porn, MLM ads and other junk.
I'm here because I saw a comment mentioning it and I wondered what it was. Then I saw there were threads with hundreds of responses and thought, "hey, this isn't actually dead, maybe it could be fun"
Seems like there's enough content to actually get into the habit of contributing and exploring, but discoverability feels harder. At the same time, so much social media these days is a mainline, drip feed, brain dead thing. Just interacting with YouTube/Instagram/Reddit/Twitter makes my eyes glaze over.
I think just the right amount of friction is probably a really good thing.
I finally decided to make an account after a week of ignoring Reddit, what is going on over there is ridiculous at this point, Reddit should have just given 3rd party apps an exception and called it a day.
Stopped using reddit after 12 years when the blackout began, and kept up with the developments through the tech news. Removing the mods and screwing around with things just because they're mad about a protest was the last straw, so now here I am!
Leftist shitposting lemmy instance. It recently updated in perperation for federation. It's not federated yet but plans to federate with lemmygrad and later more instances.
Hmm, it seems odd that the number of total user's has increased so much without the number of active user's increasing as well. Unless people are having trouble logging in?
I had the same issue getting registered. Had to fuck with it throughout the day before it finally went through. Makes me smile though. Lemmy is growing so fast it's struggling to keep up
I'm just here so i don't get fined. created an account because the developer for my reddit app is working on One for lemmy. So figured I'd give this a try
I'm going back to some older style board websites. I'm looking for a reddit replacement (deleted account there) and never knew of this site. I heard about it from Shacknews.
I dunno, but I've noticed that lemmy.ml had a bunch of bot and spam bots today to ban, and both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world have defederated with a bunch more instances compared to the other day. I wonder if the registration exploit has been patched.
on lemm.ee today there was an account https://lemm.ee/u/XeNoX that registered and proceeded to create i think more than 100 communities, but evidently has not made a single post or comment anywhere. was the situation at lemmy.ml anything like that?
Welcome. Things are starting to pick up on Lemmy. The Sync dev just announced a Lemmy version yesterday, which you can follow here for updates: https://lemmy.world/c/syncforlemmy.
I DID spend a lot less time in the last month on Reddit than before. Now everyone is constantly talking about how to let reddit be like it used to be and a lot of subs are private.
I still find myself looking at Reddit out of habit. I'm noticing the change. I really prefer RiF to the web or the official app so once it's gone I'll probably just stop looking at it regularly.
I heard about it through a negative review of Reddit in the AppStore and decided to check it out. Reddit permanently banned me for “abuse of the report function” though I had only reported a few things in my many, many years on the site. Then they proceeded to ban my entire family’s accounts because we share an IP address. Right after all of that, the news about third party apps came out and here we are.
This has to have something to do with the newly discovered API exploit to rapidly create accounts without any limits, right? Instances without captcha or email verification are vulnerable still, AFAIK.
One would think. I can't really find an upside to that, but it is quite exciting and interesting to be able to see all this take shape. Expected and unexpected things both. Happy I deleted RiF.
I use RIF exclusively on mobile. I never use reddit from my computer. The interface isn't all that different from RIF when on mobile, so I'm giving it a shot. Lots of the other places listed as "reddit alternatives" were mostly just discussion and not community focused and link sharing sites. I like it so far. (my first post!)
I'm curious if other kbin will see a similar increase, although since we're federated with Lemmy it doesn't really matter as much to me so long as the Fediverse is gaining traction which is hopefully what is happening here after the Reddit fallout.
Yes, but that was in preparation and during the early stages of the Reddit boycott (and due to kbin being a completely new project). In the same two days Lemmy jumped from 156,456 to 350,459 users, kbin went from 40,130 to 42,729. Still notable, but among the lowest two-day increases kbin has seen for a week.
Also note that Lemmy's increase of active users was minimal in the same period, so the new ones are basically all inactive.