No Stupid Questions

If they come, it will be a trickle. There isn't that much left for Reddit to do which would significantly harm the user base as a whole to force a migration. At best, one sub might get banned and come to Lemmy as a way to continue. Whether that community will be accepted by the current Lemmy federation is up in the air.

Regarding future growth, Lemmy isn't ready for it. The moderation and admin tools need work if the platform were to 10x, let alone see greater growth. I expect if that growth were to happen, federation would fracture further. You would also see some Reddit items come here as a way to moderate like becoming more dependent on a karma score and requiring more for signing up.

Yes, I think it will grow organically, and often in bursts when Reddit does something particularly publicly stupid or frustrating. We've seen this before, we'll see it again. I don't know if we'll ever see a mass exodus. I don't know if this will ever "replace" Reddit per se. Obviously it has for me, but on a whole, I think it will continue to be a niche community, and I'm fine with that. There are good people here, my kind of people, and I like it for what it is, not for what it could become. I really don't need the tiktok-memelord-masses and the teenagers and the onlyfans trolls in my life. I think they'll find their own places to congregate and feed off each other, and I don't think it will ever be here, no matter how shitty reddit and tiktok and whatever other dumb apps they use become.

I don't want the Fediverse to be massively exclusive but it doesn't need to be massively inclusive either. Its nature means it can be inclusive, and I welcome any community who really feels like they belong here. But I'm realistic about who is actually going to feel included here, and I don't think we need to go out of our way to "attract" more users, we just need to do enough that the people who want this sort of thing, can find it.

I think more of them will just quit using reddit and not come here either.

When you want to sign up for lemmy, there are questions and questions are friction. That feels easy for us because obviously we did it, we picked an instance, we got our approvals, we're here, but I've seen it firsthand trying to get people to use lemmy and for a lot of types of people that you would want for establishing more variety in communities, that initial friction is more than enough to drive them away.

Reddit doesn't even make you pick a username, they've gone almost as far as you could with making account creation frictionless. If we want to stay in our echo chamber with everyone who thinks that's not a big deal then someone else who solves that friction is probably going to eventually be the real reddit replacement. Seriously y'all, know it's been awhile, but people were picking discord as an alternative to reddit to move to instead of lemmy during the apicalypse and they barely even compare.

With all that said though, giving up the idea of Lemmy being a major competitive platform is not the worst thing in the world.

It's nice to have an option that isn't one of the corporate overlords. I want it to be successful, but I also don't want it to be mainstream, because that brings mainstream level problems too.

Some will, but if they haven't left yet I don't see why they would. We'll continue to get stragglers that get banned from reddit.

They are moving very slowly, which is a good thing.

Given the out of control censorship and normative thought dogpiling that continually occurs over there, we can only hope more and more users leave reddit. It is now known as one of the most censored websites. Now combine that with all the paid posters and bot content, and it's a recipe for little user reward.

I come across many users less than 3 months old, and they tend to introduce themselves occasionally on !reddit@lemmy.world.

It's fine if they come over a little at a time or in large waves or even if they don't. I do worry about sometimes there are periods where discussion feels a little more toxic, bandwagoney and rigid, and others where people allow themselves to be a little more nuanced when discussing with each other. I like this site more when the latter is happening. Maybe new users need a little time settling down into a slightly different culture which is normal and expected.

It depends.

If we're lucky and lemmy is more of less left to its own devices then we'll probably get a few more users as Reddit keeps getting more and more awful.

If we're not lucky then either Reddit or Meta will decide that lemmy needs to be somehow incorporated into their services wether we like it or not and we'll be inundated with a deluge of the worst possible kinds of users. Spam bots, trolls, scammers, people trying to use it for their crappy MLM schemes etc.

Only time will tell!

Yes and yes.

It'll happen repeatedly.

It'll be a good thing and it will be a bad thing.

Growth brings more content and communities but there's a point where popularity can start to hurt the quality or authenticity of the communities.

Absolutely.

It's a good thing and a bad.

Bad:

• I don't really like the prevailing philosophy of redditors. If Redditors(TM) are around, i don't like talking to them.
• a small nunber of people who get banned and come here were genuinely being terrible and won't stop once they're on lemmy. Those people usually aren't drawn to smaller less public sites like this, however.

Good:

• People who get banned tend to be quite fun, and active users. A lot of people find themsekles banned from reddit essentially for 'posting too much', e.g they make a joke that a mod doesn't like, temporary ban makes multiple accounts flag up, user gets banned on all of them.
• i think the vibe of the site you're on governs how you behave a littke bit. People will fall into communicating with you in a way you're comfortble with.

I have a headache and can't make the lists longer, oops

I certainly hope so. I hope eventually federated discussion groups become the default way for the general public to communicate about any topic that interests them.

But with how governments around the world are going after the Internet, especially the parts of it that aren't profitable… I just hope some good parts of it survive at all. :(

No.

M orons

A re

G onna

A rrive!