Let’s be honest, the real reason Lemmy build most of its traffic is because of Reddit users. But the thing is, outside of the mass exodus in the west that too from the PC era… people discover and join Reddit not because it’s another social media like Facebook or Twitter that people need to reserve their usernames on like a brand or celebrity but because Google Search is kinda… actually absolute trash by SEO and machine learning crawlers.
Most of the world (I am from India btw, hello~) join or even discover reddit because they’re trying to search for actual solutions, recommendations, advice or even reviews by actual experienced people without having to go through another YouTuber which can stem from troubleshooting a router, finding an actual FOSS option or seeking immediate solutions to the recent CrowdStrike fiasco for example. After having to visit reddit every time whenever using a search engine including for education to career advice, I ended up directly signing up with reddit a decade ago.
Recently, Reddit even restricted its search results to Google only in a business partnership meaning those using Bing, DuckDuckGo to Ecosia or even SearchGPT wouldn’t be able to access Reddit answers anymore. Say, if someone searches for how to block ads on chrome as example - Solutions like uBlock Origin come into existence and continue to exist because of the combined community in Reddit that Lemmy is trying to preserve.
Unlike others, am not saying Lemmy would be dead but it would be pretty much like Discord-Telegram or Tumblr instead of wiping Reddit or correcting Facebook. Reddit is not something you discover from word-of-mouth or join from peer pressure unlike other social media which is even truer for Lemmy but because it actually helps and is useful to people.
Lemmy can’t be taking the path of 𝕏 (Alone Mask’s Twitter) but any of the good platforms were before the Enshittification with Facebook’s way~
I don’t want lemmy to replace reddit.
Call me gatekeepy or elitist if you want, but I feel like the primary driving force of reddit getting worse was it’s popularity.
Like say mods actually moderating what gets posted in their dubs to make sure it actually fits, even if you want to do that, if you’re a 3 million user reddit getting thousands of submissions a day, it’s just not feasible.
Not to mention that rn lemmy is generally quite a like-minded community. And while we do have the .ml problem and had an influx of trolls during the reddit scandal, overall it’s still very civil here. We can talk about any subject without have 500 “controversial” comments at the bottom of the thread.
It’s not as bad but can be just as psychotic. I got banned from green text because I asked them to provide proof that the general Canadian public didn’t refer to doughnut holes as timbits. I posted sources for my argument, they did not.
I had the exact same experience in Reddit! People complained of frontpage news subreddits being of low quality. I recommended a certain subreddit because of its quality to everyone. Little did I know that more traffic means more morons flooding and deteriorating the quality.
But on the one hand, you don’t want echo chambers to develop if it’s just the same people you interact with on regular basis. Ideally you’d want differences in opinion and fresh ideas.
Read my post and my other replies on this.