Ask Lemmy

When the API changes came in on Reddit it appeared to cause quite a few people to shift to Lemmy, but not that many. I've said this before in other posts but the onboarding experience for Lemmy is awful for your average joe. From what I've read it was the same situation for Mastodon and that is why Bluesky took off instead.

There needs to be a clear concise point of entry for new users to the Fediverse that empowers users to quickly customise what they want to see. Most people don't care about how the Fediverse works and its benefits, they just want to consume content.

If I were technically capable and had the drive to do so I'd create a single onboarding site that would ask the user a few preference defining questions, chuck them on an instance that is relevant and apply some filters so they don't get spammed with anime posts if that isn't their thing. Oh and maybe show a couple of mobile apps.

Reddit will be a Frankenstein like Facebook and will refuse to die. They will find a way to monetize it while also forcing right wing engagement. Right wingers will be thrilled for some time thinking they are now the "cool reddit people"(lol) while never realizing everyone stopped caring.

Individual subs will still be as active as they always were. Mod support will wane. At the end of maybe year 5 you'll look at the site and it will be unrecognizable. Just another captured audience too entrenched to ever leave the platform.

None of this should worry you. Reddit isn't popular because a left wing person owns it. It's political lean is entirely from its users. Changing who owns the space doesn't erase left leaning people. They just go somewhere else. After having used lemmy for some time, I'm fairly confident it will be here. Even if not, wherever it is will be new and cool and away from right wing shit bags. It's almost exciting to think about having a new space to explore.

probably back to Digg, as god intended. Lemmy is way too laggy to sustain any meaningful users number

There will only be an exodus if there is a better alternative than Lemmy/kbin. Remember that twitter was still going strong despite mastodon existing until bluesky won the race and became the new twitter. If reddit somehow manages to collapse one day, most of the people won't go to lemmy because it's already been shown it's not an attractive or equivalent replacement for it, so either something new reddit-like appears or nothing changes.

No. Most of Reddit’s population has proven they don’t care about changes that much more directly affect their user experience. I can’t see a significant portion of them caring about who owns the platform if they don’t care about that.

Reddit is mostly ChatGPT bots talking to each other these days.

It depends on what changes they made. Reddit is fairly left-leaning so if they start seeing more right-wing content or racist crap being allowed on the site, it might happen.

People quit X because it allowed notorious racists and neo-Nazis back on the site, and also did dumb stuff like not allowing people to unfollow Elon Musk (it will automatically re-follow him after some time). It also prioritised and propagated right-wing content which, shockingly, left-wing users didn't like.

Yes