I don’t mean to be pessimistic, bit since most subreddits are only going dark for a couple days, the site will basically be back to normal soon. I wonder how many users here are only here because of temporary outrage and not because they actually prefer Lemmy. I’m curious about people’s outlook on this situation.
2 things.
Firstly, most will go back. With the enshittification of twitter in November mastodon experienced an influx of new users. It feels like for several weeks activity doubled, then it died down to about 30% of the increase and stayed there. So while most go back it was still great for Mastodon. Fosstodon users increased from 10k to 60k in a month.
Secondly, it’s not a mutually exclusive binary thing. Reddit will always have some great niche communities. There’s nothing wrong with following those, but you can also continue to follow some lemmy communities too.
Lemmy doesn’t need to become a reddit killer over night. I think for the fediverse in general there will be a few events like this each year, and if the fediverse get’s some exposure and increases in size, it just makes it more viable for the next round.