As much as there is plenty of new people joining the threadiverse, the real wave starts today, with thousands of subreddits going dark.

Existing Lemmy/Kbin instances get hammered with new user registrations and deploy different coping strategies. Some plead, some close registrations. New instances spring up.

Soon, mainstream media will discover Lemmy exists. They will probably miss Kbin entirely, and most will also be very confused about the federated nature of Lemmy. Some might be able to remember Fediverse exists.

When Kbin finally shows up on their radar, they will find it difficult to explain how it fits into the narrative they already spun. My money is on someone calling it a “fork” of Lemmy. 🤣

Eventually, as more instances start turning off registrations, and as some buckle under the load temporarily, the narrative becomes “this is why Lemmy will fail.” Threadiverse will get treated like a VC-funded walled garden. Media will be flabberghasted at how “poorly” Lemmy and Kbin were able to “capture” the people wanting to migrate off of Reddit. They will complain endlessly about how hard it is to choose an instance, “confusing interface”, and ask “thoughtful” questions on “how will they monetize”.

Eventually, the wave subsides. Maybe Reddit reverses their silly ideas, maybe people get tired. There is a drop in active user accounts on the Threadiverse, compared to the peak of the wave, which is then taken as “proof positive” that Lemmy and Kbin could never “succeed”.

What they will ignore, of course, is that by then Threadiverse is several times bigger and more active than before all the Reddit insanity. Communities stay active, people stay active, and slowly Threadiverse grows, as (just like the broader Fediverse) it is not a VC-funded startup that needs a hokey-stick growth.

It’s a long-term project of making community-run platforms work. And that takes time, and effort, and love.

  • Rob@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I don’t think Reddit will see a huge drop in users in the short term. But hopefully this whole kerfuffle will give a big enough boost to Lemmy to kickstart its network effect.

    Engagement is the most important thing to be striving for right now!

    • Cora@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I was watching the counter yesterday as various subreddits went dark, and I started watching when it hit 1200, and woke up this morning with it being over 6000.

      There was an initial hurdle to understanding how instances work together / how to search between them, but now that I have that figured out, it’s a lot easier. Most of the communities that I actively interacted with already have similar communities here on Lemmy. r/FountainPens was a big one for me.

      • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        I saw your comment and went “ooh, does that mean that there’s a fountain pen community over here”, and I clicked on your profile excitedly, but I can only see posts/comments that you’ve made within the communities I’ve already joined.

        How did you (re)discover the communities that you frequented? Did you just search for them one by one? I enjoyed how organic finding new communities on Reddit often felt and I’m hoping I’m just missing that now because I don’t understand Lemmy yet.

        • Mindless_Enigma@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          I can see comments and posts on their profile from communities I’m not in. Not quite sure why that isn’t the case for you. Maybe a weird quirk of how the different instances are federated. Looks like they’re talking about !fountainpens@sopuli.xyz. As for finding communities, I don’t know what the UI is like outside of Beehaw, but when I go to the community list I can chose to search all instances to find communities all over.

          • Someology@fedia.io
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            1 year ago

            I’ve noticed that some communities will just not show up when I search hereon fedia.io. !fountainpens@sopuli.xyz is one of them. No matter how I search for it, I can’t seem to find it here. Other communities from Lemmy seem to be no problem, so it’s odd.

      • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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        1 year ago

        I watched the massive spike from 600 something subs to I think it was 3500? There was like 4 minutes of just mass closure. It was impressive.

    • GrindingGears
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      1 year ago

      I disagree. Going public hasn’t served any tech company, except the founders, well. The changes announced thus far, are only the icing on the cake for what’s to come. They pretty clearly don’t have good management, or good decision making capabilities either. I think Reddit’s on a rather fast descent to it’s nadir.

      • dystop@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        “fast” is relative. Twitter is dying a slow death, but due to its size there are still millions/tens of millions of users.

        Facebook is effectively dead for anyone under 35, and yet it marches on.