I’ve seen many comments and posts regarding the API fiasco on Reddit, with the claim that there will be a huge influx of users when that happens. I’m all for it, but I find it hard to believe that the average or even above average user will make the effort to switch.
I’ll be directing all of my users in Sync to lemmy.world tomorrow.
I’m so excited for you! Sorry Reddit just disregarded third party app developers like you guys were nothing, absolutely disgraceful. Without your app, my SO & I have no desire to browse the site for fun anymore. Thanks for aiding in hours of fun for us!
Wow this is actually the dev of Sync! Guys this is big! Thank you, this will be huge, hope it her dev will follow.
Very exciting! And Sync for Lemmy is even more exciting! Question, do you plan on adding Kbin support in the future? Maybe when their API is released?
He has said he plans to support kbin in the future. But he is working on a MVP minimum viable product right now to get something that works out asap and then start addressing things like kbin support down the road. He just needs time and the support of the community. You can follow the project at !lemmy.world/c/syncforlemmy (hopefully I did that right…)
Very understandable and very exciting! Thank you for the info!
just curious…
how many users would that be?
roughly
It’s had over a million downloads and 70k reviews. So, a few.
Gotta be at least 5. Minimum!
I’m one of them and I’m here now! Only 4 more to go… but seriously I hope there’s a ton more to follow.
king
Loved sync, hope that the Apollo dev does this too.
Not gonna be a sudden exodus.
More that Reddit’s entered a slow death spiral. Redditors will start seeing an upsurge in toxicity, since mods will have left, been replaced with stooges, had their tools taken away, and most of the good mods will have abandoned ship.
Some may come here. Some may move on to Discord or other social media. Some will stick it out on Reddit, but notice that bots and trolls are taking over, whatever moderators are left can’t or won’t keep up, and the admins are seemingly asleep at the switch.
In a few months, discourse there will have assumed Youtube quality, with bots shouting down human discourse, and trolls scaring anyone remotely normal away. They’ll limp along like that for years.
Like Twitter.
And eventually it’ll end up like 4Chan, only technically still existing.
Nobody knows the future, but speaking as an instance admin, the ideal scenario would be a continued steady growth and not a huge sudden influx 😅
I think it is great here on Lemmy but tbh, the content is limited. My enjoyment here is partly watching it develop. Im like 1 week in and I can see it growing day by day. I don’t think that is what most eventual users want to experience. They want it all set up with the party in full swing.
I love the conversations here. It’s just normal people talking. No amateur comedians at the top of threads with their crappy jokes. It’s so nice.
Yes this is like Reddit was back 10-16 years ago when I joined. Much better discussions here than Reddit now. I’m honestly pretty happy where everything is already, I’d like to take the growth nice and slow so that we can stay in the good zone longer. Both digg and Reddit were too banal for me towards the end.
I love it here too. I’m finding that im connecting with people, getting into your head reading your words and it’s nice. Watching the whole process is pretty awesome. Definitely not the average users expectations, im sure.
I like that I am talking to real people, not potential comment reposter bots. Feels less like a psyops experiment and more like actual engagement.
It honestly took me a moment to get used to such a high percentage of civil discourse.
Thank you for your service. Would you be interested in testing my modern UI theme for Lemmy on your instance? It works with Lemmy 0.17 and 0.18.0. You can get the CSS files from the releases page.
Hey! I have had a few questions about themes. At this point, I am asking users to apply non-mainlined themes through userscripts - I am wary of taking on extra responsibilities in maintaining compatibility for additional themes. Sorry about that!
But all themes that get added to the main lemmy-ui repo will always be available out of the box on lemm.ee as well. The repo is open to contributions, so you could have a look at that option if that’s something you’re interested in.
I already made a proposal to improve the default theme, but my issue was closed without any response from the developers. The required changes were small on purpose and should be easy to implement for anyone already familiar with the code. So it seems that UI is not a priority to Lemmy developers. That’s why I had to develop my addon, which I then also turned into a theme. I hope that one day Lemmy instances will start using some kind of modern theme (doesn’t have to be mine), so that my addon is no longer needed.
My theme is just a small amount of styles applied on top of the default litely and darkly themes, which should make maintenance easier. Unlike an addon, a theme doesn’t need to support multiple versions of Lemmy at the same time, so we could simplify it even more. Lemmy 0.18 uses CSS variables now, so that also makes things easier.
Something needs to be done about Lemmy’s outdated UI and I’m not sure if the current approach of developing multiple userscripts and addons is efficient. I understand if you think this might cause too much work for you though.
I already made a proposal to improve the default theme, but my issue was closed without any response from the developers.
You’re misinterpreting what happened there - the issue was not closed to shut it down, it was actually converted into a discussion to make it easier to track: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/discussions/1503
It wasn’t exactly one specific issue that could be fixed, it was a longer discussion with a bunch of branches. For such things, the discussions format is much more usable.
So it seems that UI is not a priority to Lemmy developers.
I just want to point out that there has been a massive amount of UI improvements in 0.18 and 0.18.1 (just take a look at all the changes by @jsit for example: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Ajsit+). In addition, new themes are being created directly for the lemmy-ui repo as well, for example: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1682
I don’t know the developer’s exact intentions, but my issue was a specific, easy to implement proposal. It wasn’t meant to be a discussion.
There have been UI improvements, but the design is still outdated. The theme you linked to is also not a modern design. What we need the most is an improved default theme, so that everyone could enjoy an easy to read website.
I dunno, but the fact that I’m browsing a post with 118 comments using a skin that looks a lot like Apollo tells that things are going in a good direction.
Posting with Connect for Lemmy rn. I have 4 o 5 apps on my phone, so I’ll be testing waters before I can land somewhere safely.
Using WefWef too and I’m surprised how good it is for a PWA. Only thing I miss is haptic feedback.
Ugh, I will implement haptics literally the second Apple gives PWAs installed to home screen an api for that.
Are there any plans at all for a traditional app? I understand that there is an appeal to keeping things completely free from any App Store shenanigans, a certain freedom that comes with web apps over native apps.
I think the influx will be on the 1st. People are gonna try to fire up reddit on their fav app, it won’t work, and a good number of them will do something else.
A portion of those will look for alternatives. Most of those people will probably end up here. I don’t think it’s going to be a gigantic number or anything, due to how many “gates” there are to go through, but I’m expecting the biggest single-day increase so far.
And at least the dev of Sync will or has already rolled out an update to explain why the app isn’t working anymore and that Sync for Lemmy is on development.
There’s no better advertisement, really.
Reddit is gigantic, and while Fediversal alternatives are gaining users rapidly there’s a long ways to go.
A useful way to look at it is, we don’t have to defeat Reddit. We’re creating a community as an alternative. Reddit hasn’t lost a large number users when judged as a percentage of their base, but many of the people who are leaving are the ones who see where it’s going, and are the power users, the knowledgeable people, the cool people. The ones who make Reddit a place worth being.
It’s the same with Twitter. A lot of Twitter and Reddit users just keep their heads down and use the service, as it goes to hell around them. A lot of people join social media sites because it’s where other people are, or it’s where their friends are. People who joined when social media finally broke the internet away from being mostly the domain of the technically inclined. Even now, a lot of people mostly use it for streaming. These people may not leave Twitter or Reddit ever, because they really don’t care about it. But the people who were big internet users, or would have been were old enough in the late 90s or early 2000s, those are the kinds of people that Reddit, and Twitter, are losing.
Now, there are a lot of people on Twitter who I’d have thought have jumped ship by now, but to many people admin decisions feel like they have only a theoretical impact unless it affects their experience, or themselves, directly. The best thing that can be done is just keep on being awesome, and make cool posts that can’t be found elsewhere. Once a community gets a reputation for that, people will come naturally.
Take my poor man’s gold 🏅
undefined> many of the people who are leaving are the ones who see where it’s going, and are the power users, the knowledgeable people, the cool people. The ones who make Reddit a place worth being.
From the little of this community I’ve seen thus far, it seems like the average comment quality is higher than recent Reddit. Though that is usually the case in the early days of social networks as they tend to start with more motivated, passionate and informed users who have actually heard of them and are willing to put time and effort into them before they are proven.
It depends. From what I understood, moderation on Reddit will become really hard after this. So the site will go down in user experience on content, worse than it is now. That’s outside of the 3rd party apps like Apollo no longer working but will have a negative impact. It sounded like some mods would just walk away than deal with not having robot spam bots to help, which it is volunteer. That could spur on further churn, again, because quality suffers.
I removed my Reddit apps and don’t plan to go back. Having said that, the tech here is still in its infancy. I see bugs daily, the native app version of this experience is not super adoptable by a mass market yet, but it can all improve with time and more bodies interested here.
Long term, this broad concept of decentralization seems to be populous. I think people don’t understand it yet, when they show up it’s rough, and there’s alternatives. But that will all continue to change in the coming months.
The only thing we can do is wait and see. It’s only three days from now. My personal belief is that there is definitely going to be an influx of new users, but that number won’t be too big or unmanageable.
I imagine there will be a big uptick in the number of new users but it won’t be a huge wave, not initially. Human nature being what it is, users will switch to the official app, mods will try and muddle through with a more limited toolbox and, slowly, the wheels will fall off as people find that the user experience has been degraded, leading to a fairly steady flow of people moving over (and a decent number moving on as Lemmy likely isn’t ready for primetime just yet). I think what will be key is whether the most experienced moderators and most active posters make the jump - without them the site is a hollow shell as it is largely built on their disproportionate contribution. That might speed up Reddit’s downfall.
The best thing we can do is make their landing as soft as possible.
- Make sure there are welcome posts in each instances main communities.
- Keep an eye on Reddit for people asking how to make the move.
- Keep an eye on the relevant communities here for anyone struggling.
- Get equivalents to the subs set up.
- List these on sub.rehab and similar directories.
- Don’t panic! Perhaps this should have gone first.
a guide on how to use Lemmy would also be nice. I’m a former reddit user and I still haven’t figured out how to edit comments or block users.
I’ll look around for a decent guide or two but, in the web interface, click the three vertical dots on the right under the post.
yeah I think the apps just aren’t there yet. I used connect for lemmy and today I’ve installed lemming which has the edit and block functions but looks clunky. can’t have it all I suppose.
They’re coming but the fact that Jerboa is sending out error pop-ups if the instance isn’t running Lemmy 18.0 isn’t going to help.
There will be an influx. Not- nearly like the influx over the last week or two though.
But, I would expect a small bump.
It won’t be instant, but quite a few 3PA users will find it incredibly difficult (maybe even impossible) to make the switch to the official app; it’s just that bad. Hell, I can’t imagine using Reddit without the crutch Apollo provided.
I already switched over. But I guess majority of 3rd party app users are still waiting for the last moment.
I think many are simply not doing anything until they have to. Once their app quits working, they’ll make a change at that time. Of course not everyone uses Mobile. Personally I don’t use mobile much for internet access, mainly desktop browser. In that case I could keep using Reddit same as before, but I don’t want to.
So the question is what portion of Reddit users are on mobile, how many will relent to the Reddit app, how many will quit using Reddit altogether, how many will look for an alternative, and finally how many will land on Lemmy or Kbin. Could be a lot, could be not many. We’ll find out pretty soon here.
For those that do come this way they’ll have a transition phase. There’s a lot that’s different here and takes some getting used to. Also the lack of certain features may result in some angst. There’s bugs too. They fixed some stuff with 0.18.0, but searching for and subscribing to communities is giving me fits now.
Using on Android mobile has been a pleasant experience for me. Just added a shortcut to my home screen. But, I tend to not download an app unless I have to. Years ago when I was on Facebook and Twitter, I always did it that way. I never used their apps.
I am old-ish so I am not sure if that is why when I joined, it was very easy for me to find my way around. I say this because I’ve been on the internet since the '90s and have familiarity with hunting down what I need versus it just being there in an app.
Ironically, when I started on Reddit back in 2012, I quickly found bacon reader and have been using it ever since. It is one of the few apps I do use. And I will not be using Reddit any other way so I am here for the long run.
I would imagine most people planning to head here already have accounts, activity will no doubt go up though.
As the weeks go on though more will find this place and I’m sure there will be more surges to come.
No. There are good things to look at on Reddit, and effectively nothing around here. This place is incredibly barren and will continue to be unless creative people show up to populate it… which they won’t when it’s a nightmare just to get an upvote to stick,
What do you mean by a nightmare just to get an upvote to stick?