Reddit Migration

Want to start off by saying I love lemmy and I know it's not perfect but things will get better. There are many people though that don't have a high tolerance for bugs. The bug with browsing the All page would probably turn many off. Instances also might be too confusing for some people and they would rather turn back to what is most familiar. I'll admit that I still am a little bit confused about how instances work but I'd rather put more effort into learning about this platform, contributing to conversation to help grow the platform, etc. Not many users would want to put that effort in though because they seek something easy, familiar and maybe mindless to pass time.

The communities I browse are either small (behavioral science/school) or full of elders who aren’t interested with switching platforms. So that’s a pretty big reason. Some of them have organizations that still have large presences on things like fb. Not having an account hamstrings a persons ability to stay current with professional topics…not great for a lot of fields. Now, this is just my particular instance. But I’ve heard a lot of the same from colleagues and adjacent professions. As for me, my account is deleted and I don’t contribute content meaningfully anymore. Which I suspect is another major downside to all of this, brain drain.

Im not sure how much I want people to leave reddit. There was a lot of garbage users and bots and such. Even if all actual individuals left reddit the corpo, bot, other things from some organization elements I bet would be a fairly large populace.

It will take non-early adopters a while. If reddit continues to limp along, there will be people who stick. But I think the real exodus will occur when they IPO. We're only seeing the tip of the iceberg now, wait until there are shareholders and post IPO ad corporations to placate...

I think kbin/Lemmy is already showing promise as a community gathering-place, but it's nowhere near useable for being a repository of knowledge like Reddit is - if you want to know how to download videos from an obscure local streaming platform in a small country, hear experiences of doctors treating a specific chronic condition, or find answers to a highly specific scientific question, a quick search with site:reddit.com would usually give you the answer, and if you didn't there would usually be a relevant sub with someone knowledgeable in the field.

It's going to take many years for kbin/Lemmy to reach this status of a digital Great Library of Alexandria (if at all), and so much information is still going to be lost if Reddit shuts down.

So lemmy/kbin doesn't feel the same yet. A lot of the content I viewed on reddit, just isn't here in the same way. I think when the api changes take affect, we will see many more people making the switch as in a lot of subs, the content is posted via api when scrapeing other sources. That mixed with changes in moderation will be catalysts to people moving here full time. I also think there still needs to be some work on the interface. Even the best run instances don't have the same look and feel of reddit. If something feels different, people will resist it no matter how much they want to like it. As much as some people may have thought it would be, this is not an overnight migration.

Same problem as with any social network migration: the network effect.

Sometimes the largest equivalent Lemmy community for a subreddit is tiny, or worse, nonexistent. Sure, you can go create one, but unless you can also convince other people to join with you, it won't be much fun.

One thing I've seen get in the way is everyone wants their own instance rather than to setup just one community on an existing instance.

Where is everything? Whats with all the "View magazine elsewhere" things?

I fully moved to lemmy myself, but still browse reddit just for the vast amount of information available there.