Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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Did anybody seriously expect anything different?
There may be some impact, come July, when the third party apps stop working. However, I have to imagine that the vast majority of mobile users use the official app. Quality may take a hit, with the loss of some mods and mod tools, but Reddit will be just fine. Sadly, Reddit rates too highly on content, users, and resultant utility (for many communities) for most users to completely abandon it.
But who provides the content? Power users. Reddit follows the same curve as most social media where only like 1-5% of the users actually post the content, and the rest are consumers. When the content creators are gone, it's just a platform with no content.
The only people who will stick to submitting content are the poor content reposters or various spammers, which the mods have been doing free labor to filter out. Heck, even the bots using the API will die too, so all you'll have is the TOS-breaking bots posting content.
This will not end well when third party apps are gone. I didn't realize it myself, but most of my time is reading Reddit when I'm bored in bed, or on the train, on my phone. I've been a redditor for 17 years, and my time now has mostly shifted from my desktop to the "RIF" Android app, and without that, I'm simply not using Reddit, and have already uninstalled.
This site is the real difference. Lemmy had 0 activity until now. Now that there's a footing, there's a real chance of continued growth.
From Lemmy perspective there's been a huge influx of new users, but from Reddit perspective nothing changed. I do expect Lemmy to keep growing, but I don't expect that it's going to have any measurable impact on Reddit in the foreseeable future.
Honestly I'd rather have a smaller community to interact with. Less bullshit that way.
Yeah, I don't think rapid growth is necessarily desirable either since it brings a lot of toxic behaviors from reddit along with it. The goal for Lemmy should be sustainability, as long as there are enough people to have discussions with and to bring content, enough people to host servers, and enough developers, then Lemmy will be fine. Growth for the sake of growth makes little sense.