Please indulge a few shower thoughts I had:

  1. I wouldn’t worry about Lemmy having as many users as reddit in the short term. Success is not just a measure of userbase. A system just needs a critical mass, a minimum number of users, to be self-perpetuating. For a reddit post that has 10k comments, most normal people only read a few dozen comments anyways. You could have half the comments on that post, and frankly the quality might go up, not down. (That said, there are many communities below that minimum critical mass at the moment.)

  2. Lemmy is now a real alternative. When reddit imploded Lemmy wasn’t fully set up to take advantage of the exodus, so a lot of users came over to the fediverse and gave up right away. There were no phone apps, the user interface was rudimentary, and communities weren’t yet alive. Next time reddit screws up in a high profile way, and they will screw up, the fediverse will be ready.

  3. Lemmy has way more potential than reddit. Reddit’s leadership has always been incompetent and slow at fixing problems. The fediverse has been very responsive to user feedback in comparison.

      • Vodik_VDK@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        No, us generating content and community is how we get users. Reddit’s conduct only creates episodic influxes of users.

    • Tygr@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      If that’s true, thrn Reddit’s explosion in popularity had nothing to do with Digg.

    • Historical_General@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      A good many of us are here because of R’s apps no longer working, including myself. It’s been a month and now I don’t even remember using R on my phone tbh. I did mostly use desktop, but I’ve also acclimatised very quickly.

      • Subverb@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Which is one reason I am confused by the response to Sync. We left because of third party apps getting screwed over but a segment of Lemmy is saying “Yeah, but only foss apps should migrate to Lemmy because, ‘mah foss sensibilities’.”

        • Eddie@lemmy.lucitt.social
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          1 year ago

          As a proud and loud member of the FOSS community, I will say this: The FOSS community is cringe as hell and people need to start going back to the root of the movement and remember that we are about CHOICE and FREEDOM.

          If you’re judging somebody for using the platform of their choice, FOSS or not, you are the problem.

      • Noscharhar@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I agree with you, but I think there’s a level where it is true.

        Like Lemmy should grow and develop based on what users are saying and not what Reddit is doing to a degree.

    • o_oli@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Lemmy is literally a reddit clone, of course it has lots to do with reddit what are you talking about