Lemmy and Kbin: The Best Reddit Alternatives?
Lemmy and Kbin: The Best Reddit Alternatives?
Love Reddit but tired of what's happening to it? We check out Lemmy and Kbin, two open-source fediverse alternatives that are growing fast.
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Alternatives that dont even take off, sadly.
There was a spike, but the curve has flattened and now might be bleeding.
That's how growth works on social media, it comes in waves. We are basically in the first wave, because there were only a few thousand people here before June. Its going to take a while before we build up enough organic momentum to cause a second wave, unless reddit makes another oopsie; they could trigger another wave at any moment.
The curve is fine, what you're seeing is the bleeding of alternate accounts. Many of us made 2 or more accounts on different instances early on, and many of those initial alts are now becoming inactive as people settle on their preferred servers. The rate of active user growth is slower than the rate of attrition right now, but that's only because the rate of attrition is so high. That should stabilize in the coming weeks.
Look at threads, their activity declined like 70% after a week or two. Lemmy is actually retaining users at a much higher percentage than the average social media site, it's just that we haven't gotten enough people to give it a try yet.
There's been multiple waves to Lemmy.
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Early 2020: Lemmy's creators make a post on /r/communism, announcing Lemmy and offering to set up an instance for the subreddit to migrate onto. This instance becomes Lemmygrad (which is still run by Lemmy's founders/the people who also run Lemmy.ml).
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Mid 2020: Federation comes online for Lemmy. Lemmy's founders make a post to /r/Linux, advertising Lemmy and getting people to join. This is the wave I was in, originally, but the folks from wave 1 scared me off.
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Then there were a few other waves. I wasn't around for any of them, but I know in late 2021/early 2022 Beehaw was created. I believe Beehaw split off from Tildes, which is another Reddit clone run by a former Reddit admin (who also made AutoModerator).
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Then, in May 2023, we saw the first wave of people coming over from Reddit. As the other person mentioned, there were really multiple smaller waves... usually corresponding with an announcement the Reddit admins made. The blackout gave the biggest wave.
Since the start of July, it's largely petered back. A lot of the folks who are diehard anti-Reddit are here, but until Reddit fucks up again it'll probably quiet down.
Reddit will fuck up again, mind. Digg didn't die instantly, either - it was a slow, drawn-out death.
I've been trying to get this kind of Lemmy history since I got here. This is a great summary, I didn't know about pretty much any of those details.
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I think you're the fourth or fifth wave actually, there were a lot of smaller waves before the current reddit migration. The reddit migration also probably had two waves
- when the api changes first went viral
- when third party apps actually shut down
though #2 may not have increased accounts by much.
Lemmy is actually retaining users at a much higher percentage than the average social media site, it’s just that we haven’t gotten enough people to give it a try yet.
The slight difficulty in joining probably helps with this. You have to actually commit a little to join
Yeah good points. I have never used Twitter so I missed the whole Mastodon exodus, and I don't know much about Lemmy before the reddit migration.
But I'm just basing this on the MAU figure being around 1000 in March 2023 and still being around 1000 at the end of May 2023. Then starting in June there was a massive wave that pushed us to 70k at one point.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120
I get that there were previous waves, and God damn if I'm not appreciative of everyone who was here before me and created the environment that convinced me that Lemmy was worthwhile. But at the end of the day, any previous waves are more like ripples when compared to the reddit exodus.
And hopefully we have at least one more wave in our future that will make this one look like a ripple.
Lemmy has had a lot of bugs fixed and performance improvements since the big wave, I think next one will go more smoothly and it probably won't be so intimidating
Eh, I think Lemmy has reached a critical mass of users to sustain itself in terms of content in the long term. Every misstep that Reddit takes will bring about more migrations, and the platform is on its way to form its own identity. It's wait and see, at this point.
My main concern is complying to GDPR-like regulations, given that federation means that the content in each instance may be stored elsewhere in a more permanent way, compared to a centralised service like Reddit. This might threaten Lemmy and Kbin in the future, I think.
I think it is a similar situation like mastodon vs X.com right?