It's time to admit Lemmy has won the "the biggest reddit alternative" award, why it's time for all of us to consider supporting it (here's why) + reopening r/LemmyMigration
As much as that makes a great story... The groundwork for lemmy goes back years. It's true that lots of issues were addressed and client apps were ported after Reddit started going down hill, but a ton of work was done beforehand to make that all possible.
client apps were ported after Reddit started going down hill
For me, this can't be overstated. I don't work in an office/at a stationary computer and 99.9% of my Reddit time was mobile. I checked out the "mobile apps" for Lemmy, and hated them. I probably wouldn't be active here at all if it wasn't for good dedicated apps like Sync.
I haven't used Reddit since the blackout. Thankfully Sync for Lemmy was out within a few weeks. Sort by TopDay and there's enough content on here to scratch my itch.
Damn straight. I tried out Jerboa and was so disappointed that until Lemmy Sync was announced I just assumed I would no longer have a Reddit style app for a while.
Plus building it is kind of the easy part -- the hard part is getting people to migrate over and having enough active posts / users that people feel it's worth their time to stay and post as well. Migration will inevitably splinter communities as well, especially small ones, where not enough people move over (or don't move quickly enough). I've seen so many alternatives where the userbase was too small or not posting enough or just right wing trolls or the site was unusably buggy. lemmy managed to be good enough in all those categories at the perfect time - when reddit spat in the face of their users.
Regarding the content problem, I see the repost bots are still active, I wish they could be either turned off or have their rates severeöy limited.
At first glance they make Lemmy seem active and vibrant, but since they are just bots few people vote on the posts and fewer comment on them, they post so much the any original Lemmy content in those communities gets drowned out by the bots reposting Reddit threads.
During the influx of users after the apikalypse these bots where probably needed to not scare people that there was zero content from different subreddits, but now they just seem to be holding those communities hostage.
I mean... not entirely. I've been on quite a few reddit alternatives over the years. Most of them passion projects by indie devs, and start struggling the moment they hit 4 digit users. Ruqqus was nicknamed "dumpster fire" because it would go down every time a new wave from reddit came over.
The software existed for years, but yes the instances that popped up and the dev work to make it actually sorta stable at scale did happen quite quick.
It’s what makes me want to donate to keep my home server alive. It’s the first open source thing that I’ve ever donated to, and I now have a monthly donation to help try to keep this alive since Lemmy is the alternative we all deserve.