Technology @beehaw.org rysiek @szmer.info 2y ago

Reddit Wave and the Threadiverse

As much as there is plenty of new people joining the threadiverse, the real wave starts today, with thousands of subreddits going dark.

Existing Lemmy/Kbin instances get hammered with new user registrations and deploy different coping strategies. Some plead, some close registrations. New instances spring up.

Soon, mainstream media will discover Lemmy exists. They will probably miss Kbin entirely, and most will also be very confused about the federated nature of Lemmy. Some might be able to remember Fediverse exists.

When Kbin finally shows up on their radar, they will find it difficult to explain how it fits into the narrative they already spun. My money is on someone calling it a "fork" of Lemmy. 🤣

Eventually, as more instances start turning off registrations, and as some buckle under the load temporarily, the narrative becomes "this is why Lemmy will fail." Threadiverse will get treated like a VC-funded walled garden. Media will be flabberghasted at how "poorly" Lemmy and Kbin were able to "capture" the people wanting to migrate off of Reddit. They will complain endlessly about how hard it is to choose an instance, "confusing interface", and ask "thoughtful" questions on "how will they monetize".

Eventually, the wave subsides. Maybe Reddit reverses their silly ideas, maybe people get tired. There is a drop in active user accounts on the Threadiverse, compared to the peak of the wave, which is then taken as "proof positive" that Lemmy and Kbin could never "succeed".

What they will ignore, of course, is that by then Threadiverse is several times bigger and more active than before all the Reddit insanity. Communities stay active, people stay active, and slowly Threadiverse grows, as (just like the broader Fediverse) it is not a VC-funded startup that needs a hokey-stick growth.

It's a long-term project of making community-run platforms work. And that takes time, and effort, and love.

93 comments

I don't think Reddit will lose enough users to seriously consider backing down. But I expect the quality to degrade further, and I think this might start the slow descend of Reddit. I'm not sure if Lemmy, Kbin or Tiles will be the successors. I like Lemmy so far, but it was a journey.
- i miss some reddit communities, but for a basic usage, lemmy/jerboa replaces reddit without problem.
  
  Jeroba and I have some issues I haven't been able to understand. Currently the mobile page works better for me, even though I struggle with reloads pushing the content I'm about to read away.
- I’m not sure if Lemmy, Kbin or Tiles will be the successors.
  
  That's kind of a moot point, since as long as they can federate with each other it doesn't matter what software an individual instance runs.
  
  Fair, but now what I meant. I didn't mean one of them will be the successor. I mean I don't know if any of them will be.
- I'm not sure if Lemmy, Kbin or Tiles will be the successors.
  
  Tiles or tildes? Did autocorrect bite you?
  
  Autocorrect realized my butt is delicious.
- Right I mean if most power users, contributors and moderators jump ship then sure Reddit will continue to exist for years but what’s the point of it other than accessing threads from years ago.
  
  Watching bots argue about bullshit and clueless people interacting with them?
- Case in point: digg still exists.
- Same, the quality of Reddit has been dropping for years but now it will be a steep decline as opposed to the gradual decrease, with exceptions to niche communites.
I think lemmy as a reddit alternative has a massive advantage over mastodon as a Twitter replacement. The dynamics of these two services is completely different. Whereas Twitter is all about people you follow and if they're not there you don't want to switch, reddit is about the individual subreddits. For those ones does not need to have all the same traffic or the same people. "Good enough" might be enough to keep people interested in those communities without missing reddit. It doesn't matter if I read my programmer memes in reddit or lemmy at the end of the day
- Combined with that, I'm in the "same" communities on my local instance as I am on instances with a bigger community for the same thing. Reddit doesn't have a "home" like instances naturally have.
- That is true on one hand, but on the other the good subreddits on reddit were the ones managed by good mods. They kept the discussions at a quality level, not letting the subreddit devolve to memes, circlejerks or overall low-effort content.
  
  Like of course we can make an m/c/askhistorians here, but it wont be the same without mods from r/askhistorians, and that's even more of a case with smaller niche communities.
- I read somewhere around here about topic-focused content (Lemmy/Reddit/et al) vs people-focused content (influencers) and this is why for us here platforms as Instagram Twitter and honestly maybe even Mastodon are not as interesting as Reddit was and Lemmy is.
- This is a very good point! I don't think microblogging is "all" about specific people one follows, but I agree with the observation that component is definitely more important there than on the threadiverse.
I don’t think Reddit will see a huge drop in users in the short term. But hopefully this whole kerfuffle will give a big enough boost to Lemmy to kickstart its network effect.

Engagement is the most important thing to be striving for right now!
- I was watching the counter yesterday as various subreddits went dark, and I started watching when it hit 1200, and woke up this morning with it being over 6000.
  
  There was an initial hurdle to understanding how instances work together / how to search between them, but now that I have that figured out, it's a lot easier. Most of the communities that I actively interacted with already have similar communities here on Lemmy. r/FountainPens was a big one for me.
  
  I saw your comment and went "ooh, does that mean that there's a fountain pen community over here", and I clicked on your profile excitedly, but I can only see posts/comments that you've made within the communities I've already joined.
  
  How did you (re)discover the communities that you frequented? Did you just search for them one by one? I enjoyed how organic finding new communities on Reddit often felt and I'm hoping I'm just missing that now because I don't understand Lemmy yet.
  
  I watched the massive spike from 600 something subs to I think it was 3500? There was like 4 minutes of just mass closure. It was impressive.
  
  Where is the counter you're referencing?
- I disagree. Going public hasn't served any tech company, except the founders, well. The changes announced thus far, are only the icing on the cake for what's to come. They pretty clearly don't have good management, or good decision making capabilities either. I think Reddit's on a rather fast descent to it's nadir.
  
  "fast" is relative. Twitter is dying a slow death, but due to its size there are still millions/tens of millions of users.
  
  Facebook is effectively dead for anyone under 35, and yet it marches on.
Right after Digg’s fatal screw up in 2010 (switching from user content to publisher content), their traffic dropped by 25% and Reddit’s grew by 230%. Then it was a slow bleed over the next few years. I’ll be interested to see how the Reddit to Threadiverse numbers compare.
- Some people may never return to Reddit, some will maintain a Reddit presence while simultaneously having a presence in Lemmy and other forums. Then slowly, they will be able to discern the difference in quality, and maybe leave Reddit for good.
  
  So it is very important to have each of our Lemmy instance population have meaningful contributions and keep our boards alive and maintain some semblance of quality content. This will end Reddit. If others have better quality as compared to Reddit, then Reddit will be doomed.
  
  I have no doubt Reddit will continue to shamble onwards as a rotting husk for years, but I'm not going back. I never really liked it to begin with.
- Regardless of the outcome, I hope Reddit's recent decisions turn in /r/leopardsatemyface.
mainstream media will discover Lemmy exists.

Mainstream media will 100% catch up more by the reveal of Meta's Twitter alternative that implements the ActivityPub protocol.
- Yeah but you can be sure Mets/Zuck will either bastardize the protocol from the start, or embrace/extend/extinguish.
  
  Why would the implement it in the first place then?
- Interesting, but don't you think they'll just wall it off like how truthsocial.com is walled off?
  
  A lot of fedi instances will block any Meta-owned instances on sight. Some will not. How it plays out long-term depends a lot on how well Meta instances get moderated.
  
  I think there’s a picture of it floating around on social media and you can see a mastodon account in there
Maybe, but Digg didn't back down and died.
- Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
  
  Those who do not learn are simply doomed.
  
  We can only hope they are that stupid🙂
The problem is that there really doesn't seem to be a great way to scale Lemmy. And yes, it's federated, but if someone joins my instance and starts browsing and posting on lemmy.ml communities, they still get slammed by my users. And so any popular community is going to struggle because of the lack of ability to scale.
- Not quite the case.
  
  When a user on instance B subscribes to a community on instance A, instance A begins to send in real-time the posts and comments of that community to B, which keeps a local copy of that community.
  
  If instance B has 10 active users subscribed to that community on A, they’re all loading it from instance B. The end result is instance A only had to share each piece of content once with instance B, and instance B further shares it with the ten local subscribers, reducing the load on instance A.
  
  The only exception is when instance B only has a single subscriber to instance A’s community, in which case replicating the entirely of the community is more work then that user just browsing it directly on instance A.
  
  Tl;dr it’s most efficient for a large Lenny instance if most of its active users are on other instances.
  
  You seem like the right person to ask. If a user on instance b makes a comment on a post that is on an instance "a l" community my understanding is instance b sends that comment to instance a and then instance a sends messages to instances c, d, e, f, and so on telling them about the new comment?
- Your instance will host a mirror of lemmy.ml communities, which will definitely reduce the load on lemmy.ml
  
  Only with the caveat that you have at least 2 users that would view the same content. This gets significantly easier the more users you have on your instance. The most users you have, the more likely that your instance can reduce load on other instances.
My money is on someone calling it a “fork” of Lemmy

They already are. Several Mastodon posts saying so just this morning.
I'm new to all of this, can you explain the difference between Lemmy and Kbin? And why would Kbin get missed over initially?
- Lemmy and kbin are both similar to Reddit in functionality, but are two separate projects. Lemmy runs on rust, and kbin runs on php. Luckily both lemmy and kbin use ActivityPub, which means that users on each platform can see and interact with content from the other platform! Right now Lemmy is the more popular option, so most of the big communities are hosted on Lemmy servers, hence kbin being missed.
  
  Essentially, if you’re already registered on a Lemmy instance and are enjoying that, you don’t really need to worry about kbin, but if you check it out and prefer the interface, you could register on a kbin instance and still access all the same content you were seeing on Lemmy.
- These are just two different software projects that a Threadiverse instance can use. They federate with one another, so it doesn't matter all that much if you have an account on a Kbin instance, or a Lemmy instance. The differences are in the interface, some functionality, and the tech stack used (Lemmy is written in Rust; Kbin in PHP).
  
  There are 100+ instances of Lemmy, and ~10 instances of Kbin. Kbin is a much younger project (hence it might get missed), and it's main instance, kbin.social seems to be experiencing more issues with the wave of new registrations. If you want to try Kbin, https://fedia.io/ might be a good instance to check out.
  
  Sorry if this is a dumb question, but is the fediverse and the threadiverse the same thing different names?
  
  I feel like I’m finally wrapping my head around a lot of this stuff, but I’m still learning all the terms.
  
  Thanks for the info. I heard about kbin in the past couple days, and had yet to see how it looked like.
  
  Visually, I like it a little bit more than the currently available lemmy themes. Looks a bit like a "modern" old.reddit, albeit also suffering from a little blankspaceitis. And the fact it's written in PHP... well... 😒. But since it can talk to Lemmy, it doesn't really matter, I guess.
  
  Ah ok. Thanks for the info!
I think you've nailed this prediction!
uh, I prefer to call it the faediverse.
- Please step through this portal
This is the way
- We can definitely leave these copypasta comments on Reddit!

93 comments