I don’t see Old Reddit lasting long. They’ve cut beloved features before, and they’re still calling New Reddit a “beta feature”. After they’ve pumped enough resources into developing it, I’m sure they’ll move past the “test” phase and just cut Old Reddit out entirely. That’s probably going to be Lemmy’s next big user surge.
Does Reddit suppress mentioning Lemmy? I remember for a while this past June 2023 there were a lot of auto-deletions for mentioning or linking to Lemmy. I was never clear on who was deleting things and where. I guess linking to the r/Lemmy subreddit (or a fediverse sub) could work as long as the subreddit doesn’t get banned.
The migration (if there is one) will happen over a long period of time … Months or years.
Reddit initially had a huge growth period because there was no competition like it … there were other platforms but none like Reddit at the time.
Lemmy is on the same path as Reddit but with one difference, it has competition, not just from Reddit but a whole group of new platforms that are like it, or similar to it … so the community is fractured across Reddit, Lemmy and a bunch of other platforms.
The next two or three years will be an evolutionary period for all these platforms … this is a bit like the Cambrian explosion (a geologic period where a bunch of new species just appeared everywhere all at once) … all of them will fight one another and people will migrate one way or another, other factors will come in that we know about (finances, software, bandwidth, censorship, politics) as well as other factors we’ve yet to know about.
In a few years, some platforms will disappear and die out, others will linger and a few will dominate.
The evolutionary period may last a year or two or it may last longer but it won’t happen any time soon and we also don’t know what the outcome will be.
Going by past internet history it will be influenced by people’s choices but it will also be influenced by corporate interests once they figure out how to monetize something.