I’ve seen many comments and posts regarding the API fiasco on Reddit, with the claim that there will be a huge influx of users when that happens. I’m all for it, but I find it hard to believe that the average or even above average user will make the effort to switch.
I’ll be directing all of my users in Sync to lemmy.world tomorrow.
Wow this is actually the dev of Sync! Guys this is big! Thank you, this will be huge, hope it her dev will follow.
king
Very exciting! And Sync for Lemmy is even more exciting! Question, do you plan on adding Kbin support in the future? Maybe when their API is released?
He has said he plans to support kbin in the future. But he is working on a MVP minimum viable product right now to get something that works out asap and then start addressing things like kbin support down the road. He just needs time and the support of the community. You can follow the project at !lemmy.world/c/syncforlemmy (hopefully I did that right…)
Loved sync, hope that the Apollo dev does this too.
I’m so excited for you! Sorry Reddit just disregarded third party app developers like you guys were nothing, absolutely disgraceful. Without your app, my SO & I have no desire to browse the site for fun anymore. Thanks for aiding in hours of fun for us!
just curious…
how many users would that be?
roughly
It’s had over a million downloads and 70k reviews. So, a few.
Gotta be at least 5. Minimum!
I’m one of them and I’m here now! Only 4 more to go… but seriously I hope there’s a ton more to follow.
I dunno, but the fact that I’m browsing a post with 118 comments using a skin that looks a lot like Apollo tells that things are going in a good direction.
Posting with Connect for Lemmy rn. I have 4 o 5 apps on my phone, so I’ll be testing waters before I can land somewhere safely.
Using WefWef too and I’m surprised how good it is for a PWA. Only thing I miss is haptic feedback.
Ugh, I will implement haptics literally the second Apple gives PWAs installed to home screen an api for that.
Not gonna be a sudden exodus.
More that Reddit’s entered a slow death spiral. Redditors will start seeing an upsurge in toxicity, since mods will have left, been replaced with stooges, had their tools taken away, and most of the good mods will have abandoned ship.
Some may come here. Some may move on to Discord or other social media. Some will stick it out on Reddit, but notice that bots and trolls are taking over, whatever moderators are left can’t or won’t keep up, and the admins are seemingly asleep at the switch.
In a few months, discourse there will have assumed Youtube quality, with bots shouting down human discourse, and trolls scaring anyone remotely normal away. They’ll limp along like that for years.
Like Twitter.
And eventually it’ll end up like 4Chan, only technically still existing.
It all comes down to mobile UI. Most of most peoples web usage is on mobile phones, occasionally a tablet, rarely sitting at a desk with a laptop or desktop computer.
The reason 3rd Party apps is such a sticking point for Reddit users is because the “factory” options are shite. Both the new and old web interfaces are garbage compared to the factory app, which is also garbage compared with any third party app.
The Steve Jobs Sweet Solution of WebApps was flawed. Twitteriffic and other pioneering mobile Smartphone apps proved that. Proprietary Apps with no alternative destroy intrinsic value of a platform to users. Facebook.app and YouTube.app prove that.
The average user would not know about lemmy without a reddit post linking and explaining. It’s what got me here.
Nobody knows the future, but speaking as an instance admin, the ideal scenario would be a continued steady growth and not a huge sudden influx 😅
I think it is great here on Lemmy but tbh, the content is limited. My enjoyment here is partly watching it develop. Im like 1 week in and I can see it growing day by day. I don’t think that is what most eventual users want to experience. They want it all set up with the party in full swing.
I love the conversations here. It’s just normal people talking. No amateur comedians at the top of threads with their crappy jokes. It’s so nice.
It honestly took me a moment to get used to such a high percentage of civil discourse.
I also don’t miss the ragebait and troll posts, those can stay on reddit.
Yes this is like Reddit was back 10-16 years ago when I joined. Much better discussions here than Reddit now. I’m honestly pretty happy where everything is already, I’d like to take the growth nice and slow so that we can stay in the good zone longer. Both digg and Reddit were too banal for me towards the end.
I like that I am talking to real people, not potential comment reposter bots. Feels less like a psyops experiment and more like actual engagement.
Thank you for your service. Would you be interested in testing my modern UI theme for Lemmy on your instance? It works with Lemmy 0.17 and 0.18.0. You can get the CSS files from the releases page.
Hey! I have had a few questions about themes. At this point, I am asking users to apply non-mainlined themes through userscripts - I am wary of taking on extra responsibilities in maintaining compatibility for additional themes. Sorry about that!
But all themes that get added to the main lemmy-ui repo will always be available out of the box on lemm.ee as well. The repo is open to contributions, so you could have a look at that option if that’s something you’re interested in.
I already made a proposal to improve the default theme, but my issue was closed without any response from the developers. The required changes were small on purpose and should be easy to implement for anyone already familiar with the code. So it seems that UI is not a priority to Lemmy developers. That’s why I had to develop my addon, which I then also turned into a theme. I hope that one day Lemmy instances will start using some kind of modern theme (doesn’t have to be mine), so that my addon is no longer needed.
My theme is just a small amount of styles applied on top of the default litely and darkly themes, which should make maintenance easier. Unlike an addon, a theme doesn’t need to support multiple versions of Lemmy at the same time, so we could simplify it even more. Lemmy 0.18 uses CSS variables now, so that also makes things easier.
Something needs to be done about Lemmy’s outdated UI and I’m not sure if the current approach of developing multiple userscripts and addons is efficient. I understand if you think this might cause too much work for you though.
I already made a proposal to improve the default theme, but my issue was closed without any response from the developers.
You’re misinterpreting what happened there - the issue was not closed to shut it down, it was actually converted into a discussion to make it easier to track: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/discussions/1503
It wasn’t exactly one specific issue that could be fixed, it was a longer discussion with a bunch of branches. For such things, the discussions format is much more usable.
So it seems that UI is not a priority to Lemmy developers.
I just want to point out that there has been a massive amount of UI improvements in 0.18 and 0.18.1 (just take a look at all the changes by @jsit for example: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Ajsit+). In addition, new themes are being created directly for the lemmy-ui repo as well, for example: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1682
I don’t know the developer’s exact intentions, but my issue was a specific, easy to implement proposal. It wasn’t meant to be a discussion.
There have been UI improvements, but the design is still outdated. The theme you linked to is also not a modern design. What we need the most is an improved default theme, so that everyone could enjoy an easy to read website.
Probably the first since that is the day the bullshit goes into effect.
I’m part timing on both right now, Sync closes down tomorrow and then I’m here full time. We’ll see how people trickle in as the various apps close down.
Sync for Lemmy is in development! As is Slide.
I wonder. I started with a kbin account, no made an account here. I removed all my Reddit accounts but one; waiting to see what happens on the 30th. I don’t use it anymore, but am waiting nonetheless to see what happens, on Reddit and elsewhere. Alternatives still need a toooon of work to be usable by the masses. Please someone provide us with some good UX. I have a feeling that people who were gonna leave already left, the rest just started using the app or simply using the web version. I’m not gonna lie, whilst I’m here, I don’t find the “need” / fomo to visit. I don’t know if it’s the content, the curation or the UI; but something takes getting used to that’s for sure.
I don’t find the “need” / fomo to visit
I wouldn’t say that’s a bad thing. Reddit is purposefully designed to hold your attention, just like every other corporate social media platform. They have a monetary incentive to do so. Lemmy doesn’t, and hopefully never will.
They’re trying to design it to hold attention now, but back in the day reddit was designed like shit but people still used it a ton. I agree with you, just think that corporate social media isn’t always good at what they claim to do (retain eyeballs)
I already switched over. But I guess majority of 3rd party app users are still waiting for the last moment.
Maybe a bit but it won’t be a tsunami, most Redditors don’t care about the Reddit backend or mods or api changes. Don’t forget we’re just a vocal minority.
I might be alone, but I don’t want or need a huge amount of users. I’d rather discuss the subjects I want to talk about with a smaller group of users. It would be nice to have some familiarity in the comments as well. On the big subreddits, your comment was practically guaranteed to be lost in the sea of thousands of comments unless you were the first to comment, or had bots upvoting you. If I want my comments to be lost, I’ll comment on a Tiktok video.
It’ll be just like Reddit, if you want to avoid the huge mega popular communities you absolutely can. And the smaller more specific communities that you want to interact with won’t have the annoying traffic you’re talking about.
Reddit is gigantic, and while Fediversal alternatives are gaining users rapidly there’s a long ways to go.
A useful way to look at it is, we don’t have to defeat Reddit. We’re creating a community as an alternative. Reddit hasn’t lost a large number users when judged as a percentage of their base, but many of the people who are leaving are the ones who see where it’s going, and are the power users, the knowledgeable people, the cool people. The ones who make Reddit a place worth being.
It’s the same with Twitter. A lot of Twitter and Reddit users just keep their heads down and use the service, as it goes to hell around them. A lot of people join social media sites because it’s where other people are, or it’s where their friends are. People who joined when social media finally broke the internet away from being mostly the domain of the technically inclined. Even now, a lot of people mostly use it for streaming. These people may not leave Twitter or Reddit ever, because they really don’t care about it. But the people who were big internet users, or would have been were old enough in the late 90s or early 2000s, those are the kinds of people that Reddit, and Twitter, are losing.
Now, there are a lot of people on Twitter who I’d have thought have jumped ship by now, but to many people admin decisions feel like they have only a theoretical impact unless it affects their experience, or themselves, directly. The best thing that can be done is just keep on being awesome, and make cool posts that can’t be found elsewhere. Once a community gets a reputation for that, people will come naturally.
Take my poor man’s gold 🏅
undefined> many of the people who are leaving are the ones who see where it’s going, and are the power users, the knowledgeable people, the cool people. The ones who make Reddit a place worth being.
From the little of this community I’ve seen thus far, it seems like the average comment quality is higher than recent Reddit. Though that is usually the case in the early days of social networks as they tend to start with more motivated, passionate and informed users who have actually heard of them and are willing to put time and effort into them before they are proven.
As much as I’m enjoying Lemmy, I don’t see the vast majority of Reddit users making the switch to anything. Mastodon, Lemmy, and kbin are far too obscure, and most people use Reddit for pino and memes. People just aren’t very technologically inclined and Reddit satisfies the dopamine fix for most regular visitors.
If these means we’ll be able to have intelligent conversations like the old days of Reddit. I’m all for it. I posted more here than in my 9 years in Reddit. Karma destroyed conversations.
You mean you don’t like all the top comments on a serious discussion post just being a bunch of low effort memes and puns??? But the content is the comments you guys! They’re so funny I promise!!!
Idk, there are a few avenues that require shockingly little work. Setting up an account on lemmy.world took all of 2 minutes, and then another 2 to find and install Connect. The final result, about 5 minutes after I started, is a home page mostly indistinguishable from the home page of my 3rd party Reddit app.
The 30th? No. The 2nd? Maybe.
I would imagine most people planning to head here already have accounts, activity will no doubt go up though.
As the weeks go on though more will find this place and I’m sure there will be more surges to come.
