I installed the official Reddit app and went on it to see what the old place was looking like now. My inbox was filled with spam. The “home feed” shows subs I never subscribed to. There are so many ads. Between the ads and the the extra subs in the feed, it’s hard to just scroll. I also noted a lot of spam in some of the subs. Maybe they are subs with no mods? I’m not sure what’s up with that.
On that day there will be a new flood of refugees here. Looking forward to it.
That’d be a silver lining if it were to work out that way. However, seeing the stats of old.reddit usage is depressing - it’s a very small minority, would barely make a dent in reddit’s traffic if every old.reddit user migrated in such a case.
My personal issue is that reddit has that critical mass to not only sustain generic wide-appeal communities, which Lemmy also achieves, but also small niche communities, which Lemmy really doesn’t for the most part. Reddit needs to fuck up even worse, way worse than just discontinuing old.reddit.
Personally, I don’t really care if Reddit fails, I just want Lemmy to thrive. Users of old.reddit seem likely to be high-contribution people, so it’d be great if they came here.
Yeah, I see your point. On the other hand, places like Facebook also have niche communities but people still set up on Reddit. The question is not “does it exist on Facebook?” but “is Reddit better?” Now we’re in the process of working out the bugs so we can say “but Lemmy is best.”
Maybe you’re right. Best we can do is be active here.