Reddit's API Revolt Pushed Users to Lemmy, but the Decentralized Platform Centralized Anyway
Reddit Migration's Impact on Lemmy (2023)
When Reddit began charging for API access in June 2023, users flocked to Lemmy, the open-source federated alternative. A mixed-methods study of 48,272 comments, 354 survey responses, and 16 interviews finds registrations spiking around Reddit policy changes, sentiment largely positive toward Lemmy and critical of Reddit, and a surprising concentration of users on a few large instances—centralization inside a decentralized system. Users cite community-centered values and adaptability, suggesting a promising but uneven future for the Fediverse.
It reveals patterns of centralization within the decentralized platform, with a concentration of users in specific instances.
- Insimwytim
Lemmy seem to be political as hell. Reddit is political, but the feel is like there are good old paid political astroturfing.
Lemmy is like all the folks that bought that paid astroturfing and continue it, but sincerely.
And Reddit had corners, where people could hide and talk about interesting stuff, Lemmy doesn't seem to be able to compete in that, probably due to number of users (I'm not sure though).
- baggachipz
I use Lemmy every day (there are dozens of us! Dozens!) and it has replaced Reddit for me. It's basically the way Reddit was way back when; geeky, somewhat political, memes, and you recognize a lot of usernames. That's all I need, the low amount of content actually forces me to stop scrolling and go outside or read a book.
- Rochus
I was looking for a Reddit alternative for quite some time, since the once lively communities that interested me have almost dried up, and their moderators seem to see their main role in preventing contributions rather than encouraging them.
What I wanted instead was fairly simple: topic-based communities, titled posts, and nested discussions. I am interested in discussing programming languages and their implementation, not building a following. I could never really warm to twitter-style platforms, including their decentralised alternatives. I came across and tried programming.dev and did some research about it. My first impression was that it felt closer to what I liked about Reddit years ago. According to the attached paper and [1] I seem by far not to be the only one with this experience.
I wonder what experiences other users here have made. Do you consider programming.dev a suitable successor, or are there better recommendations?
- ierukah
Oh hey, I know this guy! He PMed me on Lemmy back in 2023 about a survey for his master's degree. I had no idea he actually went on to publish this document until I came across this post on HN. Great to see that it all led to something!
- petcat
Lots of tech people thought they could build alternative platforms to things like Reddit or Twitter. Mostly because the tech stack is relatively straightforward and the mechanics are proven and easy to implement. But none of that is ever the problem. The enormous amounts of moderation required to make a community even remotely useful is a burden that most people will never be able to undertake. The worst content, the most toxic users, bots bots bots. It's basically a cesspool that nobody in their right mind would get into at this point.