I’ve heard only the briefest information about what is going on with Reddit. Is the blackout something that is temporarily being done by the community or is it permanent?
The blackout itself is an initiative by the community. However, from June 30th third party apps will no longer work, and many users (and moderators of many large subs) have explicitly said that they aren’t interested in continuing with the official Reddit app or site. This will cause a huge chunk of reddit users to leave. Some will go back, some won’t. Besides that, it’s a matter of principle. They’re choosing stakeholders over users.
For most subreddits it is temporary blackout but some communities like one of the piracy subreddits I saw completely packed bags and the mods moved to lemmy. It’s too early to say if reddit is over or if this is just a temporary setback. Reddit may even concede and revert some of their api changes to appease the populace. Simply put, we don’t know enough yet.
Inertia is a thing, both in a positive and negative way. What I mean by that is, you can reach a threshold where people are leaving fast enough that Reddit will lose more people than not (positive from our current point of view).
The other way it works is people are just so used to Reddit and the habit returns quickly once the blackout is over (negative from our point of view).
Which way will this go? My pessimistic outlook is that tons of people are exploring Lemmy/KBin/whatever fediverse thing now while they have a Reddit sized hole in their daily routines, but once Reddit is back they will go back there. I think this is shown in how Twitter users bailed off pretty hard at first and Mastodon got a bunch of new people but those people slowly went back to Twitter. Some people will stay at the new place for sure, but a lot won’t. None of that is really a problem per se, either.
yes, the vast majority of what people would call the “reddit OGs” have now migrated to fediverse in the last 4 years, this last reddit event pushes almost all of them to at least have an account. A number of prolific content creators are going to home here now and some will now only post fedi links on reddit if they stay at all.
the empire has fallen, it will smolder for years if they dont go under first, thus is the case of critical mass communities. We are returning to a system that is modeled more after the way the internet was designed and built to operate based on open protocols and standards rather than gatekeeping corporations.
its our commons again.
