this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2022
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Asklemmy
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Reddit is a private company founded in 2005, valued at $1.8 billion dollars and employing around 350 people. Lemmy was founded two years ago and is run with relatuvely little funding (I would say approximately two paid employees and a dozen or so volunteers, distributed around different instances). That's not comparable. At all.
Most people aren't banned from reddit. Your personal experience is rare. If someone isn't banned from the biggest platform, they need a motivation to leave. Why would they leave? I know why YOU would leave, but why would THEY leave?
Most people coming here, not all but most, are doing it because they were banned from reddit. As a result, they just try to recreate reddit here, instead of making something better, a better culture or a higher quality of community. Lemmy is treated by the majority as a 'free speech reddit' and nothing more.
Strong political bias in the popular communities may be distasteful to the majority of people who would use a reddit-like site, who tend to be pro-capitalist liberals.
We'd love to be able to start a proper open-source programming collective, with the ability to hire more programmers than just the two of us to add features and make lemmy better, but the money just isn't there. Its difficult to compete with a multi-billion dollar company that's able to pay high salaries and mobilize hundreds of skilled programmers ( even tho I still am veryy proud of what we've been able to do with our limited time, and all the contributions people have made to lemmy ).
Its not a specific problem for us either, all open source projects need more funding than theyre currently getting to thrive. Twitch streamers make more money than open source devs, its a pretty sad state of affairs.
IMO pretty much the only reason reddit is beating us, is the first-mover advantage. I noticed a long time ago that adding more features doesn't improve the lemmyverse's user count. Its only when reddit alienates certain groups, that we see large influxes of users and new instances. Otherwise people are happy to stay on reddit, because that's where communities already are.
/r/piracy is probably the next big community that could migrate to lemmy. Reddit keeps banning then unbanning piracy-related communities, and file-sharers will see that their position is precarious there. /r/privacy should move to lemmy, the reddit redesign is a bloated mess of spyware.
Just going to tell you that r/privacy, r/PrivacyGuides, r/opensource are largely politically agenda controlled subreddits by Americans and other Westerners, that often downplay the harms of Big Tech and CIA, and prop up and fearmonger and actively encourage hate against China/Russia. You can see top posts from the past 2 days about Beijing stealing and creating dossiers of data on every single American adult, for starters.
They will never come, and if they do, they must never come here. Growth of Lemmy at the expense of grifters is the worst kind of growth, no matter the desperation.
Hey I know you have "drama" with them but the PrivacyGuides community is solely centered around the concept of technical privacy, non-contextualized, and is agnostic to every other topuc. They've criticized (if not attacked) many FOSS projects but only from the lens of privacy and so I would understand their sometimes odd behavior. That being said, it would be unbiased of you to accuse them with such conspiracy theories.
On the other hand, I'm perplexed by the fact that they prominently use the spyware crap that Reddit is for communications.
I disagree, from years of experience. It is not personal beef, and I have documented their behaviour as a 4 year record. They have stolen thousands of dollars of donations which constitutes as an international crime, and they have repeatedly recommended Brave (while taking Brave Rewards) and even Apple to people.