Aotearoa / New Zealand

Lemmy is not ready for primetime yet. There is no way that 400 million reddit users can move here, when the biggest servers struggle with tens of thousands, and the total users active on Lemmy in the last month is around 30,000 (up from 1,000 a couple of weeks ago).

Not to mention that Lemmy is really not general-population-ready. Explaining it is a bit of a mouthful, but manageable. What's not manageable for most users is things like:

• Most people have no idea how to start. The join-lemmy site just points you at a massive list of instances and hopes you know what you're doing
• if you're reading a post on another instance and someone links to a community, the link won't work and you'll have to copy/paste the URL into your own instance.
• Hot/Active don't work because of a bug in refreshing them
• The post you're reading can suddenly change, especially if you have two tabs open with different posts
• If you want to subscribe to a community but no one on your instance has searched for it before, the search will show "No results" - but then suddenly have results if you wait 10 seconds (or sometimes never show it until you refresh)
• Posts just appear at the top of the list, and worse, pop up as a notification. Great when there were only 1000 users but now the All page just gets notification after notification and the feed keeps moving
• The right combination of events means that a community can just disappear
• The search form doesn't let you change between Subscribed/Local/All unless you search for something first
• Moderation is still a problem. One of the big instances is wholesale blocking dozens of instances, including some big ones, because they can't handle the moderation. When it comes to moderation, I suspect most of the big instances are just...not.

This is just off the top of my head. Lemmy is great because we are building a new community, but the polish will come with time. We need to slowly and organically grow the community (lemmy.nz as well as the "Lemmyverse"), so issues can be worked out. Luckily places like this tend to attract a more technical audience as they are more willing to put up with bugs, and because Lemmy is open source many of these people can help write code for bug fixes and new features. The number of people helping has gone up significantly in just the last two weeks.

So what I'm getting at is if people are unhappy with the actions of the reddit board, they are (probably) welcome here. But we do not need a significant number of new users overnight - that's only going to end in disappointment for everyone involved.

This isn't the end of reddit's enshittification process. They're just getting started.

I can see it happening in stages, much like Twitter's inexorable decline. Seeing that Steve Huffman said in an interview recently that he admired what Elon Musk was doing, I don't think we've seen the worst for redditors yet.

Not from NZ, but I recently put together some thoughts on how Reddit dies based on how other social networks historically die here.

The tl;dr is that expecting reddit or any subreddit over a certain population to keel over and die and have everyone move to Lemmy was most likely never going to happen, because it has never happened before.

Just enjoy the Fediverse for what it is :)

Not really bothered what happens over there now. I’m no longer invested in their community. Yeah I’ll be poking my head back in over there occasionally I think, but lemmy is scratching my itch for scrolling and doing it in a way that seems less harmful to my spare time and mental health.

My reddit protest consisted of:

• deleting all 10+ years of content and comments I’ve contributed over there
• making an account here and supporting an alternative service

I’ve already opened a google link to something on reddit only to find it was deleted by the user. So I think the withdrawal of content is going to have a lasting impact.

Going by what happened with Twitter -> Mastodon, there were multiple waves. After each wave, things died down a bit as some people who had joined lost interest. But each successive wave brought more people than the last.

I expect we might see something like that here. There are still events to come, e.g. the 3rd party apps shutting down, Reddit supposedly rolling out new mod tools, mods realising they can no longer easily moderate their subreddit, Reddit making further changes like shutting down the old UI, etc. These will all bring refugees, and hopefully Lemmy will be in a better state when they come.

Unfortunately, I think it probably means we won't see a lot of growth in Lemmy now. Shame.

There could be another big bump when 3rd party apps shut down at the end of the month. If everything's going strong here at that point, we'll probably get a fair bit of growth.

From what I’ve read/seen elsewhere, the reddit admins would have just replaced all the mods and reopened it anyway, so it’s not a huge surprise to see it open. I don’t think I’ll miss it.

I haven't really disconnected from r/nz yet and I guess I'm hanging out at both, just looking out for what interests me. What would shift me this way more permanently is if more content and engagement pops up here to keep me more occupied, and/or if the moderation of r/nz drops to levels so bad (as has been threatened by the mods) that I can't bear it any longer.

I mean, I know that Lemmy is here now whereas I didn't before, so I'll probably keep coming back even if I drift away at times. I also like the more independent and federated model that avoids one single commercial entity being in control. It's much more like how the internet used to work in the olden days, before a small number of mega-corps sought to pull everyone into their very restrictive dumbed down siloed universes for the purpose of selling users as a product.

I'm enjoying the "everyday" content here on lemmy.nz so far - it's taken a bit to get a feel for, but for the main reason I hung out a /r/nz (breaking news, current events) it seems to hit the spot. Cheers all for that!

What I'm really missing on Lemmy in general however is that niche content - hobbys I'm interested in, bands I listen to etc. The Reddit communities for them were generally strong and active, but so far missing from Lemmy. Hopefully that changes with time, as I have no desire to go back to Reddit.

Be careful what you wish for, do we really want the horde of whiners that populate r/newzealand to show up here?

I think you will see more growth once the third party apps are shut down. After that spike you'll probably see a steady rise as people get banned or harassed or whatever.

The mods will come up with all kinds of excuses, but with every instance I've seen of mods backing down, it's been the same thing: They miss the power.