Obviously a few years ago, the API changes caused the reddit community mods to strike, and caused a mass-blackout of most reddit core communities. Eventually Reddit removed a handful of mod teams on some notable subreddits and caused the rest to chicken-out. But it did birth the Fediverse properly.
I suspect Reddit will make another step at some point which causes another comparable exodus. This time, if they do, the Fediverse is far better developed to handle it. What do you imagine it might be?
I expect it to linger, irrelevant and forgotten, much as it is now, as usage stagnates while the admins cook the books and pretend the bots are people to trick the investors and advertising folk.
much like META with facebooks, its all bots mostly.
Maybe bans?
deleted by creator
I think most of the people who are going to leave have left. Its no longer a matter of an exodus because the people who are there now aren’t the kind of people who can build a place like Reddit. Those people, we, the people, have left.
So the “next big exodus” is really about there being a newer/ better place to go for the same experience.
the recent purges this year alone was a pretty big exodus too. once they add in facebook level verification/account, facial recognition i think it might cause another exodus.

Due to the pressure’s and scrutiny they have been receiving from the current administration, I bet their next solution will be: a LLM that will monitor users, mark them as “subversive elements”, Generate a dossier on them (cause LLMs always tell the truth), then auto reports them to the FBI.
I don’t think there’s going to be another “mass exodus” again. There are people who said that they were going to leave reddit and actually did. Then there are those who said the same but didn’t. Those people will never leave until the site shuts down or they’re dead. I mean there’s not much more Reddit can do to drive people away unless they go on a massive subreddit ban wave on things that shouldn’t be banned. or they introduce a subscription plan where you have to pay to “unlock” the site and can view as much content as you want. Even then people WILL pay for that.
But even with the plethora of bots, reposts, karma farming, and power tripping mods people still stick around.
I used to think it would be the death of Old Reddit, but sadly they started that recently-ish and I’ve seen almost no pushback against it.
The issue is that they have a brain and are taking the slow approach, where they gradually strip away features and introduce interoperability hurdles to turn Old Reddit into the objectively worse choice so people make the switch to Shreddit of their own free will.
It started when they removed Private Messaging and made Chat, the replacement, exclusive to Shreddit. Notifications were also planned to become exclusive to Shreddit (try staying on top of replies without notifications), but new ones are still showing up in the direct messages archive for me.
Then they removed any indication of a subreddit’s size from Old Reddit (but replaced the subscriber count with an active users count on Shreddit). So if you want to know which of two subreddits on the same topic is bigger, you need Shreddit for that comparison. Then there’s the new wiki system which iirc is not backwards compatible to Old Reddit.Just like this, more and more features are turned into Shreddit exclusives, until there’ll be nothing left to use Old Reddit for. Yet people don’t seem particularly bothered by it.
The single community I’m still visiting (read-only) on old.reddit has recently dried up to tumbleweed territory. I could stop going there overnight, and not miss a thing.
I think it will take time , I personally tried to move when the api changed. But now am actively changing after Reddit getting shittier by the day. Last update they introduced games on the official app. Doesn’t make any sense. The feed they keep pushing on you sucks and honestly the content itself is worse nowadays. They have years of users content that is still a huge boost, but with time more and more users will get fed up with these tactics. If Lemmy continues on growing steadily it will eventually replace it
The murder of “old”
It’s coming
Porn. It’s going to be when they get rid of porn.
I don’t think they will anymore. porn has become such a high traffic item that they’ve worked with sex workers on reddit to set up a system that accommodates them as much as possible while taking “non-US friendly” traffic offsite.
I know they’re likely to go full fash but this is a way bigger meal ticket than it used to be the last time they tried to scrub all porn (which they did, don’t let them bullshit you)
Do … do we have porn?
I mean, there are NSFW instances. They’re often defederated, as often there are laws and procedures you have to follow when “distributing” porn - and when federated, “your” instance would mirror their content, which can be a headache for an instance admin. Try e.g. lemmynsfw
Or force something ai related.
It’ll be when they cave to ID verification to access the porn. Whoever doesn’t jump ship then will then do so once the porn gets banned completely.
Either way, where the porn goes, so goes the traffic. VHS, DVD, the internet/streaming. All major shifts in traffic were porn related.
I found the fediverse through the API fiasco. I fully migrated over here when they started mass banning. I got caught up in the ban wave; though I’m fairly certain they had their eye on me for a while since I was a very prolific bot flagger and I told everyone exactly why the bots are so bad on that platform (hint: Reddit is complicit and so are the admins).
From what I’m hearing, likely one of the next big exoduses might be when Reddit decides to kill old.reddit. Everyone and their grandma goes on about it being the last good thing that remains and if they kill it they’re gonna leave forever etc etc.
I suppose we’ll see if they have the chops to actually leave that shithole.
I’d say they will, I know three others that use it regularly enough and none of them use the app.
Yah, I agree with this one. I only now visit old.Reddit.com. If it’s gone, I can’t imagine scrolling through the shitty UI that’s left.
unforced? I’m sure it will be unique and hilarious as usual.
forced? governments around the world want social media platforms to be able to identify users and anonymity is a core aspect of reddit. the second they require a way to link your account with your person they will see a similar exodus, unfortunately it will have about the same impact as the API drama because the majority of people don’t fucking care.
From what I gather – I deleted my very active account there promptly with the end of Apollo support and would never have ended up on Lemmy without u/spez; I’d say “thanks u/spez”, but I’ll stick with “fuck u/spez” – from Reddit “from the outside”, those who are still there are impossible to get away. Reddit is destroying third-party apps and the official app is shit? Who cares! Reddit is only usable on a mobile web browser with great difficulty? So what? Reddit is flogging all user data to AI companies? Oh, someone probably has my data anyway.
If Elon Musk buys Reddit tomorrow (for whatever reason he’d want to) and obliges all users to buy two new Teslas, they’ll probably accept it without a murmur. They’ve all long since become jaded. Fortunately, Aaron Swartz no longer has to witness this crap.
To be clear by “exodus”, I don’t mean the destruction of the platform - but simply enough that would swell the Fediverse.
I think that is happening actively since probably January this year.
our numbers have gone down since January, sadly
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=12
PieFed has gone up, but not enough to offset the losses https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats&months=12


Of all the - often eldritch - parodies of Garfield, I like this the least.








