This is a rant post and I apologize but I had to talk about this. Most subs are coming back online and not saying ANYTHING about the next steps. Only a handful of subs are going indefinite. I checked the front page for the first time today after leaving the a couple hours before the day of the blackout and what do I see? Subs are up, and comments and upvotes are up to the general average before the blackout.
I checked r/gaming to see their recent post (WHICH HAS OVER 68k UPVOTES), and I see a comment with over 500 upvotes saying in a nutshell, “You guys need to calm down, they’re a company and need to make money”.
Along with a couple other comments saying similar things. Are you fucking serious? You can’t even have the fucking balls to say, “This is a company that has consistently screwed over its users and I need to take a stand and quit my addiction”? You’re just gonna sit and do nothing? Fuck you. You’re no fucking better than u/spez. You’re all a bunch of fucking hypocritical liars for shitting on spez and the admins while talking about how you’re “done” with Reddit and you won’t support this.
Go touch grass you fucking addicted cowards. I’m glad I made the switch to Lemmy if it means I don’t have to interact with dumbfucks like you.
I can see that. To maybe overgeneralize, the people that are active on reddit today will consist primarily of the people that were inconvenienced by the protest. Quite a lot of them are pissed that they were inconvenienced. Support for the protest on the platform will kind of evaporate because the majority that understand why it was necessary are already gone.
And this is exactly why it’s fucking stupid why indefinite blackout voting happened during that time. This whole blackout thing is an absolute shitshow that was terribly organised which could have been avoided if only people decided to go for an indefinite blackout from the very start. At least lemmy gained a lot of traction during that time and hopefully we get another bigger wave when API shuts down to make this platform properly take off. Initial surge of users hopefully allows to set things up for users from API shutdown so they don’t bounce back to reddit because there no content/subreddits they like.
A 48h blackout looked like the right decision, because it would garner support of it who are not totally in on it. Also the blackmail thing and u/spez memo which was ignoring the blackout came after the first 48h drafts were made.
I have to say that even the pitiful 48 hour blackout gave just enough buzz and focus to get people moving to lemmy. a net win in my books.
I had no clue this existed before the blackout but now i do and I’m not going back. I was addicted but this place serves my purpose now. The main communities I used reddit for moved over here or have a community over here now so I’m happy. All I’m trying to say is I agree and at the very least there are more people now aware of lemmy at least.
really glad you are here :-)
Watch Louis Rossmann’s video on the topic, he explains very well why this 48h blackout made no sense
Edit: https://youtu.be/U06rCBIKM5M
a longer blackout would certainly have been beneficial, but any blackout at all (with 48 hours facillitatiing easier group concensus) created media buzz and got many people over to lemmy.
I would argue that it was an important net positive, especially considering how vocal some were in their dishonest arguments against federated social and lemmy in particular. the blackout forced just enough discomfort for some people - enough to make then look for alternate dompamine generators.
the old guard would always have come over to lemmy, but critical social mass cant be reached on the old guard alone.
Yeah, I don’t really expect any further voting on any given subreddit’s side to be particularly successful from this point on because of that.
But honestly I’m kind of okay with a slower start on this side of things. If we see any kind of concentrated surge of users on to the various /kbin or Lemmy instances then I think we’ll find out really quick where the breaking point is from an infrastructure and moderation standpoint. Like a few others have mentioned in this thread, we don’t really need Reddit to die - we just need these alternatives to grow in to viable platforms in their own right.
certainly, a selection bias in a way I didn’t think about. Unfortuently, that seems to be the majority… for now.