I don’t mean to be pessimistic, bit since most subreddits are only going dark for a couple days, the site will basically be back to normal soon. I wonder how many users here are only here because of temporary outrage and not because they actually prefer Lemmy. I’m curious about people’s outlook on this situation.
I don’t think the kind of people who are willing to try out some geeky experiment of a social network are totally dependent on Reddit culture.
Exodus from one network to another (or to nowhere) is a thing that’s happened in the past, and if anything, people aren’t willing to go back once they finally take the effort.
Tho I’m guessing lots of people have multiple accounts such as alts for r34, and may keep using those until Reddit finally shuts off all nsfw.
This is still a new frontier of site conglomeration we have no data for. If anything we have contradicting data to previous instances of this occurring because megasites have yet to fail since the rise of Facebook.
There have been MySpace -> FB, Digg -> Reddit, Viber -> WhatsApp, Hotmail -> Gmail, BlackBerry -> iPhone. Neither was 100% conversion, some kept their relevancy in certain markets, but those were quite some waves.
Also, Tumblr completely kicked the bucket with its users dispersing, and while OF managed to save itself by backtracking, people were already migrating to other services.
It may be true that the likes of FB, Twitter and Reddit are too big to fail right now, but people also keep finding alternatives.
So, we’ll see.