Some context: I was /u/Blackstar9000 on Reddit. You might know me from /r/TheoryOfReddit. Or maybe not—I ditched my account there a number of years ago. I’ve been on the Fediverse for about 6 years, primarily via Mastodon. Last October, I deactivated my Twitter account. I’ve been through a bunch of social media sites, and I’ve seen the patterns. This post is about those patterns.
A lot of you are trying out Lemmy or Kbin because of what’s been happening at Reddit. (Welcome to the Fediverse!) And a lot of you will be going back to Reddit as soon as things quiet down. You might not think you’re one of those people, or you might not be sure where you stand. I’m not here to tell you what to do, just to prepare you to decide. That’s the goal: a decision. As opposed to letting inertia decide for you.
There are a few factors at play here. One is that you’re accustomed to Reddit. You may not like what’s been going on there lately, but the platform is familiar, you know how it works, it feels like a broken-in pair of sneakers. Every bit of friction you feel here is going to nudge you back in that direction.
Another is that the Fediverse is different. Lemmy and Kbin are designed to do something very like what Reddit, Digg and other link-aggregating social sites do, but the fact of federating with the broader network makes certain complications impossible to avoid or ignore. And there are deliberate differences that have less to do with federation than with what the devs thing might work better. Some people adapt quickly, others don’t. Some people just plain don’t like it. In any case, there’s a learning curve, and that’s bound to be a source of friction.
A third is that Lemmy and Kbin are still finding their footing. These are independent, open source services, and they’re in the process of becoming the things they’ll one day be. Mastodon went through similar growing pains, and a lot of people bounced off of them during those awkward years when the UI was rough and the feature set incomplete. People’s ideas about Mastodon changed more slowly than the service itself, and it wasn’t until things got really bad on Twitter that adoption rates kicked back up again. Mastodon still isn’t what Twitter became, and probably never will be, but it’s a much more professional-feeling piece of tech than it used to be. Someone is building the airplane we’re flying on. Any Fediverse service that survives long enough will go through that process, and if you’re not clear-eyed about the need for patience, that too can push you away.
A fourth factor is social. If you’ve been on Reddit for a while, then you probably have a decent mental map of your relationships on that platform. You’ll probably reconnect here with some people you know from there, and maybe even carve out spaces where you can reconstruct some of the communities you were a part of there. But you can’t transplant your entire social map. To stay here—to even want to stay here—you’ll need to build a new web of relationships, one that might include some portions of the old web, and that’s more friction.
All of that friction adds up, and the only antidote, really, is resolve.
So you’ll hang out here during the blackout, when there’s friction on both sides of the line. A small minority of you will take to the Fediverse immediately and move most of your activity off of Reddit. But only a small minority. Some of you will get a taste for it and split your time between here and Reddit. For most of you, though, the gravity of your history with Reddit will win out in relatively short order.
No hard feelings. We’re happy to have the people who stay. But if you go back, let that be something you’ve decided to do, not just muscle memory taking over. Because that’s another thing I’ve seen happen time and time again: People try out the Fediverse, only to drift back to the corporate platform. Then six months later, a year, two years, something new comes up. The platform finds a new way to alienate users, and some subset of them will go hunting through their email to figure out which Fediverse server their forgotten account is on, and what login name they used. (Trust me: keep that info somewhere you can find it.)
Going back is a valid decision! I just want you to decide, rather than let muscle memory decide for you. And if you go back, set a limit for yourself. Figure out the straw that would break the camel’s back. Tell yourself, “If they ever do this, I’ll delete my account,” so that if they ever do that, you actually will.
Here’s how it’s going to go down: people will return to whatever the best centralised services are.
People don’t use social media to be awkwardly spread over different redundant servers that everyone else is on. People will return to Reddit, or a simple centralised alternative. People will flock to Bluesky.
I’m a long, long internet user and FOSS user, and I find Mastodon to be an incredible pain in the arse. It’s unintuative and confusing. Without an all powerful agoriithm, “good” posts are smothered by uninteresting thought bubbles from everyone on the server
edit: and what’s with the dark-themes on lemmy and mastodon? It’s uninviting. “Power users” often switch on dark themes on their operating systems and websites, but bright and happy themes are needed to welcome “the masses”
Voat was a good test of that. A whole bunch of people moved over, voat almost thrived for a few months, and then people quietly started reviving their reddit accounts.
There’s some cause for optimism though. The people who are left when the dust settles are those who like the platform, or the people who aren’t welcome on reddit anymore. For voat, that consisted largely of fatpeoplehate and other “negative” subs.
This time round, the people who can’t access reddit are those who use third party apps. I might still use reddit on my desktop after everything, but once Slide for Reddit dies, I have no good way to use reddit on my commutes. Old.reddit sucks on mobile cos of the sidebar and horrible comment nesting, reddit mobile website sucks because it’s 50% whitespace and slow to load shit, the reddit app is even worse.
There’s going to be a bunch of people who give up and use the app. But for me, having tried the app, my choices are clear - on my phone at least, the choices are lemmy, tildes, old-school forums, or reading a book.