Hello. This is my first contact with Lemmy, and I'm happy to see that it's growing faster and faster. However there's one thing that's blocking me for now from completely abandoning Reddit after API changes.
There are thousands of various bigger and smaller communities on Reddit. Many of them are participating in the blackout, and more and more are deciding to stay blacked out indefinitely after recent CEO's memo leak. I was using Reddit for almost 7 years, and before the drama started it was one of my most viewed websites.
For 99,9% of the time spent on Reddit I was lurking and browsing small or small-to-medium sized subreddits - some of them for very specific content, some for various tech or non-tech related communities (like AI or emulation). While a good number of these subreddits already have alternatives on Fediverse, for now most of them are not very active, some of them even empty, and some content related to these communities is buried in larger, more general communities. Another number of subreddits whose doesn't have alternatives on Lemmy/Kbin have alternative communities on Discord, but on Discord it's somewhat hard to read live discussions, search options are limited, and some servers tend to be toxic - it's a messaging platform after all, not discussion and content website.
Don't get me wrong - as a 3rd party app user myself (Sync FTW) I completely despise planned Reddit API changes and support the blackout, but sometimes I fear that if many users from smaller Reddit communities decide to leave altogether, and if some of them which chose to participate in the blackout indefinitely will not return, then these communities which I watch will just disappear with no easy way to browse and search past content and discussion from them. That being said, Lemmy and Kbin are promising alternatives that shed light for the future, but I'm concerned that some smaller communities will never blow up on there, and will ultimately move to messaging platforms or stay a thing from the past.
There is one good thing though - seeing all those post about planned changes are finally convinced me to get more active on discussions I read, and I hope that Lemmy will appeal to me in this regard.
TL;DR: I fully support Reddit blackout and migration to Lemmy, but I fear that it may spell an end to some smaller and specific communities.
I wouldn't be so sure. I believe great managers could take it over and rescue it today, but they don't have great managers, the place is run by idiots. It might survive in the manner Digg survived.
They just made it a lot harder to moderate by sparking an angry powder keg like they did, let alone killing all the mod tooling. That was better than what they've managed to produce in almost 20 years. They've also lost many of the moderators who weren't doing it for the money (at least not reddit's money). They can always hire new moderators, but that's yet another expense on the earnings statement.
If they can get all the spam and hate posts under control it's going to be a repost farm and OP will not surely deliver anymore.
From where I'm standing it appears they've been given an ultimatum by VC investors who are hellbent on selling whether they lose their asses at the bottom or not.
That's what I was getting at.
I agree that reddit won't run out of users. I think the big question is whether they can figure out how to turn a profit.