If something like this can pop up in weeks and provide all of the functionality people need, what makes Reddit valuable in the first place?
Critical mass and inertia. That’s not a product I’d want to invest in, though.
Lemmy has been around for years.
to answer your question. ability to scale to millions of users and having broad appeal.
features can be copied but scale and other non functional requirements like security takes time
Wefwef offers an almost identical experience to Apollo and is a webapp so you don’t need to mess with TestFlight and also works on Android.
God damn, this is sick! I was not aware of this.
Instantly became my favourite way to browse lemmy. Been using it the last two days ish and I love it
I am in the minority but I hate PWA. I like memmy tho it’s been great Apollo replacement for me
Wefwef is so good and open source.
Mlem is basically Apollo for Lemmy. I’m enjoying Memmy too. Honestly the only value Reddit has is the user base. The diversity of apps and the lack of corporate ownership already make this space far more exciting than Reddit
The community and how it interacts has always been the only thing that made it special. It's like a car. You'll remember the places you went and the people you went there with. But when the car hits 200k and becomes more expensive to fix than buy a new one, you send it to the scrap yard.
Lemmy is turning into a promising framework for community. But it's still the community that makes it worth being here.
To answer the title question: reddit is a part of the zeitgeist, and people use it fairly regularly. By serving everyone ads disguised as posts (and shutting down API access to ensure that all traffic is served ads) they can greatly increase their revenue. Most social media has this same model.
I also meant Memmy, not Mlem.