it just passed midnight in EST, and some of the largest subreddits (e.g. r/funny) have just gone dark. goodbye, reddit!
Some [most? a few? dunno] of them will come back July 14th, but I see this as a good opportunity for the moderators to organise their users to migrate elsewhere.
It seems that many users have turned to the fediverse (myself included, only learned about it because of the blackout) because of this. Most will go back, but some will stay
Edit: I agree its a good opportunity for mods to introduce their users to free communities
This also had an impact on older users, like me; before you guys kicked in there was little content in Lemmy and the rest of the Fediverse, but now even we are spending more time in the platform. I’m hoping that this spirals up: more users → more activity per user → more content → more users. So even if most go back, overall the place is better.
I agree about the opportunity; however, Of the ~5k subreddits that went dark, almost all of them will go back with the lights on either on purpose or by force by the Reddit Admins, but Moderation will decline significantly.
Additionally, there are at least three types of users: volunteers, contributors, and consumers. I think most of the volunteers (mods and devs) see the writing on the wall and know the fate of Digg, so they are already moving and most are trying to ramp up lemmy (and maybe a few other sites incase lemmy cant handle it). I think most of the contributors have seen that Reddit has reduced in quality over the last few years, and are taking this chance to migrate: trying to figure out how to contribute on lemmy with basic content. I think the consumers who can’t figure out how to set up a new account without hand holding will stay on the new “spam filled reddit” and will be left wondering why the social media scene is nothing but bots and mindless scroll.
Yeah right, most mods are shitting their pants because their little power trip parade is about to be over. They’ll just try and migrate it on here and other platforms, but hopefully that’s put to an end somehow.
