shagie , 10 months ago

given that at least some redditfugees left as Reddit Inc. was showing a middle finger to its blind users.

Many of them headed over to !main though it only has one community on it and rather low activity overall (the most recent comment on the site was left 5 days ago). Glancing at all on that instance, not many people subscribed externally and the reddit continues to have more activity today than rblind has had this month (based on number of posts and comments).

Part of this, I believe, is a mismatch between what Lemmy offers (and while some things are more accessible than Reddit, others aren’t) and what different communities need. startrek did quite well with startrek.website… but /r/blind and rblind seem to be more of an sync chat… and Lemmy does that poorly compared to other offerings.

If you look at the tail end of many communities ( for example programming.dev/communities?listingType=Local&amp… ) you can see a bunch of “lift and shift” attempts of a community on Reddit that just didn’t do it. !boardgamedeals was one were the mod closed the sub on Reddit for a while and said “go here” … but the problem was that the mod wasn’t the one creating the content and so it kind of sputtered out.

And so part of the difficulty of the reddit exodus - it wasn’t the content creators and power users that moved over here with the expectations of great amounts of new content, but rather the mods and the dissatisfied. Those who were able to find an existing community here tended to do reasonably well. Those who tried to start one from scratch (“follow me to the new Lemmy instance”) … that often didn’t work well unless the community wanted to go and a lot of them were grumpy about a mod shutting down the sub.

Which brings us to “just dropping the culture of a reddit sub on a general Lemmy instance (lemmy.world and lemmy.ml vs startrek.website)” tended to be an experience that was overall worse for everyone involved than Reddit.

… And lets face it, the content creators that came to Lemmy aren’t the ones posting neat things in woodworking, but rather the ones making memes.