I think this is the wrong question to ask. The real question is if Lemmy is good enough for you to replace Reddit, and if not, how can we improve it. What happens to Reddit is irrelevant, and in my view it will continue spiraling towards being a hellhole of memes, ads and guerrilla marketing. Some people will stay there no matter what, and for me that’s fine - I’m not sure if I have much to discuss with people like that in the first place.

I think one needs to see the bigger picture here. The protest that started earlier this week might not have left a big dent in reddit yet. What it did though is raise attention and increase awareness for alternative news/content aggregators like kbin. They’re not anywhere close to competing with reddit yet but the door got opened.

The shortsighted reddit politics basically helped to kickstart their own future competitors. If we do our best here and bring in good content, comment and get past only consuming there will be a real chance to become more appealing than reddit in the long run. I’m definitely here to stay.

Considering the volume of bots spreading venom about it, I have to say it’s doing something

This incident won’t be the last straw, but it will be the turning point of a slow and general decline.

The louder they protest it’s not doing anything, the more you can be certain that it is.

We won’t know until early July.

The protests aren’t over yet, and Reddit is beginning to make demands to open up subs. You’re beginning to see cracks in the system.

I don’t think Reddit will change its mind, but I can see a lot of churn happening in subs happening based on those that are protesting and subs that aren’t.

This could be Reddit’s Digg moment, but it is going to play out a lot slower and we’ll probably start seeing Lemmy posts on Reddit.

This will end exactly the same way the Twitter -> Mastodon thing ended.

Reddit will continue. A slightly worse Reddit, with more bots, more low-effort content, and less quality OC.

Moderation will degrade slightly as the admins replace protesting moderators with more obedient ones, and/or communities lose interest and use the new “voting” (lol) systems to pick admins which will give them the reliable dopamine hits.

A small percentage of Redditors, especially the power users, will move on. A small percentage in Reddit terms is a tidal wave for any other platform. Some percentage of that number of Redditors leaving will come here.

Lemmy & Kbin will experience growing pains. Issues caused by scaling up infrastructure, instance to instance friction, etc. These will get resolved with time. When things settle, we will have a fraction of reddit’s userbase, but neither will we need more. We’ll have enough to have stable, engaging communities which will slowly grow.

In other words, a mirror reflection of the Mastodon story.

Personally I don’t care if the protest is having an effect or not because it’s been already said that it will not change reddit’s policies. Reddit is over for me, I’m just waiting for the API changes so that i can’t use my mobile client of choice anymore. In contrast, I’m finding interesting and vibrant discussions and comments on here, which is looking like the early Reddit days, and I’m very glad for this.

I’m gone, that’s for sure. And it’s so much better. My blood pressure is lower.

I don’t really care. I’m here now, deleted my 12 year old account in the process. People thinking Reddit will die are delusional. The Reddit as us old people know it has died years ago, it just became unbearable now.