Am I the only one a bit confused as to what Threads has to do with Lemmy, beyond them both using ActivityPub…? Like, these are completely different kinds of websites, Lemmy is a Reddit clone and Threads is a Twitter clone. What purpose would federation serve?

Seriously lol. These are social networks, what is the point of using this stuff at all if you don’t care about anybody being able to view your posts or interact with you

It depresses me that millions of people don’t see any issue with this

Same, and also an OG Reddit user. My Reddit use has probably went down at least 75% since Apollo stopped functioning. The official app UI is so bad that it’s not even worth me scrolling through all the ads or fighting the horrible layout to try and find the stuff I’m looking for.

I now only check the desktop site maybe once a day. And funnily enough most of my favorite subs have been dead since before July 1st anyway. I would love to see Reddits metrics because there’s no way they haven’t felt this dropoff, even if most of the TikTok crowd continues to consoom the big meme subreddits.

Many of the smaller to medium size subs have either been abandoned by their mods, set to restricted, or have just lost a lot of their most active users. There’s a very noticeable drop in engagement, for example posts that would’ve once gotten 1k or 2k upvotes within a few hours are now pushing like 600-800.

The quality of posts and especially comments has gone down the shitter, way more comments from trolls or low IQ types looking to pick a fight. It’s not like Reddit is dying per se but you can just tell something is missing. I think it’s a mixed effect of many mods getting removed or resigning + many 3PA users moving to Lemmy + Reddit’s dogshit mobile app messing with stuff because it uses some shitty algorithm instead of just letting users sort by Hot.

You also have to remember that the only good UI left on Reddit at this point is old reddit with RES, but even that isn’t the best for just casually browsing memes and video related subs. For me it’s basically a Digg 4.0 situation where there may be content I’d like to see but it just isn’t worth crawling through that shit pipe that is the official app.

Right now? Absolutely not. The platform itself is insanely buggy, normies still can’t wrap their heads around federation, and the big instances are only just beginning to stabilize and take shape.

But long term yes, I’m very bullish, and it’s for this simple fact: this is only the beginning of enshittification. All those r/NBA whiners you saw bitching on Reddit about the protests are gonna have their “leopards ate my face” moment when spez decides to start charging $14.99 a month for the privilege of subscribing to more than three subreddits at a time or some shit.

As many have said, interest rates are high and the gravy train has stopped running. This means the only way these huge platforms with massive server costs are going to survive is by making a profit, and they can’t do that without resorting to Twitter Blue-like subscriptions.

If people want to consoom and shitpost for free, at some point they will have to end up here in the fediverse, where the costs of running such a huge platform can be distributed among a bunch of large and medium-sized instances, which will probably be mainly funded by donations.

I think this is the beginning of a big transition, as big as the one from web 1.0 to 2.0. And ironically it’s gonna look a lot more like the internet of old than the era of massive social media platforms.