Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.
I was on reddit for 11 or 12 years. Commented several times a day. Voted 100 times or more per day. Left mid June and haven't been back once. Now I do that shit here instead.
Turns out that Reddit is a lot easier to quit than most people claim or realize. I still end up there from web searches occasionally, because some communities just don’t exist in lemmy (also lemmy frankly sucks as a place for finding niche communities due to fragmentation and shitty search tools). But besides that, there’s nothing particularly compelling about reddit anymore.
I wonder where people are going though? They’re definitely not coming here unless they’re an adult male technology/linux nerd.
I’m a woman, and although some technological things are interesting I’m not quite a tech nerd and definitely not a Linux one. Linux seems cool but I’m too lazy to make the jump. MacOS and/or Windows serve well enough for me.
I also have several different Threadiverse accounts and try to post frequently in niche communities I’m interested in, although not so frequently I become the only contributor and it feels spammy.
I'll be the first to say that if they rolled back the changes I'd return in a heartbeat.
I miss reddit a lot, but I decided to leave if they went through with the API changes and I stand by that decision. But I definitely miss it and Tildes and Lemmy simply don't replace it.
I'll never return, regardless of what Reddit does, but I don't blame you for your position.
I'd just say don't give up yet, I think we have a pretty large chunk of people sitting on the sidelines temporarily, waiting to see if Lemmy actually becomes what it aspires to be.
Also I don't mean to be rude, but it would be nice if Tildes users just came to Lemmy and helped us build here. I'm sure many Tildes users use Lemmy anyways. Tildes is just way too small (like 10% the size of Lemmy) and even if it did take off, it would probably turn out the same way as reddit. But that's just like, my opinion, man.