A Changing Landscape
Come July 1st 2023, a big change is likely on the horizon... No, I am not talking about the end of Universal Analytics (which I am sure we are all tired of hearing about) but a move by Reddit that could be a huge impact to them, the contributors/moderators and, subsequently the users.
Reddit have decided to change the API fees, making it fundamentally unsustainable for 3rd party app developers to run the apps that we, the masses using Reddit, know and love.
Let’s be clear on one thing though, this is targeted at app developers that profit from the apps by charging for the download across the app stores (a fair price for the awesome apps). There are free/non-profit app developers that Reddit say will not be impacted. That said, some of the best apps on the market are paid for.
What Reddit have done is shoot themselves in the foot as there has been an uprising and many people and communities are not happy.
The Uprising
It was great to see the support of developers from the many communities on Reddit where they opted to push a ‘blackout’ period early in June 2023. This resulted in hundreds of communities either going offline or going private for a few days. Some of these (approx. 100, some with large followings) are still restricted (not receiving new messages/comments) and some have even set the community tag to NSFW (not safe for work) in protest. You can see the ‘blackout’ tracker here.
Reddit are standing firm and have even contacted many of the communities advising that persisting in this action is likely to result in users being removed as moderators and new moderators put in place. This is being seen as pretty underhand techniques from Reddit, even if they are trying to keep communities running.
The uprising itself has also sparked a significant move for many users (myself included) to source other means of Reddit style communities. This is where Lemmy comes in.
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Lemmy?
Lemmy is a federated social network platform that works in the same way as Reddit, with one significant difference, it is not controlled by any single user or entity. Don’t be mistaken though, this is not decentralised as such as ‘instances’ still have to be hosted.
So, what does it mean to be ‘federated’? Basically, anyone can host a Lemmy instance and it stands as it’s own network, but, a site can then be federated which cross-links it with other networks in the ‘fediverse’. This means that you can register on one instance and view content, engage with content from other instances.
Herein can be the rub, in that a host can set there own rules, terms and conditions and can chose if they want to federate or not. This can be changed any time. Also, instances can be defederated by other instances. All this can make it a little hard to follow and it means you could lose access to some content where federation is an issue.
At the time of writing this, the biggest Lemmy instance is lemmy.world, an instance that aims to be the most federated and user centric ones out there. I am on that one and it is certainly a busy community. There are a lot of instanced (approx. 800 at last count) with over 35k monthly active users. You can see all the instances here.
Since the Reddit blackout, traffic to Lemmy has gone from an average of 1,000 active monthly users to 44,000 active monthly users. With the volumes of posts doubling and comments skyrocketing. Lemmy is blowing up and a lot of communities that are/were on Reddit are either creating communities or shifting completely. You can see the growth data here.
Understanding the Lingo