I’ve seen many comments and posts regarding the API fiasco on Reddit, with the claim that there will be a huge influx of users when that happens. I’m all for it, but I find it hard to believe that the average or even above average user will make the effort to switch.
It depends. From what I understood, moderation on Reddit will become really hard after this. So the site will go down in user experience on content, worse than it is now. That’s outside of the 3rd party apps like Apollo no longer working but will have a negative impact. It sounded like some mods would just walk away than deal with not having robot spam bots to help, which it is volunteer. That could spur on further churn, again, because quality suffers.
I removed my Reddit apps and don’t plan to go back. Having said that, the tech here is still in its infancy. I see bugs daily, the native app version of this experience is not super adoptable by a mass market yet, but it can all improve with time and more bodies interested here.
Long term, this broad concept of decentralization seems to be populous. I think people don’t understand it yet, when they show up it’s rough, and there’s alternatives. But that will all continue to change in the coming months.
NSFW content (posts, profiles, and subs) will also not be available via the app, so moderators and users won’t be able to see any, which will also make moderation more difficult.
It’s unclear whether the official app will be affected, or whether Reddit has a secret API that will exempt it from those restrictions, similar to how they implement the other functions.
It’s likely that users will also begin moving over in that case, although it’s probably a good idea for Lemmy to have its NSFW tagging done up before then, so there’s not just a massive influx of pornographic material.