It’s really amazing how much Lemmy has improved in just a few weeks. At this point I genuinely prefer it over old Reddit, the only exception being an option to change how comments are sorted by default

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

I’ve actually noticed a lot less content on my Reddit frontpage. Granted I don’t subscribe to any of the most popular r/all subs, but the tech and niche interest subreddits were the only reason I ever went to Reddit in the first place.

I genuinely can’t bear to use the Reddit iOS app for more than like five minutes so I tend to just skim and close the app. I wonder if a lot of other Apollo/3PA users are feeling the same way and it’s caused a drop in engagement as a result.

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.