As with Twitter, I suspect, most people won't 'migrate to a Reddit replacement' - they'll just use Reddit less.
They'll open it and find the app they have doesn't work, maybe install the official one but find it's different from their experience before, and just use it less.
Instead they'll go to other places - the ones they were already going to before - more, Discord, YouTube, TikTok, etc. Hacker News for programmers, etc.
Twitter is different - I followed 5-10 people I really cared about, and I followed them to Mastodon. The issue with Reddit is there were no single people I really cared about on Reddit that I could follow to Kbin or Lemmy. Cocktail Reddit closed, and I'm sure there's some equivalent on Kbin or Lemmy, but at this point, I just assume it's worse, and honestly, I wasn't contributing to it myself on Reddit, so I'm just waiting it out to see if that community reforms somewhere.
The value of Reddit was that you'd just run into domain experts. Roasters from well known coffee shops would pop in with advice on r/coffee. Bartenders at prestigious bars I'd been to would sometimes post recipes on r/cocktails. World-class award winning folks would post their trees to r/bonsai. At this point, I assume those people now just all have their own independent Instagram pages they're posting to instead, but I have no way to find them, so I'll just live without.
In some ways, the best Reddits were a community aggregator for niche communities. It was an easy place to get a link to the official patch notes for a game as well as the youtube video links for the major community members who were explaining it. It was all content that existed other places, but it was the easy place to find it all together. I can do that work for myself, and I'll do it for some of the interests, but it was nice to not have to.
I think that it is pretty fair that it will be a waiting game to most people. But I think there is definitely a mutual exchange relationship - dedicated members and enthusiasts post and build up communities, keep them going, and moderate them. Then when the experts come in, their is already a place for them to show off, where they know that people who understand what makes their talents special will appreciate it. So they end up working together, and if you give the finger to the enthusiasts who log on everyday and facilitate discussion, then the domain experts will eventually follow because there is no reason for them to post to a dead community.
This seems true, but there's also another level to it. If you're a major figure in a community yourself, you have plenty of other outlets to show off and get your message out. Those folks come to posts on Reddit because the audience is there. Maybe they're just cross-posting their instagram posts, but they're doing it because they know it'll reach a decent amount of people that wouldn't see their stuff otherwise.
Getting to that point takes time, and it takes dedicated amateurs keeping the community growing, engaged, and excited in the meantime to get it to the point where it's big enough that bigger names care to jump in.
It's not nothing, it's 27k. There's a point at which a social network has enough content to be usable. Reddit (to me) hasn't significantly increased in value since I started using it 15 years ago. People post the same links. Some of the conversations are a little better. The spam and reposting is a lot worse.
It’s big for Lemmy, but it’s nothing for Reddit. If the Reddit blackout were serious, I’d expect that number to be a jump to 1M+.
Just to put things in perspective, I mod’s a sub with 20k subscribers. I literally took 5 mod actions in the years that I was a mod. There just isn’t enough activity.
27k is great for Lemmy, but it’s not enough to change their trajectory.
It doesn't need to change Reddit's trajectory, it only needs to exist as a viable alternative.
Here we are on HN, and HN isn't nearly as big as Reddit either but still a valuable platform, significantly better than r/technology. More users doesn't equal better content.
I don't know about you, but my web searches have been severely hamstrung by the blackout, so it looks like a lot of subs are still taking it seriously. There is so much content that is now gone and inaccessible, Reddit's bounce rate on Google has to be through the roof.
It's not that the blackout isn't serious, it's that Lemmy isn't yet a viable alternative for most people.
The number that matters isn't really what dents Reddit, but what gives Lemmy (or the fediverse as a whole) the critical mass to actually become viable.
27k isn't yet there. If I had to guess, I'd say maybe 200k is where you need to get to. You need niche topics of interest to say, 5% of the population to get communities of at least 10 active people who will post, comment and curate. If only 10% of people do that, you have to have a user base such that 0.5% of it can sustain an interesting content.
However it isn't uniform, so perhaps 27k is already enough for the very largest communities to get off the ground.
