and is that a good thing or bad?
Yes, I think it will grow organically, and often in bursts when Reddit does something particularly publicly stupid or frustrating. We’ve seen this before, we’ll see it again. I don’t know if we’ll ever see a mass exodus. I don’t know if this will ever “replace” Reddit per se. Obviously it has for me, but on a whole, I think it will continue to be a niche community, and I’m fine with that. There are good people here, my kind of people, and I like it for what it is, not for what it could become. I really don’t need the tiktok-memelord-masses and the teenagers and the onlyfans trolls in my life. I think they’ll find their own places to congregate and feed off each other, and I don’t think it will ever be here, no matter how shitty reddit and tiktok and whatever other dumb apps they use become.
I don’t want the Fediverse to be massively exclusive but it doesn’t need to be massively inclusive either. Its nature means it can be inclusive, and I welcome any community who really feels like they belong here. But I’m realistic about who is actually going to feel included here, and I don’t think we need to go out of our way to “attract” more users, we just need to do enough that the people who want this sort of thing, can find it.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 17 minutes ago
If they come, it will be a trickle. There isn’t that much left for Reddit to do which would significantly harm the user base as a whole to force a migration. At best, one sub might get banned and come to Lemmy as a way to continue. Whether that community will be accepted by the current Lemmy federation is up in the air.
Regarding future growth, Lemmy isn’t ready for it. The moderation and admin tools need work if the platform were to 10x, let alone see greater growth. I expect if that growth were to happen, federation would fracture further. You would also see some Reddit items come here as a way to moderate like becoming more dependent on a karma score and requiring more for signing up.