I don’t mean to be pessimistic, bit since most subreddits are only going dark for a couple days, the site will basically be back to normal soon. I wonder how many users here are only here because of temporary outrage and not because they actually prefer Lemmy. I’m curious about people’s outlook on this situation.
As much as I want fediverse to become the norm, the thing is that it doesn’t really matter if users switch over - content creators have to switch over. It’s the same reason why Mastodon isn’t very relevant, very few large names actually moved from Twitter.
I’d think, there is a slight difference of content creators in reddit, vs twitter. In twitter we tend to follow people and the more famous or important they are, the more followers they have. Reddit or Lemmy is focused on linking, noone is necessarily creating content here, but linking to outside sources. In beginning of reddit, I remember most of posts were links, and later on self posts became a thing. Still lots of the posts are pointed to somewhere outside. (hence actually reddit being greedy, to claim they own the content they have in their website, they don’t)
Anyway, my bottom line, so a person that is making the content, doesn’t need to be here to be seen. Anyone posting a link and any community gathering enough subscribers to start a discussion over a topic is going to be enough to keep us going.
Now some good thing for us here is, even a small community with 5 people talking over a topic, but all of them participating, is enough to keep a community going. I’d say, it is even better than a multi million people community, that our posts/comments, most likely goes unseen.
The only downside is some communities, we need a big presence to have a discussion, and those will be the most difficult to migirate. For example a gaming or tech or a news community of 10 people will still discuss (mostly) the same thing a community of 1000s people would discuss. And the help they provide might be the same. (like how can I beat this game that we all have played)
The problem would be ask advice, or a local community of a city or a country of 10 people will be much limited in topics or the help they can provide, than one of 1000s or more. Hence those might stay in reddit. like AskDoctors, RelationshipAdvice, AskMen, …
For me also hobby communities, here would be better, since it will make it easier to be seen/ discuss a topic than a larger community of reddit. On the other hand if mods of those hobby communities of reddit decide to migirate here, would cause all their members to move as well. (hobbies like simracing, VR gaming, 3d printing, …). For these also discord is not a bad place. For example in a discord server of a 3d printing youtube channel, I get much better interaction and help, than the reddit r/3dprinting.