Wikipedia is the 7th most visited website in the world, more popular than Amazon, TikTok, even PornHub. It’s not funded by advertisers or other bullshit - rather through reader donations.
With that said, Wikipedia is still centralized content whereas Lemmy isn’t. Meaning there’s fewer expenses and pressure on any one instance or server to succeed. And if one instance or server doesn’t succeed, your access to the Federation is far from over.
Quite literally, the developer for RIF is working on a Tildes app, part of the Fediverse. Tildes is invite only for now, however - that might change down the line.
I’m seeing how things play out.
I certainly like Lemmy and I could very well use both for a while. I’m mostly worried my favorite subs (especially my local City sub) won’t migrate or be an active enough group here. Time will tell. I want to follow the community, not the platform.
I’m exploring my options.
As long as old.reddit exists and there is a large community, I’ll be ‘stuck’ with Reddit. I’m not there for the platform - I’m there for the people. I’ll go where the people go.
As far as mobile usage goes, I don’t know. Without an ‘Apollo for Lemmy’ or ‘Lemmy is Fun’ - I’m hanging around waiting for something to happen.
Reddit is the longest I’ve had a social media account after Facebook - pushing my 12th year. And I’ve participated in a lot of social media and message boards that came and went.
In my experience, websites sites die quickly when leadership prioritizes scraping profits over a user experience. And look, I completely understand and respect that companies need to earn revenue. However, it’s a two-way relationship. Users will always flock to a more streamlined and accessible experience.
It’s why Pandora > Shoutcast/iTunes Radio. It’s why Spotify > Pandora. And it’s why Netflix > Blockbuster. It’s why after years of using Fark.com for news engagement, I joined Reddit. It gave me a far superior experience (not that Fark was ever bad).
I really like Lemmy. And I like the concept of federated spaces. But whether or not the concept is a big enough draw is really to be determined - especially without knowing what the mobile experience looks like.
All this to say… I’ll delete my account when it’s no longer relevant. If I can get truly unique food and drink recommendations for my local city here, with enthusiastic participants all joining in the conversation - that’s what I’ll need to bury the past 12 years of online activity.
I just subscribed to my local city of /c/Boston - but there are no posts yet. I just really want a space where I can talk about local current events, news, business openings and closures, infrastructure projects, etc.
I also liked going into other city’s subs to see what’s going on before travelling. In Reddit, they were always great spaces for restaurant recommendations, helpful tips and tricks, tourist traps to avoid, etc.
It would’ve made the users happy, but ultimately Apollo is not profitable for Reddit. It would need to be retooled and redesigned to extract data and push advertisers. as a free version…
Of course, Reddit could sell it as a “$2/mo Premium Reddit Experience” app that keeps what it is. And I’m sure there’s a ton of folks that’ll pay the benefit of that, particularly mods and power users.
Apollo’s paid subscriber base is 50K. Assuming they maintain that, it’s $1.2M/year revenue. The question is… is that worth it to a billion dollar company? To maintain and support all that?
My gut would say ‘yes’. Although goodwill is unquantifiable, keeping the community of volunteers placated is an investment in Reddit’s longterm health. Same reason the Mafia bought turkeys for uninvolved neighborhood families on Thanksgiving - so they’d look the other way when shady happenings go down.
But Reddit doesn’t want to spend money on turkeys. So we’ll see how well that works out for them. I’m not optimistic.