Given the Lemmy Dev's belief's, they would be busy telling people there is no flood and telling everyone on the boat that God (as the ultimate authoritarian) would never do such a thing.
Lemmy is open source though. Lots of new devs have sarted contributing and if the original devs start going crazy Lemmy can be forked and we can just move on from it.
All this big talk about the great Reddit exodus will leave people here disappointed. There surely will be some movement but 50 million people don't just instantly switch platforms.
It'll be new blood, but I think a third of them may not stay. People are looking for a 1:1 replacement of current-day, hyperactive reddit. This isn't that, so they're likely to put it back down and drift to one of the clones. The inherently scattered fediverse is harder to initially grasp, and not as convenient as they're expecting.
• Subscribing needs to be made more intuitive. Everyone who joins asks the same question, and it's a main frustration for a platform whose service is to sub to things.
• We NEED some sort of collaborative, constantly updating directory for new instances to refer to. Preferably yesterday. They're sold to people "federated" and people are encouraged to join the smaller instances, but those begin life with zero content discoverability by design. The average user is not going to look up how to force this and spend hours manually including all possible enjoyable communities. They are going to assume the toy doesn't work and leave.
• I can follow and interact with mastodon users, which could be a huge selling point in the future, but if there's a way to see what they post without going specifically to their profile, idfk what it is. I would love to know this, but my assumption is it just isn't a thing yet and it all gets shoved into my subscription feed, where it's promptly drowned out by news articles.
• The people attracted to this place (at least mine, idk about lemmy) overwhelmingly saw the lessened activity and decided with excitement that the vacuum was just waiting to be filled with their own content, and that the slower discussions made for better ones that were more personal and nuanced. Most redditors are not that. 80% of redditors are lurkers that come to make easy jokes, snark at each other, and look at a picture of a dog while they wait on their microwave.
• A depressing amount of people who are here will nag if they have to wait literally two weeks to be able to have a kbin app to collapse comments. In discussions that rarely top 30-50 comments, this is much less of a necessity than that the notifications on my instance do not take me to the correct reply 50% of the time, but somehow it's requested and re-requested much more.
These are people who left Reddit primarily over quality of life services at a time when that website is so active it's impossible to run out Stuff, and now they have less of both, but they still did it. The abnormal first-adopters that would rather suffer with less than be mistreated with "more." Even they're feeling some of the newness of it.
Anyone not leaving specifically because of the protest (and half of those who are) is going to expect a ready-made Spez-less Reddit and reconsider the entire platform if it isn't instantly the fun they came for and requires their actual contribution to make it fun.
I've decided I can make my way with that, and I'll be despondent but not surprised.
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