I’ve been seeing a lot of angst and emotion on the Reddit migration, which results in either defeatism or blind optimism. In the end, it probably doesn’t matter, but I wanted to do more fact-based research into the subject.
I put my findings and my analysis into what it would actually take to kill Reddit, based on the deaths of Digg and MySpace. tl;dr it’s a lot less dramatic than most people would think.
Remember, Digg dying helped Reddit, but it didn’t make Reddit. Reddit was already fairly well-established when Digg shat the bed. It was really easy for people to glom onto a pre-existing community that already had some people who posted on both Reddit and Digg. Lemmy and kbin aren’t nearly as big or feature-complete now as Reddit was when all that Digg drama went down. However, we work with what we have, haha.
I’ve read that kbin had ~30 or so actual users before a few weeks ago. Look at them now. Lemmy is probably similar. New ideas take time to catch on and sometimes it takes a crisis to spur that into overdrive.
And now this is here, and development is being spurred on by the large migration, the next large Reddit crisis is likely to drive an even larger group here. Things will slowly build up and eventually you’ll find that more things happen here than there.