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Scientific Study analyzing impact of Reddit Migration on Lemmy

J Multimed Inf Syst: User Sentiments and Dynamics in the Decentralized Web: Reddit Migration’s Impact on Lemmy

https://www.jmis.org/archive/view_article?pid=jmis-10-4-333

Decentralized alternatives like Mastodon and Lemmy are gaining popularity in response to growing complaints about centralized social media platforms such as Twitter and Reddit, which frequently prioritize business interests over user experience. This study employs a mixed-methods approach to scrutinize the impact of Reddit users’ migration on Lemmy. It elucidates user growth patterns, revealing significant registration spikes and centralization trends within decentralized structures. A sentiment analysis with VADER, incorporating a dataset of 48,272 comments from before and after the migration, depicts a predominantly positive sentiment towards Lemmy and criticisms of Reddit. A comprehensive survey with 354 responses from major Lemmy communities validates and supplements the findings, shedding light on users’ motivations, adaptation experiences, and long-term intentions. Furthermore, qualitative interviews with 16 purposively sampled users offer in-depth insights into individual experiences, community dynamics, and perspectives on decentralization and engagement. This study reveals a promising future for Lemmy, highlighting its adaptability and users’ commitment, and contributes valuable insights to the discourse on the sustainability and growth of decentralized platforms in a dynamic digital landscape.

10 comments

dmtalon

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It 100% brought me here. Didn't know what Lemmy was until the chaos over there. ultimately deleted my account never looked back. And that was a lot of eyeball time they lost from me.

We're missing the overall mass of people that both generate new, and answer questions on the content that was there, but I'm OK with that and I actually get better engagement here with those missing mass of people. I'm sure there's a point of more is not better when it comes to users.

Lemmy_2019

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I don't want to get all 'Rick and Morty is for high IQs' but I would imagine the type of user that left Reddit in the recent protest is a bit more clued in than the average r/jokes commenter.

The discussions around here certainly have a flavour of the Old Reddit, before Digg even.

dmtalon

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I didn't hit Reddit until Digg's problems started up, but those, like these now here, where the good 'ol days :)

Blaze

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Great study, thanks for sharing!

ElJefe

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I hate that my attention span and adhd make it so hard to read interesting studies.

TimewornTraveler

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it just takes familiarity. In grad school we had a checklist on what to look for when reading. turned it from a slog to a scavenger hunt.

I can't remember the exact list but it was something like: what's the title, what's the purpose, what's the question, what's the prior research, what's the methodology, what's the data, what's the conclusion, and then finally what's the abstract. or something, idk, I'll try to find it but I don't know you jefe

dessalines

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Many thanks to the author for this, this took a lot of work and their labor is much appreciated. This is one of those great papers where it not only details a situation / problem, but points to things we could do to improve lemmy. I'm sure we'll be referring to this for a long time to help us prioritize which things we focus on.

wiki_me

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Any highlights from the study?

It seems mostly like "lemmy is now moderately liked".

Companies use customer satisfaction as a way to estimate their future potential (like apple was cited as a company with a relatively high customer satisfaction, and indeed it's stock and profits later seemed to surge).

Would be interesting to see something like that for lemmy (you can replace "customer" with "user" for this discussion it's basically the same thing). comparing 1-10 rating of lemmy vs reddit or other platforms (but sample it well, to avoid review bombing), You can compare reddit google play rating with those of jerboa , but that has it own problems (for example a lot of people don't use a mobile client i believe).

dessalines

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I'm still digesting a lot of this, but the main ones for me are:

Third party apps

ppl love them and are outraged by reddit shutting them down. So lemmy needs to continue to prioritize requests from app devs, and think of ways we can make our API better

Communication

Reddit's scummy treatment of mods and app devs is becoming transparent. In a way that's unavoidable because reddit is a for-profit company that by nature must prioritize profits over its userbase. We as open-source devs have different incentive structures, and the more fully we become funded by donations, the more we're accountable to what users want.

So we need to keep doing our bi-weekly dev updates, and stay accountable to devs, mods, and users.

SomeGuy69

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I'm still on Reddit but it becomes less and less on my phone. Actually I only move to Reddit once my Lemmy supply of instant reward doom scrolling is depleted. On desktop I use Reddit exclusively because of the lack of searchable lemmy content yet. I almost use Google only with "Reddit" as search term by now, I don't see that for Lemmy yet.