I'm not entirely convinced that it isn't all mostly bot activity.

It's funny reading posts that say something along the lines of "I've always used the reddit app and it's fine, I didn't even know there were third-party apps". I get this might be astroturfing or bots but if not, congrats on not having a clue, I guess.

what made the switch easier for me, was installing an RSS feed widget to my desktop and adding lemmy instances to it. gradually, i start to notice topics that interest me more and more which are viewable straight from the rss widget itself and i am able to comment on it, thus i have interacted more on here in the last few days than reddit. though it is still hard not to add :"reddit" to my searches online.

It would appear it's mostly bots, probably paid for by reddit (or interested groups) to muddle the waters.

I have seen countless posts trying to discredit the fediverse, how it won't work because it isn't financially backed (completely ignoring that email is still a thing), or how Mastodon apparently failed. On top of that, there are tons of comments in the threads for subs that went dark where the commenter argues "all this does is hurt the sub". but when you look into the commenter, they have no previous history of being active in these subs at all.

But, i've seen this kind of activity all over reddit for the past 2 years. Especially when something unpopular is happening. There is a lot of the same type of crap you see during the presidential elections of the US. A lot of fake comments, posts, and statistics, and other things to try steer the public opinion in an engineered direction.

Its such a weird complaint that these people are having right now. They're demanding that unpaid people come back and labor for them for free and/or give away the tools they've created for free.

It's like they have no idea how reddit works. People whining that the NFL sub is closed and demanding it to be reopened for instance. They can go make their own sub and moderate it themselves, but they dont. The entitlement to just demand that people do free labor for you is insane.

It's pretty simple. Most people won't do anything unless it directly impacts them.

This has been true time and time again throughout history as well. People only revolt or start an uprising when things get so bad that it directly influences them. Even then most won't do anything unless they aren't able to ignore it anymore.

Don't worry, it will become an even more toxic cesspool soon....

The lack of societal solidarity for the betterment of everyone is sad.

But that's ok, reddit was never going to die after this protest.

I think what took place was a successful test of what alternatives exist out in the wild.

Now it's up to those of us who migrated to post through the highs and lows of early adoption in order to encourage others to come and stick around when the next shitty move by Spez takes place.

For example, I migrated to Mastodon in late 2018 during an initial surge. And over the years tried to keep posting content so that when the next migration took place when Elon took the reigns, people were able to possibly feel more at home.

This shit takes time. A lot of time. But the internet is a big place and there's plenty of opportunity for things to be better. We just can expect things to rush themselves

I can assure you it's not AI, most people there aren't even aware of what's going on or just don't care about the new reddit changes

They don't care. People are happy in their bubbles.

They gonna stay there until they feel the real consequences. Most people just don't get what's the real problem. I'm happy in the fediverse, feels like I make better use of my time, instead of scrolling like an idiot.

I'm suspecting phantom upvotes. Neutral or pro-Reddit comments get highly upvoted suspiciously quickly after a sub comes back on line, drowning out anything else.

My friend started using reddit about 3 years ago. He doesn't care about the blackout at all and told me I was being mad about a free service trying to make money. He'll just keep using it until he can't then lurk elsewhere. I told him to stop being an ass, but that's unlikely. His stupid attitude is shared by a vast swath of reddit and will ultimately lead to the site's total decay.