Lemmy numbers spike after Reddit ban
A ban on subreddits helped promote alternative Lemmy with a general boost to federated platforms.
From 12th to 14th June, thousands of communities on Reddit went dark in protest over the site’s new policies regarding third-party apps. The protests centred around changes to API pricing policies, which could potentially kill off third-party apps used to access content from the site. Christian Selig, developer of Apollo for Reddit (one of the biggest third-party Reddit apps), estimated his fees could reach $20 million under the model.
In the wake of this, there have been many active online discussions about alternatives to Reddit, particularly those following a federated model. In simplest terms, federated networks operate as a collection of independently run but interconnected servers. This would make it far more difficult to enforce unpopular policies like Reddit’s, as there’s no single platform to control.
Lemmy, which was first released in 2019, follows this model in that users can create communities local to their particular instance but can also post to and from communities on other instances.
In early June, one Redditor, TheArtsaInventor, who had been actively promoting switching to Lemmy, had his account suspended briefly. The subreddit /r/LemmyMigration was also temporarily blocked.
This sparked controversy and was discussed widely on the Hacker News website and Lemmy itself. The official reason given for the ban was spamming – most users interpreted this as Reddit protecting its bottom line.
If so, this move backfired spectacularly – in June, the number of Lemmy instances increased from 100 to 519, while user numbers spiked to over 45,000, no doubt in part caused by the extra publicity Lemmy received for Reddit’s temporary ban.