> Many users, upon finally reaching the site, complained about the new design

Sounds like Reddit. When I go to reddit, I use "old.reddit.com". I hate the new version, once old.reddit disappears, I disappear too.

The lack of an obvious place to go seems to be all that stands between Reddit and total collapse. Instead of an obvious Digg->Reddit type path, it's more like Reddit->a bunch of less than equivalent options.

You've got your Lemmys and Lobsters and so on, but none of them are a centralized catch-all. I can't (for example) go to Lobsters and talk about Star Trek in a /r/DaystromInstitute equivalent, and the official equivalent running on Lemmy is far from equivalent to what the subreddit was before all this chaos.

It's kind of the same deal with Twitter. Twitter was the place ~everyone went to as forums collapsed. Now there's [Discord, new forums, Reddit, 9000 different ActivityPub platforms, Bluesky, Cohost, ...] and none are quite a match for what even the narrowest niche used Twitter for. You could easily go from your forum chat threads and topical threads and recreate that experience on Twitter with a high level of fidelity. Digg->Reddit was similar.

There's no obvious match for the centralized platforms because they sucked up all the energy for creating new centralized platforms that existed before.

I think less centralization is actually a good thing but yes it does mean that reddit can hang on a little longer because it's less obvious to people what they can replace it with.

The obvious place is discord, but discord sucks in lots of other ways. Great for voice chat, but not great as a reddit replacement.

I can't understand the appeal behind Discord for general communities. Everything is one giant persistent group chat--there's no discrete threads or posts to search, at least not in the servers I'm in. Sad that so many companies are opting for Discord for building communities.

I've tried multiple times to use discord, and the fundamental blocker for me seems to be in it's name. Every one feels just like a private slack channel for a company I don't work for. Discordant.

To say that product is going to replace twitter is -imo- just wrong.

Same, Discord is useless to me

If old.reddit didn't still have a very sizeable user base they definitely would have killed it by now, so you are not alone.

It's only about 5% of users, which is sizable but not unkillable by any means. The third-party mobile apps had way, way more than that and they proved very killable.

I wonder how much those 5% contribute compared to the folks using the new interface.

When Digg started to do stupid things, everyone switched to Reddit.

When Reddit started to do stupid things, some people moved to lemmy but it wasn't as clear cut... I guess distributed networks are always a bit harder to get traction.

So the question is, if Digg users fled to Reddit, where are Reddit users fleeing to now?

Before anyone replies with "the fediverse"… I've heard people talking about Mastodon etc. for years now and afaict it's still a fringe nerd thing that most people outside techie HN-adjacent circles haven't heard of. It doesn't seem remotely comparable to Reddit in terms of popularity, or potential popularity.

I think the issues is that there isn't an obvious successor place - rather lots of different ones - lemmy, etc...

Mastodon recently blew past 15m users, though, so not nothing.

Is that registered or MAU?