Winning should not be judged within the span of a single month. Much of Reddit’s power users left, meaning the minority that posts the most content was decimated. Reddit will still have lots of traffic but it means they will decline to something where memes are circulated instead of made, like 9gag. That’s not winning by a lot of metrics.

Between the loss of original content and the genuinely obscure/questionable shit now dominating r/all, I’m pretty sure they’ve backfilled their DAU losses with bots.

I’d go one step further and allege it’s a deliberate scheme, because if repost and content bots are running it’s because they have unhindered access to API calls, and that comes from admin. Also, Reddit can actually analyze their traffic and know far better than we can what is likely human and what is likely bot, and use that to try to better hide the authorized bot traffic.

So yeah, they may well have traffic, but I would put money on some unknown yet significant portion of that traffic not being human, as a deliberate strategy to retain advertisers.

Agreed, and Rome wasn’t built in a day. Any more crises with any of the major social networks will just continue to build this place up more. I think it’s too big now to fade into obscurity and is just going to continue to grow, even if it’s not as large as the mainstream stuff.

I really hope Lemmy and the fediverse achieves a certain critical mass, to have enough users for a nice active community. Im perfectly fine for reddit to stay number one though, to attract all the toxic idiots and the cesspool they create in their wake.