While I don’t expect there’s going to be any meaningful impact on Reddit once the dust settles, I do think this will bring a lot of new users to the Fediverse.
Reddit losing a few hundred thousand users is a drop in a bucket given their user base, but it is a significant boost for us.
I think things will probably slow down a bit again after the initial euphoria is over, but yes, I think this has brought a lot of attention to Fediverse alternatives.
The same happened with the migration to Reddit from Digg. It wasn’t all overnight, some people switched early as Reddit got more users, and for a while people used both, etc.
But I think things are in a pretty good state (especially if 0.18 fixes some of the UI issues), I see no reason to go back to Reddit.
Mainly that as more of the contributors and technical users switch to Lemmy, there’s less of what you’d want to see on Reddit anyway. This is exactly what happened to Digg over 6 months or so.