Discord has a really low barrier to entry for conversation, it’s low friction. If someone playing a game gets a sorta funny screenshot they can share it in Discord and have a decent chance to get some responses or reactions.
But they won’t post it on Reddit or anything because there’s more friction there, it feels like more work to create a post and then you’re unlikely to get any responses anyways, and even if you get upvotes you can’t see who upvoted like if it’s someone you know, and there’s no easy emoji reactions. And users making comments to respond also feels higher friction than a message, people are just less likely to do it for whatever reason.
It just feels like small scale conversations are more likely to happen in Discord than anywhere else. If you have a small group of people then something like Reddit/Lemmy probably won’t be sustainable, it’ll never take off, but get them in Discord and you’re more likely to keep the group active.
Small communities were somewhat sustainable on Reddit, but they’re completely infeasible on Lemmy unless you already have authority over a community. Like, Star Trek is a great success story for Lemmy because the r/risa mods told everyone exactly where to go and used that authority that already exists. But r/warframe did the same thing and dormi.zone has very little activity. People don’t want to make a Lemmy account on a gamble, they want to go where they have an account or they know there’s community. Lemmy has a bootstrap problem. You can overcome the bootstrap problem with something like a community for memes or cats, but good luck building a community for some obscure game or interest here.
When I’m talking about a small community, I’m talking about like my own Discord with only ~200 members, but the communities you’re talking about are WAY bigger
You mentioned r/Warframe, that has 660,481 followers
These are all much much bigger than what I meant by small communities, and I don’t think my Discord community would be active on Reddit either.
But yes you are correct, another similar success story is lemdro.id and they did the same thing where the mods of r/Android pushed people to that Lemmy instance and they still have a link in the sidebar
Discord has a really low barrier to entry for conversation, it’s low friction. If someone playing a game gets a sorta funny screenshot they can share it in Discord and have a decent chance to get some responses or reactions.
But they won’t post it on Reddit or anything because there’s more friction there, it feels like more work to create a post and then you’re unlikely to get any responses anyways, and even if you get upvotes you can’t see who upvoted like if it’s someone you know, and there’s no easy emoji reactions. And users making comments to respond also feels higher friction than a message, people are just less likely to do it for whatever reason.
It just feels like small scale conversations are more likely to happen in Discord than anywhere else. If you have a small group of people then something like Reddit/Lemmy probably won’t be sustainable, it’ll never take off, but get them in Discord and you’re more likely to keep the group active.
Small communities were somewhat sustainable on Reddit, but they’re completely infeasible on Lemmy unless you already have authority over a community. Like, Star Trek is a great success story for Lemmy because the r/risa mods told everyone exactly where to go and used that authority that already exists. But r/warframe did the same thing and dormi.zone has very little activity. People don’t want to make a Lemmy account on a gamble, they want to go where they have an account or they know there’s community. Lemmy has a bootstrap problem. You can overcome the bootstrap problem with something like a community for memes or cats, but good luck building a community for some obscure game or interest here.
When I’m talking about a small community, I’m talking about like my own Discord with only ~200 members, but the communities you’re talking about are WAY bigger
You mentioned r/Warframe, that has 660,481 followers
r/risa has 28,568 followers
startrek.website has 3k users
[email protected] has 6.53k subscribers
These are all much much bigger than what I meant by small communities, and I don’t think my Discord community would be active on Reddit either.
But yes you are correct, another similar success story is lemdro.id and they did the same thing where the mods of r/Android pushed people to that Lemmy instance and they still have a link in the sidebar