Many of us have seen it happening in the last 4-5 years. reddit subs, and reddit in general has become a bit s***. Of course there are still good subs, especially the truly niche ones can often have a small helpful crowd. But with 100s of thousands of users, some sub drown in hate and negativity.
I’ve been thinking about why. With the offical reddit app, reddit is as easy as facebook, many people even refer the the platform as an “app”. Perhaps this ease of use attracts the wrong kind of people. This place is currently very far removed from this. You applied to get in, you chose this instance on the fediverse among a selection of other instances.
Calling it a concern would overstating things, but I think maybe we shouldn’t strive to become as ubiquitous as reddit has become. A couple of 100K users on this instance and maybe a couple of million spread across the fediverse is enough users. The ‘gate’ you have to go through to register actually makes this place so much better than reddit.
What are your thought?
I’m not looking for “the next Reddit”. I’m looking for community, and reddit lost any semblance of that years ago. If that means we’re a smaller instance, fine.
You’re allowed to say ‘shit’ on the internet.
This guy right here, officer.
Holy f+#* you just blew my mind!
Not buying it. The main subreddits got crappy when they got flooded with people, but part of having a million billion users is that some of them go off and make the niche subs that are great. A lot of quality is a function of quantity. If I can dodge mud-slinging titans ala r/movies and r/videos with a single “block magazine” click, but get 40 active niche magazines, 3 of which I care about, in exchange for it, that makes the site better.
Agreed. I love small communities, but i love small communities about topics i actuallly care about. And so far the only magazines i’ve found on Kbin/Lemmy that have any activity in them are about super generic stuff.
I don’t want r/movies, r/anime or r/games, i want r/moviesfromthatoneobscuredirectorilike, r/thatonenicheanimenobodyelsewatches and r/thatoldassgameonlymeand10otherpeopleplay
i think that’s an intrinsic value of beehaw. if someone wants a more “reddit” experience, other prominent instances give that. beehaw curates a safe environment for discussion and by default i think that will make it a smaller community.
It is absolutely an intrinsic value. We are not a reddit replacement. We don’t want to be.
That doesn’t make any sense, other than beehaw can moderate. Anyone can read, post, upvote or subscribe. All fediverse users.
That doesn’t make any sense, other than beehaw can moderate.
i mean, yeah. “beehaw can moderate” is the whole point of beehaw existing
All fediverse users.
Not lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works presently.
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I’m coming to recognize people from this instance, and not just from communities I frequent. This @[email protected] person, for example, had a conversation with me recently about digital accessibility and the hamburger menu icon.
It’d be super dope if we could maintain that!
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Upvote for your username ;-)
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Art Vandelay? Is he your latex importer?
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Importer exporter
I can see the logic in it, but it’s a tough pill to swallow for me. Sometimes not seeing much activity can feel pretty lonely. IDK, Im afraid a lot of my favorite topics will not transition to Lemmy cus of its complexity.
Quality over quantity 👌
This 100%. When I was reading threads on Reddit, I was looking for a few good comments that were among hundreds of chaff. It seems that here most of that other stuff is gone. Sure, there are comments numbering in double digits and less, but so far they’ve been more thought provoking or at length (or at least more clever!)
I disagree. There are millions of topics that you just can’t discuss on the fediverse, because you won’t find anyone interested in them.
While having more people obviously makes some things more challenging, just because Reddit failed to deal with that doesn’t mean the fediverse will. As evidenced by recent decisions, Reddit is run by idiots. Over here on the fediverse, we can require instances be run by people who know what they’re doing - or be defederated. We’re already seeing that happen.
Yes, there will be growing pains. I think it’s worth it.
Also - you can have your cake and eat it too. An individual instance, maybe even one that decides to defederate itself entirely, can have a small number of users. Those instances will exist if that’s what you want.
Also, I don’t think we really have a choice. This is a good community already. People will discover it and sign up. We can’t stop it (well, we can’t stop it on the full fediverse, maybe we can here on Beehaw).
I definitely prefer a smaller community over a large one. I actually feel more inclined to interact with others in a small community like this. It feels less intimidating.
As someone that never had a Reddit account* but still read about 18 subs on a daily basis (via Teddit) I was a bit sceptical about the value of signing up for Lemmy. So far, so excellent. It reminds me of the newsgroups I used to frequent 25 years ago. Big enough to be useful, small enough to be comfortable.
*I never had a Facebook or MySpace account either. I used Twitter for a year about a decade ago but it all seemed a bit “look at me” for my taste.
Agreed. This is reminiscent of an earlier time on the web. Everyone complaining about potentially needing a second lemmy account doesn’t know what it was like to have an acount at several bb forums.
I’m actually more turned off by the (growing, it seems) protective attitude towards platforms like bluesky/Mastadon/Lemmy/beehaw :/ I don’t think making or keeping things less accessible is overall a great mindset for progress — isolationism always does just that, isolates
Here’s the thing, for beehaw? yes. absolutely. But for lemmy? we don’t get to choose. That’s the cool part about federated social media though, is that as a corner of it grows, the whole concept grows. Which is really cool but also kind of an interesting problem for scalability
I am reading this and commenting from kbin.social.
I hear you and agree that reddit was peak awful in the past few years, but I do in my heart of hearts want a reddit-like experience.
What I think is intriguing about the Fediverse is that it almost doesn’t matter how many people seem to be on any on instance because they mostly talk to each other.
I commented elsewhere two weeks ago that I think reddit’s redesign attracted a bunch of users who were looking for a facebook-like experience, and at the risk of falling into the false dichotomy of normies vs redditors, I think the redesign brought too many normies who didn’t want to learn reddiquette. I think something that will help kbin immensely is how (I say this lovingly) ugly and mostly featureless it is. There aren’t bells and whistles to make it an attractive draw for any other reason besides you want to be here and engage the content and community.
I do hope that as many of these early instances who seem to be “in it” for the right reasons quickly and unequivocally defederate from instances started up by companies like Meta, though.
Quality over quantity is what should be aimed for. The internet evolves and social sites get to a point of imploding. For whatever reason, and people then move onto something else. Some of us can remember BBS and IRC.
Each place shouldn’t set out to be the previous sites’ replacement. It should take what worked, the good parts, and build on them. Mix them with something new, and experiment. This way, you are not directly competing with the competition, but are close enough to draw some people away from the older websites.
Everything gets too big, too popular. It happens. Reddit was at its best 7 to 10 years ago. It’s well past its best before date. It has gone mouldy, started to smell, and taste funny. Time to chuck it out.
I’m not a member of “this instance” yet here I am commenting. That’s the strength of the fediverse.
