It’s interesting, too, to see how small the subreddits need to be to maintain that community feeling. I helped found a political subreddit 9yrs ago; a non-partisan US state news & discussion subreddit. Political communities tend to be pretty spicy for obvious reasons, but when we had like maybe less than 500 sub (so maybe like <100 actually active users), there was a nice sense of community, even though people of different political persuasions would argue and debate. I’d see people tend to have fairly civil discussions. They’d chit chat and joke around in less controversial threads. It wasn’t always rainbow and unicorns of course, but for the most part, the active users played nicely together. We rarely had to bring out formal moderation tools. A simple “Hey, you two, chill out,” was usually enough to settle things. And it was like that for a few years.

As the number of subscribers and active users increased over the years, that sense of community started getting away from us. There was a lot more dogpiling. A lot more incivility. A lot more of the typical rPolitics style low-effort comments. The older active users started dropping off. Reddit tends to lean left, so the left-leaning majority started drowning out the right-leaning users. And my state is solidly right-leaning these days. Not that our sub had to be representative of the state political demographics, of course.

Today, the sub is like under 7,000 users, which is still a smaller subreddit, relatively speaking, but any sense of community is long gone.

I’ll admit, we – and especially me as head mod for most of our existence – could’ve done better to tamp down on that stuff. But I also think that that kinda thing is a natural part of growth of a community. That the sense of community tends to disappear. People can’t individually recognize and emotionally connect with that many people. It’s so easy, especially on the Internet, to simply say something mean-spirited to someone and metaphorically walk away. They may never see or interact with that person again. And if they do, do they really remember who they are?

Obviously my experience is just anecdotal. But it still makes me wonder how Lemmy (and similar sites) will deal with that. How can we maintain a sense of community, while also wanting to allow people in and grow communities?