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.
I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment.
You’re allowed to say ‘shit’ on the internet.
This guy right here, officer.
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).
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
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’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
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I’m coming to recognize people from this instance, and not just from communities I frequent. This @ArtVandelay@beehaw.org 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 ;-)
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.
User counts are overrated. It’s neat, and there is a minimum amount of users necessary to keep an instance alive, growing, and, most importantly, interesting, but growth for growth’s sake isn’t worthwhile.
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.
No! Most certainly not. Keep it small, keep it safe!
I agree with your points.
That said I think one of the biggest draws of reddit (to me) was the constant influx of content. You could scroll and scroll and scroll and very rarely see repetitive content and there was always something new.
While this behavior was addictive and probably bad for me, it is something I miss with Lemmy, which just has less content because it has less users. More users would probably solve this problem, but I get how it also destroys communities really easily, so… tradeoffs I guess.
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.
I’m happy for the increased userbase, however I’m worried and bracing for the inevitable circlejerking that seems to chase reddit users around.
We have to accept there are different levels of moderation. Lemmy allows for quite a few and there are complex interplays between them. Communities are their members, not their moderators.
