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?
You’re allowed to say ‘shit’ on the internet.
This guy right here, officer.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I think it aligns with Beehaw’s values. Not sure if a couple 100k of users, specifically, but not wanting to be so big that the sense of community is gone (and that’s only achievable with smaller numbers).
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!
lol! I always whisper to myself “the cuuuuube!”, kind of like Crush from Finding Nemo, whenever you pop up in a post.
Upvote for your username ;-)
lol! Thanks. :P
See, I hear “Baggins” in Gollum’s voice, for you.
Art Vandelay? Is he your latex importer?
I’m an architect! 😂
I’m just glad there isn’t the dang karma thing. That was a downfall to many folks and posts and not so great content. Also larger instances right now are shuddering from the Reddit hug.
Really good point on karma, hadn’t really thought about fediverse not having it until now. Hopefully it cuts down on a lot of the trash.
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 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.
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.
No! Most certainly not. Keep it small, keep it safe!
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 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.
