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 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
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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!
Art Vandelay? Is he your latex importer?
Importer exporter
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 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’s definitely a weird & difficult balance to try and hit - grow enough to sustain enough active, interesting communities for folks to want to stick around longterm, but not big enough to turn into whatever reddit/twitter/other sites have become. I’m not really sure how to do that, and my only main thought so far as a brand new user here is that it was surprisingly confusing, at least for someone like me with very little technical knowledge/etc. I definitely had to take a sort of “leap of faith” and power through the confusingness to get to this point where I have an account, an instance, am interacting, etc, but I am a little worried that other communities/people who would help create and build awesome communities on here will be confused or discouraged enough to not make it past understanding the site, instances/communities, finding communities they’re interested in, etc.
Edit: rereading your comment, I especially felt the “seeing little activity” thing. I’ve been poking around trying to find communities to subscribe to, to build a page for myself that offers enough of the things I’m interested in, but have been finding most communities empty, mostly empty, or nonexistent, which is unfortunate. I know that logically I can create my own communities if I want, but I don’t really know how to do that and start from scratch, so I unfortunately then just end up not being a part of communities I’d be interested in being a part of, and I imagine many others hit the same wall.
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!)
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.
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.
You’re allowed to say ‘shit’ on the internet.
A situation that I could see evolving over time is Lemmy/Kbin instances that are focused on a single or small number of subjects instead of being reddit-like and having a space for everything under the sun.
I can imagine that administration of such an instance would be easier in some ways because of the more narrow focus of the site. For example a 3D printing focused instance could have it’s own sections for news, memes, reviews, etc. In such an instance a politics section could be focused on only politics dealing with 3D printing. All other political submissions get purged. Nice and tidy, and with clear rules that are easy to follow and understand site wide. Nobody cries about “censorship” because you don’t have warring camps antagonizing each other in the first place.
Instances like that could also choose to only federate with related instances with similar focuses knowing that many of the problems that come along with massive discussion forums are at least abated.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.