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?

  • Dane@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • frogman [he/him]@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • hawkwind@lemmy.management
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      1 year ago

      That doesn’t make any sense, other than beehaw can moderate. Anyone can read, post, upvote or subscribe. All fediverse users.

      • chris.@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        That doesn’t make any sense, other than beehaw can moderate.

        i mean, yeah. “beehaw can moderate” is the whole point of beehaw existing

  • abhibeckert@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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).

  • upforitbutnotdownforit@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Jorgelino328@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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

    • KnoxHarrington@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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!)

  • NausetJF@vlemmy.net
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Rannoch@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • slaytswiftfan@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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

  • Spudger@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • can@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Autumn@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Pixel@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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

  • HandsHurtLoL@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Veraticus@lib.lgbt
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • chris.@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    100% agree. in my experience in various internet communities (both centralized & federated) over the years, small-medium sized communities have a lot more fruitful, intelligent, high quality content & discussion than larger ones, & once a community starts to go above the size of medium, a large part of the content takes a nosedive no matter how much the community tries to preserve the same vibe. the problem is simply scale - while it’s definitely possible to have a well-run large community, it’s a lot harder, & requires a lot more people & logistics than many internet moderation teams even have. thus, enshittification ensues.

    hell, even large companies like facebook & twitter have basically given up on moderation recently, & while part of that is no doubt due to apathy on the parts of leadership, i’d bet my dinner that the other large part is just simply a result of just how hard it is to moderate sites that big. at some point even growing the team & hiring/volunteering more moderators doesn’t even help, because now you have to deal with the issues that come with coordinating across such a large team (setting consistent rules/lines, ensuring everyone is moderating to code, power mods, etc). once you get to the point where your commmunity & team are that large, moderating just becomes a mess & a chore for everyone.

    imo small communities are where the fediverse shines, & where a lot of people are just missing the point by trying to grow as big as possible. trying to grow an instance to be as large as possible… just doesn’t make much sense on the fediverse. the issue with small communities on centralized platforms has always been simple numbers - when there’s not enough people in a community, it dies. you can’t talk with other communities or import the minds that feed them content, so the only choice is to grow the one you’re on. therefore, the only way to survive is to have more & more users on a single server.

    federation resolves this issue by letting small communities congregate & interact with each other. it essentially eliminates the above problem by letting all the small, scattered communities form into a large community on posts/threads/comments without having to take on the issues that comes with taking said community fully under their wings. i could make a single user instance right now, & still be a part of the overall community here & everywhere else. here we don’t have to follow the tenet of infinite growth to ensure our survival, & we can actually focus on cultivating our community instead. (defederation is imo just as crucial to this aspect as federation, but this comment is already getting too long so that’s another topic for another day)

    from what i’ve seen, the only reason why people want lemmy to grow as big as possible is either because they want lemmy to be reddit, or because they want to get “revenge” on the reddit app situation by seeing the company bleed users & die. but lemmy is not reddit in any sense but the ui & basic concept, most lemmy instances cannot hold all of reddit’s users, & despite some of our best efforts, reddit is not even close to dying. imo lemmy users focusing so much on reddit is just like when people focus on their ex after a breakup - it’s a lot healthier & more rewarding to just move on & focus on building something better.