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.
Oh poop.
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.
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
Yes! This is what I think I was attempting to get across in another comment, but you said it better. In my opinion, it’s difficult or impossible to create a number of niche, high-value communities if the overall number of people is kept quite low. You end up with only general topics forums like you mentioned. Based on what I’ve heard so far, I think my opinion is - in order to get those niche communities (that I’m certainly hoping I’m able to find on here someday, as those are the ones that I spent the most time on and was most heavily invested in), those larger, more general communities also have to exist and have to exist with a large enough userbase to allow the branching off to occur successfully. I think limiting to a small number of total people kind of stifles the cool things a larger number of (good faith) people could create together. But, I’m very new here, so I’m interested to read others’ thoughts!
Edit: I seem to always remember one thing I forgot to say right after posting. I agree with most commenters here who say they prefer a small community - I just think that in order to get that for particular topics you’re most interested in, it likely takes a large number of overall people, versus keeping it a small number of people with only general topics available, if that makes sense?
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.
Yeah. There are some communities that I can see having a hard time swallowing the initial entry into this place. Kerbal Space Program, Hyun’s Dojo and other more niche communities are the first that come to mind for me
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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
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Upvote for your username ;-)
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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 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 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).
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.
I fully agree with you. My only concern is that we’re missing some quality of life improvements. Like it takes two clicks to either go to the All page or my Subscribed mags, these can take one. Just put it in the header. Notifications need to be more visible, I didn’t know I had any until I was trying to switch to my Subscribed view. Images should be viewable without having to go through multiple clicks. It’s small things that make the experience a little less tedious.
Okay now this is completely dictated by which instance you use. I see that you’re on kbin.social as well, but other instances may have this fleshed out already.
These QoL features - and others, such as comment collapsing - are in the pipeline. Ernest knows people want these features or are frustrated with parts of the kbin UX for now.
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
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.
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.
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
The upvoting system rates a post in relation to other posts and does not depend on a large user base.
The quality of posts depends on the type of users, and that can be better managed in medium-sized platforms like Beehaw and its application-style subscription.
On those two aspects, the Fediverse is already better than Reddit for me, especially on Beehaw.
Only in niche areas is a large user base still beneficial. However, I am confident that over time, niche communities will emerge on the Fediverse.
