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?
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.
Very well said. I think Lemmy can be valuable in how it can build its own culture and community, and after some time I think the Reddit drama will die down, and we can see what we can build here in Federated land.