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?
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.