I know Kbin will grow in time but I miss how huge Reddit was.
I don’t. I like how I can comment on something and not have it buried. Engagement is much higher here
Yeah–I constantly read about how people liked reddit back in the day, or liked digg, but don’t connect it to the fact that the reason why they were better back in the day was because they were smaller and more intimate (for lack of a better word).
I’m excited for the fediverse to grow, but for me it’s already reached that critical mass for it to be engaging
That intimacy was still available on Reddit, but you needed to dig into the niche subs to find it. Commenting on large subs was definitely a cup of water in the ocean feeling.
Oh absolutely–that’s really the only reason I was able to stay on reddit. I do miss some of those smaller communities, but have resorted to actual forums now (if applicable), or just going without.
Shoutouts to the fiberglassflyrodders.com forums
Niche sub is just another way of saying echo chamber. Reddit was shit, every part of it
Right. Those damn knitters and their echo chamber of knitting tricks.
I dare you go say an unpopular opinion in a knitting sub, lets see how good it goes for you
Post something that is clearly crochet
Settle down Hitler
And wow, those doctrinaire twits on /r/fountainpens were to hard to bear. So I like Hongdian pens. Sue me!
Try telling them knitting sucks and they should be crocheting.
Ehh…as someone who was on Reddit and Digg back in the day, they were much larger than Lemmy currently is.
Sure but the fediverse isn’t just Lemmy. I’m commenting through kbin right now for example.
They weren’t born large. Reddit was seeded with content by the developers before the users came. The secret to growing a community is to grow a community. It all has to start somewhere and frankly, fediverse is starting with a much stronger kick start than digg and Reddit ever had.
Reddit was seeded with content by the developers before the users came.
That makes me wonder how people would feel about copying content from other platforms using bots in order to boost some communities. Those that have <1k subscribers could use some seeding.
There’s a project underway to do just that @BotIt
As someone who was on Reddit and Digg way way back in the day, there was a point where they were about the size of what Lemmy currently is.
hear, hear! i don’t miss all the spam and bots.
The UI definitely needs an update. Need more distinction between comments.
You can try changing appearance theme found in the settings (gear) icon towards the bottom. Helped with differentiating comments.
I do agree that UI needs improvement which will eventually come.
It’s great to know that people actually read and respond to your comments imo.
Same thing on mastodon, you can actually have conversations there
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I understand this only because my husband still is looking at reddit. I had to have a talk with him as to why I am changing platforms, the point of not visiting a site during a protest, and how Lemmys and kbin need time to grow. He was looking at news and he said “well your site doesn’t have anything! It’s basically empty where am I supposed to go for discussion!”
I told him he needs to either just view the news sites directly and contribute, or just try to curb usage and allow the sites time to grow. Use your phones native news app for now, whatever it takes to not add to Reddits ad revenue and user count.
If this was reddit, you’d be smothered in replies asking why you haven’t left your husband yet.
Red flags everywhere, you know I’d forgotten that was everyone’s response on reddit!
I mean, there’s a lot of content here already.
Yeah it’s not the same endless dopamine drip feed conveyor belt that is Reddit, but there’s plenty of content to engage with.
Yeah it’s not the same endless dopamine drip feed conveyor belt that is Reddit
Which sure as hell isn’t a bad thing!
I’ve been enjoying commenting and having a more social experience here rather than endlessly lurking :)
Leaving reddit has made me start looking at actual websites for content and then if I like it I bring it back here. Where in reddit everything was pretty much guaranteed to already been linked somewhere. I know if this community get big the same thing will happen. But for now I actually feel a part of the community instead of just passively experience the community.
My SO still uses it and I would rather he not but I’m still using technology created by slave labor and taking 1 hour long showers. Reddit is going to be there, it’s not going anywhere, and they’ll keep doing whatever they’re doing but I’m here because it was a good excuse to leave and find somewhere else. Yeah they suck just like Walmart and spectrum and att and Coca-Cola and nestle and every single corporation. I’m not gonna start a fight over whose corporate addiction is worse though.
On the contrary, the smallest communities are the most fun and enjoyable to interact in. The big ones are just good for making sure there’s always fresh content on /r/all every few hours. It’ll grow. This is just the first big migration wave, there will be more when the third party apps shut off and there will be more again once people start realizing it’s not just a tiny forum experiment no one cares about.
The current communities are a bit too small to be really engaging. There’s often only a handful of comments instead of a wealth of discussion. It will grow and they will get better, but it’s understandable that some people are feeling the content is a bit hollow currently. I bet another doubling in size (very doable) would easily bring us to the activity level needed for things to be lively and fresh.
Yup and that’s the reason I think it is crucial now to stay here and be active instead of going back just because the learning heard goes after the memes. As Valdair said, it’ll grow step by step now that a proper alternative exists. Everyone just needs to do their part, either by posting, commenting or developing.
Or a handful of votes but no comments. I’m trying to be more interactive here. I’ve already made three posts and over 50 comments, hoping that more involvement will encourage others to be involved, too.
idk about smallest XD I think there’s a certain size of critical mass to have enough people on enough of the time to make a thriving community or subreddit or magazine. On Reddit I think it was probably around 10,000 nominal subscribers that a subreddit really felt alive for me! In the high-100,000s though it starts to feel impersonal instead of like a community.
Small is fine if everyone contributes. I made an opinion question post on the Harry Potter (I don’t know the words for everything here yet but a Harry Potter sub, lol) that got a handful of upvotes, but no one commented, so it’s just me. Lonely little me.
Better to be a grower than a shower
It took me an embarrassing long time to process the word “shower” in that phrase lol.
Ohh I get it now.
I’m gonna go have a bath.
Reddit feels like it grew exponentially the last few years. I noticed a huge increase in the number of accounts with auto-generated usernames and accounts referring to Reddit as an “app.” To me it also seemed to become increasingly toxic with this new wave of users. Hoping for a big reset with one of these new offshoots.
Around 2019 is when I noticed that shift.
I had an account from 2010, and over the course of the 2016 US presidential election is when I started noticing the shift. Society seems to have shifted in general. MeToo and BLM coincided around that time, as well.
2013 for me. There definitely was a shift in volatility in 2016, but I felt there was a far more drastic shift in 2019.
There was absolutely a phase shift in the atmosphere of Reddit when it grew exponentially.
Used to be, people were willing to discuss topics in ways that had at least some nuance. But nowadays you get attacked for discussion that doesn’t fit the narrow guidelines of “acceptable”.
Still, the smaller communities of Reddit retain some of the open-minded discussion that’s lost in big subs.
Hopefully here we can grow to a respectably sized community, while still allowing the freedom of dissenting opinion.
Without algorithms that target division to increase numbers, that might actually be possible here in a way that’s non-existent on the corporate platforms. But it’ll be a difficult achievement.
You also forget about those memes or pictures whose specific joke was understood only when you saw them through a phone. Like, we people on the computer do exist too.
My wife says, “it’s not the size but what you do with it”. And she’s really smart. But seriously, I’m loving the smaller start. We’ll grow, but right now I feel like I’m heard on a level Reddit never offered. Every great journey begins with a single step.
I have size but don’t know what to do with it, can confirm women don’t like that.
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It’s definitely a higher engagement ratio or whatever the right term is for it! I do love that!
I don’t lol, every comment and post I made there was like screaming into the void. The responses you do get in large subs are either tired memes, people trying to argue even though they agree with you, or just straight up bots reposting comments.
I usually only lurked on the larger subs because of that problem
On reddit if you were european you were basically missing the action since the posts were written by americans and already 8 hours old, and your replies would be buried under the hundreds of comments.
Most of the time there was no point if you weren’t present like 1h after a post was made.
The only people who would read your comments would be an AI.
hmmm I do miss some European space on lemmy/kbin. Earlier today there was a question on what communities to add and it got closed even before Europe had woken up.
It’s all still very USA-focused.
I think there’s a size between Reddit and Lemmy that’s ideal. And as Lemmy grows it will get hopefully there. I have no desire to post a comment in a thread with 10k comments. I’m more hopeful that Lemmy will get better than in hopeful that Reddit won’t get worse.
My favorite subreddits were those that had a good 25k active users. Enough that there were a good 2500 active posters and commenters, and people knew each other a little. However, some support subreddits with 100k+ were nice.
How are you counting active users? I’ve checked the subreddits I enjoy and none of them have more than 1k users active right now. Given default subs such as worldnews are showing 33k active users right now, I can assume you’re measuring it differently than I am (as the way I’m measuring has varying results with time).
I also wonder how many active users Lemmy/Kbin instances/communities/magazines have. It would be interesting to know to get a feel for how the amount of active users correlates to the overall feeling of community.
Subscribed users. A large subscribed community (10k+) usually resulted in an active user community (~100 active at any given time)
Yeah, I totally agree here. There is an optimal size. Three people commenting on one post might be too limited, but 10k people commenting on one post is pointless. There’s a middle ground that will be awesome. Also, maybe the slightly more decentralized nature of a federated setup will solve that problem entirely? I can foresee places that do become Reddit size, with islands of tiny intimate communities that preserve the smaller feel that people seem to be enjoying today. Only time will tell!
Just like a bad ex…. Gotta just let it go.
I do too BUT, it’s nice to actually get to engage with people when I make a comment due to the smaller community. Reddit is so big, my comments usually get buried quickly under the memes and quips.
It feels like a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I agree - I was definitely more of a lurker on reddit than a massive contributor (14 years, <30k karma), but I loved how there was always a relevant subreddit for even fairly niche interests. I miss that on the fediverse - but at the same time, I’m hopeful that the fediverse will, in time, gain wider attention. I don’t miss the low quality content, but I miss the sheer volume of content, and with careful curation of subreddits, managing the signal to noise ratio was easy enough.
kbin could be a bit bigger, but the collective reddit personality is downright insufferable, and I suspect it’s largely because of its size. There are just too many people with opinions as strong as they are different, and we’re often not any better off after our interactions with them.
Plus all the troll bots and fake AI posts.
Meh, I haven’t see a single toxic comment since I came here, althought that will probably eventually change. I don’t expect toxicity will become a huge issue. Every time I’ve encountered toxicity on Reddit basically boils down to either covert racism, or false accusations of being a racist.
Have you noticed basically no one downvotes here? The user base seems to be more accessible and emotionally mature in general so far.
There have been a few issues. If you are ever curious, check the moderation log on the right or bottom on mobile. The deleted comments go there
I love your faith in humanity.
Not the entirity of humanity use Lemmy
When I started on Reddit in 2012, it was mostly because I was in Rarotonga and I needed something to entertain myself that didn’t use hoards of data like YouTube did for me at the time and Reddit was largely text and image based so it fit the bill perfectly.
Over the years I definitely saw a cultural shift and the quality of content absolutely dropped but there was still so much of it that I could still lurk…
This fediverse does a pretty good job of capturing that same vibe of text based forums that I’m really enjoying, whilst I totally get what you’re saying about the size of Reddit I’m more than happy to be hanging out here and I actually like the simple interface, reminds me of my Nexus 4 days hah
