This is going to be a short and sweet little history of Reddit. Reddit was founded in 2005.

Take a look at what Reddit looked like in 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20061206235353/http://reddit.com/

Note that it didn’t have subreddits back then because the user base was too small.

Look at Reddit in 2008 (December 31): https://web.archive.org/web/20081231080128/http://www.reddit.com/reddits/

Politics had just 72,314 subscribers. Technology had 85,678 subscribers, and the “Nicher” Food subreddit had only 4,438 subscribers.

Lemmy/Kbin follows the same path. Initially, generalist communities like Politics and Technology will have the most momentum and gain subscribers, just like Reddit did back then. As the user base grows, “niche” communities will be able to sustain themselves.

Let’s not think about the Reddit of today, let’s think about Reddit of old. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

  • Punctum@feddit.deEnglish
    5·
    11 months ago

    Yeah. Eventually there’ll be another meltdown. There always is. At that point , it’d be great to have established structures, a simplified onboarding and a compelling app ecosystem.

    • metrics@programming.devEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      Biggest problems I see with Lemmy right now is servers going down, defederation for petty reasons, and duplicated communities fracturing a user base. I’ve also noticed users with the same name on different instances but it’s not always clear if that’s the same user or a clone. i basically quit Reddit cold Turkey when I lost use of Apollo and I’d been there since well before the Digg migration. I’m looking forward to seeing how the Lemmy community resolves the issues I noted, no doubt they will.

    • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukEnglish
      0·
      11 months ago

      The other two are being worked on but onboarding will always be tricky as people have to get their head around instances. It’s not too tricky but still a hurdle.

      The join a server page could do with an improvement - perhaps let people add their location and interests and offer them a more filtered list with some data like active users and uptime.

      • setVeryLoud(true);@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        11 months ago

        I kinda wish the Fediverse took an SSO approach to instance sign-in, where you can log into your account that’s on your instance, from any instance that is federated with yours.

        The sign in would be handled entirely by your instance, and it would then give something like a JWT token to the federated instance to certify that you are signed in.