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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fragmentation will be a huge problem if we want Lemmy and Kbin to succeed. We can’t have 45000 technology communities with 45000 duplicate posts with 45000 different discussions under these posts. We need a way to unify all this in the clients and that, to me, seems like a pretty big issue as you can’t just get all the posts and merge them without ddosing all the Lemmy instances or without other unwanted side effects
I saw an issue that would allow admins to just point a sub to another server, if that community grows more. seems like a reasonable idea.
It doesn’t help when the same user posts the same thing over a bunch of instances. It’s obnoxious.
I disagree. To me, instances are like countries with their own constitution (rules) and police (mods). This means that two communities in different instances may seem the same, but they are not, because they have to follow the rules and culture of their instance.
Just like a PS5 club in Germany will not be the same as the PS5 club in the US because they will be culturally different. I think it will take some time for the Fediverse to think this way.
For me, this is better. Instead of having one giant technology community where your comments and posts are drowned out, we can have different technology communities with their own culture and norms, just like we visit different countries. Your comment and posts will be not drowned out.
It is a different paradigm to the centralised one of Reddit.
You can have /r/technology and /r/tech and /r/technews etc…
It’s a problem that resolves itself. One community or the other will “win”.
And if not, whatever. On Reddit, my home city has two subreddits. The content between them is slightly different (different mod teams) and the comments on duplicate posts are different. I subscribed to both to see slightly different opinions and avoid echo chamber.
Let’s not think about the Reddit of today, let’s think about Reddit of old. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
I can agree with this to a degree, but can’t we just not think of reddit? I mean, back then, I don’t recall redditors obsessing over other sites as much as I have seen on lemmy. Digg was the top dog, and I don’t recall daily threads about reddit’s numbers or how it wasn’t matching up.
It was just it’s own thing and not constantly comparing itself to it’s alleged competition. I feel like that helped it grow into it’s own thing, and we should give lemmy a chance to do the same instead of trying to turn it into reddit 2.0. That said, I might just be forgetting—there could’ve been constant ‘sky-is-falling-because-we-aren’t-Digg’ posts—but I just don’t recall them.
True. I think it is important to understand the social media landscape is much different now. 2008 was when Facebook was getting started too.
We’re going to need a bigger boat
Nah just spread the load over bunch smaller boats, a few dinghys and a couple of cruise ships to keep it going in the right direction.
