I’ve been on Reddit for too long. It’s so good at just eating away at the most precious resource we have. Time.
However, for all its faults it has been the absolute best platform for getting “help” on the internet. I put that in quotes to specifically generalize it. Not degrade it. One of my hobbies is 3d printing, both FDM and SLA. I am terrible at it! I have problems all the time. If I am struggling and needed support I rarely went to discord. I went to Reddit. Discord is a never ending stream of thoughts. It wasn’t organized. I can’t easily search it for answers. And if someone helped me or I help someone else, on Reddit it would persist and be indexed. On Reddit people were there to help me make sense of all this insane technology.
I can extend this to finding trustworthy service providers in my area, or career advice, or a place to help me walk back from the ledge when it’s 12:30pm on a Sunday and my dog just threw up…
The thing that made Reddit great, to me, was the smaller communities where you could find genuine people who wanted to help you.
So how will that sense of community survive in a federated world where anyone can spin up their own node.
On hacker news, since the protest started, I have seen so many posts by people promoting their Reddit alternative projects. And they are commendable. But I’m just worried. Everything is fracturing.
If 5-10% of redditors got to Lemmy. And maybe 0.05% go to each of the random Reddit alternatives… will any of them reach that critical mass of passionate helpful experts?
This is what I’m afraid of losing by turning off Reddit.
Anyway Apollo forever. Screw u/spez
I’ve had the same thoughts. Just looking at Lemmy’s list of instances to join there are already hundreds of them. Many with duplicate topics. Where is everyone going? Which one will become the main instance for a given topic?
But I guess that’s what happened with subreddits as well(?) I wasn’t there from day one, so I don’t truly know. But there appear to have always existed one main subreddit for a topic, and then dozens of subreddits to cover all the subsections and niche areas of the topic. Looking at it like that it appears that the fractures have always existed. They just all existed under the same parent domain instead of under multiple different ones which is where we’re going now.
It’ll either create leaders or clans of enthusiasts for things. Before, there was only one leadership team on a topic, but now there can easily be many.
For example, there can only be one photography community on Reddit. Sure other ones with different names but only one with that name. With Lemmy, there could be one on every instance or just one. No one gets to decide the community, and it’s culture.
I call this out because the photography subreddit was trash. There wasn’t any way to replace leadership to better grow the community without making a new one with a somewhat familiar name.
Makes sense and I hope you’re right! Can’t tell you how many subreddits I saw suffixed by “new” or “2” lol
Or with the _r32 suffix. So many of those.