I'm not looking for "the next Reddit". I'm looking for community, and reddit lost any semblance of that years ago. If that means we're a smaller instance, fine.

You're allowed to say 'shit' on the internet.

Quality over quantity 👌

i think that's an intrinsic value of beehaw. if someone wants a more "reddit" experience, other prominent instances give that. beehaw curates a safe environment for discussion and by default i think that will make it a smaller community.

As someone that never had a Reddit account* but still read about 18 subs on a daily basis (via Teddit) I was a bit sceptical about the value of signing up for Lemmy. So far, so excellent. It reminds me of the newsgroups I used to frequent 25 years ago. Big enough to be useful, small enough to be comfortable.

*I never had a Facebook or MySpace account either. I used Twitter for a year about a decade ago but it all seemed a bit "look at me" for my taste.

I can see the logic in it, but it's a tough pill to swallow for me. Sometimes not seeing much activity can feel pretty lonely.

I disagree. There are millions of topics that you just can't discuss on the fediverse, because you won't find anyone interested in them.

While having more people obviously makes some things more challenging, just because Reddit failed to deal with that doesn't mean the fediverse will. As evidenced by recent decisions, Reddit is run by idiots. Over here on the fediverse, we can require instances be run by people who know what they're doing - or be defederated. We're already seeing that happen.

Yes, there will be growing pains. I think it's worth it.

Also - you can have your cake and eat it too. An individual instance, maybe even one that decides to defederate itself entirely, can have a small number of users. Those instances will exist if that's what you want.

Also, I don't think we really have a choice. This is a good community already. People will discover it and sign up. We can't stop it (well, we can't stop it on the full fediverse, maybe we can here on Beehaw).

I’m just glad there isn’t the dang karma thing. That was a downfall to many folks and posts and not so great content. Also larger instances right now are shuddering from the Reddit hug.

Not buying it. The main subreddits got crappy when they got flooded with people, but part of having a million billion users is that some of them go off and make the niche subs that are great. A lot of quality is a function of quantity. If I can dodge mud-slinging titans ala r/movies and r/videos with a single "block magazine" click, but get 40 active niche magazines, 3 of which I care about, in exchange for it, that makes the site better.

I'm actually more turned off by the (growing, it seems) protective attitude towards platforms like bluesky/Mastadon/Lemmy/beehaw :/ I don't think making or keeping things less accessible is overall a great mindset for progress — isolationism always does just that, isolates

I would say that any online community at some point reaches critical mass. Heavy modding can mitigate it but it's bound to happen.

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.

No! Most certainly not. Keep it small, keep it safe!

I definitely prefer a smaller community over a large one. I actually feel more inclined to interact with others in a small community like this. It feels less intimidating.

I am reading this and commenting from kbin.social.

I hear you and agree that reddit was peak awful in the past few years, but I do in my heart of hearts want a reddit-like experience.

What I think is intriguing about the Fediverse is that it almost doesn't matter how many people seem to be on any on instance because they mostly talk to each other.

I commented elsewhere two weeks ago that I think reddit's redesign attracted a bunch of users who were looking for a facebook-like experience, and at the risk of falling into the false dichotomy of normies vs redditors, I think the redesign brought too many normies who didn't want to learn reddiquette. I think something that will help kbin immensely is how (I say this lovingly) ugly and mostly featureless it is. There aren't bells and whistles to make it an attractive draw for any other reason besides you want to be here and engage the content and community.

I do hope that as many of these early instances who seem to be "in it" for the right reasons quickly and unequivocally defederate from instances started up by companies like Meta, though.

100% agree. in my experience in various internet communities (both centralized & federated) over the years, small-medium sized communities have a lot more fruitful, intelligent, high quality content & discussion than larger ones, & once a community starts to go above the size of medium, a large part of the content takes a nosedive no matter how much the community tries to preserve the same vibe. the problem is simply scale - while it's definitely possible to have a well-run large community, it's a lot harder, & requires a lot more people & logistics than many internet moderation teams even have. thus, enshittification ensues.

hell, even large companies like facebook & twitter have basically given up on moderation recently, & while part of that is no doubt due to apathy on the parts of leadership, i'd bet my dinner that the other large part is just simply a result of just how hard it is to moderate sites that big. at some point even growing the team & hiring/volunteering more moderators doesn't even help, because now you have to deal with the issues that come with coordinating across such a large team (setting consistent rules/lines, ensuring everyone is moderating to code, power mods, etc). once you get to the point where your commmunity & team are that large, moderating just becomes a mess & a chore for everyone.

imo small communities are where the fediverse shines, & where a lot of people are just missing the point by trying to grow as big as possible. trying to grow an instance to be as large as possible... just doesn't make much sense on the fediverse. the issue with small communities on centralized platforms has always been simple numbers - when there's not enough people in a community, it dies. you can't talk with other communities or import the minds that feed them content, so the only choice is to grow the one you're on. therefore, the only way to survive is to have more & more users on a single server.

federation resolves this issue by letting small communities congregate & interact with each other. it essentially eliminates the above problem by letting all the small, scattered communities form into a large community on posts/threads/comments without having to take on the issues that comes with taking said community fully under their wings. i could make a single user instance right now, & still be a part of the overall community here & everywhere else. here we don't have to follow the tenet of infinite growth to ensure our survival, & we can actually focus on cultivating our community instead. (defederation is imo just as crucial to this aspect as federation, but this comment is already getting too long so that's another topic for another day)

from what i've seen, the only reason why people want lemmy to grow as big as possible is either because they want lemmy to be reddit, or because they want to get "revenge" on the reddit app situation by seeing the company bleed users & die. but lemmy is not reddit in any sense but the ui & basic concept, most lemmy instances cannot hold all of reddit's users, & despite some of our best efforts, reddit is not even close to dying. imo lemmy users focusing so much on reddit is just like when people focus on their ex after a breakup - it's a lot healthier & more rewarding to just move on & focus on building something better.

A situation that I could see evolving over time is Lemmy/Kbin instances that are focused on a single or small number of subjects instead of being reddit-like and having a space for everything under the sun.

I can imagine that administration of such an instance would be easier in some ways because of the more narrow focus of the site. For example a 3D printing focused instance could have it's own sections for news, memes, reviews, etc. In such an instance a politics section could be focused on only politics dealing with 3D printing. All other political submissions get purged. Nice and tidy, and with clear rules that are easy to follow and understand site wide. Nobody cries about "censorship" because you don't have warring camps antagonizing each other in the first place.

Instances like that could also choose to only federate with related instances with similar focuses knowing that many of the problems that come along with massive discussion forums are at least abated.

Here's the thing, for beehaw? yes. absolutely. But for lemmy? we don't get to choose. That's the cool part about federated social media though, is that as a corner of it grows, the whole concept grows. Which is really cool but also kind of an interesting problem for scalability

I agree with your points.

That said I think one of the biggest draws of reddit (to me) was the constant influx of content. You could scroll and scroll and scroll and very rarely see repetitive content and there was always something new.

While this behavior was addictive and probably bad for me, it is something I miss with Lemmy, which just has less content because it has less users. More users would probably solve this problem, but I get how it also destroys communities really easily, so... tradeoffs I guess.

We have to accept there are different levels of moderation. Lemmy allows for quite a few and there are complex interplays between them. Communities are their members, not their moderators.

I personally see Beehaw as like a nice little cozy community and while large communities can be nice and potentially cozy as well, they can also be kind of intimidating.