I joined reddit in 2009 after lurking for maybe a year. It felt as small as the fediverse and that’s what made it good. Instead of it being a gigantic nightmare machine it was just talking with the usernames I recognised on a silly forum where I could make a subforum for anything I was interested in at the moment. Every subreddit I started or got involved with early grew in quality until 50k subscribers and then mutated into something only recognisable as worse.
Having been on the internet since 1995, the golden ideal is just a basic forum where you can talk with weird friends. That’s it. Nothing feels better than the close-knit World of Warcraft guild or hobbyist forum. It doesn’t matter if that has five members or 50k, but beyond that it’s so far outside of our Dunbar number that it stops being what we liked about the place. I’d hate to be on a fediverse with the traffic of reddit. It’d just make me leave for something like Hexbear again.
It still has room for growth, but the happy spot is when you can get like 3-5 good posts per subcommunity per day with 10-50 comments per post. That’s a few good conversations between known community members that you can jump into without the content volume being too under/overwhelming. Beyond that the amount of activity is so high that we have to game the algorithm to compete with strangers. Hexbear seems like it’s right below the low-end of that with our federated commenters and it’s a pleasant user experience. Back when it was /r/chapotraphouse with 100k~ subscribers, it could still maintain that feeling but was already reaching the point of oversaturation that a subreddit like /r/hasanpiker now has. Each thread had like 50-100+ comments with the majority being filler or algorithm bait.
I joined reddit in 2009 after lurking for maybe a year. It felt as small as the fediverse and that’s what made it good. Instead of it being a gigantic nightmare machine it was just talking with the usernames I recognised on a silly forum where I could make a subforum for anything I was interested in at the moment. Every subreddit I started or got involved with early grew in quality until 50k subscribers and then mutated into something only recognisable as worse.
Having been on the internet since 1995, the golden ideal is just a basic forum where you can talk with weird friends. That’s it. Nothing feels better than the close-knit World of Warcraft guild or hobbyist forum. It doesn’t matter if that has five members or 50k, but beyond that it’s so far outside of our Dunbar number that it stops being what we liked about the place. I’d hate to be on a fediverse with the traffic of reddit. It’d just make me leave for something like Hexbear again.
Hear hear, lemmy is perfect like it is, leave it alone. I’m frankly fine with this reddit dork staying put.
It still has room for growth, but the happy spot is when you can get like 3-5 good posts per subcommunity per day with 10-50 comments per post. That’s a few good conversations between known community members that you can jump into without the content volume being too under/overwhelming. Beyond that the amount of activity is so high that we have to game the algorithm to compete with strangers. Hexbear seems like it’s right below the low-end of that with our federated commenters and it’s a pleasant user experience. Back when it was /r/chapotraphouse with 100k~ subscribers, it could still maintain that feeling but was already reaching the point of oversaturation that a subreddit like /r/hasanpiker now has. Each thread had like 50-100+ comments with the majority being filler or algorithm bait.