Many of us have seen it happening in the last 4-5 years. reddit subs, and reddit in general has become a bit s***. Of course there are still good subs, especially the truly niche ones can often have a small helpful crowd. But with 100s of thousands of users, some sub drown in hate and negativity.
I’ve been thinking about why. With the offical reddit app, reddit is as easy as facebook, many people even refer the the platform as an “app”. Perhaps this ease of use attracts the wrong kind of people. This place is currently very far removed from this. You applied to get in, you chose this instance on the fediverse among a selection of other instances.
Calling it a concern would overstating things, but I think maybe we shouldn’t strive to become as ubiquitous as reddit has become. A couple of 100K users on this instance and maybe a couple of million spread across the fediverse is enough users. The ‘gate’ you have to go through to register actually makes this place so much better than reddit.
What are your thought?
Yes! This is what I think I was attempting to get across in another comment, but you said it better. In my opinion, it’s difficult or impossible to create a number of niche, high-value communities if the overall number of people is kept quite low. You end up with only general topics forums like you mentioned. Based on what I’ve heard so far, I think my opinion is - in order to get those niche communities (that I’m certainly hoping I’m able to find on here someday, as those are the ones that I spent the most time on and was most heavily invested in), those larger, more general communities also have to exist and have to exist with a large enough userbase to allow the branching off to occur successfully. I think limiting to a small number of total people kind of stifles the cool things a larger number of (good faith) people could create together. But, I’m very new here, so I’m interested to read others’ thoughts!
Edit: I seem to always remember one thing I forgot to say right after posting. I agree with most commenters here who say they prefer a small community - I just think that in order to get that for particular topics you’re most interested in, it likely takes a large number of overall people, versus keeping it a small number of people with only general topics available, if that makes sense?