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.

  • Pasta Dental@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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

    • starlinguk@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      It doesn’t help when the same user posts the same thing over a bunch of instances. It’s obnoxious.

    • Mereo@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • travysh@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • dbilitated@aussie.zoneEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.