I know of Reddit and I have an account that I use every so often. I have never felt the need for a site like Digg or Reddit, because I don’t feel the need to look at what people are sharing and reading, and promoting or demoting. For a long time it felt like a website that had users, but had not updated it’s UI for years.
The Issue
The problem with Reddit, Digg, lemmy, kbin and other alternatives is that they’re large enough for everything to be shared within seconds, and you get trolled if you share something that someone else has already seen. That trolling discourages me from doing anything more than lurking.
I came across Lemmy, Kbin and one or two other Fediverse alternatives over the last three or four days. It’s interesting that an alternative to reddit is ready, and seeing a growth in users, but at the same time it feels like part of the same problem, in a different networked environment.
The decentralised centralised environment
On paper the notion that we can have niche servers, and distributed communities that can talk within their ecosystem, as well as externally is great because if one server goes down then there are 20 others to switch too. The issue is that the toxic behaviour that stems from large communities doesn’t end just because people jump from Twitter to Mastodon et al. It doesn’t end because people jump from Reddit to Kbin, Lemmy et al.
Reddit’s Momentum
Yesterday I searched for something and I got Reddit discussion results. If everyone stopped using Reddit today, or tomorrow, then it would take weeks, or months for Lemmy, Kbin and other alternatives to rise up in the search engine results, to dethrone Reddit. This means that although users could migrate, and leave Reddit to become a ghost network, it still has plenty of content to serve, in theory for decades.
An Amusing Phrase
On several Fediverse instances I see people say “I need to figure out how I’m going to use this.” To me the answer is simple. “You’re going to use it like you used the site you emigrated from.” For me the real question is “How long will it take for the sites to reach critical mass, for the open source versions to become self-sustaining and compelling to use. Identi.ca and other solutions never took off.
And Finally
I have joined Lemmy instances out of curiousity, and so far I find them not to be about the topics that interest me. It could take a while for them to pick up on those topics. In practice it would be easy to create the topics I want to discuss. For now, like others, I am lurking. I will keep blogging, whilst people move around between the monoliths, and the Fediverse.
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