Reddit Migration

I firmly believe that Reddit is too big to actually be useful as anything other than a passive ingestion experience for the overwhelming majority of people there, even the ones who want to be engaged. Major subreddits are too big to actually discuss issues, and the entire comment system is gamified to promote finding new posts in popular subs with a low number of comments with the potential to reach the top of the sub and then posting something biting.

That's not actually a healthy model of interaction, and it actively twists the way we think about topics, both as posters and lurking readers.

A multitude of accessible communities of a few hundred to a couple thousand users on the same topic where those users can actually be seen and heard and engage in a discourse is just better for us all. For each of us individually, for the online communities, and for society as a whole.

The fragmentation is a feature, not a bug.

Yes, there's the very real possibility that some post that you would have been interested in will show up on another website. Maybe that website will federate with the one you're using, so that you can go and fetch it and engage in it directly, temporarily engaging with another community. Maybe it'll happen on a website that doesn't federate, and you'll have to open another browser tab to read it. There will be friction there, sure.

But that friction is a good thing. It makes you make active choices in how you engage, rather than passive ones.

And yes, there's also the possibility that the post never crosses your field of vision, and you never know it exists. That you miss out on it entirely.

But that already happens on Reddit. It happens more times than you can count, as new posts that might be interesting to you get ignored by the subreddit at large and never get upvoted into relevance.

The FOMO is real. I get that. I experience is quite strongly myself. I go down way, way, way too many rabbit holes during my day, because websites like Reddit are designed specifically to make people burn hours scrolling past ads while having interactions of negligible meaning to anyone.

We have the opportunity to do something different now. Something more considered. Something without CEOs and investors who are looking to exploit our psychology and our passions to line their pockets. Instead, we can take ownership of the space at the infrastructure level and decide what's actually good for us, not just what's easy or what extends session times and clickthrough rates.

And that's a big, huge, massive deal.