this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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This is a transition period.
Reddit lost a lot of important contributors during its little krystalspez crackdown. The formula for a successful, self-propagating online community is: good moderation + posted content + interesting comments + lurkers = healthy community.
Reddit still maintains a lot of its heavy posters, but a lot of the interesting comment makers have drifted off... a lot of them moved here. The federated communities don't have the continuous churning content creators en masse yet, but they do have interesting comments coming from the people that are here.
Reddit is somewhat the opposite. The content creators are churning away, but the interesting comments are dying off. There is more content being created on Reddit, but the comment that you will quote, or think about all day, is now slightly more likely to be made in a federated thread.
So Reddit feels hollow, and out here feels growing but still light on content. I predict that prolific posters prefer pointed ripostes to their posting, and will work their way here. That will be great, but it will also drag along a lot of the problem children of reddit as well. That will put a huge burden on the moderation here, as well as start piling on those server fees. I predict in a year or two, we will face the choice of doing zany pledge drives to protect our larger servers, or face some forms of blatant monetization. Also we'll have to figure out how to avoid giving the hug of death to new federated servers with interesting content.
...and there will be hidden corporate shill servers trying to latch in. Another problem with federation we need to consider down the road.
But it's worth it. Capitalism will always try to exploit community, but community is an important human experience. If we can keep the leeches down to a minimum, we can build great things together, and help each other in a world that increasingly only offers what profits most. That type of community is what Reddit pretended to be, and it's what the Federated Communities can be.
This is honestly a great observation, I've noticed on those rare times I need to search for answers to specific questions on reddit, posts have fewer and generally less thorough/helpful comments. The biggest downside to reddit imploding has been the decrease in "real" posts and interactions when you're trying to find genuine discussions or answers to niche questions.
That's the biggest reason I still think Lemmy has a ways to go, there's not really an efficient way for all these posts to be search-indexed for engines like Google, DDG, etc. If that problem can somehow be solved, it'd do wonders for Lemmy's discoverability.
Like you said, there's definitely flaws to this platform, and by nature of being a community center it's likely to be targeted for corporate interests, but the architecture of this Federated platform makes it much easier to keep power in the hands of the community and keep things genuine and interesting over here. I'm just glad I have a place to scroll through where people's comments are longer than a few words, and people seem genuinely interested in interacting.
What are lurkers for if there is no advertising?
I think at some point we are really going to need to look at success stories like Tildes and HackerNews and find the common strategies we can employ to sustain the viabillity and legitimacy of Lemmy.
lmao
It is because it is basically self-sustaining, its already won me over with the quality and rigor of discussions (which exist), and guess what they don't have problems with: moderation and CSAM issues, which Lemmy currently does (alledgedly).
We can argue over the semantics of "successfull" since its a vague overlapping conflation of quantitative and qualitative metrics, but let's try to maintain a productive discussion about allies we can work with to improve our own platform.
Why do lemmy users keep ignoring the obvious success of Mastodon. Its clearly the most successful federated platform. We should be learning from Masto.
That too, yes definitely :)