Digg never had individual communities on Reddit's scale. Reddit has subreddits for every obscure hobby, niche and fetish imaginable, and it's much harder to convince the users already there to jump ship.

Also, once you're logged into Reddit, the friction of exploring a new subreddit is essentially zero. Compare this with needing to sign up and email verify etc every time you want to join some random phpBB forum.

It’s different now. As one of those Digg refugees who has now been looking to ditch reddit for a long time, there just isn’t a good, obvious reddit alternative in the same way there was a good, obvious Digg alternative. The internet is too grown up, too parceled out, the big players are too dominant.

My covid side gig is a modest attempt at starting something: https://discoflip.com

Nah, I think we're fucked now. The Internet is a completely different place than what it was in 2011. Any reddit alternative that springs up now is immediately populated with spammers, conspiracy nuts, identity politic types...you know the types; all the ones that reddit banned. They instantly bring the quality down which makes it unattractive to most people who want to switch. And then it gets shut down e.g. voat. Rinse and repeat.

With each passing day, the Internet looks more and more dire.