Reddit while still having good user generated content has become an utter shithole as platform.
Just shows how powerful network effects are.
Just shows how powerful network effects are.
Even Mastodon bungles and messes up very simple things like uploading a PNG image, and it's not trying to match even 80% of reddit's functionality.
There is this hard to place aura about it, that the closest word I would use to describe it might be elitism. Despite being prescriptively and almost cloyingly inclusive at times, it’s still somehow not a place for all people and walks. Contrast that to a place like Facebook or Reddit, and even if you’re uneducated, technologically limited, and by all accounts living a most ordinary and unexamined life, you can find a community to welcome you. The fediverse really doesn’t have space for that sort of person, or really even folks who just empathize with such people and don’t mind them around.
And yes I know the fediverse is beautifully principled in that it’s not one thing or platform or instance and anyone can make their own blah blah but that’s not really how it plays out.
I don’t think the fediverse is a bad thing. But I do think it’s more of a home for the kind of people who love RSS feeds and classical music and vim and GPL and adblockers than it is for the huddled masses that comprise the majority of internet space.
To be honest i don't even care about that. As a user i want a place to store my thoughts, outside the impossibly juvenile corporate gardens, even if very few people read it. And if censorship becomes too much of a problem i can still create my own instance.
I mean if you want to join an instance with no rules that is a hive of horror and villainy, I'm pretty sure they are out there. They just won't be widely federated.
Basically, 99% of the people on the Fediverse are tech-savvy, anti-corporate, chronically-online people*. Which also means that there's a much smaller population, because it only consists of these types of people. Meanwhile, there are more "normal" people on Reddit so it has more/more active communities and the viewpoints are more diverse.
It's ironic seeing Lemmy have even worse left-wing bias than Reddit, because there's a lot of left-center people on Reddit, but mostly only radical leftists are motivated to participate in Lemmy.
* Excluding the nearly-separate Fediverse of right-wing groups, who move to alternative platforms because they're banned from centralized ones. Except it's also an extreme echo-chamber, just a different one.
Early Quora was a bit like that. I also used to visit a non-English website with a blog section that was amazing - wide variety of mostly smart people with memorable personalities and diverse set of opinions. There were heated debates on various topics, humor, technical posts about some niche field and a specific atmosphere, it felt a bit like a small-town pub. It was not an echo-chamber like most places today, probably because there was no comment voting. Little to no moderation. I still remember a lot of the people, which I can't say about HN or Reddit.