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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

> The engagement reason is the simplest, so let's look at that first. Just looking at where people spend their time, short-form platforms like Twitter, Instagram, etc., completely dominate longer form platforms

That might be the reason. I'd rather poke my eyes than "hang out" on Twitter or Mastodon. My day worsens by the minute the longer I am on those websites, with the amount of bad takes and terrible idea slogans.

I hate the Twitter style posts because I exist outside that all-consuming bubble of neurosis.

Reddit is dead, HN is alive and kicking, so this is basically my front page of the Internet (:

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>Reddit is dead

Reddit is different.

Reddit still holds a lot of value for me only in the subs I join. The smaller the community (niche) the more likely politics or social topic of the week will not get inserted into a post.

Stay off /r/all and the main politics-esc subs (There are many now) and it is fine.

How is lemmy nowadays?

When the Reddit strike started, I tried Lemmy for a few weeks. Absolutely the only content that got any discussion was posts about how Reddit was bad or about Lemmy itself (both criticizing the owners and extolling the platform). I was interested in programming posts but there was almost nothing interesting there :( so I was quite happy when Reddit came back (it seems to have come back to normal levels now).

> Absolutely the only content that got any discussion was posts about how Reddit was bad or about Lemmy itself

I call this the new social death spiral. When meta-discussion dominates for too long, it kills the community. I'm surprised Mastodon has lasted for as long as it has for precisely this reason.

Mastodon definitely got a critical mass of non-Mastodon subject matter.

Yeah, this is kind of a problem with a lot of 'alternative' social media sites and platforms. They become places where the majority of discussion is "why the existing site/service is trash and why the people using it are idiots/wrong"

But that's not an interesting topic to discuss, at least not for very long. A community based on negativity towards an existing community is built on sand, and probably isn't going to last very long.

So they need to find a way to attract people who discussing 'normal' things, and don't spend every waking moment of their life being obsessed with the platform/the old platform.

Looking at https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy The Reddit exodus brought "active users" from ~0 to 70k. Half of them have left again since then.

That matches my subjective perception. Activity has significantly waned again. Larger communities are good (e.g. !europe@feddit.de). Smaller ones (e.g. !rpg@ttrpg.network) were good but are dying now.

It would be good timing for another exodus scandal by Reddit now.

At least the "generic" instances are full of edgy far-left wannabe-revolutionaries and wannabe-intellectuals.

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