Digg was more self-immolation than failure. Reddit succeeded by being the place people fled to from Digg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4
Reddit is on the same path, but it's more of a slow burn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4
Reddit is on the same path, but it's more of a slow burn.
Sounds like Reddit. When I go to reddit, I use "old.reddit.com". I hate the new version, once old.reddit disappears, I disappear too.
You've got your Lemmys and Lobsters and so on, but none of them are a centralized catch-all. I can't (for example) go to Lobsters and talk about Star Trek in a /r/DaystromInstitute equivalent, and the official equivalent running on Lemmy is far from equivalent to what the subreddit was before all this chaos.
It's kind of the same deal with Twitter. Twitter was the place ~everyone went to as forums collapsed. Now there's [Discord, new forums, Reddit, 9000 different ActivityPub platforms, Bluesky, Cohost, ...] and none are quite a match for what even the narrowest niche used Twitter for. You could easily go from your forum chat threads and topical threads and recreate that experience on Twitter with a high level of fidelity. Digg->Reddit was similar.
There's no obvious match for the centralized platforms because they sucked up all the energy for creating new centralized platforms that existed before.
To say that product is going to replace twitter is -imo- just wrong.
When Reddit started to do stupid things, some people moved to lemmy but it wasn't as clear cut... I guess distributed networks are always a bit harder to get traction.
Before anyone replies with "the fediverse"… I've heard people talking about Mastodon etc. for years now and afaict it's still a fringe nerd thing that most people outside techie HN-adjacent circles haven't heard of. It doesn't seem remotely comparable to Reddit in terms of popularity, or potential popularity.
Mastodon recently blew past 15m users, though, so not nothing.