I think it’s a boon that we’re a tiny fraction of Reddit’s size. Reddit is something like 30+ million MAUs and Lemmy dropped recently from 62k to ~50k. We’re a grain of sand compared to Reddit, and I think the community is better for it.
Lemmy isn’t really a Reddit alternative. We’re too small to have niche thriving communities, and depend 100% on sorting your feed by “all” or “local” to get new content. What’s nice is it feels like one close knit community vs closed off micro communities inside of subreddits.
I get exposed to more things this way oddly enough- viewing content I normally wouldn’t in favor of my smaller selection of subreddits. People are more polite, more informative, and far more original with their comments.
Keep on doing your thing, everyone! We’re building something different here.
Reddit did some things right, somehow. Through good decisions made by people who were probably let go later, or whatever they hashed out a workable structure for a theoretically infinite number of topics to be held and, to some extent, managed. That’s good.
The bad of course is the corporate nature of it which we’re seeing in all it’s glory as they do all they can to goose the monetization ahead of the IPO so the executives, etc. etc.
I think Lemmy/kbin’s real test is yet to come when people who don’t normally post their actual thoughts (as opposed to hot takes, recycled memes, or other “easy” content like simple reactions) step out to do that - hopefully. The “test” is that they should be comfortable and happy to do it, and the userbase’s test is to let them without reacting in a kind of ‘default reddit’ mode.
Anybody who was on a BBS or a message board or usenet or used/uses RSS or has a “home base” of a small community knows what that’s like. We see it in little pockets here and there - sometimes as a new, non-reddit type of post, sometimes as a reaction against a typical reddit-type of post (who’s spamming random? whatever.) But it’s fun to anticipate and whenever it happens that users feel lemmy/kbin have hit their stride it will certainly be different from whatever reddit is now. How, we don’t know yet. But it’s set up such that it has a really good chance to be good.
Reddit succeeded despite itself. Ultimately they stumbled into a secret formula that other social media sites couldn’t figure out: somewhat decentralized, unpaid moderators by the thousands. The competitive advantage it gives them over other sites is truly hard to overstate.