I’m a Reddit refugee who was on that platform for 10+ years. I saw not just a tremendous amount of controversies, but attempts at introducing alternatives to Reddit during all of them. The 2015 blackout saw a ton of alternatives suggested, and if you go back and look at them many have either not survived or never achieved their stated goal of serving as a viable alternative to Reddit. Places like Voat, Ruqqus, or Parler promptly turned themselves into extremist shitholes and imploded. The truth is most internet communities which found and advertise themselves as an alternative to Reddit die.
However, I think this newest wave of searching for an alternative has more legs than I think I’ve ever seen, and the key to that is the kind of users who are moving. The people who were pissed off by the recent changes are the old guard of the internet. These are the people who still remember searching for and finding RIF, Apollo, or AlienBlue (before it was bought), and have the technical know-how to care about the quality and usability of their platform. I think you all are people who engage with their online spaces with intention, and because of that I believe that we have more of a shot at making this work than I’ve witnessed since I joined Reddit all those many years ago.
In order to make this all work out though, I think it’s really important to cast our thoughts toward what made the websites that have come before us successful. Every single one of these spaces have distinct ways of interaction that indirectly communicate their ideologies. Memes, in-jokes, and lingo form the backbone of online communities and help to direct users back to the source, but they never gain real purchase without a unique viewpoint. I’m pretty sure I can confidently suss out whether a meme comes from 4Chan, Reddit, or Tumblr, just through the message conveyed and the template used. For an online platform to have relevance and draw, I believe it absolutely needs to have an individual and communicable perspective.
Now I am aware that much of this is organically generated, but I think we underestimate how much of it isn’t. The structure of a website clearly communicates to users its core values, and users almost certainly respond to that. The fact that users are by default anonymous on the Chans absolutely contributes to the unique “flavor” of those websites, and the subreddit structure of Reddit allows it to contain a greater variety of clashing values. We can already see some of this on the Fediverse, the tension engendered by the federated instances I think places greater emphasis on building consensus. The fact that an entire server can be excised at will from a group of other like-minded server owners means that one has to always have an eye towards the common consensus, and I think we will see many fights over this in the not-so-distant future.
So as we go forward, and while we are in the most nascent part of this website’s lifespan, I think we should be discussing and commenting on what we think is most important about this space. I’m already seeing that people think that Kbin is “nicer than Reddit” and you’re more convinced that you’re interacting with real people. I think this is all good, and I think that while we’re making content, we need to have an eye on putting that particular spin on all the things we brought over from where we came from. Eventually, we need to get to the place where we’re creating unique meme formats, and having our own slang, but for right now we need to be thinking hard about what we want out of our online lives and how this website can be built to serve those purposes. I think the risk of not doing that, and forever being only a federated Reddit clone is going to leave people forever jonesing for the experiences they had on Reddit, and this space is going to die just like every other attempted alternative has before.
TLDR: Now that we’ve all left Reddit, for this new place to live my opinion is that we need to have more discussions about what our principles are, and we need to make unique content that brings people to this website.
An old internet saying is “if it’s free, you’re the product”, and that’s exactly the problem platforms like reddit are currently encountering. Users leave, delete their old posts, and move elsewhere.
It’s also a problem Lemmy/kbin see, from the other side: you need a critical mass of users to generate enough content to keep running and attracting and keeping users.
Given enough time, the corps will just continue going down the drain, since they’re 100% profit-driven, and short-term gains over long-term sustainability. We here just have to keep going, and preferably in a way that minimizes drama. If one of the big 5 shits the bed and takes a lot of communities with it, the now homeless users might be hesitant to just join somewhere else, at least partially.
That’s why I found it very unfortunate that beehaw defederated from .world and .works – it also happened at a very bad point in time, in the middle of a boom.
If the platform matures enough, and the userbase is stable, it will most certainly grow over time, as the corpo options get worse and worse over time.
We also have to be vigilant and isolate all bad actors immediately. The extremist instances, like lemmygrad and exploding-heads, and the corporate assimilators, like Meta. Else people will not join here, either because we have a bad rep, or because we just get swallowed and spit out again by a tech giant.
I believe a “unique identity” will develop organically, given enough time.
I sure hope so. I’m just worried that we won’t have a mature enough community to strike while the iron is hot. I really want an alternative to succeed, and have for some time. I just fear that if the economy somehow turns around and tech companies start getting their VC money again, all the big companies will just keep on trucking and we’ll all learn entirely the wrong lesson from these experiences. It’ll feel like corporate consolidation of online spaces is an inevitability, and people will just increasingly capitulate. Meanwhile there’ll be an obscure userbase of antiquated posters on this website just quietly plodding along without making any headway, and nobody will come to join us because none of dynamism of a vibrant community exists here.