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.
Then, why are you here and not on Reddit? Serious question. I’d like Lemmy to be like Reddit too, and I’m here because Reddit doesn’t feel like Reddit anymore. I can’t even say why; it just doesn’t.
Because we have a spine?
I’m here cause it’s what reddit was/could have been.
By which I mean, I used Reddit for my community purposes until the corporation showed profits are more important than those communities. Then I found these alternatives, and while they are smaller and less active, it provides the same engagement of community based knowledge sharing.
Bonus: less of the annoying bullshit that’s crept in seems to be here. I didn’t really realize just how annoying the “Hi didn’t I’m dadbot” comments and seeing that 30 of the 100 comments on a post are roughly the same smarmy pun. I don’t mind them from time to time but every post? I’m fine with useful bots like tl;dr or conversions or whatever, but truly useless spam ones aren’t missed.
When communities aren’t as populated we rely on a more central content feed. Young reddit was the same way. People identified with the site as a whole with advice animal memes and news instead of everyone having their perfect niche subreddit feed that emerged with a huge userbase.
The general feed that we have now is a little immature but that’s how reddit was too. Lemmy or whichever platform succeeds will mature and cater to us eventually but for now it’s kind of like going back in time. It’s weird and fun and definitely good enough. No fucking way I’m being an experiment to some shitheads that don’t respect what reddit is about. It will all be worth it when lemmy develops I think.
Because they killed the good apps. Now that sync exists for Lemmy I’m here.
And while I dislike the development of some of my subreddits in the last few years it’s not much different here. A comfortable number of users is simply difficult to reach, but not exceed.