AI has certainly killed Reddit.
But where do people turn next? There were a lot of benefits to some of its niche communities.
AI has certainly killed Reddit.
But where do people turn next? There were a lot of benefits to some of its niche communities.
I don't think an alternative exists. Reddit was very unique. The last great BBS (in a sense) that non-Internet natives "got".
Before astroturfing on Reddit at scale was possible, it was an extremely reliable place to get perspectives from real people about loads of things. It's still useful for this purpose, but the same level of trust isn't there.
Now that social networking a la short-form video is "it" right now, I'm not sure if something text-based will thrive again like Reddit did. (People have been trying to make Lemmy the thing, and it's less popular than Mastodon.)
>Before astroturfing on Reddit at scale was possible
It has become so difficult to tell what is karma farming and what is people not bothering to search before asking.
In a strange way, what already started happening to the "other side" of Reddit six or so years ago with the emergence of OnlyFans turning that into a place where people just want to sell you was a precursor to this.
Everything kind of fractured apart and now those niche communities are building up again elsewhere.
Discord has a lot (looking at my discord I see, gaming, programming, clothing/fashion/aesthetic, language, dnd, music, keyboard / hardware, dance, etc... communities).
I've noticed a lot of the major reddit communities have matching communities in the fediverse, specifically the ones with old reddit-like UIs. (lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, mander.xyz, etc...).
I've also noticed a lot of web-standards / browser developers and some gamedevs moved to twitter-style fediverse sites (e.g. mastodon.social, indieweb.social, infosec.exchange, hackyderm.io, floss.social, fosstodon.org, etc...).
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I think the fediverse is working well for the niche communities for three reasons:
- Having that little bit more initial friction to learning how the fediverse works has made it better since it keeps out the low quality spamming users.
- Niche communities can only grow organically within their own spaces (since forcing them makes them seem inauthentic).
- The big plus of the fediverse is being able to follow/interact with users/communities across the boundary of being on another website. So it doesn't matter if a niche community you want to follow springs up on another website, you can follow them and participate from the website you already use.
For example: the old reddit-like communities that I follow (listed above) appear in a single feed in my programming.dev account (since that's the first one I joined), and the old twitter-like communities I follow appear in a single feed in my mastodon.social account (since that's the first twitter-like one I joined).
Is there a resource for finding these fedverse?
It's kind of like making an email account. First you pick where you want your email to be (gmail, outlook, proton, etc...), then make your account.
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If you're brand new, pick where you want your account to live.
- General worldwide website: mastodon.social
- or pick a website by topic: https://fedi.directory
- or pick a website by locality: https://fediverse.observer
Your starting global feed will have different users/posts based on which website you pick.
Check out which one you want then make an account there.
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Now choose some people to follow:
- Either in the global feed on your website
- or choose people by topic: https://fedi.directory
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Then people who you follow will share posts from other people, and you can choose if you want to follow them too.