The great news is we will get both with an instance for everyone.

I can see what you're saying and I do agree on some level. However one of the things I liked most about Reddit was how pseudo-anonymous it was.

There was too many people to know who everyone was, so I feel like it mitigated that unwelcoming cliquey-ness that you tend to get in the kind of smaller communities you tend to see on discord. It felt as if everyone equal, whether they had just joined a community or been furniture for a decade.

Entirely willing to suggest this might just be my own perspective and not a very common one

I kinda love the anonymity of Reddit, I could talk about my personal life with strangers who won't remember me within 5 minutes so I felt safe being open about things I can't talk about IRL even if I didn't get any feedback. I'm hoping that regardless of size, the communities here allow me to do that and still feel safe. Obviously I'll be more cautious here with a smaller user base, but I was still cautious on Reddit too because bad actors who would do you harm exist everywhere and can't be totally avoided if you engage online at all. Sometimes a larger user base simply helps alleviate the stress because you are just another random user rather than a recognisable user for people like me, but it definitely cuts both ways and sometimes people forget you are a human too. The quality of the community is absolutely the most important thing tho, and good communities will grow naturally.

I miss IRC. I wish I could have my mIRC days back.

I agree completely. I like the feel of what's here so far. Changing to be appealing to the masses is exactly how Reddit got to where it is today

I couldn't agree more, feel much more at ease here than on Reddit.

I was not contributing anymore there, too many things going on , the sheer number of people , the rage , the bots..

Maybe my posts and comments won't be as articulated or good as others but hey I am engaging again and I don't mind at all the small size if it mean more quality interaction.

Lemmy and other federated solutions will get a big boost in users, but it will only very be a tiny fraction of the reddit userbase.
And 98% of those users will probably just head back to reddit in a week or two.
Subreddits that have closed and moved with be replaced with new subs on reddit.

I think in the end it will be a healthy boost for Lemmy, but so far I suspect don't think we are at "Mass Paradigm shift" yet.

This is not going to be Digg > Reddit

Absolutely on point. The intimacy of irc servers is nowhere to be found on these massive boards nowadays.

i tried to become active in mastadon and i realized pretty quickly that the majority of the conversation was about mastadon growth and adoption. i just didn't care enough about that to stick around. i hope there is more here.

I kept getting pm's on reddit. None were worth responding to.

Samesies. Overly large groups tend to get a bit impersonal. Not always, but it's a tendency I notice.

Kind of agree! It definitely gets to the point where it gets overwhelming, I remember early days reddit used to be a chill place to hang out, even after the great migration from Digg it was still not overwhelming as it is now.

I agree, communities take time to grow

Ye flipping gods irc chats were great. Personally, I like it here. I’ll do my news checking, throw some comments around. The nice thing is I get responses here.

I think you're pretty much right. Communities need to be big enough, not necessarily the biggest.

I totally agree with you. Genuine participation > growth for the sake of growth.

(Long-time reddit user, and former IRC (and ICQ!) user here too)

You've got a very good point here that I don't think a lot of people have considered. I'm glad someone had mentioned it -- it could very well be just what we need.

I have nothing else to add that wouldn't be portrayed as negative so I believe putting efforts frontwards to bettering what currently is, is a great course of action.

I agree, I think we shouldn't be focused so much on "growing" the network and more just making it better. I think it's unlikely we'll reach particularly high user counts, and that's okay. We can have a nice little comfy community.

I loved IRC! I'm sure it's not super popular these days, especially with the rise of Discord, but it was super fun. I always used PurpleSurge as the server which is now gone. Maybe it will come back into fashion?

You and andobando make good points. It's fun because I noticed myself paying a lot more to usernames since I've started using Lemmy. Maybe it's because of how people are engaging with it, I'm not sure, but it totally does feel like I'm actually engaging with multiple individuals here as opposed to some vague entity.

One of the most useful things about reddit was that due to the sheer size of it you could quickly get answers on a myriad of different things from health problems to what kitchen appliance is better, often with very good arguments and trustworthy reviews. This is immensely useful and I hope we can replicate it here over time. It's nice to have a small community, but if it's good it will grow. There's not much that can be done about that. You can always start a new group based on some subsection of what the big groups cover to stay nimble.

yeah, looking back at it now that you mention it, the only names I really recognized in reddit were the famous/infamous ones, or the ones that were obnoxious enough on the subs I subscribed to. in reddit, over the 15 years I used it, I created a new profile every year or two - had to, I kept getting banned from top-level subs. a profile name generally meant nothing inasmuch as it was required to use the platform...