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.

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

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

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

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

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

I've noticed that with Lemmy and a couple other alternatives it feels like the first days of 4chan and Reddit. People are actually being civil and conversations are happening instead of people staying quiet because they know their comment will be lost in the thousands.

It's really relaxing tbh.

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.

Bigger is not always better. Smaller communities are exactly why the old internet used to be better. Less centralization of userbases meant more productive discussion and friendlier communities.

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

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.

This is one of the biggest things I have been saying. While a bigger community is great, I’d be happy with a community of just 1% the size of Reddit. The small community vibe really gives me memories of the older days. Glad to see other people feel the same way.

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'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.

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.

From my POV all we need to do is post and comment and create good communities. The people will come naturally if we do that.

I'm enjoying the time when there are no suspicious accounts telling me that "both parties are the same" for an entire year before the US presidential election, or how old Joe Biden is.

The bad faith actors have not arrived on this platform yet.

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

Kek for now I just recognize @communist@beehaw.org because he's everywhere

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.

You are absolutely right, you are hitting the nail on the head with the issues I had with Reddit too. I was pretty much just a lurker because it seemed like every time I tried to reach out or make a connection with a community, it was largely unseen or ignored.

Cheers to a new start friend!

Yes i was amongst the irc chat netizens from back then and I like the retro style feel now!

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)

I miss the days of messageboards and IRC rooms. Back in the day, Nintendo had a messageboard (the Hyrule Town Square and then the NSider Forums) and I was somewhat active on both of those. I even ran my own messageboard and made some good friends I still talk to to this day on another forum. There was an IRC room I'd hang out in a decade ago before they mostly all moved over to Discord.