Could anyone explain to my why some people are trying so incredible hard to turn lemmy/kbin into Reddit 2.0?
Reddit wasn’t exactly great before this migration wave, it hasn’t been an interesting place in quite some time and I sincerely doubt it will get better in the future.
In my opinion most content on there is pretty much trash in a variety of flavors. That and doomscrolling. Sure there is niche subs and I get that losing them to might suck, but everyone managed before we had those and everyone will manage now. There is always the option to remake them somewhere else when Reddit decides to kill them, be it by removing modding tools, drowning the content in ads or what ever malicious shit might happen.
In most cases a massive number of users has been detrimental to the quality of subs. I don’t really see the benefit trying to get as many people to switch as possible. In fact I think there is an argument to be made for smaller communities.
There is also a tendency to argue that people shouldn’t use Reddit. People also drink till they black out and shouldn’t do that either. Or drive their cars over the speed limit. Or pronounce “gif” with a “j”. Why not let everyone do what they want, why does this have to be a binary choice or a choice at all?
Maybe a few people just feel like this is some kind of battle that has to be won. It isn’t. Reddit will try to make as much money as possible at any cost, it is how most companies operate in capitalistim. You don’t have to like it. As a matter of fact I’d respect you more if you didn’t. But it is nothing you will fix by trying to “convert” people to Lemmy like you are a Jehovah’s Witness of discussion platforms.
Or maybe you are mad at spez. Good, he is an ass. Maybe other people will realize that and take it as a reason to use Reddit less or not at all. Maybe they won’t. You don’t exactly have agency when it comes to their decision.
So what exactly is it that is driving you? Do people have friends over there they want to bring over here? Do you miss the endless meme subs and can’t survive without them?
I clearly don’t get it and would very much appreciate some comments, so I might be able to understand your motivation better.
I like to think, in a similar way to Mastodon, a fair proportion of users here want it to be something totally different and not a new version of Reddit. It doesn’t have to be big, or popular, or make headlines, as long as it is a good community with lots of discussion and information that’ll do for me.
Personally I would like to leave all the “drama” bollocks behind, that whole atmosphere around the large general-interest subs which dominated and sadly defined The Reddit Experience for casual users and people outside. That’s my main desire when not wanting this to be Reddit 2.0, that and a move away from the heavily US-centric bias, in views, content and assumption it’s the default lived experience of the users.
I think the whole federation thing would do wonders on the anti-US-centric-bias end imo
Unfortunately, American lensing isn’t a function of reddit, it’s a function of Americans, full stop.
True, it just seemed to be a lot more prominent on Reddit for some reason.
What other large-scale social networks or media sources were you participating in?
I’m Canadian and the US “lensing” of media has always been present even before the Internet became a prominent source for me. It’s on TV, it’s in the movies, it’s in books, and so forth. The reason the US is so prominent in media is simply that the US is prominent, period. Especially when you restrict yourself to the English-speaking subsection of humanity.
It’s going to be prominent on Kbin/Lemmy as well. However, there are some good tools here to allow for better internationalization than Reddit had. There are whole instances that are region- or language-specific. I suspect it’ll be a lot easier to create communities like “News, but Canada-focused” if you can create news@lemmy.ca or whatever.
The difference between Reddit and other large sources for media is the popular places on Reddit were where you’d encounter US bias, whereas other places were easier to tailor to your locality (I’m in the UK). Maybe it’s because you’re effectively interacting with a lot of random people whereas Twitter or Facebook you were more likely to be interacting with people you know or who were from the same region.
and
have a very, very small overlap. The advantage of reddit was it’s reach and community size. Do we need the 10M subscriber subs for pics and world news? Not for the core purpose of a vibrant discussion site. Instead, those are advertising (if you will) that gets people in the door to see how deep and wide the communities go. You might stop in because it’s a place to see what world new stories people are talking about, and find that there’s a community of a hundred others who love creating turtle harnesses from ropes made of human back hair and all of a sudden there’s a hundred-and-one of you all discussing harvest methods and weave patterns, or how to identify the right anchor points on a great Mongolian terrapin.
And sometimes it’s just fun to kill time on the “big” communities, and it happens to be convenient that they’re all in one place. I don’t want the drama of reddit, but I like the size because of the depth it implies (and delivers, in many ways, if we’re being honest).