I’m a Reddit refugee who was on that platform for 10+ years. I saw not just a tremendous amount of controversies, but attempts at introducing alternatives to Reddit during all of them. The 2015 blackout saw a ton of alternatives suggested, and if you go back and look at them many have either not survived or never achieved their stated goal of serving as a viable alternative to Reddit. Places like Voat, Ruqqus, or Parler promptly turned themselves into extremist shitholes and imploded. The truth is most internet communities which found and advertise themselves as an alternative to Reddit die.
However, I think this newest wave of searching for an alternative has more legs than I think I’ve ever seen, and the key to that is the kind of users who are moving. The people who were pissed off by the recent changes are the old guard of the internet. These are the people who still remember searching for and finding RIF, Apollo, or AlienBlue (before it was bought), and have the technical know-how to care about the quality and usability of their platform. I think you all are people who engage with their online spaces with intention, and because of that I believe that we have more of a shot at making this work than I’ve witnessed since I joined Reddit all those many years ago.
In order to make this all work out though, I think it’s really important to cast our thoughts toward what made the websites that have come before us successful. Every single one of these spaces have distinct ways of interaction that indirectly communicate their ideologies. Memes, in-jokes, and lingo form the backbone of online communities and help to direct users back to the source, but they never gain real purchase without a unique viewpoint. I’m pretty sure I can confidently suss out whether a meme comes from 4Chan, Reddit, or Tumblr, just through the message conveyed and the template used. For an online platform to have relevance and draw, I believe it absolutely needs to have an individual and communicable perspective.
Now I am aware that much of this is organically generated, but I think we underestimate how much of it isn’t. The structure of a website clearly communicates to users its core values, and users almost certainly respond to that. The fact that users are by default anonymous on the Chans absolutely contributes to the unique “flavor” of those websites, and the subreddit structure of Reddit allows it to contain a greater variety of clashing values. We can already see some of this on the Fediverse, the tension engendered by the federated instances I think places greater emphasis on building consensus. The fact that an entire server can be excised at will from a group of other like-minded server owners means that one has to always have an eye towards the common consensus, and I think we will see many fights over this in the not-so-distant future.
So as we go forward, and while we are in the most nascent part of this website’s lifespan, I think we should be discussing and commenting on what we think is most important about this space. I’m already seeing that people think that Kbin is “nicer than Reddit” and you’re more convinced that you’re interacting with real people. I think this is all good, and I think that while we’re making content, we need to have an eye on putting that particular spin on all the things we brought over from where we came from. Eventually, we need to get to the place where we’re creating unique meme formats, and having our own slang, but for right now we need to be thinking hard about what we want out of our online lives and how this website can be built to serve those purposes. I think the risk of not doing that, and forever being only a federated Reddit clone is going to leave people forever jonesing for the experiences they had on Reddit, and this space is going to die just like every other attempted alternative has before.
TLDR: Now that we’ve all left Reddit, for this new place to live my opinion is that we need to have more discussions about what our principles are, and we need to make unique content that brings people to this website.
Old guard… I was expecting further back than using AlienBlue before it was bought.
I suggest that there is, indeed, a facet of the old guard present. Those of us that remember what Reddit replaced, and it wasn’t just Digg…it was all the other niche forums, usenet, webrings, and everything else that represented the early soul of the internet slowly faded due to costs or commercialization. Reddit replaced all of that, even the dirty underside of the internet, for quite a while. Then they came through with quarantines, and there was the whole Pao/Taylor event of 2015, and now this. Reddit corp has sold its soul to the modern commercial internet bandwagon, and the site already seems to have lost a lot of the user content that normally comes in with the shutdown of 3rd party apps.
lemmy/kbin is great. Already feels more open, content flow is there, and people are talking. Maybe we can get that old community web board/forum feel again. Way better, JMO.
Old forums are still alive, very much, they’re just a lot more niche because you probably need a desktop computer to read them easily, but here are three examples:
The head-fi forums are still kicking too and they’ve been around like 20 years.
https://www.head-fi.org/forums/
For music makers, the KVR forums are still going.
https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/
Yeah 😅 I’m not old enough to remember aol chat rooms, geocities websites, or limewire. It just felt like there was an element to the internet at the edge of my early experience that held so much promise and was so much more open, that seems to have largely gone away. I think a bunch of that has to do with the monopolization of power of so many of these companies, and how so much content is now only discoverable through them. Hopefully we’re learning our lesson about the consequences of monopoly now.