yumcake

The mass-scale casual interaction producing flashes of surprising relevance can’t happen when the conditions aren’t pulling in so many people that the 1 in 300 million person with the answer doesn’t casually happen across the question that only he/she can answer. That’s the unique content from Reddit.

Link aggregation, message boarding, messaging, all that stuff is merely tech that lots of other places have. Reddit’s moat is the user presence which other platforms can’t just replicate. Reddit needs to die first so that 1 in 300 person stops going there and goes to other places and somehow runs into the question there, hopefully in a way that they turn up in Google search.

Is the fediverse where that happens? Seriously asking because I’m no expert on it. It doesn’t seem like the concept can scale distribution at that level. There will be pockets of interaction, but not everything is shared everywhere.

I am too, however one of the differentiating qualities of Reddit was it’s scale. The “hive mind” of posts being visible to such a broad audience is that you’d sometimes run into insights into niche experts on obscure topics. If the audience is too small, those posters don’t encounter the question, and we lose the opportunity to see them share their insight into the topic.

I do hope the fediverse eventually scales to a point where serendipitous interactions like that can start happening again. It’ll probably take a fair bit of time after the Reddit diaspora for the public to make their way to one instance or another.