Reddit was like Lemmy at one point, a little gem of a website that you only knew about if you participated in online culture (which, before smartphones was not a lot of people). Then the masses learn about it and it gets destroyed because the system that made it good can’t scale to hundreds of millions of people.
So, now people ‘in the know’ move to the niche alternative. As the Fediverse continues to develop and gain users it will eventually undergo a similar phase transition when the population gets too high. You can already see it in popular communities on large instances, it’s nearly indistinguishable from Reddit’s comment section.
This is always the cycle.
Reddit was like Lemmy at one point, a little gem of a website that you only knew about if you participated in online culture (which, before smartphones was not a lot of people). Then the masses learn about it and it gets destroyed because the system that made it good can’t scale to hundreds of millions of people.
So, now people ‘in the know’ move to the niche alternative. As the Fediverse continues to develop and gain users it will eventually undergo a similar phase transition when the population gets too high. You can already see it in popular communities on large instances, it’s nearly indistinguishable from Reddit’s comment section.
I think the Fediverse has the ability to branch out and grow in a more healthy way, but it’s yet to be seen