As a community grows in popularity, it often shifts from hosting insightful discussions to attracting memes, funny, and low-quality content. This change appeals to a larger audience interested in such content, creating a vicious cycle where valuable discussions are overshadowed and marginalized by the platform’s primary demographic.
It’s the pendulum swing of pretty much every community on Reddit.
- Community starts out with a small group of users dedicated to quality content related to the topic
- Community growth reaches a point where the most popular posts begin to trend outside of the community
- New users join the community after seeing popular posts show up in their own feeds. Growth accelerates
- Community becomes “popular” enough that posts regularly trend outside of the community
- New users flood in
- Users flood the community with low-effort content to karma farm
- Community now sucks.
It happened to basically every big sub on Reddit once reaching a large enough size.
Exactly that. And especially in social media, this is of imminent importance. Always remember that the Fediverse is not only Lemmy.
I’m mostly active outside the Threadiverse. The Fediverse outside the Threadiverse is dominated by Mastodon and thus by people who refuse to read anything that’s over 500 characters long.
But I’m not on Mastodon myself. I’m on something that doesn’t have a character limit. So the thoughts that I pour into posts are not necessarily simple enough for 500 characters. They don’t have to.
So I could write an essay about them. Thousands of characters. But many Fediverse users (remember that Mastodon is 70% of the Fediverse) will ignore it because it’s too long, because it’s over 500 characters long.
Or I could pick an appropriate meme template that’s best at expressing my thoughts and feelings and make an image macro out of it, adding my own text. By the way, I mostly hand-craft my image macros in GIMP. And then I post that.
Sure, I do add some explanation afterwards where explanation is due. I link to the KnowYourMeme entry that explains the used template(s), and I link to what my image macro is about. If I can’t link to the latter, I explain it in my own words. But I do so after the image. If you don’t need these explanations, if the image macro works for you without these explanations, you can skip them without having to skip the image macro.
A few examples (content warning: all these links lead to meme content):
You could ramble on and on about how tricky and difficult something is. Or you can let Boromir speak for yourself: One does not simply implement FEP-ef61. If you think I’m just too lazy to type, check out the 25,000 characters of explanations right below. That was before I was told that linking to external sources is actually more convenient for readers than having such a massive pile of infodumps within the post iself.
Here, I’ve commented on the bleak future (or total lack thereof) of three Fediverse server applications in only one fully hand-crafted image with only few words. This time, the templates weren’t images but phrases (“That’s cute”, “Bitch, please”). For comparison, the whole situation is explained below. Notice what a wall of text it is. Imagine exposing someone who’s used to Twitter to so much text.
Another example: I could say that the history of Mike Macgirvin’s Fediverse creations is pretty complex. You wouldn’t have an idea of how complex it is. Or I could use the Pepe Silvia template to illustrate it. That’d give you more of an idea of how complex it is without me having to ramble about it and give you details that you haven’t even asked for.
I could also have written an essay on the current spam wave on Mastodon, how it’s bad, but how I don’t care, and I don’t pity Mastodon because Mastodon had it coming with its self-imposed weaknesses, and Fediverse server software with reasonable safety features are not and can’t be affected by this kind of spam. Instead, I resorted to having Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear and The Grand Tour speak for myself, using an image macro which I had made as a response to an earlier spam wave a while ago. Easier to understand with much fewer words.