Communities naturally change as they grow. I’m sure I’m not the only one who can remember being able to read every single Tweet as the scrolled by on the Twitter homepage, before it became necessary to pick and choose who to follow. Or who watched popular BBS boards fission as the load got too high.

The challenge is to have healthy growth. Thoughtful moderation goes a long way (unless you’re looking for a free-for-all environment, which some people are). Welcoming and engaging people who you want to encourage to set the tone helps too. I suspect the fact that in the Fediverse you can “vote with your feet” and switch servers without losing access to previous discussions may also help to limit the spread of toxicity.

I remember some years back on Reddit there a change to what the default subs were. Suddenly my reddit frontpage was full of /r/aww and a lot of incredibly low effort content. From then on it was necessary to show only subs I subscribe to. I like memes as much as the next person, but in moderation.

I’m not worried and don’t see a big problem if there are some subreddits/communities with memes and low effort content.

In the discussion of size. I subbed to the classicalmusic sub. Right now there is an equivalent in the fediverse I think but it’s quite dead. Just having one community for all types of music isn’t really appealing. I don’t want to go through 1000s of popmusic post to find two about classical. This example of mine with classicalmusic transfers well to other topic. I started using a distro of Linux on my computer and want to connect with others also using Linux. For all these niche interest size is important.

Then as for joining. I won’t say it’s complicated to sign up, but there is an extra hurdle in a way with how it’s a lot to take in about how the fediverse is working. Many people will join, but it requires slightly more effort still than many other social places around the internet.

So one of the defenses we have against this is the federated nature of lemmy. It’s not “Lemmy” that you join. It’s an instance run by some people you hopefully have found to align with your values. That instance does not need to grow large on its own for the whole network to be strong and you can maintain moderation in the instance by limiting then number of members joining. This doesn’t weaken Lemmy, there are other instances that denied applicants can go to and they can all interact. Think of it like a bus service where if one bus is too full, you can just catch the next one. Except the next bus is already there waiting for you. It may just be enough of a disruption to stop a hivemind from moving in and taking over entirely, especially if instances are founded on a strong sense of culture. Beehaw certainly has its own culture compared to other instances and that’s a great thing to hold on to when lot’s of people show up and want things to work here exactly how they worked elsewhere.

Edit: We don’t WANT to host the mass exodus from reddit. But if during that exodus a bunch of people who find they like our way of doing things better happen to join us then that’s amazing.

I’m here mostly due to my love of the Apollo app. I started on Reddit nearly 15 years ago after bailing on Digg. My usage of Reddit has 100% moved to mobile for various reasons. So after my personal exodus, I find myself a Mlem user enjoying it 100%. I don’t think the mass exodus from Reddit will change a ton on their end and this will probably just be a blip on the radar. But it might be just enough of a blip to push Lemmy and apps like Mlem to start to get some real traction. I don’t want Lemmy to become 100% like Reddit and i’m excited to see where this goes.

I think it will be very similar to the Mastodon exodus. There’s going to be a huge spike (prepare your servers, folks) but it will die down steadily. You’ll see a lot of obnoxious r/redditmoment types for a while but eventually they’ll go crawling back to their hole (not enough easy clout to gain here), and at the end of it all we’ll just have more cool people. So, bumpy ride ahead but a net positive at the end. but i might just be saying that bc im part of the migration, i dont know lemmy culture too well

I’m ok with people going back to reddit if thats what they want. i feel like it will just be a filter to drain the low effort users and as the resident low effort user i support that.

I just hope the more technical discussion doesn’t go back. r/sysadmin not making the exodus might keep them using reddit, however that sub has gone downhill quite hard over the past 4 years or so.

In a sense I promoted that idea because I believe that communication should be open and free. Frankly, I do agree with you that keeping the community to mildly tech savvy folks is quite nice indeed.

I welcome and look forward to reading everyone’s thoughts on the issue. I made some large posts because I wanted new folks to see they could come here - not that they will stick around ultimately.

It’ll be up to them.