It’s like Reddit from 18 years ago, if everyone then had kept expecting it to work like Reddit from 18 months ago.
Early Reddit had no subreddits, and then it just had a handful of major ones—it wasn’t until it got a much larger user base that all the thousands of niche subreddits became viable. (There were still plenty of conversations about niche topics—they just took place within larger subreddits instead of dedicated subreddits with their own associated infrastructure.) But ex-redditors on lemmy expect those fine-grained niche communities to work right from the start, before there are enough users to keep them all active.
(I wonder if one solution might be for every community to have a designated “parent” community, where if activity falls below a certain threshold, posts and subscriptions get temporarily redirected to the parent community until activity picks up again.)
It’s like Reddit from 18 years ago, if everyone then had kept expecting it to work like Reddit from 18 months ago.
Early Reddit had no subreddits, and then it just had a handful of major ones—it wasn’t until it got a much larger user base that all the thousands of niche subreddits became viable. (There were still plenty of conversations about niche topics—they just took place within larger subreddits instead of dedicated subreddits with their own associated infrastructure.) But ex-redditors on lemmy expect those fine-grained niche communities to work right from the start, before there are enough users to keep them all active.
(I wonder if one solution might be for every community to have a designated “parent” community, where if activity falls below a certain threshold, posts and subscriptions get temporarily redirected to the parent community until activity picks up again.)