What do you think is responsible for lemmy’s growth over other alternatives like KBin and Tildes?

Frost Wolf@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 327 points –

Is it speed? Features? Ease of development? Just curious why lemmy is seeing more activity as opposed to other networks.

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To answer the question about Tildes specifically, Tildes has been around for years and remained effectively dead. Its moderation is extremely controlling and screen all people before letting them in. It's a club of people the owner approves of that only post "quality" content (I.e. the in-group's definition of quality). This results in an extremely inorganic experience where content is removed for little reason beyond mods thinking it's too "low quality" (the definition of which is very flexible). Your presence on Tildes is considered a privilege that can be taken away at any time for any reason (no alts, no second chances), so there is a perpetual sense that you're under the lense, and can't disagree with the rest of club. It's a custom built wind tunnel, ostensibly to screen out hate, but in effect created a gated community of the same people celebrating their own exclusivity and very concerned with strangers walking down the sidewalk.

In essence, it doesn't want to be reddit, because it views itself as "better" than the riffraff. It's an elitist clubhouse, not a true social network.

I vaguely recall a discussion on Tildes with that sentiment on tildes. So thank you for the reminder of their blatant elitism.

https://tildes.net/~tech/16bm/beehaw_org_defederating_effective_immediately_from_lemmy_world_and_sh_itjust_works

This one I think. And scrolling through it now renewed that bitter taste in my mouth.

That first comment isn't wrong though. It was definitely an issue of growing pains that Tildes wouldn't have to deal with, since they have a centralised model, rather than the Federated one Beehaw and Lemmy had to deal with.

The issue Beehaw had was with people firing up an account on an open instance, and then going over to cause trouble, bypassing their account creation policy. Lemmy grew too quickly for their moderation to deal with, and lacks the relevant tooling, so they just disconnected from the biggest trouble instances, until Lemmy comes out with a better mod toolkit.

I suspect that if Tildes connected to open instances, they would have the same issue.