Contrary to some of the discourse on rexxit, I don't think the goal should be a "reddit killer" - just to breath life into this corner of the fediverse

This is just sort of a stream of thought from somebody who has been glued to my screen tracking the drama from the past week or so., and also watched the digg exodus happen (although I never used digg, just watched it from reddit's perspective)

Been spending a lot of time browsing /r/redditalternatives and the different drama threads from the past week and seen a lot of back and forth about "Where are we moving to?". And I think a lot of the mentality is that things are going to unfold for reddit like they did for digg. But I think this is wrong for a number of reasons.

First off, the scale is much different. At it's peak, digg had 30 million monthly active users. Reddit has over 50 million daily active users. Social media happens at a different scale than it did back then. Twitter wasn't something world leaders used as a communication tool. Facebook was still in it's nascent, hip stage. Instagram, well that was still being developed.

So, that sort of exodus is never going to happen. Reddit and these other social media platforms are here to stay. I mean, Elon absolutely destroyed twitter's reputation in the publics eye and the site still tanked the hit.

I don't think that should even be the goal either. I'm not here out here hoping for reddit to shutdown. I haven't really cared about reddit as an entity since the early days. Over a decade of eternal september events (Anybody remember how big the Obama AMA was?), mishandling by the company, and just changing my internet browsing habits has left me uninterested in reddit as whole. Reddit to me is just a host to the other smaller communities inside.

And that is where I think the fedivserse, specifically this kbin/lemmy "threadiverse" portion of it, has something useful to offer. Instead of some big platform being the host of these communities, it is the smaller communities coming together to build the larger platform in the aggregate. It is actually a new(ish) way to do social media all together.

That's not to say there aren't issues. The influx of users has really shown the different ui/ux and technological challenges of the system, but these are the early days. The people here now are early adopters (obviously not the earliest adopters, hats off to y'all). This is our chance to work out the kinks, and build a new community.

I don't want to say stop caring about reddit. Juicy drama is juicy drama. I just don't think that should be the centerpoint of conversation. I think the conversation should center the fediverse as this cool thing we are building and taking part in, rather than trying to be Reddit 2.