I kept getting pm's on reddit. None were worth responding to.

Kind of agree! It definitely gets to the point where it gets overwhelming, I remember early days reddit used to be a chill place to hang out, even after the great migration from Digg it was still not overwhelming as it is now.

Ye flipping gods irc chats were great. Personally, I like it here. I’ll do my news checking, throw some comments around. The nice thing is I get responses here.

Lemmy and other federated solutions will get a big boost in users, but it will only very be a tiny fraction of the reddit userbase.
And 98% of those users will probably just head back to reddit in a week or two.
Subreddits that have closed and moved with be replaced with new subs on reddit.

I think in the end it will be a healthy boost for Lemmy, but so far I suspect don't think we are at "Mass Paradigm shift" yet.

This is not going to be Digg > Reddit

I agree, communities take time to grow

As a "reddit refuge" I agree with this. I showed up on Lemmy a few days before the blackout, and even that small amount of time has been enough to notice a difference. I know people are hoping to recreate the things about reddit they love/miss here, but I really hope it doesn't become a carbon copy of that place. Like many have said, I didn't feel the urge to engage on reddit since it just felt a bit pointless, no one was gonna read it. Here I've felt like I can actually have good conversations with people, and have been doing so. Ultimately things will be what they will be, but I hope we can maintain that friendly community feel for a while longer.

You and andobando make good points. It's fun because I noticed myself paying a lot more to usernames since I've started using Lemmy. Maybe it's because of how people are engaging with it, I'm not sure, but it totally does feel like I'm actually engaging with multiple individuals here as opposed to some vague entity.

I agree somewhat when it comes to the giant subreddits, but the best thing about Reddit is that there were vibrant communities around an absolutely high variety of interests. Some of those communities were reasonably sized, but provided excellent discussion. On a smaller service like Lemmy, those small communities become ghost towns, with 1-2 people in there, and that's not fun at all.

I think the beauty of a community-of-communites platform like Reddit/Lemmy is that we can have both in a way. Sub-communities should be encouraged; where high-level communities can grow for the increased engagement and content while sub-communities can remain small and connected.

You've got a very good point here that I don't think a lot of people have considered. I'm glad someone had mentioned it -- it could very well be just what we need.

I have nothing else to add that wouldn't be portrayed as negative so I believe putting efforts frontwards to bettering what currently is, is a great course of action.

From my POV all we need to do is post and comment and create good communities. The people will come naturally if we do that.

I've noticed that with Lemmy and a couple other alternatives it feels like the first days of 4chan and Reddit. People are actually being civil and conversations are happening instead of people staying quiet because they know their comment will be lost in the thousands.

It's really relaxing tbh.

This is one of the biggest things I have been saying. While a bigger community is great, I’d be happy with a community of just 1% the size of Reddit. The small community vibe really gives me memories of the older days. Glad to see other people feel the same way.

I loved IRC! I'm sure it's not super popular these days, especially with the rise of Discord, but it was super fun. I always used PurpleSurge as the server which is now gone. Maybe it will come back into fashion?

We don’t need to recreate Reddit. Lemmy will revolutionize that idea of communities and make it a nicer place.

I can see what you're saying and I do agree on some level. However one of the things I liked most about Reddit was how pseudo-anonymous it was.

There was too many people to know who everyone was, so I feel like it mitigated that unwelcoming cliquey-ness that you tend to get in the kind of smaller communities you tend to see on discord. It felt as if everyone equal, whether they had just joined a community or been furniture for a decade.

Entirely willing to suggest this might just be my own perspective and not a very common one

I totally agree with you. Genuine participation > growth for the sake of growth.

(Long-time reddit user, and former IRC (and ICQ!) user here too)

One of the most useful things about reddit was that due to the sheer size of it you could quickly get answers on a myriad of different things from health problems to what kitchen appliance is better, often with very good arguments and trustworthy reviews. This is immensely useful and I hope we can replicate it here over time. It's nice to have a small community, but if it's good it will grow. There's not much that can be done about that. You can always start a new group based on some subsection of what the big groups cover to stay nimble.

I miss the days of messageboards and IRC rooms. Back in the day, Nintendo had a messageboard (the Hyrule Town Square and then the NSider Forums) and I was somewhat active on both of those. I even ran my own messageboard and made some good friends I still talk to to this day on another forum. There was an IRC room I'd hang out in a decade ago before they mostly all moved over to Discord.