The great news is we will get both with an instance for everyone.

Yes i was amongst the irc chat netizens from back then and I like the retro style feel now!

Kek for now I just recognize @[email protected] because he's everywhere

You are absolutely right, you are hitting the nail on the head with the issues I had with Reddit too. I was pretty much just a lurker because it seemed like every time I tried to reach out or make a connection with a community, it was largely unseen or ignored.

Cheers to a new start friend!

I kinda love the anonymity of Reddit, I could talk about my personal life with strangers who won't remember me within 5 minutes so I felt safe being open about things I can't talk about IRL even if I didn't get any feedback. I'm hoping that regardless of size, the communities here allow me to do that and still feel safe. Obviously I'll be more cautious here with a smaller user base, but I was still cautious on Reddit too because bad actors who would do you harm exist everywhere and can't be totally avoided if you engage online at all. Sometimes a larger user base simply helps alleviate the stress because you are just another random user rather than a recognisable user for people like me, but it definitely cuts both ways and sometimes people forget you are a human too. The quality of the community is absolutely the most important thing tho, and good communities will grow naturally.

Someone posted a link a while ago to an article called killing community. I believe it speaks what I've been thinking for a while. I've quit so many social media over such a long time but I'm also part of a small community of friends. We Have our own little corner of the internet with file sharing and things like password manager and chat server and so on. We've been going strong for 15 years and going. Growth at all costs destroys communities.

yup, I agree. I forgot how much better smaller communities are now that I haven't used reddit in about a week. much less garbage on my feed that will eventually start to grow

I agree, I think we shouldn't be focused so much on "growing" the network and more just making it better. I think it's unlikely we'll reach particularly high user counts, and that's okay. We can have a nice little comfy community.

yeah, looking back at it now that you mention it, the only names I really recognized in reddit were the famous/infamous ones, or the ones that were obnoxious enough on the subs I subscribed to. in reddit, over the 15 years I used it, I created a new profile every year or two - had to, I kept getting banned from top-level subs. a profile name generally meant nothing inasmuch as it was required to use the platform...

Denial is the most predictable of all human responses. But, rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have destroyed it, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.