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So, where is everyone headed next? We all know reddit has been on a slow decline for years now, and things are unlikely to improve as they head towards IPO. I

So, where is everyone headed next? We all know reddit has been on a slow decline for years now, and things are unlikely to improve as they head towards IPO. Is there a good alternative yet for those of us who have little to no use for the viral front page content and whose primary use of reddit is interacting with niche communities, essentially using the site as a poor replacement for the dedicated forums from decades back? Lemmy looked interesting last time I checked it out, but didn't quite seem to be taking off, an the dev team's censorship issues, even if they have been resolved, are troubling.

mustacheemperor 3y ago
I've been returning to forums, myself. I'll give mastodon a try at some point. What originally drew me to reddit (10+ years ago) was the dense front page of geek-adjacent content, which I could customize to be made up of communities focused on niches I enjoy. Reddit's default front page is now more like MSN News, and the content quality of the niche subreddits I found back then seems to have really dropped - especially subreddits like /r/vinyl that exploded in popularity. Meanwhile, forums like the Steve Hoffman Forum never went away, and maybe have become more of a filtered, high quality niche for their particular brand of content, at the same time those reddit communities grew massively and dropped in quality. If I want to find a great version of a specific album, I can just search the Hoffman forum, and find a single dozens of pages long discussion about it by experts, on a board that requires everyone to put their system hardware in their profile before commenting on sound. The alternative on reddit is maybe finding a 5 year old post with obsolete recommendations, or asking my own question that's deleted by a moderator and sent to a megathread where it will be ignored. Likewise if I'm looking up a new film stock on Photrio - reddit is a great place to see a bunch of pictures taken on that stock, that were maybe edited, manipulated, overexposed, etc. I might as well just go to Instagram. Photrio will find me a thread where a community of dedicated geeks have studied every aspect in explicit detail and held each other to high standards of analysis. The biggest thing missing from those forums, I think, is that dense front page effect - the mass saturation of varying content that changes almost every time I visit. But on the other hand, those forums don't have the same prevailing community zeitgeist of toxicity, cynicism, outrage, and knowitall contrarianism. Stepping away from reddit has led me to realize the dense front page created by that community is toxic for my mental health, and what's drawing me to try Mastodon is the idea that I might be able to find a good alternative. Or hey, maybe I'll just go outside more. The experience has me reflecting on my use of HN too. It's largely replaced Reddit as my go-to 'refresh feed,' but I find myself closing discussions with regularity when I realize they're full of non-experts speculating to each other and tweaking the same emotion-knobs that drove my unhealthy engagement with Reddit. But I think on HN, it's easy enough to learn to just avoid the sorts of emotionally charged threads where that kind of "discussion" occurs. On reddit, it feels like that's every thread, about anything.

mustacheemperor 3y ago

I've been returning to forums, myself. I'll give mastodon a try at some point. What originally drew me to reddit (10+ years ago) was the dense front page of geek-adjacent content, which I could customize to be made up of communities focused on niches I enjoy. Reddit's default front page is now more like MSN News, and the content quality of the niche subreddits I found back then seems to have really dropped - especially subreddits like /r/vinyl that exploded in popularity. Meanwhile, forums like the Steve Hoffman Forum never went away, and maybe have become more of a filtered, high quality niche for their particular brand of content, at the same time those reddit communities grew massively and dropped in quality. If I want to find a great version of a specific album, I can just search the Hoffman forum, and find a single dozens of pages long discussion about it by experts, on a board that requires everyone to put their system hardware in their profile before commenting on sound. The alternative on reddit is maybe finding a 5 year old post with obsolete recommendations, or asking my own question that's deleted by a moderator and sent to a megathread where it will be ignored. Likewise if I'm looking up a new film stock on Photrio - reddit is a great place to see a bunch of pictures taken on that stock, that were maybe edited, manipulated, overexposed, etc. I might as well just go to Instagram. Photrio will find me a thread where a community of dedicated geeks have studied every aspect in explicit detail and held each other to high standards of analysis. The biggest thing missing from those forums, I think, is that dense front page effect - the mass saturation of varying content that changes almost every time I visit. But on the other hand, those forums don't have the same prevailing community zeitgeist of toxicity, cynicism, outrage, and knowitall contrarianism. Stepping away from reddit has led me to realize the dense front page created by that community is toxic for my mental health, and what's drawing me to try Mastodon is the idea that I might be able to find a good alternative. Or hey, maybe I'll just go outside more. The experience has me reflecting on my use of HN too. It's largely replaced Reddit as my go-to 'refresh feed,' but I find myself closing discussions with regularity when I realize they're full of non-experts speculating to each other and tweaking the same emotion-knobs that drove my unhealthy engagement with Reddit. But I think on HN, it's easy enough to learn to just avoid the sorts of emotionally charged threads where that kind of "discussion" occurs. On reddit, it feels like that's every thread, about anything.