Ask Lemmy

subs

Strictly-speaking, the term is "communities" on the Threadiverse, for the things that are analogous to Reddit subreddits.

Honestly, the community alone isn't what it needs. What the Threadiverse would need is a larger userbase to make a lot of niche communities viable. If existing users posted and commented more, that'd help somewhat, but there's just only so much niche interest coverage that you can do, even if users pretty actively participate, if your userbase is about 50K MAU.

A couple things that I kinda miss from Reddit:

• There are a lot of video-game specific subreddits on Reddit, with a lot of interesting information; in many cases, these are the best online resources for information about the game. There are very few active video game communities on the Threadiverse. !pixeldungeon@lemmy.world does have the author actively participating and modding the community (and it's a good game, IMHO maybe the best open-source Android video game). But...it's still very limited in size compared to Reddit. We can get some discussion about major video games that a lot of people have played, stuff like the Fallout series, but outside that, it's hard.

• While we do have !whatisthisthing@lemmy.world and associated communities---post an image of something and users see if they can identify it---Reddit's userbase allowed for pretty impressive identifications. Was neat both as a challenge and to help find obscure things, and to share knowledge about tools to help do so.

• Not quite communities, but Reddit (used to? not sure if they still do it) used to have pretty impressive live coverage of breaking events. I remember when they did Hurricane Katrina---it was semi-moderated, with people gathering information about a given topic. It often beat out the news in detail and response time.

• We don't really have enough users to have something like /r/SillyTavernAI or /r/StableDiffusion, which are pretty useful repositories of information about AI use. We do have some analogous communities, but they just don't represent a comparable store of knowledge. As these are rapidly-changing areas, having people with knowledge answering questions and sharing information was pretty helpful; I still think that Reddit is one of the better places online in terms of information on this.

• I personally enjoyed some of the content from subreddits where people posted artwork or photographs. I don't have the skillset or interest to do most of that, but it was fun to follow. Again, we have some analogous communities, but just not the userbase to really support much volume of posting.

• We do have !europe@feddit.org, but it just doesn't have enough people commenting to be much of a store of information; /r/europe had enough people with familiarity about European political processes and such posting that I could learn a lot from it.

• I miss some of the collaborative fun "creative process" subreddits, which were often ongoing gags, with people dropping in to contribute. Stuff like /r/firstworldproblems, /r/secondworldproblems, /r/thirdworldproblems, /r/fourthworldproblems, /r/fifthworldproblems, /r/sixthworldproblems, etc. /r/totallynotrobots.

• Or some of the creative writing things, even if non-collaborative; I enjoyed reading things like the short stories on /r/HFY. People would post some neat stuff, others would compliment them.

• The vexillology subreddits---stuff related to the study of flags---was interesting. Had people post flags and critique and redesign flags (IMHO, often rather better than the existing flags in use by various political entities).

• Gardening-type stuff. I didn't regularly follow, but Reddit had accumulated a lot of information, such that it was a major resource on the Internet for site:reddit.com searches.

• I've been playing around with fountain pens recently, which have seen something of resurgence in popularity in recent years. We do have !fountainpens@lemmy.world, and it's quite good given the scale---I posted something about how I wasn't satisfied with an ink recently, and someone else went out and gave a list of recommendations, then created a new post with pictures and talking about the characteristics of an alternative. But...there's a lot of information on /r/fountainpens that would let a new person come up to speed that just isn't here. I see, for example, Goulet Pens videos pointing people to Reddit to answer questions---it's a major online resource. We just...only have so much stuff here.

• One thing that I've seen frequently mentioned by users when topics along the "what do you miss from Reddit" is niche pornography communities. I kinda miss /r/nsfwcyoa, where users go out and create something analogous to the starting charater-creation process in many video games, just with an erotic flavor to it; I haven't really seen anything similar to that elsewhere online. Not really a fan of the name, as I think that it's easy to confuse with full-on choose-your-own-adventure games, but it's a way that people kinda created a collaborative collection of simple Web games, which was neat.

• Another one I often see mentioned, which I don't personally care too much about, but entirely understand people being interested in, is communities around specific cities or areas. We do have !bayarea@lemmy.world and !california@lemmy.world, which get a little traffic, but I think that most areas just don't have enough Threadiverse users to really support "locale" communities.

• Another that I also don't personally care about, but see mentioned on these quite a bit, are sports communities. Reddit has a large enough userbase to let fans of teams talk about what's happening in their sport.

Honestly, it's easier to list stuff that I think that we do presently have enough scale to maintain to be a really useful resource than stuff that we don't, I think. I think that we're okay on IT and server-hosting stuff. Linux and programming. Probably politics, though I don't go out of my way to seek out the political communities. I imagine that if you're an auth-left type person, you might have more stuff on some of the Threadiverse instances than is on Reddit. We're...marginally okay on news, I think, at least in the US. Probably really major events will show up on here.