I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?
I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!
I find the multiple instances very confusing and also have concerns about how this will split up communities. Like right now there aren’t many “niche” communities, but if there were, say I would want to browse something like /r/eu4, but there are like 4 different ones, even if i am subscribed to all of them, how would I like… browse them all at the same time to get “all eu4 content”. Like it seems very problematic to do something like that.
Multiple communities is an issue there that needs communication between mods to work out. Ideally when you have 2 100% identical communities, the mods from both communities should come together and merge their communities into one. I think this was issue Reddit as well and essentially serves as growing pains for any new platform that requires moderation.
as time goes on and (hopefully) more people join, all new users will pick one of the communities to join and just be active there. from that point, it should be obvious which community will be the main one.
unfortunately there just aren’t many users yet, hence the lack of niche communities which sucks
This is not an unfounded concern but I don’t think it would be as bad as you might think.
If you’re interested in a topic, are you more likely to create a new community right away and try to grow it from nothing, or would you first seek out an existing one with quality discussion and an existing userbase first?
While yes, it’s possible there could be 100 different eu4 communities spread out across many different instances, in practice it would be difficult to sustain that many separate communities. Especially for niche topics you’d expect that when people want to connect with others they will gravitate towards the most active communities.
If anything I see it as more of an issue for broader topics like gaming since there is a much larger userbase, so it’s easier to sustain multiple separate communities spread out across many servers. Already we see this happening with gaming communities on Beehaw and Lemmy.ml. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though! Each instance will moderate differently so they can still be unique. Like maybe gaming communities on separate servers that do/don’t allow memes for example. If someone doesn’t like the vibes on lemmy.ml they can check out beehaw.
And even on Reddit it’s not too different. Think about how we have r/games and r/gaming that are both fairly large/popular. They’re both about gaming broadly but they’re a little different. Meanwhile there’s only one large eu4 subreddit.