Rabbithole, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

The truth is most internet communities which found and advertise themselves as an alternative to Reddit die.

To be honest, there were damn good reasons why Voat, etc, died in a massive fire. The Reddit exoduses in question were from huge chunks of the userbase effectively being kicked out for being massive bastards/racists/bigots, etc. The communities that they spawned after leaving were absolutely horrific and nobody else on the internet wanted to go anywhere near them.

The current exodus is made up of actually normal people (at least, normal enough), and the reason we're here isn't just because we're all joined by hatred (weeeelllll... maybe a hatred of u/Spez in a lot of cases, ha!), but because we're genuinely looking for a better forum-space than what's been available recently until now.

Sure, there are similarities, we're still here because we find corporate control over the forum-space to be "oppressive" (just what an incel/racist would say, right?), but it's not because our views aren't tolerated there, it's just because we're really fucking tired of the cost of having somewhere to actually discuss things is that we're endlessly sold as a product, followed by our discussion area being destroyed by corporate greed. Over and over again.

The reasons why this place is getting busy is fundamentally different than the reason why the previous migrations created places like Voat or Parler, etc. We're already in a massively better position due to that alone.

Eventually, we need to get to the place where we’re creating unique meme formats

I agree with what you're saying in general, but I really hope that all of the interesting discussion here doesn't eventually get buried by memes like back on Reddit. Memes can be fun and all, but sorting a lot of otherwise really great niche-subs by top of all time back there was often a case of finding nothing of value at all because there were 50 pages of fucking memes at the top of the list. Personal preference, of course.