The Future of the Threadaverse. Is a Lot More Growth a Good Thing?
I’m a recent refugee from Reddit and a very long time social network user. When the Apollo app announced its demise, I joined kbin.social and beehaw.org and love these new networks. The discussions seems much more reasoned and friendly. I do miss some of the more esoteric groups such as music theory and jazz. I’m sure they’ll be created as the threadiverse (kbin and lemmy) continue to grow. In this case, growth will be good. Is there, however, a point where these new networks get too big?
Imagine 56 million daily users (the current figure for Reddit) using the threadiverse platforms. If they were divided evenly into groups of 10,000, that would be 5,600 instances. Surely, such growth would take years, unless Huffman pulls another catastrophic move such as making you pay to be member and having to view ads as well. Even if he did, I doubt Reddit would completely go away. It would join myspace and AOL in the backwaters of the Internet.
Back to my point. Let’s say there are 20 million daily users. Magazines on kbin and communities on lemmy would have 100’s of thousands or even more that a million subscribers. The subreddit r/worldnews has 32 million subscribers. There could also be 100’s of thousands of magazines/communities. Reddit has 2.8 million subreddits. I know communities are tightly limited on beehaw.org, only being added when there is sufficient interest and support for them. On kbin, it appears any member can create a magazine. I could be wrong. Lemme.ee also allows members to create communities without restriction as far as I can tell.
Assuming there were enough instances to support such a volume of users, would that be a good thing or would discussions turn into flame wars, vitriol, and personal attacks? Even if such things were kept under control would threads become full of pointless or uninformative comments that kept you from reading quality posts. I don’t know one way or the other although I suspect, at some point there would be such a thing as too big. Most likely, it will take years for the threadiverse to grow so there’s plenty of time to plan and implement mechanisms to handle it.