I am theoretically switching over from Reddit to Lemmy. Finding myself spending more time on Lemmy than on Reddit. Maybe it’s because I am limited to using the desktop and can’t aimlessly browse Reddit on my iPhone. Of late, the only subreddits I cared for were on sports and their matchday threads and r/watches. I found myself aimlessly browsing through r/AskReddit and asking and answering pointless questions.
Let’s look at what Snoosite has been historically good at.
The web content is already all over the place and takes no more than a dedicated core moderation team to begin driving discussion. The latter - content communities - is what really made Snoosite exceptional, and what drove that engagement was principally the aggregation aspect in the beginning combined with a distaste for the alternatives.
Lemmy is modeled very closely after Snoosite, obviously, and shares the same potential for link aggregation. The community building is really an organic function, and if we’re able to ride the wave, we may not continue to blast into the stratosphere but arriving at a decent plateau to provide a viable federated alternative is a noble and lofty goal.
The secret sauce, if the Lemmy devs implement features creatively, is ActivityPub. Cross pollinating conversations and communities between microblogging, distributed image sharing and tagging, and link aggregation communities of content using built-in features of hashtags and boosting is … well, it’s game-changing, and it gives me tingles to think about how well it COULD be done.
I’m not really wasting any time on Snoosite anymore other than for archaeological purposes. Now, it’s only been a few days, so I can only speak from my own history - when I made a decision to drop Birdsite like a hot rock, I did so completely and deleted my account. I’m a little less inclined to be as drastic with Snoosite because of historical significance relating directly to technical interests of mine. But as time passes and the Fediverse grows, and Lemmy (or another technology) matures into the space, I think the relevance of Snoosite will fade like so many farts in the wind before it.