I found a lot of the subs I visited through other subs. i.e subs that linked to each other. These communities did that because Reddit’s search functionality and discoverability is notoriously terrible. But they got away with it because of the sheer numbers of users. I estimate that just before the digg exodus, reddit had about 30 to 40 million users and that number tripled by a year later. To put this into perspective, lemmy probably has about a milllion users currently. Maybe two if we are being generous.
Theres not really enough users or history to have the word of mouth growth reddit did without a good means to introduce users to new communities. Especially given that several of them are duplicates. eg. technology
You have a point here. On r*ddit, people just link a sub that exists or not, no matter, by just writing r/randomsubname. Sometimes just for a joke, sometimes to share a niche sub or something.
On lemmy linking communities is much harder so you do it if you really want to. You have to know the name and the instance and at least for me, there is no auto complete.
I found a lot of the subs I visited through other subs. i.e subs that linked to each other. These communities did that because Reddit’s search functionality and discoverability is notoriously terrible. But they got away with it because of the sheer numbers of users. I estimate that just before the digg exodus, reddit had about 30 to 40 million users and that number tripled by a year later. To put this into perspective, lemmy probably has about a milllion users currently. Maybe two if we are being generous. Theres not really enough users or history to have the word of mouth growth reddit did without a good means to introduce users to new communities. Especially given that several of them are duplicates. eg. technology
You have a point here. On r*ddit, people just link a sub that exists or not, no matter, by just writing r/randomsubname. Sometimes just for a joke, sometimes to share a niche sub or something.
On lemmy linking communities is much harder so you do it if you really want to. You have to know the name and the instance and at least for me, there is no auto complete.