[derefr]

I don't know what you think of Reddit as, but I think of it as two things:

- a collection of independent niche communities that are just using Reddit for hosting, whose members don't think of themselves as visiting "Reddit" but rather as visiting those specific community forums. This is the valuable part of Reddit, that generates and gathers original content and novel discussions that can't be found anywhere else on the Internet. This is the part everyone's rushing to preserve/archive or migrate elsewhere.

- a Usenet-like set of generic default-subscribed "category" subreddits, that just act as content aggregators to bubble up the "least controversial" stuff in each category from across the Internet. Nobody cares much about this (other than Reddit's investors), since it's just another view on the same content that gets surfaced through every other social network one way or another.

If you think of Reddit as just the valuable part, and forget about the junk, then you can reinterpret the Reddit UX like so: Reddit just happens to have a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple communities' posts, just like Twitter has a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple accounts' posts. But 1. this isn't crucial to how users engage with these communities; and 2. you could preserve this property anyway, by having a shared SSO system (like how WordPress.com works) and by making Reddit-the-software federate its posts through ActivityPub. Then a "Reddit client" would actually just be a fancier kind of RSS reader that also knows how to post to individual communities' servers. But each server would still be "sovereign" over its own administration, being able to ban or approval-queue users, etc.

[timerol]

> Reddit just happens to have a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple communities' posts, just like Twitter has a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple accounts' posts.

I disagree with the "just happens to have" part of this. The single-pane view is the killer feature of Reddit for me. I've tried to engage in smaller forums before, and small, niche communities have valuable but infrequent content. Being able to see which of the small communities have fantastic posts today is valuable, and encourages me to participate in some of the less headlining posts.

For a good example, consider /r/ultralight, which is a backpacking community focused on keeping weight off your back. 90% of the posts are "Help me shave weight! (The 10 pound lead weight I carry is sentimental and non-negotiable.)" Slightly more interesting are new product reviews, and the best are overviews of product categories.

I would not visit a standalone forum for once-a-month interesting content. But I'll definitely follow the sub, which leads me to 1) see all of the most interesting posts, and 2) engage with newcomers occasionally when I'm on reddit and nothing else is catching my attention. ("You really don't need the lead weight - just carry a picture of it for sentimental value.")

[derefr]

Let me put it another way, by making an analogy to a service that (surprisingly) does this one thing correctly: Tumblr.

Tumblr "just happens to have" a dashboard, but that doesn't really matter, because each blog also has a web subdomain that serves both the blog's posts, and serves a (public, unauthenticated) RSS feed for said posts. Which means that I can just subscribe to all the Tumblr blogs I care about through my RSS feed reader of choice (which is a single-pane-of-glass I control, and one which muxes together many other posts-once-a-month sources as well) and forget that the Tumblr dashboard exists.

And the Tumblr dashboard itself also doesn't need to be operated by the same company that hosts Tumblr's blogs. It could just be a fancy RSS reader, that uses Tumblr's API only for posting. And so it could be a third-party app, without needing to make any (authenticated) API requests to Tumblr, when all a user is doing is consuming content.

[ris58h]

> I don't know what you think of Reddit as

A set of subreddits that people browsing casually.

I don't think that there are many communities that live only on Reddit. Most of subreddits are pretty casual. Even niche ones. Niche communities already have other places to have discussions. They aren't core audience of Reddit. The core audience browse a 'junk'.