[lorean_victor]

its not about "usability", in general, though. do you think reddit is truly usable?

as a content consumer I would love to be somewhere where there is engaging content and content discovery. I go to mastodon, my feed is empty and the search doesn't work. I bounce.

as a content publisher, I would go wherever the audience is. I go to mastodon, users have a hard time finding me, no one gets my stuff. I bounce.

now I (personally), as a consumer, hate the fact that I need to follow people at least on 3 platforms to get their content proper. as a publisher, I (again, personally) hate the fact that I am forced to at least partition the discussion on my content. but I'd tolerate these pain points for content / audience, because the main role of a social media is to give me content / audience. being nice and not having all these pain points is secondary.

[TulliusCicero]

> do you think reddit is truly usable?

Compared to federated equivalents? Oh yeah, definitely.

That's not to say it doesn't have other problems, but casually following subreddits and commenting on them is super easy, and you don't have to worry about which subs federate with other ones, or where your Mastodon account actually is or anything.

[bsder]

> its not about "usability", in general, though. do you think reddit is truly usable?

Um, apparently, yes?

Google searches were doing "+reddit" before reddit melted down. The content was super discoverable and searchable. Everything (including discord, slack, and the fediverse) is laughably bad on that front.

People switched from twitter and reddit to ... discord and slack. Mostly beause they handle identity and phone apps--apparently searchability and discoverability isn't that important. I'm one of the olds, so don't get why the fuck people want phone apps to pester them all the time, but apparently the youngs want this very, very badly.

So, yeah, apparently twitter and reddit were really quite usable for the vast majority of users.

I'm a big fan of the fact that reddit's meltdown caused a bunch of people to set up forums again. However, that's a lot of duplicated work for every single forum administrator.

[lorean_victor]

I am sorry I couldn't aptly understand you.

did people migrate from twitter / reddit to discord / slack? That's an interesting phenomena if it has happened that I wasn't aware of, do you have sources I can read up on it more?

anyways, my point was that "usability in general" is not the key (reddit has famously terrible interfaces, for example). it is being really usable on the core functionality it should provide (like having tons of content to discover, and getting your content to tons of other people, in case of social media) is what matters.

[bsder]

> did people migrate from twitter / reddit to discord / slack?

Six technical reddit groups that I monitor regularly all migrated. I was kind of surprised as that was 100% of the technical groups I regularly track on reddit. 3 are now on Discord, 1 went to Slack, 2 set up a Discourse.

In terms of "number of people", it's probably not that much. However, in terms of adding "+reddit" to Google searches, it's going to be a massive hit.