Here (kbin), Lemmy, Tildes… I hear Mastodon had a user spike. Is there something obvious I’m missing?
I ask because I haven’t felt the same mass of users that Reddit had. Obviously users have spread out, servers have been hammered, UIs have a learning curve and so on… But there might be other alternatives I haven’t looked at that are worth that look.
No, it’s centralized, basically a dude trying to re-create reddit with some twitter-like functions and a tweaked UI. So far he’s been diligent, responsive, and willing to (eventually) ban racist trolls, but he has his eye on maintaining control and moving towards monetization. IMHO he’s also in a bit over his head, for instance spending a large amount of time working on local image uploads to spur engagement on meme subs before listening to his user base, who were reminding him of the bandwidth, costs, and legal oversight he’d incur.
The simplicity of it has attracted people though, and engagement seems good. It’s not a bad site; it just has more potential failure points than something open-source, decentralized, and not-for-profit.