There’s the problem of filtering as well – if I jump into a thread that’s a few hours old on Reddit, there may already be hundreds of replies. How do I filter this? How many discussions have you been in where there were several different people all with the same response, simply because someone else had the same opinion 30 minutes earlier?

On the flip side, if you’re in a small local sub, how do you get new ideas injected? It’s the “joke #243” problem, where everyone’s heard everything already. Until more people arrive with fresh insights and ideas, the community can become insular.

i think its just another UX issues, reddit also had the concept of topics but it was rather weak and not leveraged. With a federation setup topical sorts should get more prevalence. Even getting some small communities togher might be a challenge, even some small comms dont post because reddit culture rather than the sub being small. “back in the day” you could easily find active communities of 10 users on a phpbb forum.