I'm taking this out of the reddit thread to discuss it directly.
Kienan was moaning about how .win is less searchable than reddit and how searchability is somehow vital to the success of sites.
This is patently false. Search is not what determines the success or failure of a site. Having a compelling, active community that people want to participate in and spread word about is what makes or breaks a site.
Every time a person types in communities.win, or selects it from their bookmarks, that was a LOSS for google. A loss for reddit. That was traffic that reached us, without them. IN SPITE of them. A net lost customer to them.
That is the power of the internet.
The power to look at any site and decide "you're dead to me", walk away, and deny them all power and go directly to the sites you actually WANT to use.
To those of you who still use reddit: I doubt your commitment to the great work of defeating reddit. In my eyes you are a failure by your own choices as a consumer. You give them power OVER YOU by your continued patronage.
The only answer is to walk away, make this the best we can, use it for everything, and BE THE CHANGE WE WANT TO SEE.
Going back further in time, when the KiA2 sub was new I remember people complaining that there weren't any posts or comments so they had to use KiA1. Then over time KiA2 got more and active to the point where there was more going on there than KiA1.
An existence proof that "be the change" can in fact work.
KIA banned all of us most active users and the sub basically became Bvolleyball posting.
True the KiA mods did themselves no favors by removing everything remotely interesting. But that started in earnest a bit later.
There was a time where I would read the KiA1 and KiA2 subreddits during lunch at work. I still remember there was one day where it seemed like the posts on KiA2 never ended and I was worried that I would go over my break trying to read KiA1, only to realize that KiA1 had not had any new posts since I had read it the day before.
I definitely agree that engagement is what makes a community work, and in a way KiA1 has killed themselves in that regard. I worry about KiA2 kind of bleeding out though, between the original split with KiA1, and then the split between reddit and .win, potentially resulting in users being spread too thin.
Fortunately we seem to have at least settled on one alternative to reddit instead of being split between here, saidit, poal, etc...
Which is why I believe that the reddit kia2 should have been locked the day kia2.win went online.
Coercion is wrong and also ineffective. If people don't want to come here, they won't come here if the sub is locked either.
People don't want to come here because most of the people are over there.
Because you didn't shut over there down. Dumbass.
Weekendgunnit closed itself on Reddit and the site here is a shell of its shit posting self. First few days were active then it really fell off. The hundreds of active posters and thousands of lurkers dwindled to dozens of us.
Good.
Now you know how many of them were worthless sheeple and how false your imagined community was. You were deluded. Now you are free. It may take years but you'll build back up, and you'll build back free of reddit.
I left behind communities on reddit that HAVE NO equivalent here.