So before I went to bed, we were having a talk in another thread about gaining new members and drawing more growth to the site.

I made the statement that we'll never be reddit, and that got a little pushback. Which I've been catching up on. This exposed some things about chapo.chat I wasn't aware of, that people here want to be reddit. I've always seen this site as a rejection of reddit. I don't think reddit is good. I think it's designed specifically to turn people against each other. I think it gameifies the worst aspects of online interactions. And ultimately it's a tool for propaganda/advertisement ie inherently pro-imperial and pro-capitalist.

So I want to make a new thread and discuss this idea of whether chapochat should strive to be reddit or not. And to kind of subtweet @Awoo at the same time since she seemed to be the main proponent of this idea. I'm not sure who all the founders are, but if they could be pinged, that would be helpful.

How people imagine decentralised/federated social media will work and how it will actually play out are completely different.

Reality is that ONE of the fediverse projects will hit it big and all the others will gain some crumbs from that but it will be that one single big project that succeeds that continues on as a major internet force.

Why? Why would any project hit it big? Nothing is guaranteed. And the definition of 'big' varies. Big could just mean getting 500k users for a year or two then dying.

ChapoChat’s trajectory is going to be the same trajectory as reddit’s as long as it doesn’t make a catastrophic mistake that sees the community abandon it. Reddit’s trajectory was as a source for tech news and tech discussion initially and then slowly slowly slowly branching into hobby related content after receiving massive influxes of users from the complete and total collapse of Digg. At the time of the collapse of Digg there were still only a hundred thousand or so active users of reddit. 10k-20k was considered a BIG subreddit back in them days. Breakouts that sailed into the 200k region in the first year of the digg exodus were all the default communities.

Reddit was always a capitalist venture. It was designed to be that. I hope we're not on the same trajectory. What if the community does abandon it? This is just saying "we're either going to be reddit or we're not. and if we're not, it's the community's fault" Do we not believe that right now, at the foundation, we have some agency in what happens with this site? It's up to us to build a strong foundation.

Reddit was able to become big because it had investors. Do we have investors? They could pay for exposure that we can't. Capital rules in capitalism. This lacks materialism. It's the "great man theory" of websites. That a good concept goes further than the cash behind it. There are real world examples proving that wrong, like Uber. Uber is a bad idea with billions behind it, making it work.

ChapoChat’s trajectory will be the same, but instead of being a tech community that then transitioned into many entertainment communities while maintaining its strong tech core (before later killing it off) it is a politics community that will transition into many entertainment communities while maintaining its strong political core… And hopefully not later killing it off.

Hopefully? I'd rather try to not be reddit and remove the chance of losing our core values than try to be reddit and lose it. Don't throw away a sure thing in favor of something that has a large chance of not working.

The pathway is the same one and I do not see the political core as a barrier to creating high quality entertainment communities that other people want to take part in. If the communities are good, if they have high quality content that they’re not getting easily elsewhere because they’re run by libs or focus on easily digestable garbage content, if the content is actually good? People will use them. They will use them because they like them and those communities create value. If the communities do things like start projects that have actual value in those hobbies people will be forced to visit ChapoChat in order to consume the thing that they value because the source of that content is literally here.

I pictured us being a meme site that moved closer to activism. Not a meme site that moves towards entertainment. Was this the goal of chapochat the whole time? Is the hope here that if we just let people talk about prestige TV they'll be open to radicalization because there's a marxist comm too?

The politics doesn’t matter. The vast majority of people do not give a fuck if they want hobby content. If the hobby communities are good it won’t be a barrier at all.

Still confused by this. Are we a leftist alternative to reddit or are we just a hobby/entertainment startup?

We aren’t and never will be as disgusting as 4chan is to the mass majority. The vast majority of people are apolitical and as long as a place isn’t saying something outrageously racist or fascist people really aren’t turned away. Even then, outrageous fascist and racist shit still doesn’t turn many apolitical people away from consuming something like /v/ on 4chan. Don’t overestimate how much starting off from a political core is going to affect the site.

It's interesting to claim to want to be reddit, but I actually think 4chan is more of what we're going for. 4chan was just a branch of 2chan. It was built around hobbies and entertainment. Then it became super political late in life, after getting very popular. It still doesn't compete with reddit in any material sense. But it definitely has influenced the culture of an online generation. It's worth, what, $3M when Hiro bought it? No investor will touch it except nazis. But so far something like 4chan is what's being advocated here.

4chan was also a much smaller startup, with a few people, in bedrooms. It wasn't the project of some SV techbros trying to create the next thing. Sounds like us to me unless our founders here are actually techbros.

Finally, is the intention to monetize chapochat? Are the founders planning on growing this userbase and then dumping it when they turn 25? What are the plans here?