Been thinking of making a post like this for some time, apologies if some of this is not completely relevant: this community seems more like it’s about Reddit the platform/product than Reddit the social “thing”, but I’m sure a lot of people have similar experiences to mine. Maybe on some instances more than others.
Here’s the one of the last comments I wrote as a regular Reddit user, on the eve of the blackout (almost a year ago to the day), under a post titled “Will your participation in Reddit change”:
My comment
I will keep searching Google for Reddit help threads, but as a cultural and news aggregator I think this is the end for me. Maybe I will check it every so often. On desktop. On the old site. Until they sunset that too.
I wouldn’t be against using the first party app if it wasn’t so awful to use.
It’s a massive shame that we’ve all collectively agreed that Reddit is the de facto way to create open communities online. There were so many forums that could fill the void left by Reddit for things like tech and art and they’ve all shut down in the past decade.
I try not to be too negative about the evolution and constant growth of the userbase of the site and of the internet as a whole, but I’ve really felt like things are moving in a direction I can’t even be cautiously optimistic about lately.
I think of all the mod tools that will be defunct. The commonly cited example is that people who comment excessively on adult subs are automatically barred from commenting on the teenagers subreddit. Sure the admins can whip up functionality to do this, but this site was built on custom tools and custom CSS and all that. I think the API was one among the many secret sauces that give Reddit this staying power. These sites and forums I talked about - I used to hop from one to the next year after year. Until I found Reddit a decade ago.
I like that I choose my subs and that I don’t get algorithmically ordered sludge designed to game the algorithm on my homepage. Yes the sensibilities of the lowest common denominator redditors are gamed by people posting, but that’s (in my opinion) acceptable.
Frankly if they kept the old Reddit Gold pricing (4 bucks per month/30 annual) and gated unrestricted API access behind it I would have been inclined to finally give Reddit money. I use it a lot, I don’t mind paying now that I can afford it. But something about how it’s all going down really doesn’t fill me with confidence.
I’ve been trying to write a post about this for a while now, but I haven’t felt like it was relevant. Thanks for asking here
Reading through this is a bit funny, in retrospect, seeing how Reddit-centric my understanding of the internet had become at the time. I am happy to report that I have checked the home page maybe a half dozen times since the blackout, instead of once or twice a week like I expected. I suppose the disgusting state of the heavily astroturfed worldnews sub was a big part of it as well: for me Reddit was the one big online platform where the average visible user didn’t seem to be very misinformed about Palestine (at least not by default), and it was frankly very sad to see where it got in the past few months.
I do miss Reddit, I haven’t been able to replace it outright. I’m from Lebanon, and Lebanese Twitter is (if you can imagine it) even more of a toxic cesspool than regular Twitter. I’m not on Facebook (also cesspool here), I’m not on Instagram - my point is I don’t get anything about my country on ostensibly user-curated social media. /r/Lebanon was very far from perfect, but it was nice to get a trickle of local news with users who were more in line with my own politics. The local news outlets focus on a lot of irrelevant crap, the sub’s news feed was a bit more interesting.
One thing I loved about that subreddit was that users with more mainstream views in my country (eg. transphobia-as-default) were allowed to spout their bullshit in the subreddit with little mod pushback (if it’s just JAQing off etc, not harrassing people obviously). Then the regulars would dogpile on that user’s post - very refreshing! And very validating I would imagine for anyone who is used to hearing this shit everyday.
I was applying to be a mod to help keep the sub moving, at one point, but hey. Maybe that headache was never worth it. Still, I felt like I lost one of my online homes.
More generally, I have enjoyed my first year on Lemmy, although the experience has been lacking in many ways. For one, while Reddit has a reputation as a meme cemetery, the memes here are generally a bit moldier. But that’s okay. The fact that there’s fewer posts I think isn’t necessarily a bad thing either, I think we all preferred Reddit’s slightly slower homepage in 2013 than the one we left in 2023, that would regurgitate more and more from the bottom of the barrel if you were willing to keep scrolling.
I’ve toyed with opening a Lebanon community here on dbzer0, having opened one on FMHY that nobody used. But it wouldn’t be the same, and I wouldn’t know how to populate it. I posted maybe 2 non-question posts on Reddit in my decade+ of being a regular user, but I wrote tons of comments. It also helped keep my English sharper, I think.
I’ve reactivated my old Instagram account and it’s pretty ass out there. The ad/post ratio is just egregious, and they’ll just serve you random posts from random pages. I want to see my friends goddamn it, isn’t this what your platform is supposed to be for? For those of you who don’t know, the app will also send you a notification once or twice a day suggesting you look at “today’s top reels”. I have never watched a reel of my own will, fuck off.
Point being, the main platforms people use online haven’t been up my alley. I can only hope the zoomer dumbphone pushback keeps expanding, and that social media starts being seen as something for older generations. Wishful thinking?
This is just a post about enshittification, everyone’s favorite word, but every time I think about it for more than 2 minutes I can’t help but miss a simpler internet. Some part of me was hoping it would kickstart me “growing out” of spending this much time online per day (not everyone spends a ton of time online), but it hasn’t.
Also every time I ask something longer than 20 words on Discord some middle schooler will reply “yap”, even in the channels designated for questions. Discord has had its uses (yes I know there’s privacy concerns), but it’s hardly a replacement for Reddit, or forums. Both of which are/were searchable. But enough yapping from me.
Thoughts? How has the exodus been for you? Is this how Digg users felt?
The only thing I miss is /r/listentothis. I would open rif and vanced in split mode on my phone and sort by hot/month. I could then easily start playing a song on my TV and continually add songs to the que. Now they changed it so that posts with a YouTube video didn’t even give you a YouTube link. It embeds the video in the Reddit post so you have to go into the post and then click play in order to open the video in YouTube. Way too many steps and I’ve never been able to figure out a way to quickly get a list of links to create a playlist on YouTube or VLC.
I still lurk on Reddit for some communities like for my city, but I no longer engage
I still get on reddit, but not often because red reader is basic, and the reddit app is trash
I couldn’t give it up. My baby bump group and parents of multiples group are too valuable a resource. The general parenting sub on lemmy isn’t active, much less such niche things. The main alternative to them is Facebook groups, which I’m even less inclined to deal with than reddit.
I miss some of the friendships I’ve formed over there. other than that, I hardly open the website at all, and when I do, it’s via Redlib.
just took a look at reddit, one of the top posts is some open racist shit, full of openly racist comments under post of a german police officer having died of stabbing by an extereme-islamist, good riddance of that shithole
I only miss the small communities, especially the ones for video games like r/stalker. Nowhere else to talk about these things.
I’ve been around the internet a long time and seen, and been part of, community growth. The general trend is that you post to the larger community until it has enough momentum to continue on it’s own in a more niche space.
So talk away about stalker in the general sub is my advice. It’ll grow and then there will be a specific community in time.
My experience on lemmy has been very similar to my experience working in a startup. I’m constantly concerned that I’ve picked a sinking ship, and concerned that the people I’m on it with are not the people I’d want to sink with. But there’s excitement around being a part of something that’s still playing out, and being able to influence the long term trajectory.
I don’t think the small community is a detractor, though. I’ve felt for a long time that large social media circles quickly fill with the worst kind of content, and normalizes the worst kind of behavior.
Anyway, I think the thing that makes this worthwhile is the decentralization and the knowledge that it’s (for now) safe from corporate capture. I’m happy to be contributing to an alternative to for-profit social media, and that makes all the worst parts of it worth enduring
Honestly I spend less time on it and that’s a good thing. I read more news, blogs, use other sites etc
If I want to see stuff from my own country I’ll read the local news
I don’t treat Lemmy like some Omni platform like reddit was, but more of a niche platform like all the others. I don’t use Twitter, Instagram kr anything either.
I still use old because the technical scene here in Lemmy is not as good as Reddit. I unsubscribed from all /r/ in my account except for technical ones. I haven’t used /r/all since RIF broke.
reddit it still useful for small-medium sized communities but large subs are slowly becoming botfests and not worth using at all
Same. I still have RIF on my phone hijacking Reddit links. It’s a nice little interruption as if to say “can you really be arsed with Reddit?” and unless it’s a discussion about an obscure technical problem or something my wife sent me, I always click the back button.
Reddit has been a huge part of me growing up.
Watching the site self-destruct has been… painful.
Reddit is dead and buried, what’s left are bots and teenagers. Those yappy discordians now run the show, most of us 10+ reddit veterans either came to lemmy, or gave up on “the internet”. I’m pretty sure you’re not the only one who considered reddit to be the internet at that point.
Most power users, myself included, spent 5+ hours per day there, at times more so than at their paid careers. Especially the mods (I’ve been moderating 6 subs, two of which had over 1M and 5M users).
I do miss some of those communities. I don’t miss modding. Leaving reddit showed me what ungodly amounts of time I sunk into that platform, now that I had to fill other means to close the gap. With Lemmy it’s 20-30 min a day, often spread out over 5+ sessions since there’s not much to say or see that takes me more than 5 min at a time.
I’ve stayed on some of the moderator discord channels since those are fine folks, and chat with them in the off-topic rooms. Which shows me that reddit has gone off the deep end once and for all. With many decent folks leaving, ads and bots exploding all over the place, only the die hard shitposters and radical opinion leaders stuck around. They might not have had a digg moment, but are going the way of tumblr, which is arguably worse.
What I’m trying to say is that while Lemmy isn’t the arch we wanted it to be, going back isn’t possible either since the harbor burned down.
Personally, I’ve started a PhD just about a year ago at the time I left, and it does plenty of filling the gap in my daily calendar…
on which topic you are doing PhD. just curious cuz I want to do it too.
Faculty of Business, and I’m doing it on Clinical Trial Protocol Development since I work in the medical device industry.
I’m permanently banning you for asking a question.
Rule 7a, subsection III. Please read rules before commenting. No appeals.
Muted 30 days lmao 🤣
I lucked out in this regard.
I was able to join up on sopuli, a local Finnish instance with a small but active number of users, who post about and occasionally comment on local things in [email protected]. It’s still quieter that reddit in that regard, but I do at least get some local news.
I’ve also made a huge effort to bootstrap an active anime community here on lemmy, and luckily I’ve not been alone in that. [email protected] has been growing steadily. Instead of getting my anime fanart on reddit like I used to, I upped my usage of pixiv significantly, and then translated that into several communities and activity on lemmy.
If you can, try and get your news from local outlets, and if you actually get into that habit, set up a community for your local area, and start curating articles worth sharing, and posting them there.
My problem with ani.social is that it’s full of moe, and I HATE moeshit with a passion.
That’s too bad, because I’m almost solely responsible for that particular genre of post on the threadiverse, and I don’t plan on stopping.
A “passionate loathing” of a concept sounds like a 100% “you” problem.
Also, I list literally every moe community I run in each of the sidebars of every community. It’d take you less than a minute to find and block them all.
And if you’re using “moe” to refer to anime in general, you know v19 introduced instance blocking, right?
Edit: I don’t understand why anyone would bother downvoting me or any of my posts? Do you people think anime-fans will just go away or stop being anime-fans if you disapprove hard enough?
Just to prove the point, I commit to making ten more posts for every downvote I get. I’m up to over 600, configured and ready to go. If you don’t want to see them, just block me already.
I like the idea of moe culture in theory, but on Lemmy, Moe is exclusively drawings of unrealistically busty young girls in provocative poses.
It’s gross.
I block and I block, but there’s always a new subforum on the front page.
I have no clue what you mean by “moe culture”. And please look up what “exclusively” means. Your use of the word here is a bit too far beyond hyperbole.
The word “moe” refers to the attachment people feel for fictional characters, and as different people like different characters, it can be felt towards nearly any type of character. Japanese vtuber Oozaru Subaru used the word to describe how she feels about BT, a 40-ton three-story battle-robot from Titanfall 2.
In the case of the moe communities I run, that means neat character art. Various niches of such, depending on the community and explicitly the kind that doesn’t go all the way to porn. Short of that, it includes the full range from completely platonic to full on implications.
What you think is gross could not interest me any less. The idea that arousal is off-limits in art is a view held by the narrow-minded, prudish and boring. It’s as valid a feeling for an artist to set out to evoke, as any other.
Again, I list every community I run in the sidebars of them all, and the last time I set up three new ones was two months ago, but I’m so sorry I didn’t DM the updated list to you for you to block.
Anime and TV discussion threads are what I miss most about reddit.
So long as the anime sub doesn’t overly gatekeep shit near to anime but refuses due to arbitrary FetchFrosh reasons then I’m good.
Stopping shit like Thunderbolt Fantasy or near Chinese /Korean anime from being discussed was absolutely ludicrous. But then they have anime best girl competitions constantly like wtf.
The amount of sidebar bullshittery just gets stupid.
Like animemes and animeirl should really all be combined for now until there’s enough people here.
There has been some drama around anime because the largest communities used to be on .ml. But they made the bonkers decision to defederate ani.social, which then caused people to make new communities on ani.social in order move away from .ml entirely, in response.
The discussions over on [email protected] are likely some of the most active, but the anime community also has them, though not every series has enough watchers to get comments.
For animemes [email protected] is the most active, ATM.
I too miss reddit sometimes. Mostly because it had such a large userbase that there was always something interesting to find/read. If you had the right subreddits it was a very nice and friendly place. I like the fediverse (I’m on mbin) but there are still some hurdles to take. Such as finding nice magazines not on your home server. There are some lists and stuff, but I just want to search in the search bar of the site and find them. Also, there is still a 20 year gap of information. If you have a question it is most likely already asked at reddit. So searching on DuckDuckGo or Reddit will almost certainly give you an answer. Searching on the fediverse won’t give you the same hitrate. Especially for more non-mainstream subjects. For instance: I have a specific kind of motorcycle, the magazine on the fediverse is dead. Not one post, no activity (so that’s my fault as well). On reddit, there a couple of thousand threads. I just recently decided I wanted to interact more on the fediverse (hence this reply) to put in my effort to keep the fediverse alive, active and growing. I just need to find some subjects to start a relevant and interesting new thread.
I don’t think lemmy/mbin/etc. will be as popular since it’s too much trouble for the non-techies. I do think mastodon/misskey/etc. is quite active and interesting. It’s better then twitter. And since I follow the right people I really like pixelfed instead of instagram. I think those are better, but it is an adjustment. Since you have to put in the work to find the right people to follow. And while I dislike the instagram algorithm, it did offer some very good, high quality photography. But I think it’s going the facebook way. Facebook in it’s early days was a great way to see what your friends and family where up to. Now it’s just old memes, stupid jokes, fake news and advertisements. Instagram is becoming that as well.
