Came for APIpocolypse. Stayed for Sync.

Fuck spez

I am yet another fledditor. I think I looked at nearly all the alternatives and I liked the Fediverse the best.

I do miss the sheer volume of participation on reddit, but I that has been steadily improving. And the quality and tone of the conversations is generally much better.

Any forums with large numbers of participants is going to have certain problems. The difference is that reddit turned most of those problems into institutions while Lemmy provides better ways to deal with them and easier ways to avoid them.

Having worked in high tech for almost four decades, I have come to appreciate the advantages of not having everything controlled by a central authority. Sooner or later the leadership, however benevolent, will change into something repressive and exploitive. Once that happens, it will remain that way forever, because there is no financial or political incentive to move in that direction. Replacement has been the only thing that works, at least so far. The Fediverse provides an alternative to that cycle that seems viable.

When they killed third party apps.

Like the majority here, reddit refugee

Reddit killing the app I used.

Bitches took away Apollo. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Reddit being stupid. Specifically, they killed 3rd party apps. RIP RiF

Reddit api change but indirectly.

The 3rd party app closedown led to tons of weird niche subs showing up on popular, and their mods were quite silly, and several sub bans later, a complete ban for defending Palestine.

Killing my favorite 3rd party Reddit app and the way they treat their customers and subreddits

Came over (first to kbin) the day the blackout started. Never left.

I didn’t like the changes on Reddit with the API and suddenly charging for access. Turns out, I like it better here. Probably would have liked it before the Reddit refugee situation, too.

The reddit IPO.

I admit it should of been sooner, but I had to make two emails just to sign up for this. (I wanted to try Protonmail and for some reason you need a email to get email with them so you can email your emails.

Realistically, I just thought it would be slightly better, just because it was a little bit lesser known as a website, and I am consistently longing for older styles of internet engagement. The de-federated nature is nice, sure, but I really don’t tend to care about that shit too much. Reddit had their whole api debacle, I’m sure old-reddit getting canned is on the table if not for apparently necessary moderation stuff that’s still locked behind it. But I dunno, I still have browser extensions on mobile firefox that send me to a perfect libreddit redirect that works almost every time, so functionally it’s sort of identical to what I was already doing, if not more convenient, because I don’t have to deal with a reddit app substitute’s search engine when I want to find stuff, I can just look it up, click on the link, blam, redirect. Not a big issue. The biggest problem for me with the API shit is that everyone decided to throw a bitch fit and completely delete their posts, so like a quarter of the things saved to this useful compilation of internet knowledge is kinda just gone. Except for unddit, but that shit’s probably going to die at some point now that it doesn’t serve a non-archival purpose.

With that said, I think I’ve found lemmy to be basically the exact same as reddit, give or take. It is just as relentlessly annoying as reddit is, and it has less diversity in terms of subject matter, as a whole. There’s basically politics, i.e. inevitable “both-sides”-ism and vote shaming, technology stuff, i.e. stuff that is just linux, and like, assorted general posts, which are going to be comprised of either of the former two categories of thing, and gen-x pop culture references. Any other topic that comes up is a complete toss up, and will probably get commented on by a bunch of brainlets who think they know more than they do, but are actually just parroting the super standard talking points, or whatever they learned in high school.

You also get reddit posting habits, where people tend to mostly respond to the lowest effort meme posts, or horrible headlined news articles, rather than well-written posts or longer writeups. You also get that annoying thing where people just reply with sarcastic remarks that only serve their own self-satisfaction, instead of being critical of their own engagement for a half-second. I guess those are mostly just modern internet phenomenon in general, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying, for sure.

The problem you will inevitably find with any forum organized around topics is that there’s really just not that much to talk about, for most subject matters, so you either prevent communities from forming wholesale, or, more realistically, you just get insular garbage communities where people end up repeating almost the same exact conversations over and over. I think probably the unsung reasons that most old forums died isn’t because of centralization, you know, digg and reddit, but it’s because they all talked about everything already. Have a post? Oops, someone already asked that question in 2009, here’s the thread, should’ve looked in the catalogue, you should go there, looks like it also never got answered and it’s inactive, fuck you have a nice day. Reddit’s only addition to that is the ability for people to post le relevant xkcd link, and we kinda already had/have somethingawful for that, for when you want to just talk, more than you wanna actually talk about something specific.

More seriously, I think my biggest problem is just that reddit, and by extension lemmy, kinda breaks the conventional format of the forum, in favor of something that kinda works less well but is more low-rent to engage with. Used to be that you would just browse a bunch of post titles, click on one, and get greeted with likely a huge customized post, maybe a compilation of all the past posts on a topic, maybe a couple links and natively hosted images thrown in there for good measure. Most reddit posts are just like, a single article, or a single video of something stupid happening. That’s a major downgrade, imo.

Partly it was the API fiasco on Reddit, and partly it was Lemmy that drew me in, honestly.

I’ve left discussion/chat forums before over the years when technology moved on, or the quality of discourse declined, like FidoNet, Usenet, ISCA BBS, or Slashdot. I lived my life just fine without them. Reddit was a good COVID19 distraction for me, a way to stay connected to people using a low-data phone plan. I hadn’t heard about 3rd party apps until the appocalypse. I knew that the Android app ran up the count in DuckDuckGo’s App Tracking Protection, and the iPad app drained the hell out of my battery. (Seriously, I could watch a 2-hour movie on Netflix, and the battery would be at 96%. An hour of the Reddit app drained it to about 60%. Was it, like, live-streaming the view from my camera back to Reddit servers?) I tried Apollo less than two weeks before the shutdown, and it was marvelous. The quality of the discourse had become, just, bad, so I figured I’d just leave Reddit behind when it ceased to function.

But, I checked out Lemmy after reading about it. It was small and quaint. But, I checked it out again. And again. And again. Then, about a month after API Day, I signed up for an account and never looked back. (The big draw, I think, was users who view comments as a discussion, not as a form of verbal combat that you “win”.)