I wish there was an alternative to leaving Reddit
Personally I’m eagerly awaiting Reddit’s demise.
This reminds me so much of the mass digg exodus of 2010. It’s going to be interesting to see how this goes.
Tricky thing is going to be the onboarding process for laypeople. Problem with the fediverse is helping people wrap their heads around servers. People think the server is the “community.” And it kind of is, and it kind of isn’t. Servers are a community of people, but severs also host capital C “Communities” within them.
This is probably the biggest thing holding back the adoption of the fediverse. This user experience problem hasn’t been cracked. Onboarding isn’t intuitive.
The confusion is the signup process and front page
If when you joined instead of picking a user name it was username @lemmy.world or @beehaw.org then people would see it more like an email address.
Then when you reach the front page instead of showing server admin picks, it should show a list of popular communities across servers and then the alternative local version with some text at the top explaining multiple versions of some communities exist and you can subscribe to both.
Oh boy, I’m more confused now!
So there are global and local communities?
Life on the net is the life of a nomad fleeing a string of manmade apocalypses.
Missing Reddit is better than mourning what it’ll end up as when the screws start to tighten (when you have a captive audience, stage 2 is ramping up the ads).
Your first sentence was actual poetry.
Their username checks out.
Yeah, to be honest, I used the reddit mobile app and I loved reddit and I’m also sad to see it go. However, nothing lasts forever.
At this point I’m wondering whether people will stick to reddit even if they pull a 180 on api pricing and all. The whole smear campaign against Apollo and others just underlines they can’t be trusted.
Even if they reneged on everything, I still wouldn’t go back. The problem with Reddit at this point is the quality of its users. It’s next to impossible to find any kind of legitimate discussion because everything is buried under reddit-comedy and virtue signaling. Most of the major subreddits have just become political tools for their mods. It scares me thinking how curated the posts are there.
That is also a criticism of Lemmy already
I’m feeling pretty good about Lemmy, honestly. I wasn’t sure how I was going to fill my downtime, but this and mastodon may just pan out for me
Glad to see it go. It was not as useful as it once was and the community had grown very angry and bitter.
i miss the memes, the rest of it is toxic
I love the thrill of discovering something new on the internet, and then sharing the content with my friends.
Reddit substituted that thrill by localizing it through all the niche subreddits, but as time went on it was obvious how dangerous that can be.
I’m personally excited to get back to exploring.
The downside is that the internet of 2023 is not the internet of 2013, and definitely not the internet of 2003 - but that doesn’t have to be encumbering.
But I understand that most people don’t want to work for that shit. Hopefully the added competition spurs innovation from all over.
I’m sad too. What’s with these tech companies making the shittiest changes lately? I thought I’d be fine deactivating my Discord after their horrendous username change since I’d still have Reddit but now Reddit is going to become lower quality. I’ll be active on here and Twitter since its fandoms are similarly, like Reddit, seperated by subtwitters (communities)
What was so bad about the Discord username change? I literally just dropped the number they had forced on me.
This won’t work for a lot of people though.
I’m aware. Doesn’t answer the question.
The bad thing is that people are forced to give up their username to make it a unique token with people they will never meet and care about.
Question for most people is: Why? Where is the good reason to force this upon everyone?
And even as a techy guy I have no clue to be honest.
Seems a bit dramatic to completely abandon the platform over a username change though, especially since you can still use whatever nickname you want on the servers.
I prefer non-corporate alternatives, like lemmy or mastodon. However, if it’s going to last, users are going to have to contribute what they can to keeping the lights on, otherwise, if lemmy grows, they’ll have to resort to things like ads to cover their costs and it will become reddit all over again.
Well, we are on the ground floor here. Let’s find something that keeps the lights on and gives everyone the incentives they need to make a great community!
Perhaps a good start would be a page that gives statistics about the time and money required to run an instance. I really appreciate those who have dedicated their time money and reputation to start things up. Lets find a way to build a better social media experience together.
I think many of us would be OK with a number of different models, donations, non-intrusive ads, reasonable subscription fees, etc. Perhaps there could even be incentives for people who put time into building communities by moderating or other tasks. The important thing in my opinion is that everyone feels they contributed to the structure in a way that they want to keep participating.
Edit: I found a budget page from the donation link on the side bar of the main page of lemmy.world.
I’ve been on Reddit for almost 15 years and it’s just gotten too big and too moderated for me.
The biggest thing I’ll miss isn’t actually being on reddit but the fact that basically any time you needed to look up somthing you could just google it and add site:reddit.com and find some good threads about it… it’s been a valuable knowledge base.
Agreed, I feel like the social part of reddit is pretty easily replaceable but the amount of niche and specialised information was incredible
I also do this, but even before the recent turmoil I started losing confidence and trust. Brands know about this trick and they know how much consumers trust honest reviews by real people.
Generative AI like ChatGPT makes it easier than ever to flood subs with search-engine friendly posts and comments how awesome product X is…
True… look at reviews too for instance. Feels like more and more of them are generated by their owners in different ways to trick people. Same with tracks on spoitfy and so on as well, companies script playing their tracks all the time so they’ll end up higher in rankins.
It’s really starting to be hard to find anything that’s honest these days.
Agreed, although I do love that their own search engine was complete dogshit. That said, many of the posts I found really useful were at least five years old, sometimes as old as 12. In some ways it may be good for the knowledge base to update a bit. Actually, are Lemmy posts searchable the same way as Reddit?
Be the change you want to see. Start a community, advertise it, start bring the reddit folks over here.
I’m sad too. I grew up in the early 1970s loving newspapers and oddly loving the classified ad sections (that sounds strange, but reading scattered somewhat classified content still is pleasing to me. That is how my carefully curated Reddit home feed felt.) As newspapers died, I realized that my small metro area had no good written way to interact or hear about local issues. Our local subreddit became my best source.
And I loved reading subs such as /nursing and /medicine and /talesfromyourserver not because I work in those areas, but because they are IRL communities that I count on for my quality of life and hearing their stories helped me empathize with them and (I think) made me a better human.
If I woke up in the middle of the night, I could read something to get my mind off of whatever was running through my head.
Other than paying for my Apollo subscription, making about 25 comments a year, and using the upvote function liberally, I didn’t interact much. My almost 10 year old account is very shy. I was always wary of being attacked or ignored. Oddly, IRL, I’m very apt to dive into any conversation.
I’m tentatively trying to be more interactive here. Smaller groups feel safer.
As someone who worked at a major U.S. newspaper in the late 90s, I think the world needs more people who think the way you have just expressed… valuing local information, empathizing with people outside your circle, and considering how your words will be received. I hope you find Lemmy to be a place where you feel comfortable contributing.
For now it’s great! I loved newspapers and was a co-editor on my high school paper. Reading and writing have always been favorite things for me to do. Thanks for your time in the newspaper business. Wonder how many here still seek the goodness of that medium that was also largely lost?
