I went searching for something today and instinctually clicked on a reddit link. Fortunately the sub was dark for the protest anyway, but it’s crazy how ingrained in me it is to go to reddit for everything.
Unfortunately now we’re going to have to get used to clicking on those clickbait tech articles like “TOP 10 FACEBOOK ALTERNATIVES 2023” to find information, and weed out the crappy blogs.
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The fact is that there is some useful info that only is on Reddit. No shame in looking that stuff up since that’s where it is.
The main thing is to stop using Reddit as your go-to time waster/doom scrolling app
Now I will doomscroll on Lemmy. Problem solved
Tbh the lack of people and content here has limited my doom scrolling tremendously.
Also helps that everyone here is like a kid on their first day of high school or college. Zero toxicity! 😎
Give it time. The toxic trolls will soon realize they’re all just talking to each other and come to the fediverse for fresh meat.
I don’t think trolls think that hard. It’s all for instant gratification. There are few dedicated and motivated trolls. It’s a low effort sort of deal.
Same. I’m feeling so good about myself now.
Actually for the first time I’m contributing now, on reddit I tried a few times but I never liked it, and never did more than liking.
If people stop providing useful information on reddit, it’s usefulness will disappear over time.
There are also lots of people using Shreddit to remove their entire log of comments.
I’m debating whether or not to do that with my account… I have several comments with solutions to specific tech issues, documentation on specific things. At the same time, I feel less and less comfortable with Reddit benefiting from information users provided for free.
I’ve been on the fence about wiping my account as well. It’s just hard for me - my history, wholesome interaction with users, friends made, how many people I’ve helped, I’ve written a few guides. Man it just sucks. (the largest guide I’ve written, for Vindictus, is partially outdated, but also I put in sooooooo much effort into it and I’m really proud of it. maybe I’ll download and save as a .doc or something)
I think I just need to hear someone’s stance on it, hear their points, and be persuaded
I also need to figure out -when- to do that if I end up doing it. I assume before the 30th, but I’m not sure if some have started doing it already, and why
Grab those comments and repost them in a place where you are more comfortable. You can keep that knowledge out there without needing to keep your account if you don’t want to. Some of those apps actually give you your comment history in a file when they’re done.
Honestly? ChatGPT (4) is basically a stackoverflow 2.0. It’s my goto when I want help with specific problems. There are alternative options, is what I mean.
I deleted all my comments on Reddit. I do not want them to benefit from my knowledge even if it might inconvenience someone else
The big problem with chatGTP is that you never can be sure that it’s right, you need to check it. On reddit and sites like it, you can see the amount of upvotes, which shows you if they are right or not.
I have seen a lot of highly upvoted comments on reddit which were very, very wrong.
I still use reddit for help on things. But for topics that I’m less knowledgeable about (so I can’t gauge the accuracy myself), I try to just take everything with a grain of salt.
It helps that if something is wrong on Reddit, another redditor usually points it out since there are many eyes on any particular thread.
True, but the chance of it being wrong is substantially smaller than the chance of chatGTP dreaming up something.
The big problem with chatGTP is that you never can be sure that it’s right
A lawyer wasnt aware of this and used it to do research on a case. It went poorly.
Jup, legal eagle fan here (:
One of my favorite parts about reddit is people will always be there to call out your BS, whether it be via downvotes or a comment. I always appreciated that because more times than not, they will tell them they’re wrong and explain why, sometimes even with sources. A lot of the time, they redirect people to better sources of information, like a telegram group about a custom android rom
Of course, this isn’t true 100% of the time, not even downvoted comment is wrong - like the other person commented, it’s fair to take it with a grain of salt
That’s why my solution for this is to research a topic EXTENSIVELY by reading tons of threads and comments about it, put them all together in my head and consider them all, and then decide on the best outcome/answer based on all the research combined. That way, I don’t just rely on 1 person’s response and hope they’re right. For most things though, them being wrong might not even make a huge negative impact
I’ve found that Redditors also generally have our backs - they warn us about stuff to do or not to do, that companies don’t warn us about because it would otherwise profit them
If you don’t have too many maybe consider posting them on Lemmy as new posts before deleting them? Keeps the information discoverable and helps populate Lemmy with good content, while giving Reddit the middle finger - TRIPLE WIN!
We also don’t know if search engines will pay the new fees to index reddit, so that could potentially make it disappear faster.
Really? Doesn’t google and similar search engines use web crawlers, outside of the devloper API of reddit? Or is that different for reddit?
Currently yes, but I’d imagine they’re also going to disallow crawlers via robots.txt or what’s to stop OpenAI and friends from acquiring the corpus that way? Though of course that assumes this whole thing is really thought through which might be a big assumption on my part…
I long for a day where my search queries will end in Lemmy instead of Reddit.
I think this is exactly right. I plan to use info available on reddit as reference material if needs be, but I will no longer be posting and therefore creating more content for reddit to sell on in the future.
Personally it feels like working for free by posting on Reddit. Id rather create content about my hobbies here where no one is making money off of it.
The fact is that there is some useful info that only is on Reddit.
I mean reddit has become a insanely huge knowledge base for all sorts of technical problems and other topics. I’ve searched with site:reddit.com so many times for problem solving.
Google has been pretty much useless lately because it just spits out this SEO spam (probably all written by LLMs, that’s the only way to explain why it’s never happened before but does happen now), so losing reddit as one of the best sources of non-AI-generated information would set us back a lot.
What we need is the current state of reddit, but frozen in time and just as searchable as reddit is right now. And since reddit won’t want to lose SEO, they will be open to scraping.
There are archives of Reddit history, notably the Pushshift archive & current ongoing Archive Team archive. Much of the data can be searched on the Wayback Machine provided by the Internet Archive, although it’s not as convenient.
Would it be possible to somehow mirror the archive as a read only lemmy instance? Like… Funny@oldreddit so that it would be still searchable from lemmy?
I can look into doing this because it sounds like a genius idea. I’ll have to work with a friend and see what we can pull together
Let me know how can I help
I’m sure it’s possible. Someone would either need to transpile the current data format to match Lemmys’, or just build a new front-end for it. Also, it might be considerably difficult to host something like this because there’s just so much data. The Pushshift archive alone is 2TB, which is primarily just text.
What does LLM mean?
It means “large language model”, software like ChatGPT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
Thank you!
Large Language Model. A type of AI such as Chat GPT
Large Language Model (like GPT-4)
I think it’s perfectly okay to compromise. I’m gonna hopefully use Lemmy as Reddit, and if I can’t find the desired info on here, then Reddit will help me out. I can already find lemmy posts when searching for infos.
Google search has just gotten so incredibly bad. It’s even getting bad at programming searches which used to be a strong suit. Luckily duckduckgo has actually gotten better.
I know it’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but don’t forget you can often grab a cached copy of the page if you found it via Google. That’s probably the best way to extract some information without giving Reddit a hit right now.
It’ll take time. I think eventually we’ll have enough knowledge on Reddit alternatives like Lemmy where we can add “lemmy” to our search strings instead of “reddit”.
The problem with that is, that not all instances use “Lemmy” or even “feddit” in the URL.
What do you mean? Who would register at such a place.
Hopefully search engines can eventually work around that.
Sparks an idea, I briefly remember google or some search engine letting you search for forums, a browser extension which did this for a few different larger forums and then aggregated the results could yield a similar result.
I think the one you’re looking for is kagi.com!
Nice to see Kagi get mentioned!
I’ve been using Kagi for about a month now, and I love the quality of results you get. I’d say it’s still a niche product for people who need to do a lot of searches but can’t be bothered to dig through commercialized ad-driven SEO’d crap. I haven’t used the personalization features like lenses much, although it’s useful for finding PDFs and answers to programming questions.
What do you think about Kagi?
Never heard of it, just went to have a look and they had a “give it a try” button with a “best headphones” example. Note the very first result. Given the context of this thread, pretty funny 😅
I think Brave search goggles can do exactly that
We all have to do our part to talk about the products and services we use here on Lemmy. Does anyone know of a good community similar to /r/buyitforlife on the fediverse?
Is there a way I can follow that without having to create a new account? Still trying to figure everything out
https://beehaw.org/c/[email protected]
(replace the beehaw part with whatever instance you are registered with)
Just to note, this only works if someone on your instance has already made the instance “know” about the community by explicitly searching for it in the search menu - otherwise you’ll run into a
404: couldnt_find_communityerror.Someone needs to make an extension that seamlessly manages federations and servers like that, since it is going to be the worst part of switching
Interesting! Thank you!
Search for a community and write [email protected] as you’re search term.
How are those search terms meant to work? I’ve seen so many people recommend searching for communities by adding an exclamation point in front, but that has never produced any results when I search using Jerboa. Is that actually supposed to work, or is the exclamation point a placeholder that I have to know to exclude or replace with something else?
I’ve had the same experience, I’ve found better luck subscribing to outside communities through the websites on desktop but it’s still not 100% for me. Jerboa really needs to find a way to handle community links properly.
It seems to fail initially, but if you wait a few seconds and try again, it should show up. At least that’s how it is on desktop.
Default search is for Communities but I found I could only find some I looked for if I changed it to “All” when searching. It would say nothing found otherwise. They were an existing (but new) community on another Lemmy instance.
You can link it to be accessible for all instances Buyitforlife
So far, I just search the sub name in the instance I’m registered to and it always appears in the search results at the top.
Click that and I’m in!
I also found this GreaseMonkey script that simplifies the entire process by allowing you to redirect any community to your local instance: https://sh.itjust.works/post/70143
This really simplified my workstream for adding new communities. There is also a script to reformat the site to look more like old Reddit if you are really wanting to feel at home. Some great work being done in that community.
I spent some time on mastodon, squabbles, kbin and vlemmy today subscribing… it helped seeing many of the same communities in them. I’m 60… so I know younger minds are nimble enough to make themselves comfortable elsewhere.
What I’m interested in seeing is if others are committed and tenacious enough to stand their ground - outside of Reddit. One thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older… things change, and sometimes fighting over turf leaves the winner a ruined playground with bad memories for everybody.
The key is amassing a large enough audience of people who want something new, not just people who want a 1:1 replacement for reddit. There’s no way lemmy will be able to compete in content volume but I think the idea of “non corporate” social media will be attractive to people
For what it is worth, I am about your age. The special thing about Reddit is scale. I come from the days of Usenet and it had scale. CompuServe did too. So this can suceed if people want it too. I am not going back for now. Deleted my app. Thinking about deleting my account. For me Tax, Law, and Medical stuff seem like the difficult gaps.
Muscle memory is also hard to break. I had to remove Apollo from my homescreen :D
I know the feeling. I had to put it in a folder “Do not use”. It’s like the first rhing I check in the morning. This lemmy thing has potential. I miss Apollo so much though. Jesus if Christian ported Apollo to use a lemmy backend I’m not sure I’d even notice it wasn’t Reddit. 😀
I made a shortcut automation in iOS to close Apollo as soon as it’s opened. Works & has caught me in my habit a few times already. lmao
I replaced my reddit icon with Jerboa. I’m working on my own client in the mean time, though
Did the same! Now I don’t have to think twice before clicking it.
Same lol. Replaced the icon with the Lemmy app for Android and here I am 👍🏻
I have my 3rd party apps installed still but have put them behind an app locker so there’s an additional step if I knee-jerk! Also disabled notifications so they won’t tempt me in.
It doesn’t help the fact that depending of the question, every single answer ends up being only on reddit and nowhere else.
I have this problem because Google hasn’t been as good the past few years unless I append “reddit” to my search. During all of this going on, I’ve been trying to be diligent about viewing the cached version instead, but it’s not always available.
This is one of the problems for me. I frequently search tech issues and more often than not, a lot of links are from Reddit.
Really specific issues are more often than not only found in reddit, and that’s not even all, for me at least; a lot of those answers in reddit are short and to the point. Sometimes you search for the solution of a problem and find posts on websites filled with irrelevant information that you don’t really have the time/patience to read. . .
I’m worried, not all but large enough group of Reddit users are already deleting their account, and with that are gone years of knowledge and good answer threads using the tool that retroactively edits your comments.
They have their full right, of course, but it will be a net loss for the future.
There will be archives made available by various groups I’m sure. And that’s assuming Reddit doesn’t just go undelete all those. Either way I’d guess that certain subreddits/communities will end up finding their new home here or elsewhere and over time the information that shows up on reddit will become more and more stale
If you delete an account now, all the threads it ever commented on will lose context and become useless unless archived already. That’s the situation we’re in, people are deleting their accounts without thinking about all the content that they have contributed to and destroying it.
I think their mindset is that they don’t want Reddit to profit off of those contributions. I understand that, but personally I won’t be nuking my account, even though RiF is the only way I really browse the site.
We’re all in rehab 😐
Honestly I’m trying to retrain my brain to type beehaw instead of reddit as a reflex when I open a new tab. Beehaw is literally my rehab
I named my lemmy instance bookmark “Shmeddit”
I feel like we need a Redditor’s Anonymous community lol.
Hi I’m Swintoodles and I’ve tried to open reddit 3 times this morning. The site is sparse, so I only browsed for 20 minutes, but I know I can get better!
Ive been tapping the empty space on my phone where the reddit app was out of habit all day
I put Jerboa in there so when I try to open Reddit it brings me here!
I downloaded two news apps and put them where my Reddit icon used to be and it’s not a bad move because it means I read news instead of just checking comments on news.
Yeah I was thinking of using Perun’s referral link to Ground News, and sticking it in that spot. Probably only after the end of the month though.
Same. RiF has occupied the top-leftmost spot on my home screen for 3 phones. I removed the icon from my homescreen on Saturday night and I’ve definitely gone to tap the empty space a few times.
I have set a 0 minute timer on Boost and Infinity, so I can’t navigate to reddit. On the first day of blackout I had to open reddit to try and find the name for lemmy, squabbles and raddle so I had some alternatives as I couldn’t remember them!
I have opened and closed youtube way too many times. It’s been tough. I even went to 4chan after many year last night. A real blast from the past.
It’s going to take time to reposition, but for the long haul this is the best course of action, personally I’ve uninstalled and blocked - but I do miss some of the subreddits from before.
This community seems to be in its early steps, so every contribution means progress, and sooner rather than later we’ll be back to where we want to be!
I’m using a pi-hole on my network and I added reddit to the ‘blocked list’ to cut down on myself clicking the links. I should find a way to filter out the links from my search results easily, but this works for now.
I was going to ask in a full post, but as a comment on this topic would be better: what kind of modifiers would we type in when we want to narrow a web search scope to the fediverse? Like, it’s easy to just add ‘reddit’ to any query, that instantly cuts out all the BS. Hoping there’s some magic keyword in the metadata in the ActivityPub guts.
Someone feel free to start a full post on this, if you figure it’s warranted.
This is a very good question - when I’m troubleshooting things my default search pattern is: “<problem> 2023 reddit”, because 99% of the other search results are pure garbage.
Fr, it is very hard to break. I instinctively add “reddit” to the end of every search.
This speaks to how bad Google has gotten IMO - I do it too.
Yup
I know, it’s so much harder to find answers to anything past very simple answers with Google these days. After the blackout, I’ll probably do far less jumping straight to Reddit, but I feel like it’s still going to be unavoidable sometimes.
After the subreddits go un-dark I will probably still use this for searching until there’s a LLM set-up to “replace” google searching (which Bing is Still Not, imo).
Agreed, I use reddit for a lot of my research be it for purchasing decisions or other random questions I think of during the day.
Unrelated but we have similar usernames :)
Hahaha that is amazing! I was going to go for my cryptic variation of ‘1bluxjay’ only to realize that I can have the actual username. Been a long time since I’ve been able to do that.
Yeah, even if I quit using reddit as a community tool the information value is huge. When something breaks on a niche subject they can be the only easy to find source.
Quitting Reddit’s hard, but it’s heartening to see just how many people are posting from different instances here! I’ve got to admit, even after Mastadons limited success, before today I never seriously thought that federated social media would actually ever work. It just seemed to complicated for average person to grok.
Here we all are though! Decentralizing the decision making for who gets to post and host, what gets seen and what doesn’t, seems to be worth fighting for. For enough of us at least to make this corner of the internet interesting for a while.
I’ve got a question though, are there any non technical people here? If you are interested in technology do you know non technical people who are participating in the black out?
I think a Reddit type platform lends itself better to federation than something like Twitter. Reddit is already split up into sub communities so it’s easier to digest vs. Mastadon/Twitter meant to be one big conversation.
Your question about non-technical savoy folks being on here is valid and there’s probably not many. But Reddit also started out like that and it took many years before it became mainstream. Federated serves are a new thing, even for the technological literate, so I suspect it will take a while to permeate into casual internet users but it will happen in the future.
I wonder if you could design an instance to completely hide the federated aspect by default. So far I’ve barely needed to think about the federation, it feels a lot like just Reddit.
Yeah I can see a path for this ramping up slowly, especially given the horrible mismanagement of places like Reddit. Even if they weather the storm of the blackout, given the official app, it seems like they’re just chasing the same infinite dumb stream of memes design that places like Facebook and Tiktok have already embraced. Probably because that’s where the money is? I don’t know.
The more niche communities are always what made me hang out at Reddit though! I’d bet they continue to alienate and marginalize them enough that more people continually jump ship over the next couple of years. I do hope Beehaw and other spaces like it succeed in becoming a non-profit and truly community driven, and the web decentralizes itself again.
it’s heartening to see just how many people are posting from different instances here!
it just works! I don’t know what happens with this reply because I guess beehaw.org is offline right now, but I figure you’ll eventually see it? That this is possible with an organic collection of instances is pretty damn cool, and I hope it keeps on working as more people pile on
responding from beehaw: Yep, we can see you!
I’ll say that sometimes, I click the “Reply” button after writing my reply and it just sits there, seemingly loading forever. Generally has been doing that when a thread was on beehaw.org or lemmy.ml
so the communities that run on a specific instance are dead in the water if that instance is frozen? I thought that maybe the other instances might continue exchanging posts regardless of whether the original instance is currently online
Honestly, I’m not sure. I would hope it could continue with other non-frozen Instances. But in my very limited experience so far, I’ve seen it do that (click Reply, and turn into a spinning circle) a few times. Just never finishes.
it’s heartening to see just how many people are posting from different instances here!
How do you see that?ok nvm I just realized it’s right behind the usernameIt just seemed to complicated for average person to grok.
Oh, yeah definitely. I’m still struggling to wrap my head around the most basic things. Like, initially I created multiple accounts until I realized I could actually just search for stuff in other instances.
On the website if the username looks like [email protected], then it is a user from another instance.
Yep, same thing happened to me. Tried to figure out what the Fragile modifier does in Trackmania but I couldn’t find the answer anywhere. /r/trackmania is shutdown (based) and i literally couldn’t find the answer anywhere. I still don’t even know what it does…
It allows your car to become damaged if you hit a surface too hard. Being damaged will screw up your steering.
Finally, closure. Thanks a bunch lol.
Damn love this place already
every time I look at my phone I’m instinctively hitting the RIF app… this is gonna take a while to adapt to, but new communities are popping up all the time, new server instances appearing, and new users flooding in so perhaps we can continue to being unproductive procrastinators.
On the upside, I guess my productivity will go up by at least 5% for a few days.
Anyone know if there’s a good lemmy community for tracking the creation of new communities? In particular, ones that existed on reddit and now exist here?
theres a little bit of movement starting on [email protected] I don’t know how to make a link that automatically sends you to your specific instances /c/[email protected] so that you can subscribe immediately, just cut and paste the name.
I don’t know how to make a link that automatically sends you to your specific instances
Oh that would be great to have. Manually copying things in the URL bar is less than ideal.
apparently if I just link like this Link it does it properly. so why isnt that the default link type then?
I guess if the linked community isn’t yet federated with your instance it would just 404… teething problems!
Yeah it leads to an awful 404 error. The subscribing to other communities is such a pain in the neck anyways. That should be super high on the list IMHO. But I guess there are so many things that are high on the list, haha.
its not easy to know if there’s just a typo in the link, or you need to wait for it to synchronize with your instance to show up.
It’s worse of course when you try to talk new users into signing up on smaller servers to spread the load too.
I am the only user on my instance, and it’s a true pain in the neck. IMHO you should be able to add other instances in the UI, and then community lists should be exchanged by these instances automatically, so that I don’t have to do the URL-copy dance every time.
I think something like this would be a fantastic idea and would help accelerate adoption.
Discoverability is a real shortcoming of Lemmy but if we circle around one or more communities focused on helping connect users to communities it could ease the transition significantly.
There are some popular comment chains on the github pages talking about implementing a customizable aggregator, much like multi-reddits / custom feeds. you could add a bunch of similar (or identical) communities across multiple instances and combine them into one feed to be interacted with as if it were one singular community. Definite interest from the devs, and it is possible in the architecture so just a matter of time.
Absolutely. When I was having my first coffee this morning, I tried to browse Reddit out of a habit. Luckily, Apollo reminded my with a banner that I shouldn’t do this. Now I am trying to change my “browse Reddit” habit into “browse Lemmy” habit. So far I it works great - not missing anything until now.
Yeah, as long as content builds out faster than I consume it I could be quite happy here.
