For me it feels like breaking up with someone after many years. At the same time, I feel a bit dirty mentioning the name in the post title.
A little bit. What I hate is losing the communities related to my hobbies. Reddit is/was very very helpful for me. Finding new music, finding new games, discussing movies and TV, learning about weird movies or cult shows, sharing my stuff to people that find it cool… It was 11 years of that. I needed that site, so many very helpful posts. I hope whatever comes next is better. For now I’m here, waiting to see what happens.
I have really been diving deep into a lot of niche hobbies and Redd** had such a great community for them. I have no problem starting over for the sake of justice, but it is going to take a long time to build them up.
Preach. I get that entirely.
I hate reddit. But it feels like the library of Alexandria burning down (yea I know). All those google search results and educational subreddits that are shutting down forever, and because they are too small reddit won’t force open them again.
A lot are in the pushshift archive, but that cuts of at 2022. Also, it doesn’t include a lot of the smaller subreddits.
I have had my PC running 24/7 with multiple VPNs to avoid rate limits downloading as much as I can before the API dies, but with some blackouts moving forward a day I have already missed a few.
Like many others, I would often add “reddit” to the end of my searches to get better results, half the websites on web searches now are either AI generated, copies or on completely AD ridden websites that ask you to turn off your AD blocker.Reddit hasn’t really been the same for a long time anyways. I liked the feel of Reddit in the old days better, and this kind of has the same vibe
It has felt pretty toxic more recently. Often I’d see something and end up just leaving to do something else, I’ve been describing it as the “two-minutes hate” internally for a while now.
There are some good communities and I’ve done a good job of trimming what I subscribe to, but that “popular” button is too tempting.
Honestly, mainstream social media as a whole is practically a two minutes hate. There’s a reason why “doomscrolling” is a term. While I do miss the occasional upsetting posts on r/iamatotalpieceofshit or r/facepalm, honestly having them gone for me is better in the long run.
So many times in the past few months I would open reddit, stare at rhr uninteresting front page and close it. Especially the past few years it has taken an astronomical nosedive, and that’s coming from someone who joined in 2013 which some consider too late.
I’ve been thinking that for a while. I really miss the old feel of reddit. I recently opened it up in archive.org and the content just had a different feel back when I first joined. Also fun seeing the old news stories.
I think it will hit harder when I want to search for something on google and have to avoid adding reddit onto the end.
Actually I feel excited, because Lemmy has sparked a new interest in news aggregators and the fediverse and I’m enjoying my time here a lot.
I agree, it feels a bit like the internet in the early days, where you can find mindblowing new things just around the corner with a single click
Exactly! And without being called names for asking questions or interacting with people.
Yup and no big corps were tracking us.
Fully agree, I’ve been TOO excited since I found out about Lemmy’s existence. I can’t wait to see how it progresses with so many people joining. :-)
No, actually, I used reddit just to pass time, never really engaged in the community, and without this whole debacle I wouldn’t have found out about lemmy and the fediverse as a whole, which is really exciting and a new part of the internet (for me) that feels like a breath of fresh air after years of everything being so centralized around very few companies, I’m getting a vibe of the internet from 15-20 years ago, exploring the wild west of the internet.
I’m getting the same retro vibe, for so long I’ve been missing how cool and simple things used to be, the fediverse sounds really amazing and a more futuristic way of engaging online.
However, I indeed miss the old reddit since I was an active member and also all the lost karma lol.
It’s probably unhealthy to have such an attachment to fake internet points that do literally nothing.
I guess for me Reddit lasted longer and grew bigger than I expected it to, so I see this as a natural progression. It grew much further than it had any right to, I think.
My only trepidation comes from the niche communities on Reddit that I loved and whether they’ll transfer over to the fediverse. /R/woodworking for instance has some of the most supportive, pleasant users I’ve ever interacted with.
Hopefully it won’t be long before such communities exist here too
I don’t exactly have such a huge attachment but for 4 years of using reddit as a silent lurker, I only ever started posting and gaining karma last month… i got about 9k since then so yeah… having to restart is draining a bit… but like you said, it doesn’t really matter.
12 years of reddit. It will take some time to adjust but I also switched from google to duckduckgo years ago after decades of google, and then too never looked back. Lemmy does need a LOT of work, still, but so did reddit in the early days…
To those working on Lemmy, please don’t fuck this up for us. Don’t be a spez.
The nice thing about Lemmy that Reddit never had is that it can only improve in ways that the community wants! Not more putting up with asinine decisions from people who only see us as dollar signs.
How is lemmy financed? Someone still needs to pay for servers, right?
Lemmy is opensource, you can see and get a copy of the source code here. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy There’s no development cost because all developers are volunteers at this stage.
For each instance that depends on the admins running that individual instance. The instance I use is being sponsored by a NZ company that are providing the admin’s a free virtual server to host on.
I have no idea. I’m sure we’ll figure that out along the way. At first it will probably be out of pocket from thousands of homelab hobbiests.
Maybe eventually they could implement something like gilding that Reddit had. I’m sure gilding alone could fund a lot of servers. When you take out the millions of dollars the share holders were taking it properly didn’t take much money to run all of Reddit.
Yes, but that means it’s going to split communities up between servers. So there won’t be a mass exodus like reddit, just a handful of communities at a time (if needed).
Nah, that’s where the federation comes in. The tech has a lot of room to grow, but you never have to move to join the “winning” group for a topic - you just have to sub
Moving forward, there’s already talk about how/if you should reconcile overly similar groups across servers. It’s certainly possible, and discovery is definitely going to improve quickly - the only question is can Lemmy hold onto the new users long enough to get past the growing pains
Each instance is responsible for their own server costs. Many accept donations!
It’s also up to us not to fuck this up. Let’s not turn this into a toxic hate-filled dystopia lol.
That will happen nonetheless, when more people start coming in. Its something that will just have to be managed.
On the other hand, I do hope that here on lemmy we will stop just kicking anybody with an opinion that we don’t like. That will only cause echo chambers where everybody will repeat the same stupid opinions that will only get more extreme. We will have to listen to those that we don’t agree with.
I’m sorry but no. I don’t have to listen to Nazis. If they are allowed here, it will drive me and a lot of other people away. We had more than enough “free speech” experiments now. It always ended in these platforms being an insufferable cesspool of Nazis, conspiracy theorists, incels etc. and all sane people were driven away. It doesn’t work. These people need to be deplatformed, that is the only way.
I respectfully disagree.
First of all, on Reddit I rarely ran into right wing extremists. Do you know who I ran into a LOT? Left wing extremists. That is what tends to happen when you start polarizing discussions (both sides) and then kick out one side. The other side just becomes an echo chamber.
Second of all, this is not a problem you can ignore. Its not as if these people just magically disappear into thin air once you ban them. You can’t deplatform them because they’ll just go to another place. Where will they go? To their own moderated places, which will allow much more extreme discussions, leading to more and more polarization and problems in the real world. I think part of the problem here is that we (collectively) stopped listening to people in minor disagreements, and instead of having reasoned arguments, just kicked these people out to the curb. I honestly think that that sort of behavior from the left side of the spectrum is what fueled US polarization which culminated in Donald Trump becoming president.
You may not want to have reasoned discussions with people who are more on the right side of your political spectrum, but you HAVE to. We all have to because if we don’t, they will talk only amongst themselves and they will only fall deeper and deeper into their right wing pit. Have no illusion, the same goes for left wing extremism. Extremism on that end might still be milder, but its there alright.
I’d rather have a group of people with a few minor-and-controllable nutcases in it than a conform-with-the-rules group, and a group of dangerous terrorists outside that group.
There are examples where this was tried. It doesn’t work. People who disagree with Nazis leave the platforms, so the result is the same.
The problem is that there are no Nazis. Nazi’s stopped existing in 1945, anything after that are people that sympathize with some or all of its ideologies. The problem is that its a sliding scale and people these days are VERY trigger happy to call out NAZI! I’ve been called a Nazi on Reddit (and banned from multiple sub reddits) for literally arguing that I’m not sure how good an idea it is to give puberty blockers to kids that might be trans, specially because these blockers do have consequences later in life.
Great, now I’m a Nazi, apparently? Should I be banned now?
When IS a person a Nazi?
I’ve talked a LOT on reddit, I had over 130K karma over probably the same amount of messages. I don’t recall talking to Nazi’s much, if ever. I have had quite a few deep discussions with people on the far right part of the spectrum and it helped me a lot understanding them, where they come from, and why they have the ideas that they have. I call that progress. You can listen to somebody and politely agree to disagree.
What you are pushing for tends to end in censorship. Can’t talk about naughty things now! Can’t disagree with the masses! All look in the same direction! Don’t dare to step out of line!
It also ends in situations where douchenozzles like Trump become president of the USA because the right feels like they no longer have a voice (which truthfully, is correct), so push back harder and extremer.
We MUST allow dissenting voices. Yes, if somebody scants “KILL THE JEWS!”, you ban him of course. But if there is a conversation happening about, say, the “US bathroom issues” I think we should allow dissenting voices. As long as the conversations are respectful and thoughtful, the worst that could happen is progress.
You can theorize about semantics all you want, but don’t try to gaslight someone who was physically attacked by actual, real Nazis, who describe themselves as Nazis and can’t be seen as anything but Nazis.
They kinda can’t be a spez, by design. Just make sure you make backup accounts on all the other instances, and use them occasionally
It’d be cool if lemmy implements features that’ll help switching instances easier, like what mastodon did.
get to the github repo and chuck a comment in support of this with maybe some description of your use case and benefits too
Admittedly, I don’t know how switching instance work in Mastodon either, I just know that it’s possible
How does one make a backup account on another instance?
I mean literally just register your account again. Maybe subscribe to the communities you like on each account if you have the time to, but if not just reserve your username on each and have them saved in your password manager and ready to go in case of a break-glass incident.
Ahh, understood. I thought that you meant that there was some sort of built-in functionality to mirror your account on another instance.
Kinda. But I don’t care about Reddit itself. I care about a few communities and the people there. I know a couple of them are here. But we are scattered and trying to figure out this site.
Time will tell if this sticks or not. I pretty much hope so.
If someone finds a Lemmy equivalent to r/Grimdank or r/40klore please let me know.
I joined Reddit during the digg exodus. Before digg I was into fark and before fark, something awful.
It’s good that things die. it’s where new mediums come from. It also keeps the power with the user. It’s an important part of the internet life cycle.
This comment gives me hope. Lol.
Wise words fomo_erotic
Man, I’m grieving a little. Anger, denial, the whole gamut really.
Mostly anger tbh. We all knew it was coming, once they started moving towards an IPO, but I think we hoped that it wouldn’t be this bad. The way spez handled it all makes it even worse. Just shitting on all the mods and users that made the IPO possible in the first place.
It would not surprise me if there’s something in the news about a bunch of angry ex redditors going project mayhem on him. The whole “do not fuck with us” thing kinda fits here, and there are some crazy people on reddit
Not really, im actually excited about exploring the lemmy verse. Feels like a breath of fresh air. Reddit was starting to feel stagnant.
I cared more about the niche communities than I did about Reddit as a whole. Once those move over here, I’ll be just fine.
I do. Started using reddit in 8th grade and now I’m finishing my masters. So it’s been a while. Over the years, it has changed a lot and I’ve been pretty dissatisfied, to say the least. It used to be a great place for insightful and more-or-less friendly conservation, there was a sense of community. It hasn’t been that way in a long time, so I’m ready to move on. Still sad but it’s for the best.
I’m hoping Lemmy will have the same spirit as reddit had when I created an account all those years ago. I’m staying optimistic.
I view this as a fresh start. Cut off the old and grow a new one. Just like a gecko. I spent a lot of time on reddit but I can’t say I ever actually connected with another person on it, there were just too many people on even the small subs I joined. Maybe lemmy will bring back the small internet forum feel and we’ll actually be able to stand out from the crowd better and actually get to know each other.
Hey RickyRigatoni, nice to meet you :)
Yes, I’m really upset about it. It feels like i’ve had so much taken away from me over my life and I was always willing to accept it and move on, but to see something so simple and innocent get taken away seems just so pointless and depressing. Like why am I not allowed to just have my little shitposting community? is it too much that I get to smile without some capitalist coke rat getting a payday? I hate this so much and there is nothing I can do about it. I will mourn for awhile, until I cant even remember why im upset anymore, and when I wake up tommorrow the world will be just a little bit worse. it always is.
