I wish there was an alternative to leaving Reddit
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.
Eh, I’ve left other sites. Reddit has been going downhill for years.
You’re using it.
Yeah, it’s a bummer Reddit went the way it did. But here we are. I’ll miss it to a point. Still figuring out Lemmy, we’ll see how it goes. I’ve tried Mastodon a bit as well but it feels more like Twitter to me, which I used for maybe a week years ago. No thanks.
well, for me at least, Mastodon IS an alternative to twitter, though it may change since it is federated (?) with lemmy? And yeah, my mastodon account is just collecting virtual dust there lmao
I never got into Twitter and was freaked out by the content on Mastodon. I just want a nice chill community that shares interesting information/news/facts/pics.
Freaked out by the content? What was there?
They might have been on an instance that federate with things like poast and noagendasocial
not heard of those but I’m guessing they’re ‘free speech’ servers for ‘honest everyday people’
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
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.
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.
Glad to see it go. It was not as useful as it once was and the community had grown very angry and bitter.
I’m glad to be a part of something new. Still confused a little bit that’s part of the excitement lol
Me too!
I felt kind of bad last night knowing I might not ever be able to see my favourite subreddits again but honestly, I just moved to Lemmy and so far the community seems super nice and it’s nice to be a part of something new and refreshing.
People actually feel like people here, not some randoms, if you know what I mean. Reminds me of the good old days where I had a bunch of forums I frequented instead of just Reddit. I like it!
For sure, but what makes Reddit special are the users, the content, and the discussions. The admins add no value.
We can recreate the communities in a distributed and federated way so that we never find ourselves in the same situation again.
Pretty sure community admins add value in well run subs, but I take your point.
This. One thousand percent - this.
We are ground floor. Be active! Make this the community you want it to be!
It is tragic. But on the plus side I think this transition will be a lot smoother than trying to leave twitter since here you don’t have to individually find everyone you want to follow, just show up at the proper forums.
idk, i’m having kind of a hard time. i have a lot of niche subs on reddit that don’t seem to be on lemmy. i feel like i did when i first started reddit and just saw all the default pics/music/gaming subs
You can still use Reddit, just now many users have a motivation to diversify their information platforms. Fediverse does that, and only ask that your new content, discussions, and questions be added in the fediverse instead. To help growth here.
For example, I curious about SFF PC building and, yup, Reddit already had a sub for that. If I have future questions I’ll just post them on /m/technology instead.
I agree with this. As part of the Fediverse while it’s still small, it’s our job to build it up by creating content here.
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’m sure it’s a pipe dream atm, but I’m just hoping fediverse will have a unified method to look up archived posts across all platforms. Unfortunately, it’s probably very difficult to set up because indexing would take forever given the exponentially increasing amount of content. I used to use Reddit to look up a lot of video game info/memes. Reddit’s search engine was garbage, but at least I could find info from older game guides from 10+ years ago. My main concern is that a lot of indie game devs are directing people to talk about their games on Discord, which is terrible for archiving information.
With Google getting increasingly worse, reddit is usually where I find what I’m looking for in a sea of blog spam. And while I personally think Discord is absolutely great as a chat plaform it is nowhere near close as being a reddit replacement. Everything posted in there is silo’d and not searchable from outside.
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?
well for example there is !photography@lemmy.world and !photography@lemmy.ml
Oh, no, that’s confusing…
Fight to the death between forums I guess
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.
