I think many people were looking for a reason to leave but kind of felt stuck seeing all the alternatives being either dead or abrasive.
Lemmy seems to have captured the soul of what a significant portion of people have already been looking for.
This describes me perfectly. Most of the alternatives I saw previously just ended up being coopted by the alt-right crowd who got chased off of Reddit. Lemmy (so far) represents what I want from an online community.
Its so weird that the alt right hasn't tried to seize Lemmy yet from my experience it was always the immediate fate of Reddit alts in curious if the alt right is too busy over at truth social (or rumble) oh could we please get a youtube alt next that would be so great
Peertube is a good federated alternative to Youtube, it also connects to the Fediverse and there is a central search engine called Sepia Search, which makes it easier to find content on the different instances.
I have to agree with you on that I saw a comment earlier about the people who left Reddit being a loud minority but something feels off about that
Lemmy's community feels so familiar I sadly just can't find the right words to describe it though
Lemmy in it's current state feels very similar to reddit did ~14 years ago.
I am just smitten. I'll never go back.
Exactly. Lemmy is great, and is essentially all I wanted from Reddit without the Reddit
I'm done.
The subs I moderated have either gone dark, or are going dark in the next ciuple days.
And with that I let the mod teams I was a part of know that I am moving on. I hate what reddit did to the community, and my time feels better spent where it will be appreciated.
At this point, me run out of alternatives worth trying. Just signed up for a lemmy instance today, and liking what I'm seeing so far (even if communities are quite a lot smaller than I'm used to at the moment), but there are other sites that might scratch the reddit itch that I'll try even if the fediverse stuff doesn't take off. Reddit has shown that that they're a) greedy, and b) incompetent at being greedy. And I'm not going to contribute to them again until I'm well and truly out of other options.
I'll be real: I don't want to go back. I want a return to actual communities and comradery, and an exodus from "social" influencers, on ad-riddled and bloated soap boxes.
Bingo. That's me too.
I never realized just how tired I was of social media until Reddit blew themselves up. I had already quit Zucc's armoury of social media tools a few years ago. I'll be glad if I don't ever have to go back.
i kind of want reddit to die now. people talking to one another shouldn’t be monetized or debased through some spyware algorithm run by antisocial dickheads.
Spez resigning and free API access to all third party apps as it was before.
Honestly though? Lemmy is reminding me of old reddit and I'm enjoying it so who knows if I'd even go back if this site keeps growing at the rate that it is.
One thing that irritates me about Reddit is how it's converged with the rest of twitter, instagram and tiktok to be just endless scrolling through memes, gifs and videos. Reddit is so far from it's roots and killing third party apps really does remove that old avenue. I do feel like commenting is going to reduce as people just mindlessly scroll through content without really engaging it anymore.
Nothing.
Reddit and u/spez haven't even offered an apology and/or reversed their position. But let's be real, here - apologies don't necessarily make things right, and they don't necessarily erase what's been done. At best, we can forgive. But people don't forget. Whatever trust there may have been, it's gone now. I've grown tired of the half-assed apologies made by organizations and famous individuals that are supposed to make everything ok and compel us to forget what was done. I don't think I'd care if Reddit and/or u/spec tried to make amends. They would not be genuine - your true colors are visible for all to see. Welcome to the real world where hollow apologetic half-measures don't fool anyone.
If I spat on your lunch because I was having a bad day, I don't think there would be much I could say to defend my actions. Actions speak louder than words, and sometimes when you screw up there's no going back. You're just done.
Reddit as an entity is just frustrating. Not just the recent debacle, but the pattern of getting slightly more awful with each passing minute. I'm hoping I enjoy my stay here well enough that I never feel the urge to go back. Unfortunately, it's less about what Reddit can do to get me back and more about what the Fediverse can do to keep me.
I liked seeing and engaging with unlimited new things with each passing moment. It would not be very satisfying for me to lose that. Time will tell.
I dunno, the way they've (board members, ceo, admins involved in trying to spin things, etc) been acting, it's pretty obvious they don't want the engaged, active users back. They want to turn it into an ad server and user tracking hub like facebook.
Maybe if they can spez, build a new board of directors, and walk back everything they've done totally, I might be willing to use it passively but directly (as in reading things there via my app of choice, but not interacting) rather than only indirectly via search results when the only hits are there.
That ain't gonna happen. If they don't do that, my last act will be to find replacement mods for the places I'm responsible for, and then I'm gone totally. I'd have done it already, but I'd have to use reddit to recruit anyone at all, and I'm not willing to do that until the protest is over.
Hell, I've thought about just doing enough mod actions that admins would have to break their own rules to oust me, and leaving them locked. But I don't like shitting on communities of people just because the site has gone to shit.
Reddit was dead from the day Conde Nast bought it. Every day since then was a roll of the dice as to whether they'd attempt to seize more profits and ruin it, or not. This happens to essentially every public or aspiring public company eventually. The need for perpetual growth warps decisions and guts the original mission in the end.
We call it "autosarcophagy" or "self-cannibalism."
As I understand it, Reddit also took on a lot of external capital investment, which only makes the pressure to perform financially even greater. I can't fault them for making the decisions they have to make to keep their jobs, keep their executive salaries, and so on.
Long live the sustainable, community-driven, community-funded future! Nobody can screw this up for us if we are the ones footing the bill.
I wouldn't fault them as much if they hadn't dumped the capital into absurdly dumb things to try and become facebook. If they'd invested it into better reliability and reducing costs to operate, I'd have a ton of sympathy.
As someone who really only went on Reddit for memes and techie discussions, I think I can say this: for my use-case, there was nothing special about Reddit itself. In fact, one thing I have realized is just how little the nature of the host matters beyond ease of use. Sure, certain formats lend themselves better to certain use-cases, but ultimately humans are social creatures, and even in the most inconvenient of circumstances, we find a way to make it work.
And once you realize that, it becomes less about the medium, and more about the people who lead the discourse. From what I can gather, Reddit lost that discourse a long time ago. And as such, their downfall was only a matter of time.
Funny, I was just having that discussion with someone.
I think the problem is all these platforms think the platform is the value and not the content made by the users.
And of course, since they have the best platform, it'd be inconceivable that anyone would ever leave because they're the best.
Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, and Twitch are all doing exactly the 'value is the platform' while taking a massive shit on the creators and users that made the platform have any value in the first place, then acting confused why people are angry about how they're behaving.
No actual human gives a crap about the platform: nobody goes to these sites to go to the site, they go there for the content from someone they like.
This is exactly correct, and herein lies the problem: how do you monetize content creation from people you don't pay?
Louis Rossman said it best: when you look at a lot of content platforms, you realize their business models don't make sense. The people managing these companies are riding on VC money knowing full well there isn't any long-term return. They want to cash out and dip.
This is why I feel like a Federated, user-maintained system is probably best for the long term sustainability of a community. People want a place to enjoy something or someone? Let's make it happen, by our own means
Agreed. The community MUST own it's own platform or else they're just renters that can be evicted the minute someone thinks they can make money from them.
This also isn't just an online issue (though my view is US-centric). There's been a lot of talk about the decline of a '3rd place' and its loss impacting social gatherings. You have your house, work, and then your social spaces, and there's a very big lack of social places where gathering and relaxing are acceptable without also having to engage in buying permission to be there.
This carried over into a lot of people going online to find the same social gatherings, and then seeing the gathering places turned into profit centers for the owners without any discussion with the users of the space, and now they're finding that they don't have anywhere to go be social, and the online places that filled that gap are now vanishing as well.
Now I'm not a sociologist (just a simple country computer janitor), but it strongly feels like a lot of the hyper-tribalism and aggressiveness that people are exhibiting are a direct result of having all the social spaces torn away and turned into profit centers, with zero regards for the people who visited or contributed to them.
It just makes everyone more isolated and willing to hop on to whatever the next big 'social trend' that some algorithm drops in front of them, and I think at this point it's pretty unarguable that what the algorithms are doing is not always benign. You gain a place to belong, even if what you're belonging to is abhorrent and toxic.
A week ago: Bring down the API costs. I’d have begrudgingly accepted paying a few extra bucks a year for Apollo Ultra.
Today: Nothing. Reddit admins acted like smug children in the face of the Apollo Dev’s good faith questions, then the CEO and admins pulled the stunt of trying to act like the dev threatened them. Then the CEO doubled down on that story in the sham AMA. I don’t want to feed that machine anymore.
I have edited and then deleted all my posts and comments except for a few final ones that will go soon. I will keep the account but only as a point of contact for some people until I get them all contacting my email instead.
That about covers it. If all those were to occur, I'd go back. But realistically, none of them will happen.
if reddit becomes federated I'll consider subscribing
I never considered going back. Lemmy is forward. More power to the users and the community and less from greedy shareholders. This is the way.
At this point, it's only going to get worse. It's a very large Venture Capital backed company, on track to IPO.
Large VC/public companies goals will follow more of what we see with "mainstream" sites and social media. It'd be against their goals and their business to have less ads, less agorithms showing what their partners want to see and not what the user wants to see, less bloat on their front end. Even if the CEO wanted to go that way, he'd quickly be replaced.
It's a self sustaining movement of capital now and users are annoyances that they have to deal to achieve their goals.
I'll be honest, I started using redding decade ago because most forums were very niche, specific, with weird to follow rules, very low on users, and reddit seemed to always have a community for each topic I had an interest on. It still does, but the end is approaching fast, and I don't want to search Discord servers, social media videos, or even ancient methods that are alternatives like IRC servers, mailing lists ; search results are useless in Google due to SEO and already affect other search engines
It all comes up to finding one or more sites that don't look ancient or too mobile focused, and if enough people are going to use it and stick to it. Otherwise it'll just be another corner of the web filled with a few crazy users
Literally wouldn't go anywhere if the app I like wasn't having to shut down.
Their official app is horrible to use in comparison. Just joined up here and installed Jerboa and it's like using the app I'm losing there.
Ill miss RIF, im curious if RIF had a different algorithm or something cause from what im reading there was a lot of awful going on with reddit and I saw nearly none of it.
I mean, I didn't see as much of the bad "Reddit" culture that people talk about either. But I had curated my feed to the point that I had little default subs left so perhaps I was "avoiding the crowds", so to speak.
I haven't completely left, and to be honest the only way I'd completely leave is if the niche communities I cared about died (or were active here). That being said I've noticed my reddit usage has plummeted over the last week. I used to basically live on that dumb site and now I only check it maybe once or twice a day for a couple minutes
Im hoping more communities migrate over here I really would love some new r/HFY stories
https://lemmy.world/c/hfy is a new but active community.
Honestly I really don't see much of a future for profit-driven social media. Time and time again we've seen that power over communication is just too much power for an individual company to have. The fediverse makes a lot of sense, but I'm not sure if it's the ultimate end state. It would be very nice if it were
YouTube was great before creators made money from it. Now it’s 99% hypebeasts
It's quite the opposite at this point. Reddit isn't really in control anymore. Rather, something drastic would have to happen to Lemmy to cause me to leave. Reddit is no longer the default choice.
And lemmy is deliberately designed so that such a drastic event is virtually impossible. If people don't like how lemmy.ml is being moderated, they can go to another instance. If people don't like how the lemmy spec works, they can fork it and ignore the part they don't like.
I've only been here for a day, but the lack of homophobia and transphobia here compared to Reddit has been a breath of fresh air. I'm not afraid of posting here like I was on Reddit, where I'd actually have to debate with myself for a minute or two before posting. It's like finally leaving a bad relationship; now I'm starting to see how bad that all was for my mental health.
Use the report button if you see any of that too, we will not tolerate it here.
Reddit thrives off of letting homophobes and transpbobes ruin everyone's day, because it drives up their engagement numbers. We aren't going to allow that here.
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