I wish there was an alternative to leaving Reddit
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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?
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?
Isn’t there the reddit archive project?
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Absolutely the best way to get answers to specific things. Avoids any paid blogs and questionable answers. Not to mention perfect for getting actual recommendations and reviews on things.
The only thing that’s usually better is the Arch Linux wiki but you sadly can’t use that for everything. :)
Here’s the thing, as much as I’m going to miss the convenience, I’m willing to suffer thru discomfort for not having that information readily available. LLMs now paired with web searches should be able to serve such content, and in the interim, I want something like Lemmy, a decentralized collection of instances with user generated content to grow, so that a single asshole ceo cannot ruin it for everybody else, particularly when the content in question is user generated and managed.
Be the change you want to see. Start a community, advertise it, start bring the reddit folks over here.
Personally I’m eagerly awaiting Reddit’s demise.
i miss the memes, the rest of it is toxic
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.
At least with Lemmy there’s lots of different servers, each with their own running costs.
Each could try a different way of keeping the lights on. Some could run on donations only, some could use small unobtrusive ads on the side, some could do lots of ads. If any server does too little they’ll go down due to lack of funding, if any server does too much the users will migrate elsewhere, as it’s quite easy to make a new account on another instance and keep following the same communities.
Even if we end up with some large-scale instances with big servers, millions of users and serious money involved, they won’t have a monopoly on all the content like with reddit, so the competition should keep them from doing anything stupid.
That’s true. That’s definitely why I prefer open source and federated models. No one can have a monopoly.
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
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.
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’ve been on Reddit for almost 15 years and it’s just gotten too big and too moderated for me.
It was their crappy mobile UI and app that drove me to Relay for Reddit. Now that they’re getting pushed out I’m done, it’s going to hurt a bit but it’s the right thing to do.
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.
You’re using 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.
This. One thousand percent - this.
We are ground floor. Be active! Make this the community you want it to be!
Pretty sure community admins add value in well run subs, but I take your point.
Those are moderators, not admins. The moderators add a ton of value, both on Reddit and here.
The admins (Reddit corporate employees) do not add value.
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.
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’
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
