Seeing more “cake days” pop up lately, it seems we’re approaching (or in) the 1 yr anniversary of the Reddit migration.
It’s kinda sweet actually that we all get this reminder of it with the pickup in “cakedays”.
It reminds of my seeing the wave happen. I was on lemmy before the migration (not a flex, I joined mastodon in the twitter migration and explored the other fediverse platforms around looking for a reddit/forum alternative) … and followed a bunch of communities over on my mastodon account. Early last year many of these communities were fairly quiet (or at least quieter than now) and so I didn’t really see any of them in my mastodon feed. I’d actually forgotten that I’d followed them. I’d heard word about the API stuff over on Reddit, but I knew something was happening when I started seeing more and more posts in my masto feed that confused me … it wasn’t clear where they were coming from. Double checking I’d see that they came from lemmy communities I’d forgotten about … and I realised I was seeing lemmy literally come alive!
All these cakedays are kinda the same thing … a sort of internet equivalent of a weather event or season.
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Yeah its been a journey. My cakeday for the an account I made on ml would be about now, and I think its around a month till this account is officially a year old.
Its an odd time to be on a platform like lemmy.
We’re seeing an almost complete adulteration of what we might call the internet 2.0 era sites into walled gardens of exclusion. Effectively, the stealing, en-masse of almost two decades of user generated content. The walls and gates of the gardens we planted get higher everyday; the enshittification of all things.
And yet here we are. On a self-hosted, federated, unbought, unbroken, and unbent platform. Obviously its not all roses, but for what its worth, both the users and developers have created something incredibly special: A ray of hope in a time where it seems like the world has only been changing for the worse. And while the instances have their differencs, we should be looking to embrace those differences as much as possible, because this is what truly gives the fediverse strength. If its Kbin or Lemmy or Mastadon; or .ml or .world or .blahaj.zone.
The point of the fediverse isn’t consolidation or control, but distribution and access. There is so much more possible simply because enough of us were willing to make the journey over here. We’re providing the future with an alternative that isn’t tracking them, trying to manipulate them with an algorithm, or to turn them into commodities. There is power in that.
So happy cakeday. Happy cake season to those who were messing around with a browser plug-in about this time last year, trying to delete their reddit history. Happy cakeday to the developers, to those who post, and to the commenters. And most of all, happy cake day to you dear lemming reading this. You make this place happen.
Hear hear!!
Great comment, cheers!
Well put!
Fuck Reddit.
Reddit was a great idea - common software providing free access to diverse communities needing only a single account to access them all. Fuck spez for screwing it all up by being a greedy pig boy:-(.
Without knowing the financial history of the place, it seems a good case study in something that could have gone for the sustainable stalwart of the internet path but instead fell to the dark silicon valley profit/growth side of things. With wikipedia being the only great success (AFAIK) at forging solid and sustainable foundations for the internet, I suppose the lesson is that it has to be non-profit, or open-source (or both) from the beginning.
In a way, it is kinda on many of us for not realising this and pushing against it sooner.
One of the great things coming out of the fediverse (and bluesky too at the moment) is all of the open software being developed that will hopefully plant seeds that will last a long time.
It absolutely is imho. Like at some point it was not social media as it became later, following (well, attempting to) the financial success of Facebook and Twitter/X, and instead people could submit long-form answers to questions, rather than merely vomit their feelings into the never-ending stream of others doing the same.
^This
I also choose this guy’s wife
And my bow
etc.
By deprioritizing people finding answers and instead encouraging them to make new posts all on their own to ask the question yet again, over & over, spez tried to make money and enshittified Reddit by taking it away from its original purpose that had given it such a reputation for being great.
So it’s not “having ads” that destroyed it, but the chasing after ad revenue at all costs that was driving it into the dirt. Even before the protests revealed that starkly to us all that the Reddit we had known and use to love was dead - spez had stolen it, he took our efforts and that ad-bloated, authoritatian-modded corpse was what was leftover. And it wasn’t even bc of profits alone, but greed in chasing short-term profits above all else, including long-term profits. Aka capitalism killed it.
Yeah, totally. As someone who used reddit for 10 years and had comment karma in the several hundreds of thousands, it still pisses me off that it was ruined in the way it was
It was even open source at one point.
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain
It’s been wonderful to find a home here! Hoping for many more cake days for all of us here in this friendly little corner of our beloved blue marble!
and I realised I was seeing lemmy literally come alive!
thats a rather soul stirring realization put to words. :-)
Don’t miss Reddit at all, long live the Fediverse!
I was very active on Reddit for a long time but for some reason I also don’t miss it. I think it’s because the big subreddits felt “too big” for quite some time before and even in the smaller subreddits there was often too much unnecessary negativity.
Happy to be here. It’ll be interesting to see how it grows, but I’m happy with it being a smaller crowd for now. Feels like I have many more pleasant and meaningful chats on here than I ever did on Reddit.
holy shit! i hadn’t even realized it’s been so long! sweet!
Very much true, made this account last year on June 4.
Cheers!
I started my beehaw and ml accounts on June 2. This one and Lemmy.one are coming up on June 11. And my sdf.org account was on June 30. But this is the one that stuck 😁.
I was thinking about the digg exodus to reddit just the other day.
