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.
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.
F u, you son of a… (I’m just joking. Are we doing /s here?)
Yup and no big corps were tracking us.
@mrmanager @Acetamide excited for this decentralization of user information! Is Lemmy.today accepting registrations?
Absolutely, I would be happy to get more users. It’s a decent server too with nice speed.
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. :-)
Agreed! Reddit was just becoming a karma farming center. Honestly, it’s been nice to burn it all to the ground and start over
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.
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 went from digg to Reddit during that mass exodus and will be doing the same from Reddit to Lemmy. It is a little bittersweet seeing what Reddit was 10+ years ago to what it’s become, but I’m excited for the future and to see what becomes of Lemmy, kbin, etc.
I think it will hit harder when I want to search for something on google and have to avoid adding reddit onto the end.
Yes. I loved Reddit for a LONG time. They started to crumble in my opinion when the added these Snooavatars, which later turned into a NFT scheme. I never bothered with these. The promise of the website was awesome though. Being able to follow interests and communities instead of people was a completely new concept, which I had never seen before. Now it feels like the corporate greed has finally completely taken over.
Time to jump ship.
It’s that exact reason why I could never get into twitter or Instagram beyond personal friends. I want to follow topics, not people.
I had a ton of subreddits curated on my homepage, a lot of which were rather niche. I’m not super optimistic that most of them will be replaced, which is sad.
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.
More than anything else, I’m going to miss the easy access to reliable answers by appending reddit to whatever I’m searching for in Google
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 are completely AD ridden websites that ask you to turn off your AD blocker.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.
I moved to Reddit when Digg destroyed itself. It wasn’t too hard to make the switch, although it did take a bit of getting used to. I imagine it’ll be the same this time, or maybe a bit easier, as the format of lemmy.ml is not too different in appearance from Reddit.
I actually feel more relieved. It has become toxic and dominated by bots. As soon as a real person posts anything, it’s immediately down voted
I’m enjoying Lemmy much more. Reminds me of the internet of old.
Reddit was always at its best in the smaller communities that were focused on a more narrow interest. Eg. The ones dedicated to a particular TV show, a particular type of humour, a particular game, a particular fandom, etc.
I think it will take time for Lemmy to develop enough that those sorts of communities can succeed.
It’s interesting, too, to see how small the subreddits need to be to maintain that community feeling. I helped found a political subreddit 9yrs ago; a non-partisan US state news & discussion subreddit. Political communities tend to be pretty spicy for obvious reasons, but when we had like maybe less than 500 sub (so maybe like <100 actually active users), there was a nice sense of community, even though people of different political persuasions would argue and debate. I’d see people tend to have fairly civil discussions. They’d chit chat and joke around in less controversial threads. It wasn’t always rainbow and unicorns of course, but for the most part, the active users played nicely together. We rarely had to bring out formal moderation tools. A simple “Hey, you two, chill out,” was usually enough to settle things. And it was like that for a few years.
As the number of subscribers and active users increased over the years, that sense of community started getting away from us. There was a lot more dogpiling. A lot more incivility. A lot more of the typical rPolitics style low-effort comments. The older active users started dropping off. Reddit tends to lean left, so the left-leaning majority started drowning out the right-leaning users. And my state is solidly right-leaning these days. Not that our sub had to be representative of the state political demographics, of course.
Today, the sub is like under 7,000 users, which is still a smaller subreddit, relatively speaking, but any sense of community is long gone.
I’ll admit, we – and especially me as head mod for most of our existence – could’ve done better to tamp down on that stuff. But I also think that that kinda thing is a natural part of growth of a community. That the sense of community tends to disappear. People can’t individually recognize and emotionally connect with that many people. It’s so easy, especially on the Internet, to simply say something mean-spirited to someone and metaphorically walk away. They may never see or interact with that person again. And if they do, do they really remember who they are?
Obviously my experience is just anecdotal. But it still makes me wonder how Lemmy (and similar sites) will deal with that. How can we maintain a sense of community, while also wanting to allow people in and grow communities?
I think the lack of sense of community occurring from both the increased size of the group and how long it’s been around lead to folks taking it for granted as a resource rather than a personal space they’re invested and involved in.
I think the same thing happened to Reddit overall - it reached a mass of size and establishment whereby the owners/admins were disconnected to the personal, special aspect of it and took it and the people for granted.
I feel the same. Just releif. Since the redesign and official app, deep down I knew where it was heading. It’s different this time (vs voat) where there is an alternative that has the spirit of why we all enjoyed reddit to begin with and without the commercialism that reddit has become. It’s early, surely lots of challenges ahead for this idea but the decentralized nature I think will be very interesting and will allow for the more mainstream community to create a pleasant experience for those that wish it. Also, Lemmy is need of some technical polishing and ease of use, bug fixes, etc. Instances will also need funding by providing transparency and decent moderation. It’s like reddit but without trying to monetize your content. Lol
It’s all very exciting!
Yes but I think more from a familiarity standpoint (10 year old account). I had my routine of subreddits to visit. I also liked the centralization on content.
This new federation of sites is going to take a bit of time for me to figure out. I used the reddit app and was ok with it. What actually pissed me off the most was the callousness of the admins. Fuck that.
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
While I hope Lemmy/Kbin takes off (heck, I’d love early internet forums to come back in style) and kicks off a second internet renaissance, the imminent collapse of Reddit legit is giving me anxiety. Hope y’all don’t mind if I vent a bit.
Firstly, there are a lot of “niche” communities on Reddit, mostly dedicated to individual games and the like. The kind of thing where fanart, announcements and discussions happen. In the short term, I don’t see them surviving the collapse. And if they do, they’ll probably move to a not-great platform like Discord or whatever Facebook comes out with.
Secondly, with SEO optimized AI generated garbage topping search results, Reddit has become an important reference when looking for reviews and opinions on things. As well as that, it has become somewhat of an archive of internet culture in a way. With subreddits moving to black out permanently and a push for users shredding their own data, there’s a very real chance that all of this content will be lost forever.
Archival efforts are underway by many archival teams.
However you’re right, a lot of things will be lost forever. A lot of old viral reddit posts from 10+ years ago, that kind of thing will probably not make it out of this.
That being said, screw reddit and screw spez. They’re the ones doing this. The site will be un-moderateable anyway once 3rd party mod tools are banned, so it’s going to be barely usable anyway through their broken app.
In a broader sense this is just the way of the internet. Platforms rise to prominence, then slowly dwindle into irrelevance. It has happened many times before reddit and will happen many times again in the future. The amount of media lost in this exchange is monumental. So much of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is lost forever. It’s the transient nature of these kinds of spaces that makes them this way. For instance, archive team maintains a wiki index of all social media platforms that have ever gone down. You can see how much has already gone and you never even knew it was there to begin with.
… but that probably didn’t help with your anxiety 😅 things will be okay. Communities will survive so long as people remain interested enough in them to continue gathering and talking and sharing together. Have faith in the communities you care about, and if you’d like to try you can always help organize a transition to a new platform :)
Great post and I agree. Just roll with the inevitable cycle, keep contributing and just enjoy what is there for what it is in its time.
I personally exported the comments that I deleted, so they aren’t lost. I might put them online, for archive sake
