I really do like KBin and Lemmy and the fediverse on the whole, but development is still young and the userbase still growing. KBin is still basically early access, and Lemmy is buggy. I spent alot of time in reddit and I’m feeling the pain of trying to ween myself from it. Just wanted to here community perspectives and see how other’s are taking it.
For me, I feel a bit of a sore hollow spot for what reddit used to be and watching it implode is not fun for me.
ok, some of you apparently need to get outside more.
They do, but there are good reasons for people to become reliant on social media to fulfill their human need for social connection.
There’s a comment from someone who had an accident and was literally stuck at home, I know of a few reddit moderators who were severely handicapped, there’s people who moved country or town and don’t have their childhood/uni social network anymore, people with mental health issues, people stuck living in the middle of nowhere, the gay kid who lives in a homophobic town, the atheist who lives in a deeply muslim country, etc.
Obviously it’s not ideal, but social media are their way to connect. Often they have no real alternative.
It’s easy to look down on them, and assume it reflects poorly on them, but often you have very little choice in these things. Shit happens and you end up with few real life friends.
It all happens to us anyway, especially men. Wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of middle-aged men have no friends at all.
this belongs in leopards ate my face. it was the protesters who made the last 30 days miserable for all redditors
Uh, no. It was reddit that made reddit shitty.
nah, it was the loud, entitled, and obnoxious protesters who chose to react to reddit’s policy change by shutting everything down and throwing feces everywhere. none of them own reddit, but they were able to gatekeep an entire community and the public by shutting down access to subreddits.
i hate to break it to everyone, but reddit isn’t owned by any of you. it has the right to change it’s terms of use.
spez didn’t even blink. all the protesters did was make the last 30 days miserable for everybody.
Yes, reddit is fully within its rights to change its terms.
And it’s users are fully within their rights to decide they no longer want to use the site.
Reddit produces no content itself, it did not create the subs, it does not moderate the subs, and it does not create the content on the subs.
I’ve been on Reddit for 14 years now. I honestly don’t know where else to get tailored news and discussion on niche topics, particularly ones too niche to establish a userbase here on the Fediverse yet. I expect I’m just going to be out of the loop on things from now on as I live like a hermit in the mountains.
You touched on what is the biggest thing for me. I’ve been on Reddit for about the same amount of time. That said, I’m a habitual lurker, so much of the participation and community interaction comments don’t hit as close to home for me, but I’ve been off Reddit since the protest started and I just feel out of the loop. Most of what I was reading every day was trivial nonsense but it was trivial nonsense that I at least felt somewhat informed about, now between getting off Reddit and Twitter I just feel like I’m living under a rock.
Honestly, I think I was spending too much time on Reddit. This debacle has forced me to find some other sources of info.
I am hoping to seeing the fediverse turn into something special. That would be a real gift to the future if we could pull it off.
I just set up a rss feed of all my subreddits that I still lurk. Try it out!
I lost faith in Reddit after Aaron Swartz died. The biggest lesson I learned in HS was that knowledge was real power and trust fundies will always try to take access to it and that’s what’s going on in the social media sphere these days.
Reddit was something unique and personal to each user. Some it was new, some it was the only place to find specific tech or other advice that wasn’t corrupted by ads and algorithms on goggle and other big corporations.
Reddit was my way of disengaging from world news before I knew about anxiety, and how things could affect me and become personal even though I had no way to help world events. So I used it to personalize my mental diet, if I was creative I could sub to many craft subs like leather or metal etc, it’s where I went to get other perspectives on movies and content that I didn’t fully understand.
End of the day, is all that possible still on Reddit, kinda, but it’s going away, and they pushed me personally to leave as I could see it was becoming google/Facebook, ad algorithms to push what people pay for or get paid for. So time to reset.
Become involved, I’m way more involved and adding to discussions on the new sites I’m on. Everyone adding comments and posts and perspectives and opinions are building this up from bottom up.
You are the future, make your perspective part of the future by helping guide these new sites to something we can be proud of.What I liked about reddit was its “googleability”. You had a question and found an answer without reading through an endless article that winds it’s way through rephrasing your question 5 times, adds extensive biographies of everyone mentioned, the wider history of the problem and the author’s grandmother, all to pad the article and have you scroll through more adds.
But now there’s ChatGPT, so most of my “googling” can be done that way, and I don’t have to scroll through walls of puns or “this is the way” or “thanks for the gold, kind stranger”, or “take my updoot and get out”. I wonder how much of that bullshit were bots, anyway.
First thing I did when I got chat got was use it as a search engine, it’s not perfect, but google should wake up, when something is better at its own game accidentally, imagine what’s possible if they don’t fix their algorithm
Well said @Bendermember
While I feel a bit nostalgic to leave Reddit behind, I recently realised it had become stale for me. Time to move on.
Absolutely this. It got very homogenized. I joined reddit for the variety of people and their ability to understand topics I’d like to understand better. Then it all turned to bots and reposts. Then I would unsub from one subreddit and migrate to the new sub that was similar to the sub I just abandoned until the new sub became infested with bots and reposts, then rinse and repeat.
This is a great answer.
I feel like I can do away with the doomscrolling and time-wasting, but it’s the specific advice and hobby subs that will be difficult to tear away from completely.
I’m also going to have trouble avoiding my city’s local subreddit. It’s definitely a hub for everything going on here, and I’ve made some real life friends on there who I plan on keeping up with.
I’m upvoting your comment because you bring up great points, but I personally disagree with the disengaging from world events aspect. I’ll miss the niche subreddits that helped you solve the most random of issues, but I think reddit was far from a great place to disengage from news and the political discourse brought by news. Ever since the 2016 election cycle, I personally saw a considerable increase of posts regarding politics that came from both established subreddits and new ones that popped up (like /r/enoughtrumpspam which simply added more spam to the pile).
I think Trump’s campaign and presidency really ignited a lot of this, and while I neither like nor support Trump, I miss when the biggest disruptions were from isolated events (like the Occupy Wall Street movement or the Ellen Pao fiasco) rather than 4 years of a presidential tenure.
After years of nonsense, it all just got tiring. You can curate your reddit experience, but what happens when all the political doom scrolling finds its way into your favorite subreddits?
Kbin and the rest of the fediverse will grow, and I’m aware that the same kind of posting will find its way here, too. Thankfully the fediverse lets you subscribe to multiple communities of the same name, so maybe /m/news isn’t up one’s alley but /c/news is, for example.
I didn’t realize how shit reddit was getting until I stopped using it. The constant barrage of political shit accompanied by low effort comments/puns did a number on my happiness. I stopped using Facebook for similar reasons.
I’m glad you’re also adopting the mindset of being an active contributor. For years I also just would scroll and seldom upvote, but if we want to make “this house a home”, we need to put in the effort ourselves! I look forward to seeing how this all plays out. So far, I am very optimistic. I hope you find your niche interested here sooner than later!
Some of it was also political activists or people paid to actively work to sway opinion on social media.
“Some” is a huge understatement.
After years of nonsense, it all just got tiring. You can curate your reddit experience, but what happens when all the political doom scrolling finds its way into your favorite subreddits?
I’m not much into US politics, but you know, this reminds me of why I started disengaging from my own country subreddit. At the start it was mostly about the people and the community, and I liked talking to people and hearing their problems. I was hosting regular get-togethers and eventually became a mod. As Reddit got more mainstreatm, the anti-government political people started coming in and well, I don’t want to be hearing about moaning all the time. These people also had a terrible persucation complex (not helped by my country’s history of surpressing opposition views), so any attempt to moderate these people when their posts and comments got excessive and off-topic was met with fierce pushback. I just wanted a more positive place for people, instead of endless political bickering.
Until I got to the part about your country’s history of suppressing opposition, I thought you were talking about my country’s subreddit!
We went through the exact same trajectory from being a small friendly place with meetups, getting bigger, becoming negative and political arguments all the time. In the end I stopped dropping in there at all.
Yea, it’s a shame. Thinking about it now though, maybe should’ve created a separate sub to dump those political posts to.
Might have worked. They created one for my country, and also we could filter out politics on the main sub, but some people still just bring it up in other threads.
After 6-7 years on reddit via Boost. It really was a big part of my life and it all falling apart really bothers me. Especially since it helped me mentally so much on so many levels.
Also I’m having a really hard time dealing with all the alternatives. I’m trying to get used to kbin but while I know it’s still the early stages of the product, as a UX Designer, it just doesn’t feel good to use at all at this stage. And it’s still a big question mark if the communities and niches I enjoyed on reddit will even grow or thrive on any of the alternatives. Which again really sucks.
But despite the disruption it’s caused, fuck reddit and fuck spez. No going back.
Fingers crossed that the alternatives grow and thrive.
Nah, I was already on the way out of Reddit, so this just gave me an excuse to delete my account entirely.
I think it is good and healthy to regularly go through changes that affect your daily life.
Unfortunately, the blond piggy was right; it’ll all blow over.
Most of the people getting riled up over reddit’s antics will remain there out of convenience and/or habit.It’s like with video games. People shit on EA and other AAA developers but still preorder their games.
At the end of the day, all of the internet’s content trickles from platform to platform, it’s just a matter of where in this chain you are.
The whole social media collapse has been crushing for a recluse like myself. I mean, I might as well come out straight and say that. I’m not tactile and I don’t socialize, so the internet is my main source of communication with the outside world. I’m guaranteed to find people who share my interests, people who “get” me, people who don’t act like I came from Venus when I finally open up to them. When that all folds in on itself, or mutates into something that would make the monstrous works of HR Giger look like HR Puffnstuff, yeah, it’s kind of painful. Like living through your own digital 9/11. That sounds dramatic, and I mean it to be, but yes, losing social networks that were trusted sources of discussion has been like a sledgehammer to my mental health.
TMI, sorry. I do leave my house when needed, but it’s more business than pleasure. (There’s very little pleasure involved.)
I hear you. I spent most of fmy social time as a teenager in those new-fangled chat rooms in the mid-late nineties and I don’t think I ever really learned to socialize properly in person. Lol. That said, I don’t find the newness of this platform too daunting. I was one of the people who left Digg back in the day too.
I do miss my May 2023 baby bumps group now that I’m on maternity leave and have a lot of down time feeding the little one though. It’s not like it’s easy for me to leave the house with a toddler and a newborn even if I was to join a real life parenting social group.
Taking my daughter to organised play groups several times per week was forced upon me due to needing access to the community nurses who attended, as she needed constant monitoring of a birth condition. However, I’m incredibly glad I went, and continued to do so long after the condition ceased to need such close attention.
I made friends with several other parents, our children bonded and made their first friendships and learnt the basics of social interaction. The shared learning and support we were able to offer each other smoothed over countless daily needs and little fears. Sure, these friendships didn’t all sustain themselves long past our kids starting at their various different schools, but by that stage they had already learned so much that I could tell apart many of the children who had benefited from a similar experience and those who hadn’t.
I say all this simply to encourage you to try these sorts of groups. You might not make friends who last forever, you might not meet people exactly to your liking, but that’s life and it’s a valuable experience for the kids for that very reason. People are never more welcoming and friendly than when you have young children and need some companionship, we’re all in that same exact boat.
go to an AFK group. you can’t do it once in the next 3 weeks?
half the people there (infants) def have less social skills than you.
unless you find the “platform” of baby group to be too daunting for you.
Hey, I know what you mean. As a teen I spent a huge amount of time on the local BBS scene, before moving on to the Usenet groups, IRC, and then various forums.
I’d say don’t despair. Interest groups will find a way to congregate somehow. We did fine socialising online before garguntan social media networks, and we will continue to do so without them. There’ll be a dip in the near-future, but others will come to take the place of these social networks. They may not be huge and all-encompassing, but maybe that’s what we really need: Smaller communities tailored to more specific needs and wants.
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I found similar when I left my country of birth, that many people don’t keep in touch, even if I tried to maintain a connection. Out of sight, out of mind.
What did you bond over with your friends?
It’s a common thing for people who move (country) as kids. Sociological term is Third Culture Kid.
Third Culture Kid
Wow just knowing that it’s so common an experience that there’s a name for it is comforting.
Thank you so much for sharing that.
Read a book about it if you have time or a few articles.
I read the big one (Pollock, Van Reken) and it was honestly scary how well it described some parts of my personality, and the challenges I was dealing with in my life.
Thanks, added it to my to-be-read list. My preference is fiction these days, but I’m not above mixing in an academic book every now and then
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That sounds nice. Similarly I’ve been in a book club for about two years now that was started on Reddit.
Although we haven’t read a book in months, we still meet virtually every week, so I guess we’re just friends now.
The ultimate test of these kinds of groups seems to be whether they can survive transplantation from one social medium to another. I wonder how my little book club would fare if there was a schism over using discord…
Maybe there is a board here that would help you set up something like that? It can’t hurt to look around and put out some feelers.
They have my email but none of them have reached out.
I’m going to ask the obvious- have you reached out to them?
For as good a tip as that is, and @NumbersCanBeFun should definitely try it if they haven’t (or can), it doesn’t always work.
I did the whole reaching out thing for years for those I knew from Uni, and for almost all of them I was the only one reaching out. It felt tiring holding up a relationship the other person had stopped caring about, so I ended up dropping most of them and haven’t heard anything since.
@Th4tGuyII @HeartyBeast To answer your questions. I don’t have their email, I offered it to anyone who wished to stay in contact with me prior to deleting my account but I did not request anyones. I put the onus on them to reach out to me. It sucks none of them did but as I mentioned, it’s understandable. We all communicated, interacted and posted on Reddit and I don’t expect them to go out of their way since I was the one who left the platform.
Yeah, that sucks, but you’ve done what you could in that situation
I’m sorry. That sucks
I’ve seen what 4chan can cook up, so I think it’d hardly be fair to call you a loser for having the gaul to make friends online haha
Joking aside though, it really does sucks so much, and while I can’t say I built up friends on Reddit, I do I sympathise with your situation.
There are so many people I used to know from my time at Uni, but years later I now only keep contact with a handful on a semi-regular basis, because they just never reach out. It’s always me having to extend the olive-branch, and it gets tiring after a while of realising you’re the only one holding things up.
I’m a rather home-body person myself, so I can also sympathise with not wanting to lose the friends you have for fear of being unable to make more.
I’m hopeful to talk to all sorts of new people here, as everything does feel more personal than Reddit for the most part. Also given the size of the community I do find myself running into people I’ve chatted with before to gain more insight from. In fact, I vaguely recognise your avatar, so we might’ve even spoken before too haha
The reason I am hopeful about Kbin and the Fediverse in general is because it feels similar to Old School Reddit. I’ve meet a few awesome people so far and I am really hopeful I’ll fall into another community of awesome people. The alone time has been kind of nice though. It’s been awhile since I’ve reflected only on myself or didn’t ask for guidance on something from my friends. So in a way this might be a bit of a healthy change.
KBin is fairly intuitive as well, in spite of it’s lack of some quality of life improvements they need to implement. I am using it pretty active now on it.
I can’t speak to old-school Reddit because I joined fairly late to the party (2018-ish), but this does feel a lot like the old-school forums I used to frequent.
I’m glad you’ve already had the chance to integrate with folks around here, and I’m sure you’ll have plenty a chance to carve out a niche to hang out in.
Yeah, I think a lot of people feel that way. I certainly do - the blackouts and moving to Kbin gave me a chance to reflect on how I used Reddit, the habits I fell into, and to make what I think are healthier choices about them. For one, less doom-scrolling, and more attempting to interact more meaningfully with threads.
When the convenience melts away you find out who your friends really are, and most of the time our friends are friends of convenience. Feel free to message me if you ever want to talk, I think we all have this strange disruption of our life and routines from all the reddit goings on. It’s hard on people, as pathetic as that sounds, it’s true.
Damn, I hope you’re better now.
I think this has taught us there should be multiple ways of getting in touch with people. Don’t put everything in one basket (in this case, Reddit). Hopefully the Fediverse will be one of many ways to do so.
I agree and I am enjoying my time here. There are new friends to be made and new memes to explore.
I have a small business and about 20-30% of my traffic/sales came from Reddit. That’s completely disappeared. I’ve seen a huge impact on my business already
One of my conversations as this blew up was with some guy who sold WW2 memoriabilia and promoted his stuff on a small sub. He was kind of confused as to why the main WW2 sub had become inaccessible.
checks
It looks like it’s restricted still, though not private.
Anyway, I imagine that there are other people in a similar boat.
Ouch. Yeah I still spend $0 in advertising. All my business comes from satisfied customers and word-of-mouth referrals (the way I believe it should be - I loath paid advertisements forced upon people). At one point I a few years back I was one of the top 500,000 websites in the world (Alexa verified).
I’ve taken multiple hits over the years when other platforms (like Youtube) swept through their content and eliminated unpaid “ads” as they see it. I have no clue what the future will hold, and extremely thankful that I have a few distribution partners helping keeping me afloat during these slow times. Maybe the federation’s content will be logged by google and my site will regain it’s popularity.
Best thing you can do to help us small businesses is to give a shout out wherever appropriate (not spam, naturally). Just remind people that XYZ business or brand exists is extremely beneficial and worth more than any paid advertising.
I can’t relate but damn that sucks I’m sorry you’re dealing with this.
Yeah, Reddit has been pulling unsponsored ad content for the past year. I’ve been struggling with sales since I don’t pay for advertising - all my business comes from word of mouth referrals. Same thing happened in 2018 when Youtube swept through and erased a bunch of content.
Fortunately I run a tight ship with minimal overhead so as long as I get some business weekly I can keep the ‘doors’ open. But damn it’s been tough the past 14 months both with the recession and the changes to Reddit. But that’s fine - the slow time gives me a chance to get back to what I enjoy - innovating cool new widgets for the market.
If you want to help us small businesses (all of us are struggling right now), just remember to leave an honest review or mention the business/brand online. A simple word of mouth referral is worth infinitely more than a paid advertisement.
I feel like someone who has just woken up from cryo-sleep or a soldier who’s finally come out of the jungle after twenty years.
The 90s were great for the most part. The Internet was free and open, and there were zillions of forums and personal websites. I call this period the Genesis of the Web.
Then, things got bad. Microsoft monopolised the Web with its shitty IE 6 browser, websites were riddled with malware and popup ads, and you needed an antivirus and an anti-adware on your PC to be safe. I call this period the dark age of the Web. Most search engines died out, and Google became the king of search.
A couple years into the new millennium, Firefox and HTML 5 came about. There was hope again. Mozilla was fighting the good fight to keep the Web open, and new Web development techniques were developed (jQuery, CSS3, Dojo toolkit, Ajax became easier, etc). As a Web developer, this period was very exciting. You just couldn’t keep up with the new stuff. Firefox’s market share kept increasing, and new websites appeared on the scene: myspace, youtube, thefacebook (basically, proto-social media). Google released their Chrome browser, and IE was dying a slow death. This was the golden age of the Internet.
Then, things got bleak. Apple released their iPhone, and Google released Android. By this time, most personal websites were gone, social media was on the rise, Firefox became less and less relevant, and by the end of the 2010s, the Web had become just a shell of itself. The ‘Web’ was now just a dozen websites owned by powerful corporations. Engagement algorithms were developed to keep people hooked, and Google analytics tracked everything. Privacy was gone for good. This is the period we are currently in. I call it Corpo Web or the Dystopian Web. Some of us did not want to participate in this version of the Web, so we lived in a separate world (what we call the small web).
Finally, someone came up with the idea of Fediverse; platforms that can communicate with each other through open protocols. Corporate social media platforms are falling apart (reddit, twitter, facebook, etc), and Fediverse is exploding. Each Fediverse instance has its own personality, and it reminds me of web rings in a way. There is always something new to discover, be it a new community or a new instance of Lemmy/Mastodon/etc.
What I would love to see though, is a way to Lemmy instances more unique (custom designs, chat system, games, etc). This would encourage people to visit other instances. Also, we should be able to categorise communities and group them together (like a traditional forum).
Engagement algorithms were developed to keep people hooked, and Google analytics tracked everything. Privacy was gone for good.
The explosion of privacy data tracking algorithms have destroyed the modern internet.
I completely forgot about web rings, and that’s honestly a great example. It really does feel like we’re getting a little piece of the old Internet back; spreading out and bringing back that individualized experience. And yet the connectivity of the fediverse has the potential to give us some of the good parts of the modern Internet.
A few years down the road this will probably be looked at as a transformative time for the Internet, for better or for worse. Given the negative impact of so called ‘web 2.0’ social media, I’d say getting away from it could have as far reaching positive impacts as getting tied into it had toxic results.
I mean, it sucks, but to some extent – I had hoped not to this degree – life was going to get worse when Reddit shifted over from growth to monetization.
And I used Reddit when it was far smaller and less-featureful than the Fediverse is today (not to mention with worse uptime…it used to die on a regular basis or start acting weird as the devs worked on scaling it up early-on.). It didn’t have subreddits then, much less all the niche stuff that exists today. Riding another network through growth is okay with me.
Yeah, I seriously hope Spez’s $10 million worth of greed compounds into losses greater than what he could have made on API calls if RiF and Apollo had bent the knee.
Not at all. I’ve been more productive at work too.
