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.
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 have really been diving deep into a lot of niche hobbies and Redd** had such a great community for them. I have no problem starting over for the sake of justice, but it is going to take a long time to build them up.
Preach. I get that entirely.
I think it will hit harder when I want to search for something on google and have to avoid adding reddit onto the end.
It’s so frustrating that I often have to do this just avoid getting a lot of spam sites from google when I’m searching for something niche. I feel like the internet is getting progressively worse for user experience.
I would like to say we could just use another search engine, but what made Google top dog was because it hadnt succumbed to advertisers in a bloatware way until now. Everything on the internet is just bloat now, unfortunately.
Everything on the internet is just bloat now, unfortunately
Weirdly, Microsoft is the one company that seems to be trending in the right direction (granted, with many, many missteps along the way). Or maybe they’ve just kept walking while most other tech companies race to the bottom
Bing Chat is great
Time will help that at least. The reason google links to reddit is there were great discussions there. With time lemmy (or another federated instance) will likely take its place.
I went to results for reddit because I could see people interacting about the question. This looks to have that same allure.
TRUE
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
So many times in the past few months I would open reddit, stare at rhr uninteresting front page and close it. Especially the past few years it has taken an astronomical nosedive, and that’s coming from someone who joined in 2013 which some consider too late.
I’ve been thinking that for a while. I really miss the old feel of reddit. I recently opened it up in archive.org and the content just had a different feel back when I first joined. Also fun seeing the old news stories.
It has felt pretty toxic more recently. Often I’d see something and end up just leaving to do something else, I’ve been describing it as the “two-minutes hate” internally for a while now.
There are some good communities and I’ve done a good job of trimming what I subscribe to, but that “popular” button is too tempting.
Honestly, mainstream social media as a whole is practically a two minutes hate. There’s a reason why “doomscrolling” is a term. While I do miss the occasional upsetting posts on r/iamatotalpieceofshit or r/facepalm, honestly having them gone for me is better in the long run.
12 years of reddit. It will take some time to adjust but I also switched from google to duckduckgo years ago after decades of google, and then too never looked back. Lemmy does need a LOT of work, still, but so did reddit in the early days…
To those working on Lemmy, please don’t fuck this up for us. Don’t be a spez.
The nice thing about Lemmy that Reddit never had is that it can only improve in ways that the community wants! Not more putting up with asinine decisions from people who only see us as dollar signs.
How is lemmy financed? Someone still needs to pay for servers, right?
Lemmy is opensource, you can see and get a copy of the source code here. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy There’s no development cost because all developers are volunteers at this stage.
For each instance that depends on the admins running that individual instance. The instance I use is being sponsored by a NZ company that are providing the admin’s a free virtual server to host on.
I have no idea. I’m sure we’ll figure that out along the way. At first it will probably be out of pocket from thousands of homelab hobbiests.
Maybe eventually they could implement something like gilding that Reddit had. I’m sure gilding alone could fund a lot of servers. When you take out the millions of dollars the share holders were taking it properly didn’t take much money to run all of Reddit.
Each instance is responsible for their own server costs. Many accept donations!
Yes, but that means it’s going to split communities up between servers. So there won’t be a mass exodus like reddit, just a handful of communities at a time (if needed).
Nah, that’s where the federation comes in. The tech has a lot of room to grow, but you never have to move to join the “winning” group for a topic - you just have to sub
Moving forward, there’s already talk about how/if you should reconcile overly similar groups across servers. It’s certainly possible, and discovery is definitely going to improve quickly - the only question is can Lemmy hold onto the new users long enough to get past the growing pains
They kinda can’t be a spez, by design. Just make sure you make backup accounts on all the other instances, and use them occasionally
It’d be cool if lemmy implements features that’ll help switching instances easier, like what mastodon did.
get to the github repo and chuck a comment in support of this with maybe some description of your use case and benefits too
Admittedly, I don’t know how switching instance work in Mastodon either, I just know that it’s possible
At the very least, it’s super simple to do in Jerboa if you have accounts on each.
How does one make a backup account on another instance?
I mean literally just register your account again. Maybe subscribe to the communities you like on each account if you have the time to, but if not just reserve your username on each and have them saved in your password manager and ready to go in case of a break-glass incident.
Ahh, understood. I thought that you meant that there was some sort of built-in functionality to mirror your account on another instance.
It’s also up to us not to fuck this up. Let’s not turn this into a toxic hate-filled dystopia lol.
That will happen nonetheless, when more people start coming in. Its something that will just have to be managed.
On the other hand, I do hope that here on lemmy we will stop just kicking anybody with an opinion that we don’t like. That will only cause echo chambers where everybody will repeat the same stupid opinions that will only get more extreme. We will have to listen to those that we don’t agree with.
I’m sorry but no. I don’t have to listen to Nazis. If they are allowed here, it will drive me and a lot of other people away. We had more than enough “free speech” experiments now. It always ended in these platforms being an insufferable cesspool of Nazis, conspiracy theorists, incels etc. and all sane people were driven away. It doesn’t work. These people need to be deplatformed, that is the only way.
I respectfully disagree.
First of all, on Reddit I rarely ran into right wing extremists. Do you know who I ran into a LOT? Left wing extremists. That is what tends to happen when you start polarizing discussions (both sides) and then kick out one side. The other side just becomes an echo chamber.
Second of all, this is not a problem you can ignore. Its not as if these people just magically disappear into thin air once you ban them. You can’t deplatform them because they’ll just go to another place. Where will they go? To their own moderated places, which will allow much more extreme discussions, leading to more and more polarization and problems in the real world. I think part of the problem here is that we (collectively) stopped listening to people in minor disagreements, and instead of having reasoned arguments, just kicked these people out to the curb. I honestly think that that sort of behavior from the left side of the spectrum is what fueled US polarization which culminated in Donald Trump becoming president.
You may not want to have reasoned discussions with people who are more on the right side of your political spectrum, but you HAVE to. We all have to because if we don’t, they will talk only amongst themselves and they will only fall deeper and deeper into their right wing pit. Have no illusion, the same goes for left wing extremism. Extremism on that end might still be milder, but its there alright.
I’d rather have a group of people with a few minor-and-controllable nutcases in it than a conform-with-the-rules group, and a group of dangerous terrorists outside that group.
There are examples where this was tried. It doesn’t work. People who disagree with Nazis leave the platforms, so the result is the same.
The problem is that there are no Nazis. Nazi’s stopped existing in 1945, anything after that are people that sympathize with some or all of its ideologies. The problem is that its a sliding scale and people these days are VERY trigger happy to call out NAZI! I’ve been called a Nazi on Reddit (and banned from multiple sub reddits) for literally arguing that I’m not sure how good an idea it is to give puberty blockers to kids that might be trans, specially because these blockers do have consequences later in life.
Great, now I’m a Nazi, apparently? Should I be banned now?
When IS a person a Nazi?
I’ve talked a LOT on reddit, I had over 130K karma over probably the same amount of messages. I don’t recall talking to Nazi’s much, if ever. I have had quite a few deep discussions with people on the far right part of the spectrum and it helped me a lot understanding them, where they come from, and why they have the ideas that they have. I call that progress. You can listen to somebody and politely agree to disagree.
What you are pushing for tends to end in censorship. Can’t talk about naughty things now! Can’t disagree with the masses! All look in the same direction! Don’t dare to step out of line!
It also ends in situations where douchenozzles like Trump become president of the USA because the right feels like they no longer have a voice (which truthfully, is correct), so push back harder and extremer.
We MUST allow dissenting voices. Yes, if somebody scants “KILL THE JEWS!”, you ban him of course. But if there is a conversation happening about, say, the “US bathroom issues” I think we should allow dissenting voices. As long as the conversations are respectful and thoughtful, the worst that could happen is progress.
You can theorize about semantics all you want, but don’t try to gaslight someone who was physically attacked by actual, real Nazis, who describe themselves as Nazis and can’t be seen as anything but Nazis.
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.
I’m getting the same retro vibe, for so long I’ve been missing how cool and simple things used to be, the fediverse sounds really amazing and a more futuristic way of engaging online.
However, I indeed miss the old reddit since I was an active member and also all the lost karma lol.
It’s probably unhealthy to have such an attachment to fake internet points that do literally nothing.
I guess for me Reddit lasted longer and grew bigger than I expected it to, so I see this as a natural progression. It grew much further than it had any right to, I think.
My only trepidation comes from the niche communities on Reddit that I loved and whether they’ll transfer over to the fediverse. /R/woodworking for instance has some of the most supportive, pleasant users I’ve ever interacted with.
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.
Man, I’m grieving a little. Anger, denial, the whole gamut really.
Mostly anger tbh. We all knew it was coming, once they started moving towards an IPO, but I think we hoped that it wouldn’t be this bad. The way spez handled it all makes it even worse. Just shitting on all the mods and users that made the IPO possible in the first place.
It would not surprise me if there’s something in the news about a bunch of angry ex redditors going project mayhem on him. The whole “do not fuck with us” thing kinda fits here, and there are some crazy people on reddit
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 cared more about the niche communities than I did about Reddit as a whole. Once those move over here, I’ll be just fine.
There’s already a few retro game communities but it was nice to have difference branches for different consoles and eras. So many other little things too, like city subs, ones for specific bands, shows, etc.
I’m really going to miss my local subreddit. They were a moany bunch, but they were my moany bunch.
right! it’s the people, not the product
i think someone forgot that
I have been on Reddit for the last 10 years, and a 3rd party app user for all of it. It feels like the end of an era, and that will be sad no matter what. I won’t miss the vast majority of subreddits, especially the bigger ones. It’s the smaller more niche subreddits I’m going to have a hard time not returning to and I’m hoping to find similar communities elsewhere.
The niche subreddits are definitely the biggest loss for me
Yeah, Reddit had a lot of communities that I loved interacting with and finding advice with. I do hope Lemmy gains enough traction to replace Reddit.
This.
It’s very sad what has transpired the past few weeks but it’s clear where Reddit’s priorities lie.
Let’s hope Lemmy takes off/gains a stable user base that we can all call our new home.
I saw a thread on a niche sub, where the question was if the user was gonna leave reddit. The vast majority replied with “stay”. I’m sure our numbers will continue to grow, but I’m afraid it will take a long time to replace Reddit. Maybe it’s better we take our time to build good communities here. So far, all interactions I had were great
Nah, over the years I have seen many discussions sites rise and fall, and you tend to get over it. Slashdot, Fark, Digg, and countless PHP-based boards for instance. I am happy that there is a real possibility that a decentralized mechanism for discussions is catching on again. To me it’s somewhat like Usenet back in the day, but prettier.
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.Reddit has answered almost every question I’ve ever had for years. The potential loss of all the knowledge is my greatest concern.
i getcha, but it was people who did that. it’s kind of hard to shut us up, we’ll answer more questions wherever we are
most knowledge has a shelf life anyway
I think this is honestly the biggest issue. Web search has been garbage for years, with legit the only saving grace being Reddit users sharing their knowledge. This is gonna have a horrible effect on producing good search results.
Totally agree. I feel like this is the equivalent, to some degree, of Stack Overflow just suddenly going away. The history needs to be preserved, somehow.
Is there anything in the Fediverse that is like a Stack Overflow clone? Might be time to start working on the backup plan for those big websites that do not show a sign of going away yet to avoid the rush when they inevitably do.
People have been joking lately about productivity suddenly increasing as a result of the Reddit blackout, but honestly? That loss of information is probably going to result in a loss of productivity in some cases.
Because yeah, in the nightmare scenario where both Reddit and Stack Overflow were to disappear, a lot of programmers would be at a complete loss.
It’s valuable knowledge with how-to’s that made me create an account there. I learned plentiful with the people that cared to share.
Most i implemented into my daily life & conditions have become favorable for me.
It’s unfortunate that Reddit Company have refused to collaborate with its users, since years back. Otherwise we would have seen their web & mobile app develop/ innovate in great ways. But they have chosen one limitation after the other. Slowly over the years.
how exaclty does this pushshift work? I downloaded some zsts from it but what do I do with them?
The file you downloaded is a compressed JSON file, it’s not something you can really just look at. But it contains all the data needed to build a nice UI around.
I don’t know what OS you are on but on linux you can runzstd -d -c file.zst | jq .and it will print everything in the file. It’s not really readable though. Also it doesn’t have any of the media content, only the text
Subreddits are still private but there data isn’t lost so the knowlege loss isn’t irretrievable mods from the subreddits will be able to transfer knowledge from Reddit to Lemmy
That assumes the mods do. I fear reddit will turn into another tinypic situation. even if it isn’t an image host there will be pages of answers on forums and stack exchange pointing to dead reddit links. The fustration of finding a 10 year old forum post of someone having the same issue as you only to have the only answer point to a dead link is incredible.
I’m anxious to see what happens in the next few days and weeks. I think Reddit will bring the big subreddits back online with new mods if they have to. The smaller subreddits, though, may not be worth the effort to Reddit, and those are the ones I’ll miss the most. I’m hoping some make their way here, but I suspect many won’t.
I’m glad to be here, and I’m looking forward to see what this brings.
Tbh I feel more heartbroken about the people that worked so hard to make those 3rd party apps for years just to get fucked by some dude who wanted a bit more money.
