I’m not trying to convince anyone to go back i promise, quite the contrary actually cause I think spez plans to just decrease the cost of the API and act like it was a bargain deal sacrifice while not solving any of the issues at all
But, when I think about it even if spez did actually listen and reverse all changes I don’t think i want to go back to Reddit cause from what Ive seen Lemmy is just friendlier and less :Be Corporate Friendly: I would honestly love it if Lemmy did a project like r/place one of these days so we could see what the internet is actually like instead of what happened in 2022 (I really did enjoy what a bunch of communities did but when the mods started abusing their powers to make it corporate r/place lost so much meaning) but i am curious since i’m not going back is there anything Reddit can do to make you go back to Reddit?
I think many people were looking for a reason to leave but kind of felt stuck seeing all the alternatives being either dead or abrasive.
Lemmy seems to have captured the soul of what a significant portion of people have already been looking for.
Lemmy in it’s current state feels very similar to reddit did ~14 years ago.
I am just smitten. I’ll never go back.
Exactly. Lemmy is great, and is essentially all I wanted from Reddit without the Reddit
Exactly! And like McDonalds, McFapper is loving it. Now bring on the NSFW instances.
I’ve only found one NSFW community so far.
Your name checks out with what you said 😂
Could not agree more.
This describes me perfectly. Most of the alternatives I saw previously just ended up being coopted by the alt-right crowd who got chased off of Reddit. Lemmy (so far) represents what I want from an online community.
Its so weird that the alt right hasn’t tried to seize Lemmy yet from my experience it was always the immediate fate of Reddit alts in curious if the alt right is too busy over at truth social (or rumble) oh could we please get a youtube alt next that would be so great
The structure of the fediverse (lemmy/kbin/mastodon etc) makes it really difficult for alt-right and troll instances to find a meaningful presence.
Truth Social for example is just a mastodon instance, but everyone immediately defederated (blocked) them, so they have no reach. Hateful ideologies want a large audience on which to inflict their bullshit, and the federated model makes it really easy to cut them off.
The alt-right is so strange it used to be that they wanted to be popular so they would invade subreddits and start cultivating hate until either they took over the subreddits or got expelled (almost like how a virus spreads actually)
But now its like they decided to pretend to be popular and are kinda imploding a bit
You want to know why the alt right haven’t seized this place and won’t? It’s in the name. The fediverse. We’re all a bunch of feds!
Or it’s because Lemmygrad fought them off.
Sadly its both welcome to the secret FBI army, IRS branch you’ll get your paperwork and stapler in the mail in 21 business days
21 business days? Now I know you’re not a fed!
So you know you can trust me with your SSN :D /j
Ah shit I didn’t know we were patriot front
They are out there… I was doing some exploring of instances the other day. If you look at what instances are blocking it’s pretty easy to see what is out in the fediverse.
Peertube is a good federated alternative to Youtube, it also connects to the Fediverse and there is a central search engine called Sepia Search, which makes it easier to find content on the different instances.
Was looking at Peertube earlier, but it seems much harder to pick an instance than it was with Lemmy or Mastodon for me.
I have to agree with you on that I saw a comment earlier about the people who left Reddit being a loud minority but something feels off about that
Lemmy’s community feels so familiar I sadly just can’t find the right words to describe it though
It feels oddly nostalgic. I think it reminds me of the fun I used to have when I first joined reddit.
Rather than just mindlessly scrolling with a couple “hehs” or a blowing air out my nose slightly faster than normal.
It reminds me of forums I signed up for as a teen.
Let’s hope it stays that way and grows!
I agree. Now don’t tell the others
Spot on. Lemmy is how the Internet was supposed to be.
A week ago: Bring down the API costs. I’d have begrudgingly accepted paying a few extra bucks a year for Apollo Ultra.
Today: Nothing. Reddit admins acted like smug children in the face of the Apollo Dev’s good faith questions, then the CEO and admins pulled the stunt of trying to act like the dev threatened them. Then the CEO doubled down on that story in the sham AMA. I don’t want to feed that machine anymore.
I have edited and then deleted all my posts and comments except for a few final ones that will go soon. I will keep the account but only as a point of contact for some people until I get them all contacting my email instead.
I’ve only been here for a day, but the lack of homophobia and transphobia here compared to Reddit has been a breath of fresh air. I’m not afraid of posting here like I was on Reddit, where I’d actually have to debate with myself for a minute or two before posting. It’s like finally leaving a bad relationship; now I’m starting to see how bad that all was for my mental health.
It’s quite the opposite at this point. Reddit isn’t really in control anymore. Rather, something drastic would have to happen to Lemmy to cause me to leave. Reddit is no longer the default choice.
i kind of want reddit to die now. people talking to one another shouldn’t be monetized or debased through some spyware algorithm run by antisocial dickheads.
They’ve lost me for good. Lemmy is a huge learning curve but I’m here for it. It reminds me of an early Reddit right around the Digg era. I’m excited.
I agree, though I’m a bit scared that the large, sudden influx of people will mean there will be an influx of bots similar to the number of bots on reddit, and that would be a mess
I’ll be real: I don’t want to go back. I want a return to actual communities and comradery, and an exodus from “social” influencers, on ad-riddled and bloated soap boxes.
Bingo. That’s me too.
I never realized just how tired I was of social media until Reddit blew themselves up. I had already quit Zucc’s armoury of social media tools a few years ago. I’ll be glad if I don’t ever have to go back.
Honestly, I feel like my time with Reddit is done now. You know how when someone breaks up with you and you’re in shock that it’s over but then you start reflecting and realising everything that was wrong with the relationship? That. I feel like Lemmy, and the fediverse, is a really interesting alternative way of doing things, I’m not the most tech savvy (or the least) and at nearly 50 it’s a bit harder for me to pick up new concepts than it was 20 years ago, but I’ll get the hang of it, and I actually think that this will end up being a positive change for me. There is so much wrong with the corporatisation of the internet, and this does feel like a viable and genuine alternative to that.
I’m in the same boat. I believe we’ll get the hang of it eventually thou. See you around.
Very well put. The whole API thing started a process for me that will not be reversed. Reddit is stained now.
I remember Reddit being quite confusing when I started and different to most social media. It took me a while to get my head around following communities and not individuals. Federation is something quite different, but the feel is very old school reddit and I’m finding it pretty easy to learn, just with less creature comforts at the moment that I’m sure will come with time.
That’s exactly how I feel. Even just the way comments were structured was weird, let alone the idea of subreddits
Yep, most of my friends don’t use Reddit ‘because it’s too confusing’. They stick to FB and Instagram, even while moaning about capitalism and corporates. The sad fact is that the corporates have the money to make their UIs super easy to use. Plus a lot of people only want the connections to other individuals from their social media, they’re not interested in something broader than that. I’m hoping the format here keeps the bots away, that’s been another nail in the Reddit coffin for me. It’s become a site filled with bots commenting on botposts.
There’s dozens of us!
u/spez fired, paid API policy reversed, NSFW policy change reversed, public apology to christian and all reddit users promoting lemmy who got banned + compensation for defamation, all decisions regarding site administration and API policy permanently democratized, so that this shit never happens again, make the whole thing open source.
I don’t expect a single thing on my list to happen, but everything on that list would have to happen before I considered returning.
I’m a bit OOTL on this I guess, but what NSFW policy changes are you talking about specifically? I was under the impression that they’ve stayed committed to continuing to allow NSFW content. I can’t seem to find any headlines mentioning any changes with all this API nonsense.
With that said though, I did see Huffman respond to a question in his AMA in a negative sounding way towards NSFW content, so that’s ominous. Also, I’ve heard that Reddit has recently been cracking down on subreddits with inactive moderators and not allowing appeals, with a specific target aimed at NSFW communities. Is there anything more specific that has come out lately with the API changes? Or are we talking more generally about their bans on subs like /r/WatchPeopleDie and whatnot?
they probably are referring to the fact that reddit isn’t allowing 3rd party apps to have NSFW content on them
Ahhh, I completely missed that news among the API pricing bullshit. I guess I was so focused on the fact that they’ve basically just nuked third party apps, that I didn’t notice that even if they reversed their shitty pricing, they also killed NSFW content on those apps.
completely understandable, there’s WAY too much shitty stuff happening at the moment with reddit to be able to keep track of it all honestly
Yup, thats what I meant!
deleted by creator
I think they’ve made it clear that even if they backpedal now, they’re just testing the waters to see how much bullshit they can get away with and they’re going to do the absolute most they can… Even if they completely took a 180 and said they were keeping the API entirely free, I’d still be gone.
I always found it hard to engage with larger Reddit communities anyway; Lemmy and the Fediverse as a whole are much closer to what I wanted from Reddit but couldn’t get, so I’m here to stay no matter what happens. Fuck them.
I think one of the issues for me is they’ve revealed in their pricing exactly how much value they think there is in all the content we have created over the years for free.
Someone suggested that their immediate business plan is to fleece all the AI developers looking at that rich history as training data for their new models. It may well be that spez and co are hoping to have a couple of crazy years of taking that cash and then bail out to leave the ruins of Reddit to the spammers, haters and bots.
It’s hard to say. A change in management maybe? Reddit has already gotten worse in recent years, but with betrayal of developers and users with the API, the way Spez intentionally lied about Apollo’s developer to the public, and with the upcoming IPO, I don’t see how things will get any better. It sucks because a lot of the information and utility Reddit has, I don’t know where to find elsewhere.
That being said, I’ve grown extremely tired of how the internet has seemed to have gotten worse and worse over the past 7-10 years. To me, this decentralization/fediverse is exciting because it seems like it has the possibility of making the internet feel freeing, fun, and human again.
Today’s AMA was something else. I honestly don’t know how a founder of reddit doesn’t understand reddit users.
I really like/liked reddit. I’ve been on it since digg v4 happened. Rif dies, I’m done using reddit on my phone. I’m not installing their app. If old dies, then I’m completely done with reddit. I’m not using new. Chances are I’ll use reddit less and less anyway though.
It won’t happen. Reddit is dying. The culture has had a massive shift and you simply don’t recover from that. When they have their IPO it will be very telling.
But based on this fiasco, any sane investor would have some serious reservations about the leadership of Reddit but its future in the social networking space.
They pissed off a LOT of people, and those people are the ones that create all of the content.
But look across the social media spectrum. FB, Twitter, Reddit. All of them are just tanking.
We are on the precipice of a big paradigm shift in how we communicate with one another online.
As someone who really only went on Reddit for memes and techie discussions, I think I can say this: for my use-case, there was nothing special about Reddit itself. In fact, one thing I have realized is just how little the nature of the host matters beyond ease of use. Sure, certain formats lend themselves better to certain use-cases, but ultimately humans are social creatures, and even in the most inconvenient of circumstances, we find a way to make it work.
And once you realize that, it becomes less about the medium, and more about the people who lead the discourse. From what I can gather, Reddit lost that discourse a long time ago. And as such, their downfall was only a matter of time.
Funny, I was just having that discussion with someone.
I think the problem is all these platforms think the platform is the value and not the content made by the users.
And of course, since they have the best platform, it’d be inconceivable that anyone would ever leave because they’re the best.
Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, and Twitch are all doing exactly the ‘value is the platform’ while taking a massive shit on the creators and users that made the platform have any value in the first place, then acting confused why people are angry about how they’re behaving.
No actual human gives a crap about the platform: nobody goes to these sites to go to the site, they go there for the content from someone they like.
This is exactly correct, and herein lies the problem: how do you monetize content creation from people you don’t pay?
Louis Rossman said it best: when you look at a lot of content platforms, you realize their business models don’t make sense. The people managing these companies are riding on VC money knowing full well there isn’t any long-term return. They want to cash out and dip.
This is why I feel like a Federated, user-maintained system is probably best for the long term sustainability of a community. People want a place to enjoy something or someone? Let’s make it happen, by our own means
Agreed. The community MUST own it’s own platform or else they’re just renters that can be evicted the minute someone thinks they can make money from them.
This also isn’t just an online issue (though my view is US-centric). There’s been a lot of talk about the decline of a ‘3rd place’ and its loss impacting social gatherings. You have your house, work, and then your social spaces, and there’s a very big lack of social places where gathering and relaxing are acceptable without also having to engage in buying permission to be there.
This carried over into a lot of people going online to find the same social gatherings, and then seeing the gathering places turned into profit centers for the owners without any discussion with the users of the space, and now they’re finding that they don’t have anywhere to go be social, and the online places that filled that gap are now vanishing as well.
Now I’m not a sociologist (just a simple country computer janitor), but it strongly feels like a lot of the hyper-tribalism and aggressiveness that people are exhibiting are a direct result of having all the social spaces torn away and turned into profit centers, with zero regards for the people who visited or contributed to them.
It just makes everyone more isolated and willing to hop on to whatever the next big ‘social trend’ that some algorithm drops in front of them, and I think at this point it’s pretty unarguable that what the algorithms are doing is not always benign. You gain a place to belong, even if what you’re belonging to is abhorrent and toxic.