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
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. :-)
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.
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.
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 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!
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
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
Yes, I’m really upset about it. It feels like i’ve had so much taken away from me over my life and I was always willing to accept it and move on, but to see something so simple and innocent get taken away seems just so pointless and depressing. Like why am I not allowed to just have my little shitposting community? is it too much that I get to smile without some capitalist coke rat getting a payday? I hate this so much and there is nothing I can do about it. I will mourn for awhile, until I cant even remember why im upset anymore, and when I wake up tommorrow the world will be just a little bit worse. it always is.
Capitalist coke rats rule the world.
undefined> I will mourn for awhile, until I cant even remember why im upset anymore, and when I wake up tommorrow the world will be just a little bit worse. it always is.
Felt this many times and you couldn’t have expressed it better. Sometimes I thought “maybe I’m getting old and you tend to idealize how the world was in your younger years” but the current situation with reddit is a clear example of this not being the case.
As a reddit refugee, happy to start becoming a part of the fediverse :)
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
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.
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.
Kinda. But I don’t care about Reddit itself. I care about a few communities and the people from there. I know a couple of them are here. But we are scattered and trying to figure out this site.
Time will tell if this sticks or not. I pretty much hope so.
If someone finds a Lemmy equivalent to r/Grimdank or r/40klore please let me know.
Yeah same. I have no real love for Reddit itself, but it has so many subreddits dedicates to very specific interests. They’re so easy to find and they can turn into such a treasure trove of information. I’ll stop using Reddit as my “main” social media, but I’ll probably still use it just for certain subreddits.
Yeah that’s basically how I feel too. There are/were some really good communities and content on there, but those things existed in spite of reddit as a platform, which seems determined to just keep being as hostile to its users as possible.
If it does end up going under it’s 100% because it did it to itself, so I don’t really have any sympathy for them over that tbh.
I’ve only found minipainting so far, but I’ll look out for 40k specific too
I feel just a bit heartbroken but at the same time I really love the concept of lemmy.
I’m just a little afraid that lemmy is just a short-lived alternative and the people go back because not everything is working perfect right now.
Not really, im actually excited about exploring the lemmy verse. Feels like a breath of fresh air. Reddit was starting to feel stagnant.
I guess I’m still in the denial phase. I haven’t technically left reddit yet. I guess during the blackout, then I’ll really know how I feel without it. I’ll definitely have to leave once RIF stops working.
I’m just having a really hard time getting used to kbin and Lemmy.
I do. Started using reddit in 8th grade and now I’m finishing my masters. So it’s been a while. Over the years, it has changed a lot and I’ve been pretty dissatisfied, to say the least. It used to be a great place for insightful and more-or-less friendly conservation, there was a sense of community. It hasn’t been that way in a long time, so I’m ready to move on. Still sad but it’s for the best.
I’m hoping Lemmy will have the same spirit as reddit had when I created an account all those years ago. I’m staying optimistic.
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.
I don’t exactly have such a huge attachment but for 4 years of using reddit as a silent lurker, I only ever started posting and gaining karma last month… i got about 9k since then so yeah… having to restart is draining a bit… but like you said, it doesn’t really matter.
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.
Hopefully it won’t be long before such communities exist here too
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.
