Surprisingly not hard at all. I helped build tools for moderators on Reddit that were used by millions. When the API changes hit, it completely destroyed all of my work. I have no interest in dedicating my time casually or seriously to a site that treats me that way.
I’m a habitual person but switching to the fediverse was like trading cigarettes for a vape. Same addiction, different delivery, more flavor 😛
Delicious story
That’s the best analogy I’ve heard. Thanks, I’m gonna use it. And thanks for building mod tools since I probably used them.
As a former mod, thank you for your service 🫡
Not difficult at all.
Left Facebook in 2016, Left Instagram in 2017, Left Snapchat in 2018, Left twitch in 2021, Left Twitter in 2022, Left Reddit in 2023.
I could walk away from tiktok at any moment.
Impressed that you’re still on digg and stumbleupon.
Gotta have a place to leave lists of their IRC servers
You're making great progress.
I can quit any time. I already quit 6 times.
Do it now! That shit is cancer for you privacy
Honestly I thought it would be tougher than it really was. The first couple days I did miss it, it was my go to for over 12 years.
I'm thankful RIF suggested this place, it's a much nicer environment.
Seriously! I was pretty down at first as I was seeing so much bullshit Reddit meanness and drama around the time everyone migrated. Now it has calmed down and Lemmy is back to being nice but with a TON more content.
Yeah, I had a social media coma for two weeks before deciding I finally wanted to try Lemmy out; and Mastodon, and I also downloaded Threads with the hopes of it being integrated into ActivityPub as well.
Me too. I felt kind of shitty deleting a decade old account where I'd had a lot of really good interactions with people, but I've already completed multiple craft projects that I never would've picked up if I hadn't stopped reflexively clicking on reddit every time I was even slightly bored, and now I'm here, which is nice. Not so busy I can spend all day doomscrolling, and mostly a better community.
I still haven't fully abandoned reddit. Reason: There are a number of niche communities I'm part of that just have zero or near-zero population here. Fediverse just doesn't yet have the minimum critical mass of users necessary to be a viable alternative for anything but the most common and basic topics.
As far as making the switch for the common/popular stuff, there were difficulties that I ran into but I've mostly adapted. My first big mistake was trying to use Jerboa (I thought it was the 'official' app, but quickly discovered that it loves to shit itself if the app version is out of sync with the server version by even a sub-sub-dot version number. It also crashed a lot. Another early mistake was joining a small instance and not realizing that their view of "all" communities was not the same as the view of "all" communities from a bigger instance...and so my earliest view of the fediverse was pretty crippled until I started creating accounts on other instances. My next problem was the learning curve: I didn't see a lot of the communities I wanted while on that small instances and so I started creating them, only to later discover that many of those communities already existed on other instances and were well established. Fediverse has a MASSIVE community discoverability problem that needs to be solved before more of the masses will be attracted to it.
Now that I've got a good working client that I like, have local accounts on the main instances where most of the communities I participate in are located, have re-found replacement communities for the ones I lost access to when beehaw de-federated, I estimate that after about 2 more years at current growth, fediverse might also be a viable alternate to those niche communities I'm still going to reddit for. I'd estimate that I'm 70% fediverse + 30% reddit at this point.
Interesting feedback!
Not at all. Honestly getting rid of Twitter and Reddit has given me more free time that I didn't realize I was wasting constantly scrolling. There's less to see on Mastodon and Lemmy so I usually just run through it in the morning on my way to work and a bit at night if I'm bored (like right now.) I've gotten back into reading books a lot more and getting off the computer for a lot longer.
Honestly getting rid of Twitter and Reddit has improved my life if anything.
Surprisingly not that hard. Thanks every one!
I've left better things over lesser issues.
Good for you.
Switching from Reddit to Lemmy was easy because most of the major reddit communities exist here (albeit smaller) and have generally better post quality.
Way easier than expected. I used to spend hours mindlessly scrolling on reddit, occasionally learning something useful but that was the exception. I suffer from anxiety so I genuinely had concerns about quitting reddit, but also recognised it was an unhealthy way to spend so much free time. I left on the first day of the protests and haven't been back since. Was honestly surprised and impressed at myself for managing it so easily (rediscovered my love of crosswords and my kindle). Joined Lemmy 2 days ago, so still finding my feet but so far it scratches that itch of keeping a little bit in-the-loop with pop culture. (But with time limits firmly on this time!)
Pretty much what you said except I joined lemmy the day of the blackouts. I gave up most of the other social media sites years ago but reddit was hard for me to quit until the protest. Now I am here and have a few groups on discord. My social media time has gone way down, I'm just finding other things to waste my time on now.
I could have almost written this exactly. I moved the reddit icon on my phone the day protests started, so while I went to open it a few times, I had physical barrier that made me stop and think about my action. I’ve checked it maybe 3 times to see some of the self-implosion on the site, but otherwise was shocked at how little I missed it.
I met many irl friends from reddit meetups. It’s been a huge part of my social experience for well over 10 years. It seems silly, but I felt pretty heartbroken when I realized I couldn’t in good conscience continue to use it.
Lemmy has been great and simpler to adapt to than I expected. The hardest thing was choosing what server to sign up on, and now I’m still testing out different app options.
It was easy to start, but difficult to keep to. There were communities that had a special place to me, and while I've found the Lemmy analogues and they're amazing, I still sometimes miss seeing certain familiar names I grew to associate with my time over at Reddit.
I realize we were nothing more than ships passing in the ocean of comments, but sometimes, seeing a familiar name drop some good advice or just a cheery reply on a rough day was nice.
Reddit made it very easy. If I was going to have to deal with switching apps anyway and a lot of the best moderators were gone this likely destroying those communities' ability to resist bots and other spam attacks, then may as well move somewhere that has more likelihood of being around in a few years with content rather than just ads and spam.
For me I dropped my main account cold turkey the day before the protests started. Never logged back in and never felt a strong enough desire to. There were a couple of time I was curious but held out.
My porn account on the other hand I used until Boost stopped working.
I would love to say the switch was seamless but it was clear from day one there was going to be pain points with the exponential growth lemmy experienced.
All in all I feel better with the slow pace, the friendly genuine people. No more endless doom scrolling.
For me, it depends on the website.
Twitter to Mastodon is easy. I've never understood short form text social media. I never made a Twitter account but I have a Mastodon account so I guess that says something. But I still don't use it.
Instagram to Pixelfed has been a hard sell. I enjoy photography but have hated Meta. I hated Instagram and ended up making one just because it's the only real active community, even though it's compression, resolution, and aspect ratio garbage are all awful for actual photography. I've tried 500px, Flickr, Vero, and a bunch of others and they all have problems. Pixelfeds UI and community just both aren't great so I can't buy in yet. And I'm not even using Instagram much these days anyway.
Does YouTube count? I don't comment/post much, but I have very little faith in PeerTube or any of the others ever gaining reasonable traction. So many other attempts at this have failed and the content is too important.
Reddit to Lemmy has been a mix. I completely axed Reddit apps and don't check it daily and instead use Lemmy. Been having a hard time filling the content void. And when I want hive mind type feedback on obscure things / recommendations / tech problems, you just can't beat reddits 15 year history of content and opinions. But I am actively posting/browsing on Lemmy instead.
Really easy. I assume when you say “social media” website you mean Reddit. Reddit was a website I’d browse to kill time when I was bored to find amusing content. Thanks to their recent policy change and their crappy treatment of their users, I torched my 10+ year old accounts and moved over basically overnight. Plenty of like minded individuals have done the same in the past couple months it seems. The fediverse has reached critical mass.
The core of Reddit were their users and the mods who volunteer their free time to look after the site, and they shat all over them. Killed the golden goose as it were. I’m a little surprised as to how many people (especially mods) are still hanging around over there.
I found an Android app similar to RiF so it wasn't hard at all. Still testing it out, but it's very similar and I like trying new things. FWIW the app is Connect.
Reddit is the only social media I no longer contribute to. I have a private LibReddit instance I use to read from the smaller niche communities that I can't find elsewhere, and some I even have feeding into my RSS reader. I haven't had a Facebook in quite some time and I never signed up for Twitter/Insta/etc.
The Fediverse has actually encouraged me to take part more. Not having to worry about corporate interests, or me being used as a product was always my main gripe.
Not hard once a leading contender for an alternative became obvious. Reddit helped by perma banning me for God alone knows what reason!
I’ve had multiple alts there (I am paranoid and switch accounts every now and again) that have actually never ever been permanently banned, even once after some boot licking mod found out that I had alts because I stupidly admitted it after getting shadow banned for using a specific word.
Seriously fuck that dysfunctional place, where the management are scum and trying to profit off MY posts, and the mods are bootlickers with so little going on their live they think volunteering free labor to a scum-grade mega-corp is some sort of achievement.
A bit hard. That's very dependent on the alternative though.
Lemmy: I tried it a few days after the Reddit debacle and I never looked back. I really want this to work but the main thing is that I can still doom scroll anyway so I got that going for me, which is nice.
Mastodon: I didn't use Twitter anymore but then I wanted to again. So I looked into mastodon. It's been chaotic af. Couldn't find ppl I wanted to follow because no recommendations and you kinda have to know who you're looking for. Also there's no likes, so you don't even know which tweets were more interesting and that didn't help (I know this is controversial, but imo these are things that will always make it hard for the average social media person). I kinda just gave up and until this gets easier I won't try again. Don't have the motivation nor the patience for that. Not worth it.
Facebook: “we’re now no letting you hide your profile and it must be public for sea—“
Cancelled as of 10 years now.
Steve Huffman: “I want to be like Elon M—“
And cancelled as well.
Thank goodness I don’t have addictive tendencies
I
amwas an Apollo user, and decided that Reddit killing it was too much. I switched to Lemmy, and while it has been an adjustment, I am reminded of the days of forums past. I dig it. Using Voyager (formally Wefwef) has helped preserve most of the UI of Apollo, which is nice. I had never heard of Progressive Web Apps before, and am super interested in the topic now. This makes me want to pick up programming again, in hopes of eventually being able to contribute to open source projects.Pretty easy. Here's my two experiences so far:
- Twitter: I've only ever used it for memes, to follow a literal couple of content creators I liked and to promote my Twitch channel (which, at that point, was inactive). After the Musk acquisition and the first few bullshit decisions, I've promptly deleted my account and never looked back. I've since heard of Mastodon and decided to give it a shot - Twitter wasn't one of my favorite socials to begin with so I'm not particularly active on Mastodon either, but it's hands down a much better experience compared to it.
- Lemmy: I haven't outright deleted my Reddit account and I don't think I will, not because I want to keep using the site but rather due to some contributions that can be considered important to some communities (mainly 3DS hacking & homebrew) which could be lost if I do. However, I've been enjoying Lemmy a lot and the more time passes, the more I find myself using this social compared to Reddit.
Once I was able to find the volume of content I needed to be able to find something relatively new to interact with any time I had 5 minutes to kill at work, that was it for Reddit and FB. It turns out that all I want is to hit the button and get the pellet, just like Skinner's rats.
Leaving was easy.
Using the alternatives is hard.
I agree. I miss Reddit because there is so much more content there, allowing me to scroll longer. Until the user and post count increases here, I feel like I catch up in about five minutes once a day.
I agree, but I must admit a good chunk of my time was spent scrolling past familiar reposts, so to some extent the extra volume of content was a mirage and probably created by bots.
I'm still working on subscribing to a wider variety of pups so I'll have more popping up in my Subscribed feed, but it's probably healthier that I'm not here quite so much of the day.
Quitting Reddit and switching to lemmy - easy. Quitting FB - not possible. I have no other way to keep in touch with remote friends and relatives and there are local FB groups that are useful for me. Dropping Whatsapp also is sadly impossible. With my nerdy friends I use telegram/signal but 99.99% of ppl are available only on WhatsApp.
Same, I have a facebook account just for that handful of people I can't contact any other way.
Leaving reddit wasn't so much leaving, as baconreader just stopped working one day, and that was that.
Setup an account on lemmy a day or two later and just never looked back.
So easy. Social websites are about the community, not the platform. If the people move, so will the discussion follow. Reddit now has no one that's worth talking to. Everyone worthy of having a meaningful discussion with has already left.
Now youtube... that's different... I don't think its possible for them to get replaced. Youtube is about the content created by content creators and I don't see any big youtubers moving to another platform, especially a fediverse one, since there's not gonna be adequete compensation to be worthwhile. I mean, maybe they can crosspost, but I'm not sure if the TOS allows that if you have like a special partnership agreement with youtube. Also, storage is going to be a big problem for a competing platform. Videos are much bigger than text. A text-based platform like Lemmy is going to be much easier to maintain than Peertube with videos taking up potentially terabytes of storage per day when the platform starts growing.
Maybe this is why YouTube is the hardest to abandon.
I thought I'd miss Twitter, but nope. Mastodon's great. The only difference is you have to put in a little effort and engage with people, since you don't have an algorithm trying to feed you content.
I hope in time I'll enjoy Lemmy just as much.
Once I figured out that it does not matter what instance you join, it was simple. I initially kept trying to join lemmy.world but it timed out for a couple weeks. Tried signing up with a smaller instance and they had to manually approve my account which never happened. Finally found lemm.ee which let me sign up.
The Lemmy site could do a better job in making it clear that the instance you join does not matter that much. Currently the site tells you to join one that matches your interest which is a bit silly considering there are a myriad of subs on each of them.
Tmyk. I still thought it mattered until I read this reply. Could you explain why? Everytime I try to visit other communities on instances I didn't register a seperate account on, I can only lurk.
I saw the spaz "ama" and started looking.
Twenty minutes later, I had an account and was using it
Pretty damn easy
For me it was easy because Reddit was really my only outlet. Never been a big social media user, but I've been using forums as long as I've been on the internet (a long enough time not to admit). So yeah it was a pretty easy transition other than a little bit of a learning curve in understanding how Lemmy and the Fediverse works.
Honestly, making the basic effort to try it was the hardest part…but I found pretty much all my main communities have slowly started gaining momentum here to the point where I maybe check Reddit once a week now?
Like Lemmy works great, and seems to just being gaining more and more steam.
I still visit /r/ukraine and /r/combatfootage, but less and less lately and zero engagement. Propaganda has taken over the ukraine sub and the comments have become vile. Better discussion and analysis on /combatfootage. The /c/ equivalents are low traffic.
Otherwise I haven't had any issues and feel better. I've been reading more, either reading the actual linked articles or library books/audiobooks. Every morning I ask siri 'tell me the top news today' and it reads me a 1-2 minute podcast from CBC. I might pop into ground.news while I do my morning business, and then during the day at work I'll have a lemmy tab open.
The main problem is that I use reddit for work. I need to find another place, maybe stack exchange or some lemmy instances/communities. Haven't really spent much time looking.
Hope that changes for the better.
Similar to my experience of quitting Hearthstone. It was difficult for the first few days, and I found myself opening the sites out of habit now and then, but as time goes on, living without them feels more normal and I'm less inclined to go back.
What’s been hard was that I left before the great migration. The issues were more technical and the fact that apps were just all at early alpha phases with many functionalities missing. Now it’s pretty much navy to normal. I actually even welcome the lower amount of content. Easier to keep track of instead of drinking from a Firehouse.
Now I actually like it a lot more here.
I also love the feeling of being a part of the beginning of something new.
Easy. Deleted my FB 2016, never had a Twitter, Snapchat, vine, or anything else besides reddit. Didn't become a frequent on reddit until 2017. I think the longest thing I was on was myspace. That place I was always on and posting or using to communicate with friends. Was happy with squabbles but deleted account as well due to the knee jerk policy being thrown left and right. Will wait a while to see if they get their stuff together. Lemmy is ok. Still small so eh. Always hated people knowing about me or searching me up.
Reddit was the only actually usable one until they fucked things up with the API. I have made my move to abandon that website.
I hardly ever used Twitter so when I started a mastodon account it really wasn't that big of a deal. Going to find out I don't really love Mastodon, I think I just don't like the format.
I left Reddit to come to Lemmy things were a little light not going to lie I'm missing some of my old support sites. The conversationally this place is the bomb. Less trolls less jerk wads more helpful nice pleasant people. When you get downvoted for something you can kind of tell why, but it's not like Reddit where they would downvote you and then make it through in personal vendetta to heckle you. Here just means you are being disagreed with or maybe have an unpopular opinion, or on occasion maybe you took something too far.
I haven't, really. Someone has to surf Reddit and Twitter to repost content to Lemmy, and right now I'm one of those someones.
Super easy, barely an inconvenience
Completely effortless.
I first came to check out kbin/lemmy immediately after spez's petulant AMA, but it was really just that I happened across a link just as I was thinking that maybe I should think about trying to find an alternative.
But instead, I just ended up staying. I haven't been back to Reddit since, and don't miss it.
Me neither.
Reddit and Twitter were easy to leave. FB has been a lot harder because of how many of my family, friends, and community orgs use it. Reddit and Twitter were not places I caught up with people I genuinely care about, and it's easy to swap one group of strangers for another.
I'm still occasionally browsing spezworld in read only mode and I thought I was doing okay but I just found old.lemmy.world and now it feels like I've relapsed.
I never knew that even Lemmy had an "old" variant of the website.
It was just announced a little over an hour ago. https://lemmy.world/post/1941511
Yeah, I didn't delete my account, but I've logged out so I can't comment and close it if a login to read box appears. Like you, I'll probably be just as addicted to Lemmy soon enough.
Same routine for Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit (in this order). I just stopped using them, deleted the apps, deleted them from the browsing history, and blocked them on my firewall. Other than some really technical things on Reddit (which I viewed on the archived pages), going cold turkey was not an issue at all. The relatively sparse content in the first weeks also stopped me from doomscrolling.
I had this order as well.
It was super easy, barely an inconvenience!
I left Reddit and jumped here. I admit that I look into Reddit every so often - mainly for a local subreddit - but 99.9% of my Reddit usage is now Lemmy usage.
For my Twitter->Mastodon jump, it's not fair to compare. I had already basically abandoned my Twitter account before I ever heard of Mastodon. So it wasn't really "jumping from Twitter to Mastodon" as much as it was "going from nothing to Mastodon." That signup was easy as well, though.
I'll admit that the "pick your server" step can be a little daunting. It feels like you're choosing the most important bit right at the start and can overwhelm people, but it's easy to switch later if you want. Smoothing that process out somehow would be my only recommendation.
I used to be very active on Reddit. I have now left it completely. It was not that hard because the entire time I remind myself "those are just useless internet points". So it doesn't matter where I go.
For Instagram, even though all of my friends are there, I don't really care what they are doing, so I have no attachment at all.
Replacing reddit with Lemmy was pretty easy for me. Finding an alternative for Facenook and Instagram mifgt be harder though. I'd love to see an alternative to youtube too
Abandoning social media has never been too difficult for me. I deleted all Meta (back then still Facebook) platform accounts after the large phone number leak. I deleted my Twitter account after Musk took over (could foresee the stupidity). I deleted my Reddit account because of the API change announcement.
Make me angry enough and I'll leave your platform. The platform needs me more than I need it.
Joining the fediverse alternative was easier than I anticipated. Abandoning the social media website is a bit harder, since there's still some communities that haven't migrated yet.
I know I still feel this, especially in a country where no one knows about this idea except myself. Thanks, internet.
I didn’t quit. They kicked me out when they killed my app. While I think lemmy is cool, fracturing communities is almost always the wrong answer, and I would go back if they restore access via the app.
Leaving Twitter for Mastodon was very easy. I pretty much left and never looked back. Leaving Reddit for Lemmy is not easy. Been in the process for a couple of weeks and I still find myself spending hours on Reddit and very little on Lemmy.
I had the opposite experience. The ability to watch feeds of interesting people on mastodon over Twitter was completely lost. The instance I joined was so quiet. I kind of just gave up.
Lemmy is like lightweight Reddit and the federation seems to work out of the box unlike mastodon. It’s nice to see posts from various instances without having to do much.
Yeah well in my switch from Twitter to Mastodon I also changed how I used it. On Twitter I followed a bunch of people, and many related to politics. I didn't want any of that on Mastodon so I started focusing on following hashtags instead, which I found a much better fit for me. I follow some people, but I get more content from the hashtags.
I agree on the federation on Lemmy, it seems pretty functional. But I get like a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of content on Lemmy compared to Reddit. But in a way that's good, because I spent waaaaay too much time on Reddit.
Once I figured out how to make lemmy look a lot like what I was getting from Reddit and HN, I haven't been back to either. Now I have a single RSS feed in my reader to my personal Subscribed/Active page. The RSS link you can get from your instances website while logged in includes some kind of ID to your personal feed so there's no authentication needed and I never have to change anything there, if I join a new community, it starts showing up in my RSS reader, if I unjoin, it goes away. It's quite glorious. I've found good/active enough communities to replace what I followed at the old places and the comments sections are far less flooded with nonsense.
I'm on Mastodon a bit, and I do really like it, but it wasn't a replacement for me, I was off Twitter and the like for about 7 years already when I decided to try it.
RSS was all I could've ever asked for back then. And then it was gone.
Reddit and HN still have RSS. Are you referring to other sites? I quit all the other ones long ago.
It doesn't have to be difficult.. or even done at all.
Reminder to folks that being active in the fediverse does not mean you need to not be on traditional forums, social media, etc. It is perfectly fine to be active in both, either, or none.
They told r/dndmemes to stop posting goblin porn so someone posted a link to the fediverse.... and I made an account. Simple as, really.
The first days of lemmy I didn’t see any interesting things but I am amazed about how good it is, I stopped used reddit thanks to this. In the other hand mastodon I have tried and tried but I haven’t found anything worth checking, I stopped using twitter but I haven’t found my vibe in mastodon.
Like a lot of other posters, not hard at all. I miss /r/Daddit. I miss /r/Datahoarder but the selfhosted community here is strong and seems to have absorbed some home networking, datahoarder, etc topics.
Daddit is the most fun name if I've ever heard one.
So easy, I’m wondering if everyone else I see complaining about it here was even on the same site I was on.
I didn't feel the need to abandon them because I don't mindlessly scroll them. Well, I guess I did for reddit but I stopped that easily enough by substituting for Lemmy. And since Lemmy is kinda barren right now besides the front page I've cut way down on phone time. I still use Twitter when I try to get news on something, I use reddit to get random people's thoughts on a purchase, don't use Facebook or Instagram at all. Snapchat I just use for a single groupchat.
Cutting down on screen time is never a bad thing to do. I've benefited from this as well.
Surprisingly easy. I just come to Lemmy now, and I use social media less overall too. It's been better for my mental health
Not hard at all. There's so much here to see and interact with.
Totes agree.
As soon as RIF stopped working while I was in the middle of using it, I made an account on Lemmy.World and haven't looked at Reddit again since.
If only time machines existed.
Depends on what exactly is considered a social media site. Most of them I never really used, so "easy". Reddit was the biggest one for me, and well they made my choice for me when they decided they didn't want to let me browse it in a decent way.
it was a really easy transition
I deleted my reddit account and never looked back. It wss an adjustment, but with a little patience I got used to how lemmy works.
Same here.
Reddit made it pretty easy to stop - their app is so bad I just don't bother logging in much.
I still check in a bit as I have a few open dialogues going but I don't browse it anymore.
Twitter is harder - too many people I follow.
Those are the two apps I used frequently before they both fucked themselves up. Oh, what a weird world we live in.
I guess the enshitification continues.
Yup. At least the twitter app (UI) isn't as bad as reddit's. But I'm blocking promoted tweets faster than a game of candy crush. I hope Mastodon takes off - not comfortable with Threads.
Reddit is just unusable - I never really liked Reddit until I found BaconReader. Those days are over. Such is life.
As for lemmy, it needs to mature, but that'll come. It's not bad..!
Leaving Twitter for Hive Social was a no-brainer. Almost anything that isn't heralded by that sycophant Musk was a win.
I don't use TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp .etc so that's easy to avoid.
Reddit is more or less a struggle, obviously I'm still there to a degree because their numbers outweigh Lemmy's and I do like the feeling of instant interactivity because of those numbers.
About 2 clicks and few fingy taps on the keyboard.
So not too bad, unless you don't have fingies, might be a bit more difficult.
I love my fingies
Not hard at all. I'm not a very well connected person and beyond that I value what the Fediverse is all about. I used to casual-browse Reddit. Now I don't even do that.
Didn't care, just deleted. Only told my wife who would wonder why I stopped following her.
Honestly, not hard at all. I've already been perma banned from reddit, (Mohamed raped a 9 year old, and reddit doesn't like that particular fact about that particular religion), and I was only using it sparingly through alts. Lemmy feels so much better. Yeah, it's has some tankies, but holy hell we can actually talk here.
