Did anyone try to return to reddit and notice it just didn't do it for you anymore?
Did anyone try to return to reddit and notice it just didn't do it for you anymore?
So I've switched to lemmy since the reddit meltdown started, experienced quite some withdrawal symptoms, occasionally turned back to reddit, more often logged out than logged in. Now I am merely using Lemmy occasionally and by far not as often as I used reddit before. No more doom scrolling.
So far so good.
Today I went on reddit for the first time in like 3 weeks straight (I couldn't do that for the last years... yeah, I was very addicted in hindsight). I just... I don't know what it is.
Reddit just isn't fun anymore.
I turned away after maybe 5 minutes. There were maybe 2-3 repost-worthy pics, one interesting video and a few small niche discussions that all went straight tits up within a few replies.
If I ask a question on lemmy, it usually is a straightforward, honest discussion. Almost no blaming of the posters or answerers misunderstandings or senseless answers. It goes a bit back and forth usually and people tend to thank each other for corrections. I can't remember when that happened on a reddit discussion. Maybe years back? Anyway, I'm not going back there anymore, not because I hate the CEO, but because reddit is not fun anymore. Lost all interest in it.
Did anyone of you have a similar experience?
Idk I don't exactly find Lemmy a bastion of my interests. It's very clear the community is far smaller. The niche communities of topics im interested are mostly nonexistent and it's largely a sea of memes and references I don't remotely understand or care to. Something about communists or some shit? What? Pass.
What interests do you have that aren't found here? Some tiny niche interest communities are being built, you sometimes just gotta find em
- there's half a dozen sewing communities, but no one posts in them
- fashion communities are also barren
- pretty sure I'm the only person posting in [email protected] out of 200 subscribers. I'm not a mod there (the og mod is an empty account with no comments/posts) and it's not a community I want to recreate on my instance.
Boats, fibre arts in general - sailing, sewing in particular. Also small city communities. Reddit had town subs, lemmy has nothing under the provincial level for me.
Fitness, /r/fitness is in the top 20 or so.
Food and icecream.
It seems mainly tech talk here, and anti Windows everywhere.
But based on my posts, someone decided to replace his petrol car with a Leaf. Someone else got into Home Assistant because of me. So it has its goods sides as well.
I miss my American Dad! community
I love Lemmy, but I really struggle with the content here. Of course things are a little bare, but I have been able to find some really good stuff. My engagement is a lot higher here than on Reddit. However I find the litany of anti-work and political/left/right posts insufferable. They're everywhere here. At least on Reddit I felt like I could insulate myself reasonably well from political stuff. c/mildlyinfuriating is an example of this. At least half of the posts I come across are blatantly political or are anti-work. I get it, work sucks and you don't want to work and rich people/landlords bad. R/mildlyinfurating is a much better sub than ours is a community, imo. But I can't surround myself with this kind of Lemmy content every day because it just angers me and I didn't go to reddit to be angry every day. I have found myself drifting back to reddit for 60% of my usage. I hope this changes. I've tried to sub to different communities as well to limit how much I have to read about the latest communists and nazis and racists/fascists and tankies and all that Lemmy bullshit. Clearly I need to do a better job.
If you're looking for a community that doesn't exist, you gotta create it. People will come.
Not OP but the issue isn't creating the space, but creating content in that space. Growing a community is a lot of work. Unless you already have some strong engagement and or a few people creating content it's really just up to you to keep making post until the community gets more traction. Most people like the idea of starting the new community but not the work it requires as it often just feels like yelling into the void.
The reason is because people aren't creating those communities on here. If you want a community, the best step is to do it yourself, unfortunately.
You can try to talk to subreddit admin or mod team about it, but I think it's just that Lemmy needs more people to "do" than "want" if you understand what I'm saying.
Did you ever get into a huge fight with a partner, then patched things up, except your feelings had changed as a result of the fight?
That's how I feel about Reddit. It's the same place, but the magic is gone for me.
I don't think Lemmy fills that void entirely, but it does a good enough job. I miss some communities, but I like that the big communities are small enough here that I can reply to any one I choose and get meaningful discussions out of it. It's tiring to always come too late into interesting topics on Reddit and just throw my comments into the void.
Still plenty of space for Lemmy to grow, but I'm already content with what's here. I don't really go back to Reddit unless I want to discuss a niche topic in a sub that hasn't migrated to the Fediverse.
Completely agree. I used to scroll reddit for hours a day, for the last 10-15 years. I had many accounts and thousands of comments. I deleted everything in July but continued to use libreddit and teddit daily for a few weeks, until both of those were also killed.
Reddit is dead for me now. I still check in to old every few days, but as it's shit on mobile I only view the front page for 10 mins and go back to hacker news or here. The 3rd party clients were really the only reason I got hooked and used it for so long. When spez kills old my usage will stop completely... I suspect that'll happen before the years end.
I've noticed Reddit is full of people who just don't understand how Reddit is supposed to work. Comments stopped being fun and it just feels like Facebook now
It's funny, I was noticing that. A little bit eternal-september-ish, fewer people willing to gently nudge people to the way it worked, more people not learning.
F
The irony of someone down voting your comment
Nope. Their app and their CEO are both garbage, I'm not supporting either
Reddit isn't fun anymore, I agree with that. I checked /r/all for this first time today in months. I haven't logged in or browsed since the blackout, but there are a few communities I miss and was thinking about going back over for those, so I checked r/all out of curiosity to see how things have been. The content was just so much trash, and I don't even think it's that much worse. It's just that I've been away for so long that I'm looking at it now like "how did I spend my days scrolling through this garbage for hours?" It's just boring, it's like just interesting enough to keep you scrolling hoping to find something actually interesting.
Here on lemmy there is far fewer users and far less content. But I'm starting to see that as a good thing. I pop by and scroll, but I don't spend hours here like I did on reddit. The discussions are smaller, but more engaging and thoughtful. I remember before I left there were certain threads I'd see and just skip because I already knew exactly what all the comments would be. Also, I'm actively engaging more here, so there is actually some "social" in my social media use, instead of just passively consuming like I mostly did on reddit.
Overall I think ithe switch to Lemmy has been good, for me at least. It's like I've broken the reddit addiction, and looking at it now I can't understand why I got so caught up with it in the first place. To me, reddit just isn't fun anymore.
Did you scroll through r/all previously too though?
It's always been a hot mess to me, without my curated subs reddit isn't much better to me than Facebook or Twitter.
Too much rage bait, also after a time in here it's quite apparent how much the algorithm tries to push you to addiction.
I miss the niche communities tho.
I've occasionally ended up on Reddit accidentally when following a search link. Which immediately blasts me with notifications and pushy requests to browse in some other way than I want to. After using Lemmy for this long, which lets me peacefully do my thing my way, it comes off as really rude even before I get to the comments.
At this point, I've actually started actively avoiding Reddit links in my searches. I can generally find the info I need somewhere else without getting yelled at by the website.
I went over for an article I found. Scrolled out of morbid curiosity. It's just awful. Ended up commenting about it and was down voted back to hell, apparently where I'm told o belong.
The mood has shifted drastically! I can’t believe how much negativity I receive nowadays. It’s like all the friendly and helpful people left.
Because they did leave. It's like when Facebook was good for info, then the masses showed up and just went apeshit. Over population both digitally and physically is never a good thing.
Yeah you can post fairly mundane shit on Reddit now and you'll attract a down vote and extremely hostile response. Even in niche game communities where it used to be friendly.
Depending on which subs you see, the assholes have won. Holy shit the amount of right wing bullshit that got into the place. Like wallstreet silver. I didn't much give a shit before it started looking like the front page of diet stormfront.
The remaining mods are at large, S class window lickers and ableist who have been applying to get a position for years and just now get their chance to goatse the corpse of what was once a great website. Started seeing tons of people getting banned for the most petty of shit. Buddy of mine got a 30 day ban for linking another sub reddit in his comment.
Of course, I got banned too. on my 12th cake day no less, for saying a kids attitude was going to get him beat up in high school or worse.
But if anything, there are so many folks out there that can say they were there before they got spez'd and the assholes took over. It was nice for a while, but in the end, fuck reddit.
I just got a warning for "threatening violence" for telling off a guy who said we should use mob beatings as criminal justice.
Admittedly, I said something like "I agree, we should all be able to beat and murder anyone we like for our own personal gratification", but it was on /r/uk and I thought we understood sarcasm.
I always assumed WSS was FUD from the finance industry trying to persuade apes to buy silver instead of GME.
(Like, seriously, who tries to get people who buy and hold to change to silver, notoriously a cyclical metal?)
It used to be that banning was reserved for some extreme people. Now, you can get banned for stating an opinion that others think is offensive.
Things have changed a lot in the last decades. People get offended by anything now.
Yeah, I still exist on reddit for news or a few niche communities. I see a lot of the recycled memes and point gaming. The few discussions get no traction or an overwhelming response. You can't really argue with anyone. It becomes ad-hominem and hurt feelings.
My wife mocked me for leaving Reddit in a huff for nerd reasons. A month later she started asking me what I used instead, since she could see that Reddit declined just in that amount of time.
I hope you mocked her for asking, then slept on the couch
I see a lot of the recycled memes
I think the % of OPs that are just straight up reposting bots has increased considerably. Front page is even more unusable than during TheDonald times...
Its just low quality trash.
I’m back to Reddit, I kinda gave up here, but I’ll look a couple of times a week.
Too much politics. Linux. Privacy. Bidet talk. ADHD. Bad memes. Techbabble. Snore
No matter the filters I just can’t get an interesting feed, I just blocked about 6 political subs just today - it’s kinda shitty content imo (for me anyway)
I’m happy this exists but the rage honeymoons over for me. Old habits die hard I guess …..now……..back to arguing with bots!!
Pretty much. I really struggle here to limit how much I have to read about politics, "tankies," fascists/communists, nazis, defederation, etc. It's everywhere. For fuck's sake at least I felt insulated from political shit on Reddit for the most part. Yes, I know everyone thinks the USA sucks, landlords are bad, the rich should be shaken down, etc. Maybe that's true! But I can't listen to this shit anymore and it's pushing me away from this site.
I share a bit of the same feeling. Too much memes, tech, politics, news.
What other interests do you have?
Me too is not that interested in most communities here. All you have to change is the default setting in your profile to "subscribed" instead of "local". That's the same mechanism as reddit had.
But yes, the amount of discussion here is limited. But not in a bad way. More like, concentrated rather than spread out. If you want to give it a try, go here:
Just look up the most active community for your specific interest and hope for the best. Worked for my few interests.
Do you consider anything that mentions politics boring? Do you have no interest in international relations? I understand if you're not from the US, but there's a lot of good information in those posts.
Is that really so strange? Personally I don’t care about any level of politics or news outside of a couple of fields in general, certainly don’t care for it being on social media. Generally it seems that if it is actually important I will find out about it one way or another anyway.
I think for the way I personally used Reddit, Lemmy still feels lacking, and I'm excited for it to grow. The good news is it's getting bigger every day and niche communities are being created all the time, so we'll get there. But there's no doubt a treasure trove of question and answer posts on Reddit that I still need to access at times, so it's still useful to me in that regard, but I'm not actively checking it at all anymore.
Honestly, the main reason is no fun anymore is the lack of a decent app (I loved BaconReader - YMMV). Since the UX has been downgraded severely (most have lost their preferred app), the user base, community and content have suffered.
I'd have been content to pay a reasonable subscription fee to keep using BaconReader. I'd even pay for ad removal - I'm not after a free ride. However, an enjoyable ride is now unavailable be it free or paid.
So, here's Lemmy. I hope it works out long term, but the growing pains associated with scaling are not to be underestimated. I suspect the challenges will be less technical in nature than in user wrangling and moderation. (though running the tech ops mustn't be underestimated).
TLDR - Yes.
Baconreader was so good and so beautiful to look at. It still kind of works, mind, you just can't log in.
Red Reader is pretty good. I moved to it from Bacon Reader years ago.
Exactly. Joey stopped working for Reddit, so I started trying out lemmy clients. Sync and Eternity (previously Infinity) are close enough, I'm trying to decide which one to stick with. But one thing is for sure: Friendship ended with reddit, now lemmy is my best friend
There are a few subreddits that don't have a counterpart on lemmy, or the counterpart isn't as active yet. But when I go on Reddit, I'm spammed with posts I'm not subscribed to, nor really have a want to be subscribed to. As more communities become more active on lemmy, the less I will need Reddit.
Reddit is still a much larger archive of crowd sourced knowledge, so until Lemmy becomes more comprehensive there's still some reason for me to use reddit. Though I don't actively participate anymore.
I occasionally go there but for specific reasons. No more late night browsing for me.
i tried to get the calyx lemmy communities some users but that failed
It's been a pretty clean break for me. The only times I have found myself in reddit the last few months was just for some archived post that answered a question I had.
Nothing feels like it was lost.
The only thing I miss is HighStrangeness which was fun to go through every once in a while. The rest of reddit isn't really worth looking at. But here there are tech nerds and Linux enthusiasts
and pirateseverywhere! I am among my people.I only check back once in a while for my city’s sub because the lemmy equivalent isn’t as active yet. I no longer have an interest in checking out r/all or the frontpage.
well i have an seperate account for estonian
Don't be too complacent, of course. I've seen people on the Fediverse turn feral and Reddit-esque during discussions of particular culture war issues. It's not completely peachy here all the time; there are some subjects about which some people can't help losing their composure.
I give you that. However, I feel like the amount of times this happens here feels far more natural compared to reddit before the APIcalypse. Like, depending on the community, visiting a bar can be either peaceful, fun and full of interesting conversations or end I a bar fight at worst.
Reddit felt more like a completely overcrowded mass bar full of assholes in comparison. You had to actively look for the nice circles usually and hope they don't implode quickly.
I still use it from time to time because sometime I just need the information I'm looking for. I've justified it telling myself that I'm using it 1/100th of the time I used tt and only use it when necessary.
During the APIcalypse I deleted my glorious multireddits and unsubscribed from nearly all the subreddits. This way I’ve intentionally made my Reddit experience very boring. Now that my favorite Reddit app is dead, I have to use a mobile browser, and the experience is… well not as bad as with the official app, that’s for sure. But it it’s still unpleasant or boring.
Because of all that, I don’t visit Reddit anywhere as often as I used to. Nowadays I check Reddit maybe once a week, browse for a few minutes, get infuriated by the ads and move on to something nicer like doing the dishes or folding my laundry.
It's really different, that's for sure. The front page is full of subreddits I've never seen much (or any) of before. Comments on posts seem lower by an order of magnitude on the most popular ones. I don't know about site visits but engagement seems way down. How u/spez will spin it for the IPO remains to be seen.
I looked at subreddit stats and comment rates dropped significantly across ~10 subreddits I checked (both small and large) in about mid-July, and the up vote count in a small sub (weekly posts, each got a consistent amount of up votes) dropped by about half around the same time. I haven't gone back except to some niche communities that haven't gained traction on lemmy, but at least based on the data things did change.
The don't miss the "Popular" of reddit, but the small specialized communities are not present here. I'm still using reddit for r/clashofclans, r/thedivision, r/printedcircuitboards, r/gradschoolmemes, r/phd and the discussion threads on r/movies about the movies I have watched. The community didn't move here.
My trouble at the moment is that I am reaching myself 3d modeling and texture skinning for trackmania.
Wanna take a guess where the largest repository of blender/substance painter tutorials and trouble shooting is?
I finally got around to Red Dead 2. Guess where all the good information is that doesn't try to fill my phone with full screen ads? (Try being the operative word, get fucked IGN)
We really need a better gaming community to start building up a knowledge base.
There is [email protected], but it's pretty quiet. You could try posting there to get some of that content going. It's a bit of a vicious cycle, though - the lack of content drives people away, leading to less content.
I will say that even in smaller communities I find that people are quite helpful here with questions, which is great.
It does seem like the post reddit boom of interaction and growth has waned, thought, and many of the communities that were starting to grow are now much quieter than they were a few weeks ago. I think that the lemmy.world downtime for so long really drove people away, which is a shame.
My problem here is the amount of folks whose only post or comment is to complain about the lack of content. You want that niche community experience well someone has to lay the cement. Don’t just sit there expecting to be entertained by others
I logged out and deleted it from my bookmarks. I avoid it unless I absolutely don't have any other sources.
I pop on the every so often for one specific subreddit because there's no alternative anywhere sadly. I don't log in or interact with anything though.
I'm still having a hard time adjusting, to be honest. Granted much of reddit is full of reposts, even so there's still just a lot more content and interaction. I could and did spend all day on one or two subreddits, but here it's kind of checking in one a day and seeing maybe a few new posts. I don't have anything else though, so I'm just often left starving for content. But I just can't give spez the satisfaction of returning.
Good on you for being principled. I experience the same sort of feeling, and I've tried to just redirect that need for content into other media.
That weird need for content gets to me as well. I went looking for meme sites and... well, what I found cannot be described as the bottom of the barrel, but more like the rotten carcasses of barrels in an old disused moldy cellar. My god that was horrifying. Even 4chan feels better in comparison in that regard.
It sound weird, but give reading a try. I went for Mangas using the Tachiyomi-App. Whenever I feel the need, I just read a chapter or two and that is all I need. Most will want to read books or articles, whatever helps. I also discovered news.google.com to be a great alternative for getting news, once you put all the bad sources on "do not show" one by one. Local news are often more interesting than you might think.
Go ahead, look for such things. Reddit was a giant tent you let into your life and now that the tent is garbage and gone you have a dead garden to replant with things because if you don't plant what you like, wild groth happens and you won't like most of it and then you'll be unhappy all the time.
Thanks for the advice! I'll certainly give it a try. And if there's one thing I appreciate here that I didn't get to have on Reddit, it's user interaction. I'd rarely ever hear back from a comment on Reddit, and if I did chances were it was someone with an attitude. People seem really nice here
The vibe I get from a lot of the political and antiwork stuff is astroturfing and/or highschoolers. It's a bunch of meme-driven babble that started as a solid pro union anticapatilistic sentiment that grew into nonsense.
I also find it harder to isolate communities I don't care to be brigaded by. I politically involved enough in my own life. Memes on memes on memes.
Yes I have gotten back from time to time, mostly because my Sync for Reddit app is still patched and makes it easier to not use their garbage app (which I don't even have installed).
And no, it still feels interesting to me, not with r/all nor my frontpage with best sort (this was my main page) but my handhelds multi reddit.
I am subbed to similar communities here, but it is just not the same... Yet.
It was that way for a bit at the beginning. I found the quality of discussion here was much better, and reddit was just super toxic by comparison.
I've noticed the general toxicity has creeped into Lemmy now though, so it's kinda the same either way for me now.
I only go for one community surrounding a book series, and only on Mondays when there are weekly discussion threads for new chapters. I found reddit pretty easy to cut out when I just stopped using it on mobile entirely.
Logged in yesterday, with the intent of deleting it.
It welcomed me as usual, I had notification for a reply on a thread I was participating and a PM, pluss there were a few interesting title on some subs I was in.
The reply was someone just spewing I was wrong and everything I had said was bullshit.
The PM was some random invitation from someone telling me to join their OnlyFans page.
And the general feel of the threads I snooped was all doom and gloom and 3 out 5 comments just dripping of poisounous sarcasm.
After that sample, I was done.
Ah, the sarcasm.
It kind of makes sense that everyone grew to be highly sarcastic when you think about how no matter what you say someone's going to jump down your throat about it. Much easier to avoid all that by dropping a "/s" at the end of your comment or saying something so outlandish that no one could believe you were being serious (as an added bonus, if someone does take the bait then YOU get to jump down THEIR throat!)
It's a kind of defense mechanism in toxic communities.
I do both, but the reposts and karmafarming make Reddits Popular or All options terrible while Lemmy's is just... weird but interesting. Plus, I like Linux, Star Trek and D&D. Hell, even the random porn, why not. Nobody's looking.
Granted, I'm also the kind of guy who despises wholesome crap, and would take random fringe tankie posts over wholesome (really orphan crushing machine) posts any day. No karmafarm1988, your repost about the dog that was rescued did not make my day. I'd much rather hear for the twentieth time how the dog was only homeless because of capitalism, lol.
It's also no longer personal when even in my less popular communities there's like 4000 comments, almost all of which are karma farming. No reason to chime in most the time. On Lemmy I've encountered jerks, main characters, and holier than thou type users, but it's less often. That's a feature of humanity, not a bug.
But, I do still have some subreddits I'll lurk, via Infinity (no ads, no data mining). I haven't seen a good alternative to r/comics or r/idiotsincars, unfortunately. Can't replicate the former since it's up to the artists, and can't replicate the latter because it benefits from a huge userbase. There's always someone who lives near an accident and can give solid context, even if it's bumfuck nowhere.
Their app is terrible so I keep to only checking my favorite communities that sadly haven't moved over at all.
I still go there when I want to answer something that I know there are posts there. Also some products run their user communities on Reddit but I have a much more utilitarian attitude towards Reddit. My focus on participation is over here.
I went back in during some of the recent current events to see how the discussions were. Plenty of quantity, not much quality, imo. There wasn't much in the way of thoughtful commentary or discussion that interested me.
I only go back sometimes because I find more cute anime content there than here.
I really hope that major parts of the anime community switch to lemmy. Of course so that I can enjoy the view, but also because I feel the missing Karma feature discourages bot content and the fediverse nature makes it hard for bad players to actually achieve anything. Commercialisation is also hard, as anyone can just switch instance if they like.
Anyway, we need more Waifus here.
The only time I go to reddit is to look at r/redditalternatives and witness whatever drama is going on within the newest centralized attempt at reddit that week
every time i go back to reddit there's a blacklog of content waiting that somehow never makes it to the fediverse and a few things that were earth shaking and the fediverse didn't pickup on at all.
I check it frequently but I only check my fave music subs, and even so I don't watch/listen to everything posted there. For me, the main difference has been the heaven sent lack of engagement on mostly trivial topics that seem to appear every single day on the rest of the subs I used to follow.
Yeah, I'm really not a fan of it anymore. After several post removals, and a unwarranted warning on my account, I am just done with it.
I got ip banned so all my muti year accounts were toasted. Kinda took the joy out of it for me. I made new accounts but they'd get banned too for a while. I have one still but it's inactive. The users there feel so fake, constantly on a high horse or acting like victims. I don't find the people there to be reasonable and the communities i liked are here on lemmy now. Lemmy people are less like bots, and are more inviting to conversation
Not sure if Lemmy is better or if reddit has just fallen so hard over the years. There's either been a stark decline recently or some time away has given me fresh eyes to see how bad it is. It's just a social media feed like any other now. The comments are noticably dumber and low effort rains supreme.
I didn't return, don't want to...
I downloaded infinity for reddit. Scrolled few post and deleted the app. Back to lemmy.
BTW: Infinity for Lemmy exists!
Yeap,already downloaded. Its new name is eternity.
Lol yeah, I just couldn't take the echo chamber of radical Lefties anymore. I'm by no means a Trump-voting conservative but if you even hinted at an opinion that didn't fit the narrative you got piled on with downvotes and abuse like some kind of bigoted leper.