I’ve been doing the Internet social thing since #hottub and alt.religion.kibology. My services were thus federated before it was cool.
I came to Reddit from Digg after migrating from Slashdot. Made a lot of comments and answered a lot of questions about a lot of different shit; posted a lot of pictures of foodporn. Some of it was pretty handy to a lot of people over time, if the upvotes were any indication.
About 2 weeks ago, I Power Delete Suite-ed the whole of it, editing everything to ‘null’ ahead of time. Since then, I’ve been waiting for straggler subs to re-appear (and there’ve been quite a few!), so I could give my comments within the same treatment.
Today I finally deleted my account.
Looking back, I feel like it’s a another chapter of my life closed. My relationship with the collective Reddit userbase has been more significant to me than have been several of those with people with whom I’ve had sexual intercourse, and certainly more so than with most of my past Internet relationships (never forgot you, though, lara (@umn); PM me if you see this ;)). I now feel vaguely adrift, hoping that Lemmy “makes it,” as it seems to satisfy the majority - if not the entirety - of my immediate technical and entitative specifications, but also acutely aware that I’m really after the interaction with the high points of the Reddit userbase.
That’s really the thing: Reddit did a really good job of making the Internet social thing doable, both for us net-native, “socially awkward” folks for whom Lemmy is a snap, and for everyone else at the same time. Through occasionally-careful regulation and monolithicism, Reddit did much both to establish the modern incarnation of the venerable BBS and to make it accessible to more everyday, less weathered/jaded folks than I, while still providing a relatively no-nonsense interface for those of us with a more directly functional bent.
I hope that on this, my round 2 (or is it 3 now?) of the federated/monolithic cycle, the good guys win, i.e. open Internet culture gains enough momentum from the Reddit implosion to make something in the Fediverse the new crowd favorite long enough to keep it safe from corporate compromise in the long run.
I did the same thing, granted I had less tenure. I had about 8 years. Reddit had grown more and more tiresome over the last couple years. I was never a super user or much of a contributor. I had maybe 60k total karma, so not a total lurker but not exactly coming in clutch for Reddit content.
Being that I’m on iOS, I truly loved Apollo. Apollo was Reddit for me. I realized when I finally decided to confront the realty of using Power Delete Suite, that I didn’t really care about what was deleted. I used to think I had some kind of kindred relationship with my saved posts and Reddit history. What I realized was that I had never actually reflected back on any of that, so what was the point in clutching my pearls over deleting it.
I did finally go through with it, but it was mostly symbolic. I haven’t been on Reddit in quite some time. My main issue right now is needing a reasonable replacement for Reddit. At first, lemmy seemed like it scratched the itch. As I went on, I started to realize the itch was being scratched primarily by memes. Then it continued to dawn on me how long it would take to build a community like what Reddit had.
I have mixed feelings about the emulation of Reddit. I do think we have the early adopter crew currently, and that crew has, time and time again, proven to be a good crew. I feel like Lemmy needs to come into its own organically, as Reddit did. I see a lot of copy and paste communities based on subreddits, and that’s fine, but some are a little on the nose. I think we as a community need to get more creative and take ownership of Lemmy apart from Reddit. That may just take time.
I’m not sure I agree that the copy&paste communities are per se a bad thing. Those communities came to be on Reddit organically due to demand and trial and error, nothing wrong with not reinventing the wheel here and continue to use and provide what worked (in addition with innovation that the early adopter crowd can bring, of course).
This is a really good read. Your post reminded me of it.
I think a lot of us are feeling similar.
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start
While I only had my account for 6 years, I feel similar.
I made a promise to myself: when boost for reddit stops working, I will not only uninstall it, I will permanently leave reddit.
So that’s what I did and I will never look back
Close to 13 years, if not just over. Started as a lurker. Then saw something that I felt that I really needed to share my thoughts on. Of course it was just a mumble in a crowd, but it obviously meant enough to me to go through the effort of making an account.
I can’t even remember what it was.
Over 100k karma and 3000 comments.
Reddit was by no means small in 2010, I don’t claim to be a pioneer, but it was a different feeling place. Even back then RES was a must for desktop browsing. And 3rd party apps were the only option for mobile browsing. BaconReader was my choice. I think it was actually the first app I ever paid for.
Over time I tried different apps that were being developed and tried to bring a new thing to the table, such as card view (couldn’t ever get away with that) or recently the ability to see deleted/removed comments (until Reddit started blocking certain API stuff that allowed that). Rather poetically found myself back on Baconreader just in time for the shutdown.
I don’t think Lemmy necessarily feels the same as Reddit back then, but I wonder if that is more due to me changing and the communities that I follow, but it is scratching the itch of something to browse and occupy my mind, discover new information and feel like I’m among similar people when I’m procrastinating, shitting or something else.
Never used the 3rd party apps, but I can understand why people were upset.
I wasn’t on reddit for long. Maybe a 5 years at most. But my biggest concern with it all were just the people themselves and I don’t necessarily think there’s anything that can be done about that. There’s always going to be just enough shitty people to make a bad time. The only difference with reddit is the people that would make a bad time had the authority to ban you. And adding that Big reddit gives no fucks about the end user, well, it was just time to go
For me what I appreciate most about current lemmy, is the difference in approach between an “early adopter crew” and “mostly mainstream”.
What drew me to reddit about 15 years ago was the notable difference in climate between it, and a lot of other more mainstream social media platforms. That difference withered away over time, which, in hindsight, lead me to run.
That “running” happened within reddit: First I started off my interaction with reddit at the frontpage. Until the frontpage became a cesspool. Then I made my own frontpage, with subs that were funny and interested me. Until every sub that even had the potential to hit the frontpage, suffered its own slow decline toward “YouTube comment section discourse”. So the subs I frequented and participated in, became more and more niche, smaller, and more specialized.
It’s not that my interests shifted all that much, toward “a few extremely narrow and specific things”. In hindsight it seems clear that I was just running away from the “commercial giant mainstream social media thing”, that most of reddit was becoming.
Running away from reddit is only the last step in that long process :D
Reddit was the front page of my internet for about 15 years. It’s felt like breaking up with an abusive partner. I get by now on a mixture of Lemmy and Discord. I also check out Apple News and Google News, but it seems like the bulk of the content is behind paywalls these days. On the bright side, I’ve found a new hobby as a visual novel developer. There’s suddenly so much more free time to try things like that when I’m not surfing Reddit all the time.
I think Lemmy and other federated social platforms of this type will really take off when the mobile apps start popping up. I just hope that the moderation tools can keep up with the influx, and that people will have the appetite to donate to keep these instances running.
15 year club here too! I used to feel a sense of pride for that, now I want to see it burn to the ground
Well said. I’ve got 11 years under my belt but I remember joining at an early time and it just seemed very fresh. I went to meetups, met some cool people and had some awesome experiences along the way.
The past 6 or 7 years that kinda vibe fizzled - maybe mostly cuz of my own apathy or life changes but I never saw anything about meetups anymore. Not like I would’ve went anyways - I was already somewhat of an older person when Reddit started!
Anyways for me, it’s mostly just been a lurking scroll fest for a long while. I miss all that fun content that’s just somewhat of a mind killer, but I have enjoyed myself over in the fediverse and feel more inclined to interact - which is probably a good thing for me.
I swapped my comments to fuck you spez and just left them there. It’s funny how many automod responses you get, which all shit in spez as well. 🫡 Enjoy the migration.
I first nuked my comments – “Comment removed - No IPOs without APIs” – and then let it sit there for a week. Right now I’m removing all my comments from all but 2 subreddits where I’ve been an admin (r/electricvehicles and r/vwid3owners). I’ll likely leave the second as I started that and there’s a lot of curated work there for new EV owners. Unsure about the first - it’s gone from an open EV discussion to a US/Tesla party - most everything else gets downvoted and it sucks (admins are mostly North Americans and Tesla owner(s) and there’s a clear bias).
My problem isn’t only /u/spez, but how the race for growth and “engagement” has created petty little wars everywhere. So sick of it, I’m having a hard time getting the will to restart or engage here.
