for the Reddit refugees, do you also feel a bit heartbroken?

Acetamide@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 26 points –

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.

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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

Exactly! And without being called names for asking questions or interacting with people.

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. :-)

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.

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 moved to Reddit when Digg destroyed itself. It wasn't too hard to make the switch, although it did take a bit of getting used to. I imagine it'll be the same this time, or maybe a bit easier, as the format of lemmy.ml is not too different in appearance from Reddit.

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

So many times in the past few months I would open reddit, stare at the 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.

Yeah, Reddit had a lot of communities that I loved interacting with and finding advice with. I do hope Lemmy gains enough traction to replace Reddit.

Yeah, totally. But I'm also finding extremely cool Lemmy and the concept behind the fediverse

The thing that's missing here most is the niche communities (I'm talking about like the ended 10 years ago tv shows and people are still posting about them). On the other hand, I noticed while most countries have 1 or 2 communities, my country already has at least 7 for specific locations and people still want to make more so it feels very much like home already

I'm mostly sad about losing the communites i loved, for which I have not yet found a comarable one on lemmy. r/cars and r/cartalk mostly

I hate reddit. But it feels like the library of Alexandria burning down (yea I know). All those google search results and educational subreddits that are shutting down forever, and because they are too small reddit won't force open them again.
A lot are in the pushshift archive, but that cuts of at 2022. Also, it doesn't include a lot of the smaller subreddits.
I have had my PC running 24/7 with multiple VPNs to avoid rate limits downloading as much as I can before the API dies, but with some blackouts moving forward a day I have already missed a few.
Like many others, I would often add "reddit" to the end of my searches to get better results, half the websites on web searches now are either AI generated, copies or are completely AD ridden websites that ask you to turn off your AD blocker.

Reddit has answered almost every question I've ever had for years. The potential loss of all the knowledge is my greatest concern.

i getcha, but it was people who did that. it's kind of hard to shut us up, we'll answer more questions wherever we are

most knowledge has a shelf life anyway

how exaclty does this pushshift work? I downloaded some zsts from it but what do I do with them?

The file you downloaded is a compressed JSON file, it's not something you can really just look at. But it contains all the data needed to build a nice UI around.
I don't know what OS you are on but on linux you can run zstd -d -c file.zst | jq . and it will print everything in the file. It's not really readable though. Also it doesn't have any of the media content, only the text

I think this is honestly the biggest issue. Web search has been garbage for years, with legit the only saving grace being Reddit users sharing their knowledge. This is gonna have a horrible effect on producing good search results.

Totally agree. I feel like this is the equivalent, to some degree, of Stack Overflow just suddenly going away. The history needs to be preserved, somehow.

Is there anything in the Fediverse that is like a Stack Overflow clone? Might be time to start working on the backup plan for those big websites that do not show a sign of going away yet to avoid the rush when they inevitably do.

People have been joking lately about productivity suddenly increasing as a result of the Reddit blackout, but honestly? That loss of information is probably going to result in a loss of productivity in some cases.

Because yeah, in the nightmare scenario where both Reddit and Stack Overflow were to disappear, a lot of programmers would be at a complete loss.

It's valuable knowledge with how-to's that made me create an account there. I learned plentiful with the people that cared to share.

Most i implemented into my daily life & conditions have become favorable for me.

It's unfortunate that Reddit Company have refused to collaborate with its users, since years back. Otherwise we would have seen their web & mobile app develop/ innovate in great ways. But they have chosen one limitation after the other. Slowly over the years.

Not Reddit but I feel sad for Aaron Swartz. What a monster his creation became. Thankfully Lemmy exists to fill Reddit's place.

I think Aaron would have appreciated the fediverse.

Yes and no. Reddit had become toxic and a shadow of it's former self. It was a good run for 11 years. Hopefull Lemmy can be an alternative. :)

I've been trying to jump for a long time now, I used tildes for a while, but it just didn't have enough content I'm interested in. Now it seems lemmy is gaining enough steam to be my primary social media.

Reddit really peaked with the Obama ama. After that it was all downhill, the place grew too quickly to keep its culture.

You don't have to make a hard flip, I've used this reddit protest to build out my Lemmy setup and put it in front of all my reddit shortcuts!

I just keep thinking to myself, "it's the end of an era"

Reddit has been the only social network I've used for 12 years. I've watched it go through so much change over the years, but it always felt like even at its worst, it showed its users more respect and gave them more control over what content they saw than any other social network out there. I am cautiously optimistic about the future of Lemmy, but it makes me sad to watch RiF and Reddit phase out of my life.

I closed my Facebook account in 2016 and haven't looked back. Hoping I feel the same about Reddit

I've been on reddit since the diggification. And to be honest, I miss the people. Reddit itself? I don't miss it at all.

But lemmy is turning out to be a nice place. Reminds me a lot of the old days of the internet, which I hope that we can some day go back to.

Ive spent 98% of my time here in Lemmy vs. 2% since last night. I'm not deleting my reddit account just yet, but, overall like what I am seeing here. I'm also just trying to figure everything out here.

There are issues/worries about what happens when an instance goes away, where's that content go? Duplicate/fragmented communities on multiple instances.

I'm more worried about losing the CONTENT that we created on Reddit, etc as a historic/research tool if reddit fails completely. Lot of content with people helping others.

I see/saw a lot of talk about wiping your data before leaving... I'm sure if that happened in larg volumes, they have backups of that content. No idea what legal ramifications there are with restoring them though.

I'm in a wait and see, but w/o RIF I'm gonna be hard pressed to use reddit on my phone, and if old. Goes away that might end it for me.

I'm more worried about losing the CONTENT that we created on Reddit

There are Reddit JSON dumps, I saw one yesterday.

I'm in a wait and see, but w/o RIF I'm gonna be hard pressed to use reddit on my phone

I'm using Jerboa, it looks pretty good IMO when you set the view to "list".

FYI: A shitload of people started helping with the Lemmy codebase on GitHub, it was awesome seeing the community coming together.

Not going to lie. This all feels like Google+ to me. The communities and networks are all over the place

Going to sound sad but I'm a more than a bit bummed.

Outside my family and my job, reddit and the community was a massive social outlet for me. I don't have as much contact with friends any more and being part of some of the communities there made it not so bad.

i'm sad that reddit is dogshit, but excited to watch lemmy grow and to have the opportunity to be a part of its growth

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.

I'm a little sad because I met my partner of nearly 10 years on Reddit on that account. I will keep the account because our original DMs are on there and would like to preserve them. Will probably wipe all the content and contributions, and just keep those DMs

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.

That's definitely a risk. The main way of avoiding that is to stay active :D

12 years of reddit. It will take some time to adjust but I also switched from google to duckduckgo years ago after decades of google, and then too never looked back. Lemmy does need a LOT of work, still, but so did reddit in the early days..

To those working on Lemmy, please don't fuck this up for us. Don't be a spez.

It's also up to us not to fuck this up. Let's not turn this into a toxic hate-filled dystopia lol.

That will happen nonetheless, when more people start coming in. Its something that will just have to be managed.

On the other hand, I do hope that here on lemmy we will stop just kicking anybody with an opinion that we don't like. That will only cause echo chambers where everybody will repeat the same stupid opinions that will only get more extreme. We will have to listen to those that we don't agree with.

I'm sorry but no. I don't have to listen to Nazis. If they are allowed here, it will drive me and a lot of other people away. We had more than enough "free speech" experiments now. It always ended in these platforms being an insufferable cesspool of Nazis, conspiracy theorists, incels etc. and all sane people were driven away. It doesn't work. These people need to be deplatformed, that is the only way.

I respectfully disagree.

First of all, on Reddit I rarely ran into right wing extremists. Do you know who I ran into a LOT? Left wing extremists. That is what tends to happen when you start polarizing discussions (both sides) and then kick out one side. The other side just becomes an echo chamber.

Second of all, this is not a problem you can ignore. Its not as if these people just magically disappear into thin air once you ban them. You can't deplatform them because they'll just go to another place. Where will they go? To their own moderated places, which will allow much more extreme discussions, leading to more and more polarization and problems in the real world. I think part of the problem here is that we (collectively) stopped listening to people in minor disagreements, and instead of having reasoned arguments, just kicked these people out to the curb. I honestly think that that sort of behavior from the left side of the spectrum is what fueled US polarization which culminated in Donald Trump becoming president.

You may not want to have reasoned discussions with people who are more on the right side of your political spectrum, but you HAVE to. We all have to because if we don't, they will talk only amongst themselves and they will only fall deeper and deeper into their right wing pit. Have no illusion, the same goes for left wing extremism. Extremism on that end might still be milder, but its there alright.

I'd rather have a group of people with a few minor-and-controllable nutcases in it than a conform-with-the-rules group, and a group of dangerous terrorists outside that group.

There are examples where this was tried. It doesn't work. People who disagree with Nazis leave the platforms, so the result is the same.

The problem is that there are no Nazis. Nazi's stopped existing in 1945, anything after that are people that sympathize with some or all of its ideologies. The problem is that its a sliding scale and people these days are VERY trigger happy to call out NAZI! I've been called a Nazi on Reddit (and banned from multiple sub reddits) for literally arguing that I'm not sure how good an idea it is to give puberty blockers to kids that might be trans, specially because these blockers do have consequences later in life.

Great, now I'm a Nazi, apparently? Should I be banned now?

When IS a person a Nazi?

I've talked a LOT on reddit, I had over 130K karma over probably the same amount of messages. I don't recall talking to Nazi's much, if ever. I have had quite a few deep discussions with people on the far right part of the spectrum and it helped me a lot understanding them, where they come from, and why they have the ideas that they have. I call that progress. You can listen to somebody and politely agree to disagree.

What you are pushing for tends to end in censorship. Can't talk about naughty things now! Can't disagree with the masses! All look in the same direction! Don't dare to step out of line!

It also ends in situations where douchenozzles like Trump become president of the USA because the right feels like they no longer have a voice (which truthfully, is correct), so push back harder and extremer.

We MUST allow dissenting voices. Yes, if somebody scants "KILL THE JEWS!", you ban him of course. But if there is a conversation happening about, say, the "US bathroom issues" I think we should allow dissenting voices. As long as the conversations are respectful and thoughtful, the worst that could happen is progress.

You can theorize about semantics all you want, but don't try to gaslight someone who was physically attacked by actual, real Nazis, who describe themselves as Nazis and can't be seen as anything but Nazis.

TL;DR: You create neo-nazi's.

Nazi's are members of the Nazi party. Nazi's, like the party, no longer exists. What does exist are Neo-Nazi's. Semantics, perhaps, but when talking about "Nazi's", details become important. With that in mind, I wonder if you can tell a little more about who attacked you how?

In any case, I'm not theorizing nor gas lighting you. I'm talking about actual and serious problems that exist because of what you want.

I've been called a Nazi multiple times by, well frankly, by people like you. Why? Because I disagreed with them. Our disagreement here, for example, would be enough to call me a Nazi. I've been banned from multiple subreddits because of that. What happens here is that people with differing opinions get pushed away to places where they get pushed more and more in right extremist corners. What you want ends up in people getting more extremist. If you want to resolve that, if you want to avoid being attacked by neo-nazi's, then talk to people before they become extreme...

I've been banned from multiple subreddits because of that. What happens here is that people with differing opinions get pushed away to places where they get pushed more and more in right extremist corners. What you want ends up in people getting more extremist. If you want to resolve that, if you want to avoid being attacked by neo-nazi's, then talk to people before they become extreme...

This sounds like a threat

If you've been banned specifically because of people thinking you're a nazi, and you're arguing getting banned will push people to farther extremes, brother thats not a good look.

Not at all meant as a threat, just pragmatic thinking. If you don't allow mild dissenting or disagreeing opinions, which happened and still happens at reddit, those people you push out will go to other places where they'll find much more extremist people.

You're creating echo chambers at both sides. your side will never have anyone disagreeing anymore because all that did are pushed out and so your side gets more extremist over time. The other guys went to other places where they are welcome but ochtend with much more extremist opinions and so get more extremist as well.

Pushing people out for minor disagreements is a big part of the problem. Heck, I think there is a good argument to be made about that behavior causing trump yo be elected. People being pushed out of normal discussions flock together in the crazy parts of town and cause much more mayhem that way.

And if you're saying you only block out Nazis, then next thing that happens is that people will say "you don't perfectly agree with me on every point? YOU NAZI, BEGONE!".

It doesn't solve anything. I'm not here to be comfortable with all opinions, I'm here to talk with people, have reasoned discussions, something which caused me to be banned from toi many reddit subs already.

And before you start calling me a nazi for disagreeing with you (you already claimed I'm threatening) I'm not. I'm a white guy married to a woman of a different color and race, I live in another country as a minority myself, I'm not perfectly straight, so I'd say I fall in all the popular groups du jour. I'm just another normal guy who -so far- has been trying to have a reasoned discussion about the pros of allowing people to raise disagreeing or dissenting voices.

I do feel some kind of sadness, but I feel... free. Reddit started becoming addictive to me some time ago and I have noticed that Lemmy seems to have less trolls, perverts, power tripping mods and just simply batshit crazy people. I do feel an urge to check out how Reddit is doing, but I'll soon go to a place without a proper internet connection so I think I'll finally be able to cure my Reddit addiction. My experience with Lemmy has been very positive so far.

Reddit kinda stopped being fun at some point, and I didn’t even realize it until I came here. The lack of doomscrolling potential here is an added bonus.

A little sad and a lot salty, my main account got suspended by reddit in retaliation for actions taken as a moderator and got totally ignored by members of the mod relations team and their oh so smugly named "anti evil operations" drones.

I'm sad Reddit is no longer the site it was

I'm glad that Spez and the rest of the reddit execs get to see their precious cash-cow die in flames.

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.

I think because I have left reddit and returned to it so many times over the past 15 years I was looking for a reason to make it permanent. I'm more relieved than anything else. My religion also teaches me that who you are is a result of all of the actions you have taken in your life, and that we should not associate with those whose actions inflict harm on their own community (meaning spez)

A little bit, there's a lot of specific subreddits I enjoyed browsing and talking in that have yet to reach a good critical mass here on Lemmy. I've been sharing my own custom Zelda monsters for Pathfinder 2e on the ZeldaTabletop subreddit and there's no substitute for that subreddit over here yet (I might make one once RiF dies on June 30th).

I view this as a fresh start. Cut off the old and grow a new one. Just like a gecko. I spent a lot of time on reddit but I can't say I ever actually connected with another person on it, there were just too many people on even the small subs I joined. Maybe lemmy will bring back the small internet forum feel and we'll actually be able to stand out from the crowd better and actually get to know each other.

More than anything else, I'm going to miss the easy access to reliable answers by appending reddit to whatever I'm searching for in Google

Yes but also no. I missed Digg when I left it for Reddit and I loved the earlier days of Reddit. Reddit was a lot of my college years from 2010-2012. Reddit felt like a very nice community back then, but it's been going steadily downhill for years and I'm not surprised it's come to this at all. Lemmy feels like a breath of fresh air, especially given that we're migrating off of corporate controlled media this time rather than just jumping ship to another proprietary platform with a limited lifespan. It hits different this time, in a good way. I'll miss the good times on Reddit and the communities there, but to be honest those communities were best in Reddit's heyday. I'll probably miss the vast amount of information that Reddit built up over the years most, that's over a decade of Internet history killed off by greed. I'm hoping moving to decentralized platforms will stop the cycle of corporate greed putting an expiration date on our Internet homes.

I sucks but I did the same thing with Digg when it turned to shit.

Not much. There's so much mod & admin abuse nowadays that I developed kind of a resentment. On top of that there's a lot of rude or downright hateful user behavior that seems to not just not get punished, but in some cases even encouraged. The only thing that lets me endure it for now is simply the community relevant content. As for kbin it needs exactly that. More users and content. Functionality of the site is good enough to be usable for me and will surely also improve but we really need the people and content to bring everything together.

I'm not 100% hating reddit right now, though I do hate them a lot. So not deleting my >10yo account or anything....but I do recognize that this is near the end.

The default app is garbage. I'm someone who likes my feed and interaction set up EXACTLY to my liking. So losing any customization, etc is just going to make me like it less, use it less, etc.

But I know that eventually, once they have control over how you interact with Reddit, it will only be a matter of time until it looks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter: ad-filled, "suggested content" GARBAGE. I honestly can't use any of those sites/apps anymore they're such cluttered wastelands, I don't know how people stand it.

So I guess less heartbroken, and more like dread as I know the enshittification of reddit is just getting started...

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.

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!

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.

A bit. Reddit has been a big part of my life for over a decade. If I lost access to all of those communities, it would be really unfortunate and hard to accept. I'll miss being able to get amazing advice or insightful comments just by adding "reddit" to my google search.

I think the spirit of Reddit will live on though, I doubt that everyone will just vanish and we'll all be stuck on subpar platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or Tiktok.

I'm really excited about the possibility of the new "Reddit" being a federated, self-hostable platform like Lemmy, and solving these periodic exodii issues once and for all! No more dictators deciding the direction the community should go. I'm really impressed with what Lemmy has accomplished so far with its code and its community.

Just speaking for myself, I find absolutely no interest in those platforms you mention: they do not show any really depth if you know what I mean. I love going around various sublemmies (if that's the word) and discussing these absolute niches.

I'm used to the layout of RIF and my niche subreddits NCD/Ukraine Conflict, NBA but I'm posting here and trying to add to the community. Hoping for a better mobile app one day though:X

I'm permanently suspended anyway, there's no way back. They somehow find me if I create a new account lol

Been waiting for a change from the cesspit for ages tbh.

I feel that. Reddit's bit of an addiction for me. I don't use other social media so it became my one stop shop for news, inspiration, and to connect with all the little niche intrest.

Oddly, I was frequently just doom scrolling r/all to see what was going on the the world. And when I ran out of revent stuff if just sort by new. Super unhealthy behavior.

Hopfully this transition will help me slow down a bit and get back to reality.