Who cares. Reddit is dead to me, and spez murdered it.
Reddit was amazing. I will always enjoy and fondly remember what it was like before Spez fucked up one of the most reputable cultures and brands in internet history. Fuck that guy... just... what a fucking shithead to destroy something so wonderful.
I just wanna look at memes, cats, and news and hang out in the comment section without being exposed to ads, is that too much to ask?I hope their IPO sucks and they get shorted i to oblivion while they bleed off users month over month, because thats whats going to happen if they keep pulling this sort of stuff.
when is the IPO (what is an ipo) happening? i want to see their stock graph fall and jerk off to it
I dunno there have been rumours that their IPO is just around the corner for years now, idk how they justify it reddit just isn't set up for that sort of growth model. Its users (at least before all the nonsense) I'd say are on average more likely to use 3rd party apps, ad blockers and not engage with the kind of activity that normally creates revinue (thats frankly why I'm here I'm a reddit refugee from appolo). My guess is all this activity is prep for going public but I just can't see it going well.
Reddit was a nice upgrade to usenet newsgroups
IPO = Initial Public Offering
It's basically when a private corporation goes public and offers shares of their company to the public for the first time, as well as listing on a major stock exchange. It's worth noting that private corporations can issue stock to individual shareholders, those shares just aren't traded on the open market.
I've been hanging out in imgur, which is generally nice for memes and cats, and kbin for news. It's been surprisingly effective.
Imgur is a shadow of the brightness it once was. After all the weird UI and ad changes. Plus the NSFW purge, among other issues.
I was convinced imgur was sold to Reddit. Although when searching for this it looks like I was wrong and they were instead sold to MediaLab, though apparently also a very shitty company.
It was created by a Reddit user for the purposes of hosting images posted to Reddit but it was never owned by Reddit
Imgur is owned by the same parent company as Reddit
Edit: apparently I don’t know what I’m talking about
Imgur is owned by MediaLab. Reddit is owned by Advance Publications.
Oh damn, my mistake
No worries, I thought so too.
You probably got it mixed up in your memory. It was owned by a reddit user, then sold
12 years that place was more of my life then i care to admit. constantly scrolling.
....honestly i should thank him for breaking that addiction
This is one of the things I like about Lemmy. I can scroll through and be done in 10-20 minutes. More if I want, but otherwise, the rest of the day is mine for the taking. It's like I've escaped and reclaimed my time.
Much the same, I was lost for a while till I adjusted.
It’s going to take years, but Lemmy will kill Reddit. People like authenticity. Reddit will lose authenticity as it antagonizes its user base through its monetization efforts.
A core group of people who value that authenticity above all else migrated after Reddit betrayed its values this past summer. They will be the early adopters of this brand new community. It’s happened before on the internet. People hate bullshit. They want to connect with real people that have good intentions and are good faith contributors, free of the influence of investors trying to monetize those relationships.
My bar isn't set too high to beat Reddit.
I'd be perfectly happy if we have small but thriving communities spread throughout the fediverse on a diverse set of niche topics.
We're in a good place for memes, star trek, and general discussion, niche content still has ways to go.
But to those people that are trying and posting to niche communities, I see you and I appreciate you!
I just want more diversity of communities. That needs more diversity of users, and that needs scale.
Yeah every time Reddit pulls some shitty stunt, we get a new influx of angry people demanding algorithms, whining about federation being too complicated and picking fights.
It's like the bar just closed and everybody's going to 7-Eleven to be mad about it.
We need more activity in local communities too. Even big cities seem lacking in content.
I like the way you think.
Couldn't have said it better myself, haven't been back once since I joined Lemmy and I never will.
I only go back when there's an answer to a DDG search. There's so much valuable information there, but as time goes by, that will change and the answers will become less accurate. In ten years, it'll be a graveyard.
One can hope, but you're right. There is too much valuable information on there to ignore when it's needed.
I've been back a few times for specific communities that haven't moved over, so like once or twice a week
It's much like when I initially went from Digg to Reddit; it was dramatic then with time it was less unless until one day I realized I hadn't been back to Digg in forever.
Same
The issue is, that a lot of Google searches lead to reddit
It's quite annoying actually. A huge number of the results return pages that are years old and a huge chunk of the comments are just gone.
I know why I know everyone went through all their posts and edited or deleted them or both but it shouldn't be returning in search results now.
I have a bookmark that is a link to Google with a prepopulated search field with stuff like -site:reddit.com after:2019
Edit: corrected -site:
I suggest -site:Reddit.com instead of -Reddit.com
Honestly you took the words right out of my mouth. I literally could not have said it better myself. I hate that man, and his company for what they did to one of my absolute favourite pieces of the Internet. Reddit will live in on history, because I sure as hell won't go there anymore.
Reddit will keep making horrible decision after horrible decision, completing the process of enshitification, until they slowly piss off their remaining userbase one by one until they have nothing left and go the way of Digg. It's gonna take a long time because people hate change, but they usually hate bullshit more than that and everyone has a breaking point.
Don't just blame Spez...that what the board wants you to strawman.
Blame the board as well
Who I blame doesn't matter. I just stopped using it. Spez doesn't care that I'm gone. Neither does the board. I don't like current reddit. But I'm under no illusion that they will to clamor to keep the users that want vpns and anonymous viewing.
A large group of data providers using the site is better for them than a huge group of content sharers.
Ellen Pao
In hindsight, Pao wasn't so bad after all.
Conspiracy theory: I think the whole Pao thing was a power play to make spez more powerful and played the userbase like a fiddle by doubling down on reddit's built in misogyny and anti-authority/corporate bent at the time.
Honestly, this is part of a broader trend of enshittification sweeping the Internet these days. It's not just spez, it's any SV bro from the current crop of technology companies. I think this is a lesson worth remembering for all of us who took the freedom and magic of the Internet for granted.
Absolutely. Cory Doctorow's Def Con 31 talk really nailed it. I've listened to it like 3 times. He is the person who coined the term "enshitification" and the talk describes what it is, how it happens, and some things we can do to prevent it. The Q&A at the end is also awesome.
I was active on reddit for quite a while and by contributing and visiting the site making reddit money.
I have no desire to feed their greed and what they pulled with their API pricing was nothing but greed and shortsightedness.
I'm gone from reddit for good.
Who cares. Reddit is dead to me, and spez murdered it.
Reddit was amazing. I will always enjoy and fondly remember what it was like before Spez fucked up one of the most reputable cultures and brands in internet history. Fuck that guy… just… what a fucking shithead to destroy something so wonderful.
Lemmy is getting better and better at an exponential rate. I still use Reddit but eventually I expect to fully be on Lemmy.
I just quit cold turkey and moved to lemmy fulltime. I miss some communities but whatev, its no biggie.
There's too many answers over the past decade to abandon reddit completely. Most google searches for specific questions go back to Reddit.
I've heard that Reddit is trying to kill that too so people will use their godawful search feature instead. I got a prompt from the site to take a survey about it sometimes last month and that's what people were theorizing that it was about.
I've had some searches lead me to old reddit threads where the answers are all deleted a few times since migrating here already. So even that is becoming less true than it used to be.
Yeah I only get back on Reddit from a search engine hit. And even then I'll use the cached copy if I can.
How do you get the cached copy?
archive.org has it. I self host searxng, and it gives me a link beside every search result to load it from archive instead.
Same. I realised 95% of Reddit for me was just the bants and chitchat. There’s a few communities I miss, but I can easily get my kicks here.
Just came over from reddit to check this place out and gotta say, I'm liking it so far!
Same here. I do go back for some niche browsing, but mostly over here now.
I'll go back there if they have some specific discussion with good info. I.e. Linux, video games, something. But signing in and browsing? No way.
I used to use Reddit a lot more back before the whole API fiasco earlier this year. After that, I stopped, save for posts promoting Lemmy and one very specific subreddit that never migrated to Lemmy and that I just couldn't go without. (The other subreddits I could either do without or were already replicated on Lemmy.)
If I may ask, what subreddit is that, and how big it is?
It's /r/Toonami. It's gotten about 35k members over the years, but it's not as active as that number might imply.
If there is anyone you know from Reddit that you'd like to help migrate to this community, can you tell them to join via https://portal.alien.top? This will log them in *via Reddit and automatically subscribe them to lemmy communities that correspond to the the subreddits they joined.
While the community here is empty, would you be interested in having the content mirrored to the community (via alien.top?)
I'm not too interested in being a moderator. I don't have time for it.
As for migrating the community, they actually are one of the communities that held a vote, and they voted to stay on Reddit rather than migrate to Lemmy. I'd like to respect that decision.
I don't have any problem with content being mirrored, though.
they actually are one of the communities that held a vote, and they voted to stay on Reddit rather than migrate to Lemmy.
That's interesting. Can you link me to this discussion or poll? Reddit search, as usual, is not showing much.
I apparently misremembered. There was a poll, and they posted the results here. But the poll didn't make mention of Lemmy and instead asked about migrating entirely to Discord (which honestly makes sense since the weekly thread is mainly a "live chat" of sorts). They voted to stay on Reddit instead of migrating entirely to their Discord server.
Both the subreddit and Discord server are active enough that they don't feel "barren" but small enough that they have a tight sense of community.
So the change to Discord was more of a practical one than any fundamental disagreement with the Fediverse alternatives.
In the case of Discord, perhaps a Matrix space (analogous to Discord servers) could be created instead ?
They voted against moving entirely to Discord, though. They already had an active Discord server prior to the poll and were asking people if they wanted to move entirely off of the subreddit and onto the Discord server. So I doubt they'd agree to move onto an entirely new Matrix server, especially if it wasn't run by the same mods as the current subreddit/ Discord server. The mods are actually well-liked by the community.
No, what I mean is replace what is on Discord by Matrix, and whatever is on Reddit with Lemmy.
If the mods are well liked and act in the interest of their users, even better. I'd be willing to support them with whatever they need in terms of technical support and how to migrate a whole community.
If you want them to migrate and you're offering your services to help them, you should probably DM the mods yourself instead of just talking to me about it.
I also used to rely more on reddit but just came to lemmy and can really see potential that with time will overpass reddit eventually
I think we can overpass in quality some day but not in rough numbers(at least for now, reddit has to fuck up a lot to go down like twitter).
Even with "all the fuck ups from Twitter", their traffic is down only 4-5%.
It's going to take a lot more than just waiting for them to fuck up. Network effects are real and the big companies spent the last 18 years making sure that they built enough moat around their fiefdoms.
Protests are not enough. "Strikes" were the leaders announce beforehand how long they will paralyze is not enough. Depending on moderators who are more worried about losing their status with their masters is not enough.
We need to treat this as a fight. Get all the tooling that can be used to make as easy as possible to migrate and ensure that people can get their dose of dopamine away from Reddit. Then things will start looking better.
I honestly haven’t used Reddit since the API exodus. The only reason I still have an account there is for when I have weird tech issues and the only search results are from old Reddit posts.
I only check Lemmy a few times a day, (and I tend to browse /all so I’m not limited to only seeing my subscriptions,) so I always have fresh content whenever I open the app. My posts and comments tend to get better engagement on Lemmy anyways. They don’t get buried by power users and karma-farming bots, so I actually get real responses. Nearly every time I open my app, I have three or four comment responses to check.
I miss like one community and sort by controversial to enjoy a really nice shit show.
Some of my main communities didn't take hold here, so I keep my toes in those subreddits. In the past week, the experience has gotten measurably worse. It's wild.
I wish those communities had reached a critical mass here.
Someday.
I browse old.reddit when I finish a show or movie for review and to touch in on hiphop releases. But without interaction. Lemmy is where I am now, fuck reddit I'm not a complete fuck Spez but they're a genuinely unlikeable company.
Translation: If we can't track you, you're of no interest to us.
Basically. They need to know who you are.
Correction: They need to know how they can market you to advertisers.
Weekly reminder that the best way to tell them off is to donate to the Lemmy developers, even 1 dollar is no doubt appreciated. Tell reddit off by using their competitor and paying for it.
Reminder is much appreciated. I checked out their donation page and learned that they also accept XMR, which is great if you don't want to give the middleman leeches (paypal etc.) any data or money: https://join-lemmy.org/crypto
Thanks to your comment, the Lemmy devs are now at least 20$ richer!
With that budget, gonna be some crazy new features soon!!
No really this helps lemmy, good job!
The server you use would also like some love.
In my case I'm my own server runner but hey I wouldn't mind a donation 😂
change your user agent to "fuck reddit and fuck you spez v. 1.2.45"
v23.6.12
What's Reddit?
On a second thought, let's not go to Reddit, tis a silly place.
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What does Lemmy have to do with email?
Lemmy runs on the ActivityPub protocol, which works basically like an email address. Check out "How the Fediverse works" on your browser or YouTube.
I knew about ActivityPub but it still doesn't really seem to have anything in common with email to me other than the @ symbols...
/me shrugs
It's not just the @ symbols. It's the fact that both are federated systems. Lemmy is federated because a user of aussie.zone can interact with a user of lemmy.world.
Email is federated because a user of gmail.com can interact with a user of outlook.com.
It's about the fact that they each work on an open standard and anyone who implements that standard can communicate with anyone else who also does.
Yeah that’s a weird analogy.
is decentralized
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The email analogy always sounded weird to me, especially when you want to explain lemmy to a reddit user. It’s much easier to describe it as interconnected reddit websites, where anyone can host their own site and you can sign up with any site you want and interact with posts/users on other reddit sites.
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Just an isolated kinda-lemmy instance. Not worth it.
DON'T LOOK AT THE NUMBER!! YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE IT!! YOUR BRAIN IS AN ILLEGAL OBJECT IF YOU MEMORISE IT!!
Pathetic
Edit: thanks for educating me
Aac
S
Lemmy is quickly embodying the worst of reddit too.
I'd argue that, for Lemmy, it depends on which communities you subscribe to. Even if you subscribed to one community that now has stuff you don't like, there's a decent chance that another community on another instance has what you're looking for.
Lemmy at least has alternative instances and instance blocking.
"Lemmy" is not a platform, it is software you can use to make a platform (unless you're on .ml I guess).
I'm out of the loop but I've seen this stated many times now re: .ml. What's the deal with it? I thought it was mostly dev focused with memes and left-leaning stuff?
It's the instance owned and operated by the main Lemmy devs. Most instances are run by totally unaffiliated people using Lemmy software. .ml is the only one where you could say the software devs are also the community Admins and moderators.
.ml belongs to Malian government, hence Marxist websites register the domains with that TLD.
Good ol Mali
Of course it is, it's a reddit clone marketed to redditors.
The censorship is already worse here than it was on Reddit.
Depends on the instance. Lemmygrad is the most restrictive.
jpeg of a pig pooping /s
I get this even when signed in. Reddit really doesn't like VPNs at all these days.
Advertisers probably don't like an anonymous user base.
If you're logged in you're not anonymous
It used to be that you didn't need an email to sign up. The account I had before the API crap this summer didn't have an email associated with it. Couple that with using an always on VPN browser anti-fingerprint measures, and you could theoretically maintain a reasonable degree of anonymity, assuming you don't dox yourself. I assume a lot of this also has to do with users utilizing VPNs to circumvent band as well.
But they can still use everything you've written there to work out stuff about you. I bet they don't do it well though, given how poorly targeted their advertising was
I think there is something there to start a conversation about how messed up the Internet is these days.
Walls are being placed up all over. Security teams are always freaking out and checks that charge the guest are being put up just to track people going in and out.
I think we have finally hit the breaking threshold of everyone getting online and gated communities are the only way people want to exist in the web now. I mean how many times has Lemmy been DDOS'd already on several instances. Scrapers are everywhere trying to steal data for any and all purposes.
As much as we may not like it for people that want a pleasant experience without effort entrance tickets might actually need to start being made to let people into the world's largest circus we ever made.
Seems like Spez & Co finally started figuring out just how much their traffic skews to porn seekers, and is useless to advertisers. Last ditch effort to get relevant user info and metrics to sell.
The only time I use reddit instead of Lemmy now is when I want to read discussion of TV shows I just watched.
If I may ask, what is stopping you from discussing here on Lemmy ?
Effort!
I don't usually want to contribute my own opinion. I just want to read other people's and silently judge them if they disagree with me.
This is the way.
Also it helps to get super highly up voted opinions and then recycle them for my friends so they think I'm more insightful/smarter than i am.
The water coolers never came here organically. The communities exist here, but the bots are forwarding the articles from Reddit, the moderators are meta moderators of 50 different communities that sprung up on the first migration happened. Trying to actually hold conversations in most of the communities you're just screaming into the void.
Then there's the problem of the community existing in six different nodes each with four life humans in them.
A lot of the niche communities haven't hit the user density required for self-sustaining discourse.
Then of course when you do start to get a community with a couple dozen active people moderation starts demanding tags and strict rules. I mean it's good to get out ahead of things if you can, but if you only have a couple dozen active users don't run them off.
Even the big communities feel small compared to reddit. You post something on a news comment section and you might get one to two polite replies fact checking you or giving their opinions. On reddit you would get dozens of people telling you how your post is wrong, and even if it's an opinion your opinion is worthless and you have no value in life.
Much more engagement on reddit.
Yeah quality versus quantity is a serious problem over there.
For me it's the fact that I am one of approximately two people on Lemmy that has ever seen stuff like Haibane Renmei or Shin Sekai Yori, and there isn't almost a decade worth of discussions about them to read on this platform. I could start communities for them, but I'm not cut out to moderate, and I'm not quite a big enough fan of either to justify taking on the role of a community leader
oh hey, I must be the other guy
We should start a forum and argue about whether Squealer was right all along (he was) or what the walls actually represent (honestly idk)
Hey I’ve seen SSY too! That’s already three.
I don’t recall it perfectly but I remember the end result being pretty much an ESH situation rather than someone being “right”
Community sizes are much different.
I still use Reddit for this same reason. It's the lack of communities. Every TV and every movie having a thread available. I'd love if lemmy started doing live discussions.
Wtf are they doing?
They are trying to force researchers and other data grabbers onto the API. If people can scrape the website Reddit can't charge them
Considering it took this long for them to figure out "empty user agent means it is a bot" and "well-known vpn may be used by bots", and old.reddit still apparently bypassing this, I'm going to guess they are not going to have much success.
I imagine old.reddit is going to be killed off soon.
Can't you just spoof a user agent anyway?
if they are blocking proxy and VPN connections, when they detect an unusual amount of requests from your IP they'll ban it and you won't be able to circumvent it changing your user agent.
You can, but some people don't if they don't think they're doing anything wrong
"Woah there, pardner"? What the fuck is going on with Reddit? Do they think they are like cool cowboys in the old west?
Uh, didn't you read the thing? Reddit's awesome and all!
As a first-time user I'm enjoying Lemmy. I feel like I want to contribute mostly because I won't have an immediately antithetical comment to follow my own. Am not looking for an echo chamber, I'm looking for conversation and sharing ideas. Reddit has devolved and this seems like the best way forward, for now.
Happy to hear that! While we may not have as many communities, its most good folk here. Mostly
I hope you like Linux memes and weekly updates on what reddit is doing
Use an alternate front-end. There's a couple of them out there but usually the less popular domains are less laggy. I'm currently using https://teddit.hostux.net/r/popular
Or don't.
Why not?
I think they're suggesting that we just avoid Reddit entirely
Huh, I thought Teddit was dead due to the apicalypse. Glad to see it's still kicking.
It's usable, but instances now deal with frequent rate-limits and you'll see 429 errors quite often.
Works with my VPN, I suspect this is a user agent issue rather than VPN
I got it during a websearch. Changed VPN server to another city and it went away. Mullvad.
Curious, I get it while searching too, using Proton. Haven't tried juggling servers though, might help.
It was VPN issue for me. Some IPs in Proton VPN doesn't work. When I tried a different IP or turned the IP off, I could access again.
Well, but most of the time I don't care enough to go in.
The less nefarious explination for what might be happening there is that Reddit has blocked that VPN ip because it's been used for bots and logging in with a known good account bypasses that block.
I just keep opening new accounts until they ban them, rinse and repeat
it's a bug or someone else used the same vpn (the same ip) to spam.
Noticed this last week. Thanks to split tunneling, it's easy avoidable.
Doesn't split tunneling expose your actual ip to Reddit, which is presumably what op wants to avoid?
Split tunneling generally means traffic destined to your local network isn’t tunneled while internet traffic is, which would result in the same outcome since Reddit doesn’t exist on your local network. Unless you have something more specific in mind.
To me split tunneling just sounds like "traffic matching certain rules is routed differently", and the rules depend on the configuration 🤷
Like mobile protonvpn lets you include/exclude certain apps/ips; desktop wireguard has allowed ips, etc.
Well yeah it just means that you’re not routing all your internet traffic through a VPN.
What I was wondering is how that’s actually help in this scenario. But the answer is it doesn’t, he just gave up and stopped using the VPN for Reddit traffic lol.
Yap, basically. Look, I never said it was a good solution 🤣
If you use Mullvad, You can have the Mullvad browser on the VPN while Firefox isn't.
Right but that wouldn’t actually solve the problem of getting blocked when using a VPN. You'd have to access Reddit without.
That's not avoiding it, that's playing straight into it. That's exactly the best case scenario they drew when they made the decision to block VPN connections. You are giving them your data and allowing them to fingerprint you.
Old reddit still works fine, but I suspect it won't soon enough.
Just replace "www" with "old". I just use a Firefox addon that does that automatically after seeing that nonsense the other day.
Didn't they have a similar glitch not too long ago?
I circumvent it with Tor Browser (Alpha) on my android mobile.
Doesn't Reddit have a version for Tor? Seems strange
does it still work?
Tor works.
You mean Tor as a whole or Reddit's .onion?
I daily drive FF Focus. When I encounter the discussed page, I just navigate to 'Open in..." and choose my TOR browser and open it there. VPN stays active all the time (Proton).
I'll check if it loads the page as an onion site or not.
..
Checked, loaded with default settings (.com) and as an .onion site. Both work.
So Tor works as a whole for me for now, it seems.
ETA: clarify - Added "(.com)"
That isn't how tor works, you're getting better anonymity but it isn't magically making a clear web site in to an onion site.
Thanks for the comment!
I explain poorly.
The Tor Browser has this setting to redirect clearweb urls to onion urls.
When used in the Tor browser, I can access reddit with it's clearweb site (.com) and (with the "prioritize Tor sites" turned on) the url showing it as onion site (.onion).
Hope I understand it right and with the setting turned on, tor indeed "magically makes clear web site to an onion site".
Not Tor-expert, hope I get this right. :)
ETA: clarify
Yeah. Here's a link on the Tor forum if someone wants to try
Brave gives a randomized fingerprint when you set the fingerprint blocking to strict. Set the adblocking to strict too, and use adguard for desktop to spoof your user agent to the most common chrome on windows user agent you can find.
I just made a new blank sandbox to visit reddit and they didn't block me
On each page load, Reddit pings home with some of your browser stats, including your user agent. You can't block it (easily) because it randomly uses real API endpoints for the ping, for example it will ping to /api/comment which is used to post comments so if you block that you can't post...
What I'm getting at is, they must be collecting that data for something, and doing it this way is obviously an attempt to fingerprint.
Oh and if you're using multiple accounts in the same browser without containers/incognito/profiles then they know about it, they keep data on the browser about all of them and send it to the server so it can correlate them.
Like I said, I used another instance of my browser in a different sandbox. None of the data from my usual instance was there.
Who cares. Reddit is dead to me, and spez murdered it.
Reddit was amazing. I will always enjoy and fondly remember what it was like before Spez fucked up one of the most reputable cultures and brands in internet history. Fuck that guy... just... what a fucking shithead to destroy something so wonderful.
I just wanna look at memes, cats, and news and hang out in the comment section without being exposed to ads, is that too much to ask?I hope their IPO sucks and they get shorted i to oblivion while they bleed off users month over month, because thats whats going to happen if they keep pulling this sort of stuff.
when is the IPO (what is an ipo) happening? i want to see their stock graph fall and jerk off to it
I dunno there have been rumours that their IPO is just around the corner for years now, idk how they justify it reddit just isn't set up for that sort of growth model. Its users (at least before all the nonsense) I'd say are on average more likely to use 3rd party apps, ad blockers and not engage with the kind of activity that normally creates revinue (thats frankly why I'm here I'm a reddit refugee from appolo). My guess is all this activity is prep for going public but I just can't see it going well.
Reddit was a nice upgrade to usenet newsgroups
IPO = Initial Public Offering
It's basically when a private corporation goes public and offers shares of their company to the public for the first time, as well as listing on a major stock exchange. It's worth noting that private corporations can issue stock to individual shareholders, those shares just aren't traded on the open market.
I've been hanging out in imgur, which is generally nice for memes and cats, and kbin for news. It's been surprisingly effective.
Imgur is a shadow of the brightness it once was. After all the weird UI and ad changes. Plus the NSFW purge, among other issues.
I was convinced imgur was sold to Reddit. Although when searching for this it looks like I was wrong and they were instead sold to MediaLab, though apparently also a very shitty company.
It was created by a Reddit user for the purposes of hosting images posted to Reddit but it was never owned by Reddit
Imgur is owned by the same parent company as Reddit
Edit: apparently I don’t know what I’m talking about
Imgur is owned by MediaLab. Reddit is owned by Advance Publications.
Oh damn, my mistake
No worries, I thought so too.
You probably got it mixed up in your memory. It was owned by a reddit user, then sold
Throw few bucks at your app developer, instance hoster, and Lemmy dev team.
12 years that place was more of my life then i care to admit. constantly scrolling.
....honestly i should thank him for breaking that addiction
This is one of the things I like about Lemmy. I can scroll through and be done in 10-20 minutes. More if I want, but otherwise, the rest of the day is mine for the taking. It's like I've escaped and reclaimed my time.
Much the same, I was lost for a while till I adjusted.
It’s going to take years, but Lemmy will kill Reddit. People like authenticity. Reddit will lose authenticity as it antagonizes its user base through its monetization efforts.
A core group of people who value that authenticity above all else migrated after Reddit betrayed its values this past summer. They will be the early adopters of this brand new community. It’s happened before on the internet. People hate bullshit. They want to connect with real people that have good intentions and are good faith contributors, free of the influence of investors trying to monetize those relationships.
My bar isn't set too high to beat Reddit.
I'd be perfectly happy if we have small but thriving communities spread throughout the fediverse on a diverse set of niche topics.
We're in a good place for memes, star trek, and general discussion, niche content still has ways to go.
But to those people that are trying and posting to niche communities, I see you and I appreciate you!
I just want more diversity of communities. That needs more diversity of users, and that needs scale.
Yeah every time Reddit pulls some shitty stunt, we get a new influx of angry people demanding algorithms, whining about federation being too complicated and picking fights.
It's like the bar just closed and everybody's going to 7-Eleven to be mad about it.
We need more activity in local communities too. Even big cities seem lacking in content.
I like the way you think.
Couldn't have said it better myself, haven't been back once since I joined Lemmy and I never will.
I only go back when there's an answer to a DDG search. There's so much valuable information there, but as time goes by, that will change and the answers will become less accurate. In ten years, it'll be a graveyard.
One can hope, but you're right. There is too much valuable information on there to ignore when it's needed.
I've been back a few times for specific communities that haven't moved over, so like once or twice a week
It's much like when I initially went from Digg to Reddit; it was dramatic then with time it was less unless until one day I realized I hadn't been back to Digg in forever.
Same
The issue is, that a lot of Google searches lead to reddit
It's quite annoying actually. A huge number of the results return pages that are years old and a huge chunk of the comments are just gone.
I know why I know everyone went through all their posts and edited or deleted them or both but it shouldn't be returning in search results now.
I have a bookmark that is a link to Google with a prepopulated search field with stuff like
-site:reddit.com after:2019Edit: corrected
-site:I suggest
-site:Reddit.cominstead of-Reddit.comHonestly you took the words right out of my mouth. I literally could not have said it better myself. I hate that man, and his company for what they did to one of my absolute favourite pieces of the Internet. Reddit will live in on history, because I sure as hell won't go there anymore.
Reddit will keep making horrible decision after horrible decision, completing the process of enshitification, until they slowly piss off their remaining userbase one by one until they have nothing left and go the way of Digg. It's gonna take a long time because people hate change, but they usually hate bullshit more than that and everyone has a breaking point.
Don't just blame Spez...that what the board wants you to strawman.
Blame the board as well
Who I blame doesn't matter. I just stopped using it. Spez doesn't care that I'm gone. Neither does the board. I don't like current reddit. But I'm under no illusion that they will to clamor to keep the users that want vpns and anonymous viewing.
A large group of data providers using the site is better for them than a huge group of content sharers.
Ellen Pao
In hindsight, Pao wasn't so bad after all.
Conspiracy theory: I think the whole Pao thing was a power play to make spez more powerful and played the userbase like a fiddle by doubling down on reddit's built in misogyny and anti-authority/corporate bent at the time.
Honestly, this is part of a broader trend of enshittification sweeping the Internet these days. It's not just spez, it's any SV bro from the current crop of technology companies. I think this is a lesson worth remembering for all of us who took the freedom and magic of the Internet for granted.
Absolutely. Cory Doctorow's Def Con 31 talk really nailed it. I've listened to it like 3 times. He is the person who coined the term "enshitification" and the talk describes what it is, how it happens, and some things we can do to prevent it. The Q&A at the end is also awesome.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Cory Doctorow's Def Con 31 talk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It's all about Lemmy now. Lemmy is the future.
I was active on reddit for quite a while and by contributing and visiting the site making reddit money.
I have no desire to feed their greed and what they pulled with their API pricing was nothing but greed and shortsightedness.
I'm gone from reddit for good.
"whoa there, pardner"
cunts
Lemmy is getting better and better at an exponential rate. I still use Reddit but eventually I expect to fully be on Lemmy.
I just quit cold turkey and moved to lemmy fulltime. I miss some communities but whatev, its no biggie.
There's too many answers over the past decade to abandon reddit completely. Most google searches for specific questions go back to Reddit.
I've heard that Reddit is trying to kill that too so people will use their godawful search feature instead. I got a prompt from the site to take a survey about it sometimes last month and that's what people were theorizing that it was about.
I've had some searches lead me to old reddit threads where the answers are all deleted a few times since migrating here already. So even that is becoming less true than it used to be.
Yeah I only get back on Reddit from a search engine hit. And even then I'll use the cached copy if I can.
How do you get the cached copy?
archive.org has it. I self host searxng, and it gives me a link beside every search result to load it from archive instead.
Same. I realised 95% of Reddit for me was just the bants and chitchat. There’s a few communities I miss, but I can easily get my kicks here.
Just came over from reddit to check this place out and gotta say, I'm liking it so far!
Same here. I do go back for some niche browsing, but mostly over here now.
I'll go back there if they have some specific discussion with good info. I.e. Linux, video games, something. But signing in and browsing? No way.
I used to use Reddit a lot more back before the whole API fiasco earlier this year. After that, I stopped, save for posts promoting Lemmy and one very specific subreddit that never migrated to Lemmy and that I just couldn't go without. (The other subreddits I could either do without or were already replicated on Lemmy.)
If I may ask, what subreddit is that, and how big it is?
It's /r/Toonami. It's gotten about 35k members over the years, but it's not as active as that number might imply.
Ok, so I created !toonami@metacritics.zone. Follow-up questions:
Do you want to become a moderator for it?
If there is anyone you know from Reddit that you'd like to help migrate to this community, can you tell them to join via https://portal.alien.top? This will log them in *via Reddit and automatically subscribe them to lemmy communities that correspond to the the subreddits they joined.
While the community here is empty, would you be interested in having the content mirrored to the community (via alien.top?)
I'm not too interested in being a moderator. I don't have time for it.
As for migrating the community, they actually are one of the communities that held a vote, and they voted to stay on Reddit rather than migrate to Lemmy. I'd like to respect that decision.
I don't have any problem with content being mirrored, though.
That's interesting. Can you link me to this discussion or poll? Reddit search, as usual, is not showing much.
I apparently misremembered. There was a poll, and they posted the results here. But the poll didn't make mention of Lemmy and instead asked about migrating entirely to Discord (which honestly makes sense since the weekly thread is mainly a "live chat" of sorts). They voted to stay on Reddit instead of migrating entirely to their Discord server.
Both the subreddit and Discord server are active enough that they don't feel "barren" but small enough that they have a tight sense of community.
So the change to Discord was more of a practical one than any fundamental disagreement with the Fediverse alternatives.
In the case of Discord, perhaps a Matrix space (analogous to Discord servers) could be created instead ?
They voted against moving entirely to Discord, though. They already had an active Discord server prior to the poll and were asking people if they wanted to move entirely off of the subreddit and onto the Discord server. So I doubt they'd agree to move onto an entirely new Matrix server, especially if it wasn't run by the same mods as the current subreddit/ Discord server. The mods are actually well-liked by the community.
No, what I mean is replace what is on Discord by Matrix, and whatever is on Reddit with Lemmy.
If the mods are well liked and act in the interest of their users, even better. I'd be willing to support them with whatever they need in terms of technical support and how to migrate a whole community.
If you want them to migrate and you're offering your services to help them, you should probably DM the mods yourself instead of just talking to me about it.
I also used to rely more on reddit but just came to lemmy and can really see potential that with time will overpass reddit eventually
I think we can overpass in quality some day but not in rough numbers(at least for now, reddit has to fuck up a lot to go down like twitter).
Even with "all the fuck ups from Twitter", their traffic is down only 4-5%.
It's going to take a lot more than just waiting for them to fuck up. Network effects are real and the big companies spent the last 18 years making sure that they built enough moat around their fiefdoms.
Protests are not enough. "Strikes" were the leaders announce beforehand how long they will paralyze is not enough. Depending on moderators who are more worried about losing their status with their masters is not enough.
We need to treat this as a fight. Get all the tooling that can be used to make as easy as possible to migrate and ensure that people can get their dose of dopamine away from Reddit. Then things will start looking better.
I honestly haven’t used Reddit since the API exodus. The only reason I still have an account there is for when I have weird tech issues and the only search results are from old Reddit posts.
I only check Lemmy a few times a day, (and I tend to browse /all so I’m not limited to only seeing my subscriptions,) so I always have fresh content whenever I open the app. My posts and comments tend to get better engagement on Lemmy anyways. They don’t get buried by power users and karma-farming bots, so I actually get real responses. Nearly every time I open my app, I have three or four comment responses to check.
I miss like one community and sort by controversial to enjoy a really nice shit show.
Some of my main communities didn't take hold here, so I keep my toes in those subreddits. In the past week, the experience has gotten measurably worse. It's wild.
I wish those communities had reached a critical mass here.
Someday.
I browse old.reddit when I finish a show or movie for review and to touch in on hiphop releases. But without interaction. Lemmy is where I am now, fuck reddit I'm not a complete fuck Spez but they're a genuinely unlikeable company.
Translation: If we can't track you, you're of no interest to us.
Basically. They need to know who you are.
Correction: They need to know how they can market you to advertisers.
Weekly reminder that the best way to tell them off is to donate to the Lemmy developers, even 1 dollar is no doubt appreciated. Tell reddit off by using their competitor and paying for it.
Reminder is much appreciated. I checked out their donation page and learned that they also accept XMR, which is great if you don't want to give the middleman leeches (paypal etc.) any data or money: https://join-lemmy.org/crypto
Thanks to your comment, the Lemmy devs are now at least 20$ richer!
With that budget, gonna be some crazy new features soon!!
No really this helps lemmy, good job!
The server you use would also like some love.
In my case I'm my own server runner but hey I wouldn't mind a donation 😂
change your user agent to "fuck reddit and fuck you spez v. 1.2.45"
v23.6.12
What's Reddit?
On a second thought, let's not go to Reddit, tis a silly place.
deleted
What does Lemmy have to do with email?
Lemmy runs on the ActivityPub protocol, which works basically like an email address. Check out "How the Fediverse works" on your browser or YouTube.
I knew about ActivityPub but it still doesn't really seem to have anything in common with email to me other than the @ symbols...
/me shrugs
It's not just the @ symbols. It's the fact that both are federated systems. Lemmy is federated because a user of aussie.zone can interact with a user of lemmy.world.
Email is federated because a user of gmail.com can interact with a user of outlook.com.
It's about the fact that they each work on an open standard and anyone who implements that standard can communicate with anyone else who also does.
Yeah that’s a weird analogy.
is decentralized
deleted
The email analogy always sounded weird to me, especially when you want to explain lemmy to a reddit user. It’s much easier to describe it as interconnected reddit websites, where anyone can host their own site and you can sign up with any site you want and interact with posts/users on other reddit sites.
deleted
Just an isolated kinda-lemmy instance. Not worth it.
A bit like Lemmy, but worse in every way.
Doesn’t look like anything to me.
Lemmy but for squares; like pants are for squares
Reddit is the new digg
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
What does this mean?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy
JFC
DON'T LOOK AT THE NUMBER!! YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE IT!! YOUR BRAIN IS AN ILLEGAL OBJECT IF YOU MEMORISE IT!!
Pathetic
Edit: thanks for educating me
Aac S
Lemmy is quickly embodying the worst of reddit too.
I'd argue that, for Lemmy, it depends on which communities you subscribe to. Even if you subscribed to one community that now has stuff you don't like, there's a decent chance that another community on another instance has what you're looking for.
Lemmy at least has alternative instances and instance blocking.
"Lemmy" is not a platform, it is software you can use to make a platform (unless you're on .ml I guess).
I'm out of the loop but I've seen this stated many times now re: .ml. What's the deal with it? I thought it was mostly dev focused with memes and left-leaning stuff?
It's the instance owned and operated by the main Lemmy devs. Most instances are run by totally unaffiliated people using Lemmy software. .ml is the only one where you could say the software devs are also the community Admins and moderators.
.ml belongs to Malian government, hence Marxist websites register the domains with that TLD.
Good ol Mali
Of course it is, it's a reddit clone marketed to redditors.
The censorship is already worse here than it was on Reddit.
Depends on the instance. Lemmygrad is the most restrictive.
jpeg of a pig pooping /s
I get this even when signed in. Reddit really doesn't like VPNs at all these days.
Advertisers probably don't like an anonymous user base.
If you're logged in you're not anonymous
It used to be that you didn't need an email to sign up. The account I had before the API crap this summer didn't have an email associated with it. Couple that with using an always on VPN browser anti-fingerprint measures, and you could theoretically maintain a reasonable degree of anonymity, assuming you don't dox yourself. I assume a lot of this also has to do with users utilizing VPNs to circumvent band as well.
But they can still use everything you've written there to work out stuff about you. I bet they don't do it well though, given how poorly targeted their advertising was
If I was going to r/FortNiteBR, I'd be using private browsing mode on mobile firefox too
what happen on fortnitebr
there's people who play forknife there, yuck! /s
Change the url to old. instead of www. and you can bypass it.
I love that this is the solution to all the logged-out user crap they've pulled lately.
Alas, I suspect it means they will drop old. in the near future.
It also works with nsfw content they put behind an appwall.
YoU HaVe tO UsE tHe ApP To ViEw ThIs CoNteNt.
STFU with that BS.
I hate this one. Particularly when I'm looking for SFW info.
I straight up choose to stay ignorant if it's the only option
We’ve been speculating they will drop old. for quite a while now. Im wondering why they haven’t yet.
Yep. Maybe they want to keep the MAU figure up while getting all the data from the majority that use normal / the app.
I know I only use old and not logged in if there's something I need to see on there.
Nope, doesn't help I'm afraid.
Hmm, It's worked for me recently. I guess ymmv depending on your IP.
Try to clear your cookies, they put a bad boy cookie in if you're violating the unwritten rules of le bacon
I think there is something there to start a conversation about how messed up the Internet is these days.
Walls are being placed up all over. Security teams are always freaking out and checks that charge the guest are being put up just to track people going in and out.
I think we have finally hit the breaking threshold of everyone getting online and gated communities are the only way people want to exist in the web now. I mean how many times has Lemmy been DDOS'd already on several instances. Scrapers are everywhere trying to steal data for any and all purposes.
As much as we may not like it for people that want a pleasant experience without effort entrance tickets might actually need to start being made to let people into the world's largest circus we ever made.
Seems like Spez & Co finally started figuring out just how much their traffic skews to porn seekers, and is useless to advertisers. Last ditch effort to get relevant user info and metrics to sell.
old.reddit.com still works (for now..).
The only time I use reddit instead of Lemmy now is when I want to read discussion of TV shows I just watched.
If I may ask, what is stopping you from discussing here on Lemmy ?
Effort!
I don't usually want to contribute my own opinion. I just want to read other people's and silently judge them if they disagree with me.
This is the way.
Also it helps to get super highly up voted opinions and then recycle them for my friends so they think I'm more insightful/smarter than i am.
The water coolers never came here organically. The communities exist here, but the bots are forwarding the articles from Reddit, the moderators are meta moderators of 50 different communities that sprung up on the first migration happened. Trying to actually hold conversations in most of the communities you're just screaming into the void.
Then there's the problem of the community existing in six different nodes each with four life humans in them.
A lot of the niche communities haven't hit the user density required for self-sustaining discourse.
Then of course when you do start to get a community with a couple dozen active people moderation starts demanding tags and strict rules. I mean it's good to get out ahead of things if you can, but if you only have a couple dozen active users don't run them off.
Even the big communities feel small compared to reddit. You post something on a news comment section and you might get one to two polite replies fact checking you or giving their opinions. On reddit you would get dozens of people telling you how your post is wrong, and even if it's an opinion your opinion is worthless and you have no value in life.
Much more engagement on reddit.
Yeah quality versus quantity is a serious problem over there.
For me it's the fact that I am one of approximately two people on Lemmy that has ever seen stuff like Haibane Renmei or Shin Sekai Yori, and there isn't almost a decade worth of discussions about them to read on this platform. I could start communities for them, but I'm not cut out to moderate, and I'm not quite a big enough fan of either to justify taking on the role of a community leader
oh hey, I must be the other guy
We should start a forum and argue about whether Squealer was right all along (he was) or what the walls actually represent (honestly idk)
Hey I’ve seen SSY too! That’s already three.
I don’t recall it perfectly but I remember the end result being pretty much an ESH situation rather than someone being “right”
Community sizes are much different.
I still use Reddit for this same reason. It's the lack of communities. Every TV and every movie having a thread available. I'd love if lemmy started doing live discussions.
Wtf are they doing?
They are trying to force researchers and other data grabbers onto the API. If people can scrape the website Reddit can't charge them
Considering it took this long for them to figure out "empty user agent means it is a bot" and "well-known vpn may be used by bots", and old.reddit still apparently bypassing this, I'm going to guess they are not going to have much success.
I imagine old.reddit is going to be killed off soon.
Can't you just spoof a user agent anyway?
if they are blocking proxy and VPN connections, when they detect an unusual amount of requests from your IP they'll ban it and you won't be able to circumvent it changing your user agent.
You can, but some people don't if they don't think they're doing anything wrong
Works for me 😎
"Woah there, pardner"? What the fuck is going on with Reddit? Do they think they are like cool cowboys in the old west?
Uh, didn't you read the thing? Reddit's awesome and all!
As a first-time user I'm enjoying Lemmy. I feel like I want to contribute mostly because I won't have an immediately antithetical comment to follow my own. Am not looking for an echo chamber, I'm looking for conversation and sharing ideas. Reddit has devolved and this seems like the best way forward, for now.
Happy to hear that! While we may not have as many communities, its most good folk here. Mostly
I hope you like Linux memes and weekly updates on what reddit is doing
Use an alternate front-end. There's a couple of them out there but usually the less popular domains are less laggy. I'm currently using https://teddit.hostux.net/r/popular
Or don't.
Why not?
I think they're suggesting that we just avoid Reddit entirely
Huh, I thought Teddit was dead due to the apicalypse. Glad to see it's still kicking.
It's usable, but instances now deal with frequent rate-limits and you'll see 429 errors quite often.
try: !reddit@lemmy.world
Works with my VPN, I suspect this is a user agent issue rather than VPN
I got it during a websearch. Changed VPN server to another city and it went away. Mullvad.
Curious, I get it while searching too, using Proton. Haven't tried juggling servers though, might help.
It was VPN issue for me. Some IPs in Proton VPN doesn't work. When I tried a different IP or turned the IP off, I could access again.
Well, but most of the time I don't care enough to go in.
The less nefarious explination for what might be happening there is that Reddit has blocked that VPN ip because it's been used for bots and logging in with a known good account bypasses that block.
I just keep opening new accounts until they ban them, rinse and repeat
it's a bug or someone else used the same vpn (the same ip) to spam.
Noticed this last week. Thanks to split tunneling, it's easy avoidable.
Doesn't split tunneling expose your actual ip to Reddit, which is presumably what op wants to avoid?
Split tunneling generally means traffic destined to your local network isn’t tunneled while internet traffic is, which would result in the same outcome since Reddit doesn’t exist on your local network. Unless you have something more specific in mind.
To me split tunneling just sounds like "traffic matching certain rules is routed differently", and the rules depend on the configuration 🤷
Like mobile protonvpn lets you include/exclude certain apps/ips; desktop wireguard has allowed ips, etc.
Well yeah it just means that you’re not routing all your internet traffic through a VPN.
What I was wondering is how that’s actually help in this scenario. But the answer is it doesn’t, he just gave up and stopped using the VPN for Reddit traffic lol.
Yap, basically. Look, I never said it was a good solution 🤣
If you use Mullvad, You can have the Mullvad browser on the VPN while Firefox isn't.
Right but that wouldn’t actually solve the problem of getting blocked when using a VPN. You'd have to access Reddit without.
That's not avoiding it, that's playing straight into it. That's exactly the best case scenario they drew when they made the decision to block VPN connections. You are giving them your data and allowing them to fingerprint you.
Old reddit still works fine, but I suspect it won't soon enough.
Just replace "www" with "old". I just use a Firefox addon that does that automatically after seeing that nonsense the other day.
Didn't they have a similar glitch not too long ago?
https://windowsreport.com/reddit-user-agent-error/
That glitch didn’t explicitly say using a VPN this popup one says to stop using a VPN
I circumvent it with Tor Browser (Alpha) on my android mobile.
Doesn't Reddit have a version for Tor? Seems strange
does it still work?
Tor works.
You mean Tor as a whole or Reddit's .onion?
I daily drive FF Focus. When I encounter the discussed page, I just navigate to 'Open in..." and choose my TOR browser and open it there. VPN stays active all the time (Proton).
I'll check if it loads the page as an onion site or not.
..
Checked, loaded with default settings (.com) and as an .onion site. Both work.
So Tor works as a whole for me for now, it seems.
ETA: clarify - Added "(.com)"
That isn't how tor works, you're getting better anonymity but it isn't magically making a clear web site in to an onion site.
Thanks for the comment!
I explain poorly.
The Tor Browser has this setting to redirect clearweb urls to onion urls.
When used in the Tor browser, I can access reddit with it's clearweb site (.com) and (with the "prioritize Tor sites" turned on) the url showing it as onion site (.onion).
Hope I understand it right and with the setting turned on, tor indeed "magically makes clear web site to an onion site".
Not Tor-expert, hope I get this right. :)
ETA: clarify
Yeah. Here's a link on the Tor forum if someone wants to try
Brave gives a randomized fingerprint when you set the fingerprint blocking to strict. Set the adblocking to strict too, and use adguard for desktop to spoof your user agent to the most common chrome on windows user agent you can find.
I just made a new blank sandbox to visit reddit and they didn't block me
On each page load, Reddit pings home with some of your browser stats, including your user agent. You can't block it (easily) because it randomly uses real API endpoints for the ping, for example it will ping to /api/comment which is used to post comments so if you block that you can't post...
What I'm getting at is, they must be collecting that data for something, and doing it this way is obviously an attempt to fingerprint.
Oh and if you're using multiple accounts in the same browser without containers/incognito/profiles then they know about it, they keep data on the browser about all of them and send it to the server so it can correlate them.
Like I said, I used another instance of my browser in a different sandbox. None of the data from my usual instance was there.
Works for me