Maybe all of those in favor of the protests kept their word and only those who are against it remain?
I don't miss Reddit. I checked some comment sections and holy hell is it toxic compared to here. I think part of that is because of what you've mentioned in your comment.
I used to work for this major company, biggest in my country by far.
Whether it was going well or poorly, they tended to offer severance packages to "cut back" on their staff, to appease the grotesquely overpaid consultants that analysed their finances.
What tended to happen, was that the most qualified people, who had no issues finding another job (often better paying), took those packages (I took home a one year salary after having worked there almost three, then had two months vacation and started a better paying job), which left those who didn't really have other options, those who did the bare minimum and had a lot of useless meetings.
I guess that's what reddit is heading for. They are alienating those who contribute the most, the content creators, the mods and the ones who like to engage others. They will be left with their bots, lurkers, racists, reposters and porn-spammers.
Good riddance.
Completely agree. I'm kinda hoping the substance of reddit just moves to lemmy and none of us will have to deal with so many tools and trolls.
The trash will still escape Reddit. As evidenced by my being here :)
Aww, but you're a loveable trash, just like us. 🥰
Trash gang unite!
I also think the Advertising subs don't care much. You know the ones that are content rich from the posters but actually modded by the organisation the sub is for.
For example /r/razer mods being linked to taking bribes and specific subs dedicated to a brand.
They have nice communities but they'll stay.
Could not agree more with you. This has been a very positive experience and has really add transitioning away from Reddit a smooth experience
Ever tried having a discussion in any of the default subs? If your opinion differentiates from the hivemind you will be downvoted as spam, without any responses. It completely defeats the purpose of a "discussion"
I don't see his it won't happen here. The vote structure is very similar.
Not getting negative Karma helps I think.
Yeah that is true, but it wasn't as bad on reddit back in the day (as far as I remember), it seems to have happened after reddit went super-mainstream a few years ago. So I am hoping lemmy will be like that until it "potentially" becomes super popular lol
What if Lemmy becomes so successful and then it gets acquired by Reddit? Lol.
Think of the big corps like Google, Facebook, etc. buying the competitors for their products.
Then you can move to another instance or host your own. They can't buy them all up.
Lmfao, imagine some corpo trying to buy up all the instances one by one while the users all migrate out of the instance immediately when that happens. That would be hilarious.
Ooh, i wanna see that happen, like reddit trying to do that and going bankrupt in the process
The federated decentralized nature of Lemmy and it being open-source means that when this happens the users laugh at whoever paid for an instance and celebrate whoever got the bag and all migrate to a new instance.
See AdBlock -> AdBlock + -> Ublock -> Unlock Origin for a story of idiot capitalists donating massive sums of money only to buy a product that is quite literally drop-in replaceable by design... and Lemmy makes this process even easier than that.
holy hell is it toxic compared to here
I cannot agree more! I went to reddit (wirhour an acc) and just... wow. Did it got worse or was I always blind to how awful that place was?
I think you are seeing some withdrawal symptoms honestly. People are addicted to scrolling for their next dopamine hit. When that's taken away they get cranky. Add the anonymous nature of being online and things get toxic real fast.
I was IP banned from Reddit so I only got to use it without an account for the last few months. It's very toxic. The front page (not logged in) is so fucked.
I don't miss Reddit.
I just switched over to lemmy from reddit, and it is much nicer here isn't riddled with ads and toxicity. I just hope that more users do join over here, since there were a few subreddits/people I followed and would still like to see there updates/posts
and you know what? I am happier to be around people that keep their word.
I think this might actually be the case. Let's see how things work out. Lemmy surprised me as a proper alternative it's just not as content rich as reddit at the moment. Something about chickens and eggs.
Let's just expand and improve it further than the original lemmies did. Don't be afraid to post content, heck scrape content and make this the better option. People will follow content.
I’d like to add that there’s already been a significant increase in the amount of content and comments in just the last few days. I joined a whole 5 days ago (so many ages ago, I know) and back then it was somewhere between 1 and 2k users on this instance. It was way emptier - you could read all of the posts in most of the “big” communities in an hour or so. And the new feed was pretty stale.
Lemmy’s not the firehose of content that is Reddit yet, but it’s making real progress.
There's something to that. Hearing stories of subreddits reopen and ask the userbase what they want to do, well, who exactly are they asking? I'm not there, and I've seen plenty of posts from others who are also not there. Are they taking silence as votes against? I doubt it.
I'm going to go back to reddit for a bit, but only to encourage mod teams to setup shop here.
This comment is incorrect as well.
The people that cared left and what's left behind is people that wouldn't leave anyway and the strike only bothers them.
This person is living in a bubble and can't see further than their nose.
Absolutely agree.
I believe this was reddit's intention at least in part. People who care were also those constantly exposing their anti-consumer practices and greedy policies. I'm inclined to believe the administration will be pretty glad, at least for a while, that those who get what's happening are gone.
Survivorship bias!
I think people are seeing Reddit as their only solution right now due to the lack of awareness of this place. It's been a bit sad to see all the news articles written about the event but very few plugs for alternate options to visit.
investor class protectng its latest cash-cow.
I've been telling people, the only way this works is if communities migrate somewhere else. Every single blacked out subreddit needs to post their new location on a site other than Reddit. Otherwise people will just stay on Reddit and wait or visit/make new subreddits.
I just wonder if all the anti Lemmy posts I've seen have been Reddit employees
Funny you mention that, I found out about Lemmy specifically from a dude who was being downvoted to hell for even mentioning it as an alternative. So glad I decided to look into it I love this place and the whole idea of the fediverse in general.
I understand that the fediverse isn't the most intuitive thing to understand, and that many people won't immediately understand it, but I've seen so many comments saying that it's too confusing (even in response to direct links to instances with the simplest explanations). There has to be an astroturfing campaign of some kind going on
we have had the first wave - and its gone well. second wave is incomming on or about the 30th - probably smaller, but no less committed (long term). after that its a war of attrition.
unrelated to your comment (sorta), but I just saw your comment update in real time after you edited it. I just thought that's a really cool feature and wanted to point it out :)
Ok that's pretty neat.
realtime comment subscriptions are pretty damn slick.
Yep, I feel like a lot of people are forgetting about the wave coming at the end of the month. We’ll see plenty more people then.
Then the third wave when they finally kill off old.reddit.com
You know I see that a lot of people love old reddit. I was a fan of it 10 years ago. When it switched to the modern layout, I think I was kind indifferent at first. But trying to go back to it after all these years, it seems like a downgrade in many ways. I guess I'm not seeing what they're seeing lol.
More than 3 comments in a chain
I used Reddit because I was bored and watching tv. I barely interacted. I am interacting on Lemmy. There was a lot of angry, toxic people on Reddit. So I am glad they are staying there
Man, this is true. So far my experience has been less stressful and more wholesome on the fediverse. It feels more like Reddit from 8 years ago than modern, angry Reddit.
Honeymoon period
and you can potentially replicate that honeymoon period on a wide variety of instances and local communities, each with their own vibe.
And here your one voice can have an impact on a mag or community. Your contributions can grow a community, and change how it feels.
On Reddit, even a small community is 10,000+ members, your voice is drowned out by thousands of others, your contribution is barely registered.
You just made me realize I've been sitting here for two hours in a now-dark room and I haven't turned the TV on yet. Fediverse truly is like the old reddit.
I feel like a lot of people are forgetting about survivorship bias as well. If all the people who supported the blackout left Reddit, then the only people left would be the ones who aren't in favour :)
This is a very good perspective. I haven't been on Reddit since the blackout started. Probably would have gone back as well but the AMA comments were the final straw for me.
This person can suck it. I was a big time Reddit fan (mostly a lurker) but I decided to continue my boycott of Reddit as long as u/spez is in play and even when he leaves they would need to do a lot to get me to go back. The Fediverse still has some work to do with QoL features but overall it is a less toxic world than Reddit and refreshing to take part in. When mlem and other phone apps really get going I think it will really attract a lot more users as a lot of folks are phone only users and we'll see the Fediverse really take hold.
The fediverse is the way. I’m not smart enough to say if it’s the best option, but it’s a hell of a lot better than a profit driven monolith run by out of touch investors. Reddit won’t implode but it won’t be the same as it was even a week ago. This decentralized structure is what the internet wants to be.
The fediverse has one thing going for it that any other alternative lacks: a credible approach to dealing with the network effect. In isolation, it is very difficult to start an independent social media website. This becomes much, much easier when you have neighboring sites that you can interact with. Federation serves as a catalyst. I've been longing for the proliferation of open source social media for over 15 years. Nothing has changed the state of affairs more thoroughly than the introduction of federation.
One way I'm looking at this opportunity is like email, anyone can set up an email server thanks to how it got established. So if this pans out and eventually we get funded hosts in the vein of Gmail and Hotmail, who spend money writing fancy UIs and on marketing, we still have a fundamental base where we can shuffle away from the big players and go set up our own servers.
I do hope to see some funded options come into this space, they can control/own their interface into the data, but they can't control/own the data.
I’m brand new to the fediverse concept so funded hosting hadn’t occurred to me. Yeah, let the big boys throw some money at it and we reap the benefits!
as long as we are vigilant for the microsoft method of embrace, extend, extingush/enshittify we will be good.
How would that realistically happen on Lemmy?
Server costs, lawyers, management will add up eventually. Ads or other financial incentives will take part in this at some point. The biggest instance, which will have the most funding, could monopolize by defederating others. Though with future account portability it could be made impossible. As in if reddit was the instance, most communities and users would seamlessly move over to others. But right now the risk is real.
Beehaw just defederated lemmy.world and users have to either move with the bigger fediverse of lemmy.world or stay confined to their isolated instance.
Why did beehaw defederate?
Too few moderators, poor modding tools, no backchannel to original instance, overwhelming amount of users from big instance.
It's either fediverse or nostr. But nostr is more twitter-like than reddit-like and is filled with cryptobros so no thanks no
Not sure why the casual sexism, women are in crypto too.
What?
Reposting something I wrote in another community I hang out in, but it feels appropriate to the topic:
I won't pretend "Reddit is dying" or anything of the sort, but I have noticed something interesting (that is maybe something I should've noticed long, long ago), and that is that subreddits have an insane concentration of whiny entitled lurkers that seem to want content catered and spoonfed to them.
During this whole debacle, I've seen creators and enthusiasts that drive the traffic be perfectly content creating elsewhere because it was more about expressing their passion of a topic than cultivating some kind of audience. No matter the alternative they chose, they have plenty of outlets for their creation. But everyone else hates this. All of the bitching about blackouts that I've seen haven't been "man I wanted to post cool shit" but more "where am I supposed to get cool stuff from?".
In general, what I've seen is a slight decline in activity, but a sharp decline in quality. Comparatively, my experience in Lemmy thus far has been that people creating were fine moving elsewhere to do their thing, and while communities are still small, I've seen a lot more long-form, thoughtful and respectful discussion because everyone there was a creator and enthusiast about that topic. Looking at the profiles of people commenting, they've typically posted at least once in that community already.
Meanwhile on Reddit, since the blackout wore off on certain subs, I've seen a lot of this:
[In the original, here would be an image of a typical current comment thread in a blackout-related post, but the context of it is explained below anyway]
Where people who bitch about the blackout because "but I wanted to discuss x!!" are then invited to discuss exactly that, and the conversation goes something along the lines of
"I wanted to discuss x!"
"Oh cool, me too. I like x y z about it, though I preferred if x was like this instead, and maybe z could be polished a little more"
"Well, idk I like it"
"ok 👍"
or just
"i like this"
"i like this too 👍"
because they don't actually have any proper formulated thoughts or opinions on the subject beyond surface-level observations, brand identity or attachment, or if they do have them, they don't have the drive to create or lead conversations about it and just lurk waiting for said content and thoughts to be delivered for them.
Which makes the already bad state of egregious repost bots rising to the top because people keep upvoting the same topics over and over even worse.
In a way, I guess it's kinda similar to what happened with 9gag when that hit critical mass.
To expand on this, I also find it interesting and perplexing just how far that entitlement goes. Moderators are on the verge of losing critical tools, and they're essential in maintaining the quality of the discussions held. Creators create the topics of discussion, and are the main driving force in setting the baseline quality of said discussions, and as power users are more likely to be the ones to depend on third party apps to create the content people browse.
Both seem fine with the situation, and/or migration, and very understandably go "Hey we feel disrespected on this platform and are moving to x where we feel we can thrive better without external influences deriding our community" and lurkers, who contribute nothing and have the least barrier of entry because they essentially just need to change the url they search the same terms in, stomp their feet and cry "but I want you to discuss things for my entertainment HERE!!!" like two year olds.
I have noticed this so much today. I pretty much lived in r/hockey for the past 5 years. They had a vote and decided to black out for the 48 hour protest. Once it was clear that the vote was in favor of blacking out (and that the championship deciding game could be played during the blackout), people started pleading to move the blackout to after the championship was decided, which completely defeats the purpose of the protest.
Well, during the blackout, the championship was decided. Now that it's open again, everyone is again flipping out about how pointless the protests were, and how we ruined their experience of watching the championship game.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I generally watch hockey because I like watching hockey. I feel like you might have a social media addiction if not being able to browse reddit ruins the experience. Crazy stuff.
Not going back to Reddit ever, too much bs.
I noticed that. I made a comment saying something along the lines of me disagreeing with mods going public after only 2 days and got downvoted like crazy but not three days ago it would of been the other way. Just honestly done with that site anyway so going to download wikis from the subs that come back and be done with it.
I guess it might be because those of us who actually do support the blackout tries to keep staying away until things changes, while a lot of the people on Reddit right now have been content starved for a few days and just waited for the subs to open again (and thus does not want to see them shut down again).
Personally I quite like it here on the fediverse and am not in any way in a hurry to go back to Reddit any time soon.
Eh, I used Reddit daily for 14 years, and quit cold turkey. The first few days were rough, but between the feddiverse and inoreader, I'm doing fine.
Sure the communities I left behind were much larger, but honestly the responses I get here are of much higher quality.
This change may also be explained because many protestors are still gone. I have barely touched Reddit after the blackout, and the only time I did was to support some of these votes. But inevitably I must've missed some. It's probably a bit of survivorship bias. Though it's probably also partially that people did indeed realize that they can't miss the thing they're addicted to for more than 2 days.
I knew a lot of people would follow spez and toe the company line, just like they did with Twitter. I don‘t mind, I‘d rather hang out here without all them anyway.
I've gotten death threats, Reddit cares message, and all kinds of hate mail for saying my sub should stay restricted. And I only have 167k people subbed. It's intense
You can report the malicious reddit cares message and get the reporting user banned.
People are so weak when it comes to shit like this. Nobody cares about their obligations anymore and it weakens the fight for thoes that care. Not just talking about the reddit blackout. Feels like this is the case with many things in life…
Personally, I like the Lemmy community better. It's definitely possible to find great stuff on reddit (and in particular for news, I think reddit is superior to what I've been finding on Lemmy), but the overall ratio of content : crap is much, much higher here.
Now that I've broken the seal, I honestly am not sure what people are going back to so eagerly on reddit. Maybe just the dopamine of lots and lots of stories and comments to interact with, or maybe they're part of something I don't interact with there.
There are a lot of subreddits for specific tv shows or games. Ngl that's the biggest temptation for me. There are shows that I'm obsessed with that no one else in my life has the same love for, and Reddit is the only place I can talk to anyone about them. Sad to let that go.
Yah, I get that. You could start a community here and wait for it to form up and interact, and do reddit in the meantime (or forever if the community stays on reddit forever)... I actually don't agree that "we" have to "win" by "punishing" reddit for their bad behavior towards the mods and app developers. It just comes down to what platform you want to be on to interact I think.
I think there is a strong difference between people who were on reddit before and after 2016. People who joined after were already used to the official app and new website design, they don't know anything else, so they tend not to care.
There are also a lot of lurkers and casual browsers, they also tend not to care.
The ones who do care a are very loud about it is mainly the old school hardcore members who did not have an official reddit app and who never got used to the new design
I have no intention of unsubscribing from Reddit. The recent move that company has taken has made me hostile to them as a platform. I am far more probable to engage over here and just lurk over there when I need to find the answer to something. To the extent that I can I want to help the Fediverse takeoff and replace Reddit and twitter.
Under lots of the "we're back, let's talk what's next" announcements, comments pop up that say basically - "ah well, guess that's it, just use the app, it's great" and they get positive rating, where a week ago they'd be downvoted to oblivion.
I guess everyone for whom this was actually important, has already found an alternative and at most is waiting for their 3rd party app to break.
As another person already stated somewhere in this thread: Many people probably don't realise how bad getting rid of third party apps really is. Yeah it makes all the things like apollo go away, but it also removes many helpful moderation tools and bots made for fun to like the alphabetical order bot. They just can't grasp how bad that really is
I don’t understand. Maybe it’s my adhd and lack of object permanence, but I have been so unbothered by the lack of Reddit.
I bought a plant today. I’ve never bought a plant. I bought cats before buying a houseplant. I’m pretty stoked—and it’s mostly because I was scrolling through Reddit that I got up to do it.
I'm doing my part. I hope others do an exodus and not a hiatus.
I am not a mod, mearly a user of Reddit. I completely support the blackout and continuation after the internal memo leak of Spez. I uninstalled all Reddit apps and have not logged into my account since. Now I am finding new communities being built here.
Too bad, cause this is WAY better than reddit for my use case. I am interacting the exact same way, only more of what I like. I don't really wanna interact with a reddit hive mind one liner pun. I want to interact with human beings.
This place is pushing the envelope. That's a good place to be imo.
I would go proselytize to draw people in, but I literally made zero human connection there, so all I could do is dump random comments. Nah. Let it happen if it's gonna happen.
This is one of many sad reality in life. :(
“I’ll stand by you no matter what”
“Wait, I didn’t realize that I’d be sacrificing as well”
Maybe all of those in favor of the protests kept their word and only those who are against it remain?
I don't miss Reddit. I checked some comment sections and holy hell is it toxic compared to here. I think part of that is because of what you've mentioned in your comment.
I used to work for this major company, biggest in my country by far.
Whether it was going well or poorly, they tended to offer severance packages to "cut back" on their staff, to appease the grotesquely overpaid consultants that analysed their finances.
What tended to happen, was that the most qualified people, who had no issues finding another job (often better paying), took those packages (I took home a one year salary after having worked there almost three, then had two months vacation and started a better paying job), which left those who didn't really have other options, those who did the bare minimum and had a lot of useless meetings.
I guess that's what reddit is heading for. They are alienating those who contribute the most, the content creators, the mods and the ones who like to engage others. They will be left with their bots, lurkers, racists, reposters and porn-spammers.
Good riddance.
Completely agree. I'm kinda hoping the substance of reddit just moves to lemmy and none of us will have to deal with so many tools and trolls.
The trash will still escape Reddit. As evidenced by my being here :)
Aww, but you're a loveable trash, just like us. 🥰
Trash gang unite!
I also think the Advertising subs don't care much. You know the ones that are content rich from the posters but actually modded by the organisation the sub is for.
For example /r/razer mods being linked to taking bribes and specific subs dedicated to a brand.
They have nice communities but they'll stay.
Could not agree more with you. This has been a very positive experience and has really add transitioning away from Reddit a smooth experience
Ever tried having a discussion in any of the default subs? If your opinion differentiates from the hivemind you will be downvoted as spam, without any responses. It completely defeats the purpose of a "discussion"
I don't see his it won't happen here. The vote structure is very similar.
Not getting negative Karma helps I think.
Yeah that is true, but it wasn't as bad on reddit back in the day (as far as I remember), it seems to have happened after reddit went super-mainstream a few years ago. So I am hoping lemmy will be like that until it "potentially" becomes super popular lol
What if Lemmy becomes so successful and then it gets acquired by Reddit? Lol.
Think of the big corps like Google, Facebook, etc. buying the competitors for their products.
Then you can move to another instance or host your own. They can't buy them all up.
Lmfao, imagine some corpo trying to buy up all the instances one by one while the users all migrate out of the instance immediately when that happens. That would be hilarious.
Ooh, i wanna see that happen, like reddit trying to do that and going bankrupt in the process
The federated decentralized nature of Lemmy and it being open-source means that when this happens the users laugh at whoever paid for an instance and celebrate whoever got the bag and all migrate to a new instance.
See AdBlock -> AdBlock + -> Ublock -> Unlock Origin for a story of idiot capitalists donating massive sums of money only to buy a product that is quite literally drop-in replaceable by design... and Lemmy makes this process even easier than that.
I cannot agree more! I went to reddit (wirhour an acc) and just... wow. Did it got worse or was I always blind to how awful that place was?
I think you are seeing some withdrawal symptoms honestly. People are addicted to scrolling for their next dopamine hit. When that's taken away they get cranky. Add the anonymous nature of being online and things get toxic real fast.
I was IP banned from Reddit so I only got to use it without an account for the last few months. It's very toxic. The front page (not logged in) is so fucked.
I don't miss Reddit.
I just switched over to lemmy from reddit, and it is much nicer here isn't riddled with ads and toxicity. I just hope that more users do join over here, since there were a few subreddits/people I followed and would still like to see there updates/posts
and you know what? I am happier to be around people that keep their word.
I think this might actually be the case. Let's see how things work out. Lemmy surprised me as a proper alternative it's just not as content rich as reddit at the moment. Something about chickens and eggs.
Let's just expand and improve it further than the original lemmies did. Don't be afraid to post content, heck scrape content and make this the better option. People will follow content.
I’d like to add that there’s already been a significant increase in the amount of content and comments in just the last few days. I joined a whole 5 days ago (so many ages ago, I know) and back then it was somewhere between 1 and 2k users on this instance. It was way emptier - you could read all of the posts in most of the “big” communities in an hour or so. And the new feed was pretty stale.
Lemmy’s not the firehose of content that is Reddit yet, but it’s making real progress.
There's something to that. Hearing stories of subreddits reopen and ask the userbase what they want to do, well, who exactly are they asking? I'm not there, and I've seen plenty of posts from others who are also not there. Are they taking silence as votes against? I doubt it.
I'm going to go back to reddit for a bit, but only to encourage mod teams to setup shop here.
This comment is incorrect as well.
The people that cared left and what's left behind is people that wouldn't leave anyway and the strike only bothers them.
This person is living in a bubble and can't see further than their nose.
Absolutely agree.
I believe this was reddit's intention at least in part. People who care were also those constantly exposing their anti-consumer practices and greedy policies. I'm inclined to believe the administration will be pretty glad, at least for a while, that those who get what's happening are gone.
Survivorship bias!
I think people are seeing Reddit as their only solution right now due to the lack of awareness of this place. It's been a bit sad to see all the news articles written about the event but very few plugs for alternate options to visit.
investor class protectng its latest cash-cow.
I've been telling people, the only way this works is if communities migrate somewhere else. Every single blacked out subreddit needs to post their new location on a site other than Reddit. Otherwise people will just stay on Reddit and wait or visit/make new subreddits.
I just wonder if all the anti Lemmy posts I've seen have been Reddit employees
Funny you mention that, I found out about Lemmy specifically from a dude who was being downvoted to hell for even mentioning it as an alternative. So glad I decided to look into it I love this place and the whole idea of the fediverse in general.
I understand that the fediverse isn't the most intuitive thing to understand, and that many people won't immediately understand it, but I've seen so many comments saying that it's too confusing (even in response to direct links to instances with the simplest explanations). There has to be an astroturfing campaign of some kind going on
we have had the first wave - and its gone well. second wave is incomming on or about the 30th - probably smaller, but no less committed (long term). after that its a war of attrition.
unrelated to your comment (sorta), but I just saw your comment update in real time after you edited it. I just thought that's a really cool feature and wanted to point it out :)
Ok that's pretty neat.
realtime comment subscriptions are pretty damn slick.
Yep, I feel like a lot of people are forgetting about the wave coming at the end of the month. We’ll see plenty more people then.
Then the third wave when they finally kill off old.reddit.com
You know I see that a lot of people love old reddit. I was a fan of it 10 years ago. When it switched to the modern layout, I think I was kind indifferent at first. But trying to go back to it after all these years, it seems like a downgrade in many ways. I guess I'm not seeing what they're seeing lol.
More than 3 comments in a chain
I used Reddit because I was bored and watching tv. I barely interacted. I am interacting on Lemmy. There was a lot of angry, toxic people on Reddit. So I am glad they are staying there
Man, this is true. So far my experience has been less stressful and more wholesome on the fediverse. It feels more like Reddit from 8 years ago than modern, angry Reddit.
Honeymoon period
and you can potentially replicate that honeymoon period on a wide variety of instances and local communities, each with their own vibe.
And here your one voice can have an impact on a mag or community. Your contributions can grow a community, and change how it feels.
On Reddit, even a small community is 10,000+ members, your voice is drowned out by thousands of others, your contribution is barely registered.
You just made me realize I've been sitting here for two hours in a now-dark room and I haven't turned the TV on yet. Fediverse truly is like the old reddit.
I feel like a lot of people are forgetting about survivorship bias as well. If all the people who supported the blackout left Reddit, then the only people left would be the ones who aren't in favour :)
This is a very good perspective. I haven't been on Reddit since the blackout started. Probably would have gone back as well but the AMA comments were the final straw for me.
This person can suck it. I was a big time Reddit fan (mostly a lurker) but I decided to continue my boycott of Reddit as long as u/spez is in play and even when he leaves they would need to do a lot to get me to go back. The Fediverse still has some work to do with QoL features but overall it is a less toxic world than Reddit and refreshing to take part in. When mlem and other phone apps really get going I think it will really attract a lot more users as a lot of folks are phone only users and we'll see the Fediverse really take hold.
The fediverse is the way. I’m not smart enough to say if it’s the best option, but it’s a hell of a lot better than a profit driven monolith run by out of touch investors. Reddit won’t implode but it won’t be the same as it was even a week ago. This decentralized structure is what the internet wants to be.
The fediverse has one thing going for it that any other alternative lacks: a credible approach to dealing with the network effect. In isolation, it is very difficult to start an independent social media website. This becomes much, much easier when you have neighboring sites that you can interact with. Federation serves as a catalyst. I've been longing for the proliferation of open source social media for over 15 years. Nothing has changed the state of affairs more thoroughly than the introduction of federation.
One way I'm looking at this opportunity is like email, anyone can set up an email server thanks to how it got established. So if this pans out and eventually we get funded hosts in the vein of Gmail and Hotmail, who spend money writing fancy UIs and on marketing, we still have a fundamental base where we can shuffle away from the big players and go set up our own servers.
I do hope to see some funded options come into this space, they can control/own their interface into the data, but they can't control/own the data.
I’m brand new to the fediverse concept so funded hosting hadn’t occurred to me. Yeah, let the big boys throw some money at it and we reap the benefits!
as long as we are vigilant for the microsoft method of embrace, extend, extingush/enshittify we will be good.
How would that realistically happen on Lemmy?
Server costs, lawyers, management will add up eventually. Ads or other financial incentives will take part in this at some point. The biggest instance, which will have the most funding, could monopolize by defederating others. Though with future account portability it could be made impossible. As in if reddit was the instance, most communities and users would seamlessly move over to others. But right now the risk is real.
Beehaw just defederated lemmy.world and users have to either move with the bigger fediverse of lemmy.world or stay confined to their isolated instance.
Why did beehaw defederate?
Too few moderators, poor modding tools, no backchannel to original instance, overwhelming amount of users from big instance.
It's either fediverse or nostr. But nostr is more twitter-like than reddit-like and is filled with cryptobros so no thanks no
Not sure why the casual sexism, women are in crypto too.
What?
Reposting something I wrote in another community I hang out in, but it feels appropriate to the topic:
I won't pretend "Reddit is dying" or anything of the sort, but I have noticed something interesting (that is maybe something I should've noticed long, long ago), and that is that subreddits have an insane concentration of whiny entitled lurkers that seem to want content catered and spoonfed to them.
During this whole debacle, I've seen creators and enthusiasts that drive the traffic be perfectly content creating elsewhere because it was more about expressing their passion of a topic than cultivating some kind of audience. No matter the alternative they chose, they have plenty of outlets for their creation. But everyone else hates this. All of the bitching about blackouts that I've seen haven't been "man I wanted to post cool shit" but more "where am I supposed to get cool stuff from?".
In general, what I've seen is a slight decline in activity, but a sharp decline in quality. Comparatively, my experience in Lemmy thus far has been that people creating were fine moving elsewhere to do their thing, and while communities are still small, I've seen a lot more long-form, thoughtful and respectful discussion because everyone there was a creator and enthusiast about that topic. Looking at the profiles of people commenting, they've typically posted at least once in that community already.
Meanwhile on Reddit, since the blackout wore off on certain subs, I've seen a lot of this:
[In the original, here would be an image of a typical current comment thread in a blackout-related post, but the context of it is explained below anyway]
Where people who bitch about the blackout because "but I wanted to discuss x!!" are then invited to discuss exactly that, and the conversation goes something along the lines of
"I wanted to discuss x!"
"Oh cool, me too. I like x y z about it, though I preferred if x was like this instead, and maybe z could be polished a little more"
"Well, idk I like it"
"ok 👍"
or just
"i like this"
"i like this too 👍"
because they don't actually have any proper formulated thoughts or opinions on the subject beyond surface-level observations, brand identity or attachment, or if they do have them, they don't have the drive to create or lead conversations about it and just lurk waiting for said content and thoughts to be delivered for them.
Which makes the already bad state of egregious repost bots rising to the top because people keep upvoting the same topics over and over even worse.
In a way, I guess it's kinda similar to what happened with 9gag when that hit critical mass.
To expand on this, I also find it interesting and perplexing just how far that entitlement goes. Moderators are on the verge of losing critical tools, and they're essential in maintaining the quality of the discussions held. Creators create the topics of discussion, and are the main driving force in setting the baseline quality of said discussions, and as power users are more likely to be the ones to depend on third party apps to create the content people browse.
Both seem fine with the situation, and/or migration, and very understandably go "Hey we feel disrespected on this platform and are moving to x where we feel we can thrive better without external influences deriding our community" and lurkers, who contribute nothing and have the least barrier of entry because they essentially just need to change the url they search the same terms in, stomp their feet and cry "but I want you to discuss things for my entertainment HERE!!!" like two year olds.
I have noticed this so much today. I pretty much lived in r/hockey for the past 5 years. They had a vote and decided to black out for the 48 hour protest. Once it was clear that the vote was in favor of blacking out (and that the championship deciding game could be played during the blackout), people started pleading to move the blackout to after the championship was decided, which completely defeats the purpose of the protest.
Well, during the blackout, the championship was decided. Now that it's open again, everyone is again flipping out about how pointless the protests were, and how we ruined their experience of watching the championship game.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I generally watch hockey because I like watching hockey. I feel like you might have a social media addiction if not being able to browse reddit ruins the experience. Crazy stuff.
Not going back to Reddit ever, too much bs.
I noticed that. I made a comment saying something along the lines of me disagreeing with mods going public after only 2 days and got downvoted like crazy but not three days ago it would of been the other way. Just honestly done with that site anyway so going to download wikis from the subs that come back and be done with it.
I guess it might be because those of us who actually do support the blackout tries to keep staying away until things changes, while a lot of the people on Reddit right now have been content starved for a few days and just waited for the subs to open again (and thus does not want to see them shut down again).
Personally I quite like it here on the fediverse and am not in any way in a hurry to go back to Reddit any time soon.
Eh, I used Reddit daily for 14 years, and quit cold turkey. The first few days were rough, but between the feddiverse and inoreader, I'm doing fine.
Sure the communities I left behind were much larger, but honestly the responses I get here are of much higher quality.
This change may also be explained because many protestors are still gone. I have barely touched Reddit after the blackout, and the only time I did was to support some of these votes. But inevitably I must've missed some. It's probably a bit of survivorship bias. Though it's probably also partially that people did indeed realize that they can't miss the thing they're addicted to for more than 2 days.
I knew a lot of people would follow spez and toe the company line, just like they did with Twitter. I don‘t mind, I‘d rather hang out here without all them anyway.
I've gotten death threats, Reddit cares message, and all kinds of hate mail for saying my sub should stay restricted. And I only have 167k people subbed. It's intense
You can report the malicious reddit cares message and get the reporting user banned.
People are so weak when it comes to shit like this. Nobody cares about their obligations anymore and it weakens the fight for thoes that care. Not just talking about the reddit blackout. Feels like this is the case with many things in life…
Personally, I like the Lemmy community better. It's definitely possible to find great stuff on reddit (and in particular for news, I think reddit is superior to what I've been finding on Lemmy), but the overall ratio of content : crap is much, much higher here.
Now that I've broken the seal, I honestly am not sure what people are going back to so eagerly on reddit. Maybe just the dopamine of lots and lots of stories and comments to interact with, or maybe they're part of something I don't interact with there.
There are a lot of subreddits for specific tv shows or games. Ngl that's the biggest temptation for me. There are shows that I'm obsessed with that no one else in my life has the same love for, and Reddit is the only place I can talk to anyone about them. Sad to let that go.
Yah, I get that. You could start a community here and wait for it to form up and interact, and do reddit in the meantime (or forever if the community stays on reddit forever)... I actually don't agree that "we" have to "win" by "punishing" reddit for their bad behavior towards the mods and app developers. It just comes down to what platform you want to be on to interact I think.
I think there is a strong difference between people who were on reddit before and after 2016. People who joined after were already used to the official app and new website design, they don't know anything else, so they tend not to care.
There are also a lot of lurkers and casual browsers, they also tend not to care.
The ones who do care a are very loud about it is mainly the old school hardcore members who did not have an official reddit app and who never got used to the new design
I have no intention of unsubscribing from Reddit. The recent move that company has taken has made me hostile to them as a platform. I am far more probable to engage over here and just lurk over there when I need to find the answer to something. To the extent that I can I want to help the Fediverse takeoff and replace Reddit and twitter.
Under lots of the "we're back, let's talk what's next" announcements, comments pop up that say basically - "ah well, guess that's it, just use the app, it's great" and they get positive rating, where a week ago they'd be downvoted to oblivion.
I guess everyone for whom this was actually important, has already found an alternative and at most is waiting for their 3rd party app to break.
As another person already stated somewhere in this thread: Many people probably don't realise how bad getting rid of third party apps really is. Yeah it makes all the things like apollo go away, but it also removes many helpful moderation tools and bots made for fun to like the alphabetical order bot. They just can't grasp how bad that really is
I don’t understand. Maybe it’s my adhd and lack of object permanence, but I have been so unbothered by the lack of Reddit.
I bought a plant today. I’ve never bought a plant. I bought cats before buying a houseplant. I’m pretty stoked—and it’s mostly because I was scrolling through Reddit that I got up to do it.
I'm doing my part. I hope others do an exodus and not a hiatus.
I am not a mod, mearly a user of Reddit. I completely support the blackout and continuation after the internal memo leak of Spez. I uninstalled all Reddit apps and have not logged into my account since. Now I am finding new communities being built here.
Too bad, cause this is WAY better than reddit for my use case. I am interacting the exact same way, only more of what I like. I don't really wanna interact with a reddit hive mind one liner pun. I want to interact with human beings.
This place is pushing the envelope. That's a good place to be imo.
I would go proselytize to draw people in, but I literally made zero human connection there, so all I could do is dump random comments. Nah. Let it happen if it's gonna happen.
This is one of many sad reality in life. :(
“I’ll stand by you no matter what”
“Wait, I didn’t realize that I’d be sacrificing as well”
Standard motto today with people.
leopards ate my face?