The fediverse has been good to me so far, I am more than happy to support these projects, and to support the future of social networking.
In general I’ve found Lemmy to be closer to the feel of old forums in interactions. Arguments and petty squabbles are still entirely possible, but it doesn’t feel like every interaction is about to become one. It’s what pushed me to stop using Reddit - everything seems to end up as a fight for the slightest reason. Whilst I’m plenty abrasive as a person, it felt like Reddit got worse over the last 5 - 10 years.
They might have a bigger userbase now than when I joined but it’s not ended up being worth it, I feel.
I came late to Reddit myself but even I noticed that happening during the pandemic. The decline was rather speedy, sharp, and extensive (affecting all subs).
And we could even track some of those to specific implementations or lack thereof of features by Reddit. Like how their search feature sucked so bad, thereby encouraging people to write a (still yet another) post to ask rather than look up an existing highly crafted and well-researched answer that even if posted a mere week prior still would not show up in the algorithmic feed pushing all the latest noise to the absolute tippy-top. And mods were forbidden from pinning more than two posts. And even those only showed up when sorting by Hot. And maybe not even then in some apps. And you couldn’t consolidate ones bc the moderation tools sucked so damn hard, e.g. posts made by Auto Mod could not be edited later by the very same mod team who requested that the post be made. Every damnable one of these things increases apparent engagement metrics like “number of posts”, but at the expense of actually connecting people with the information that they wanted to receive. :-(
To which we can say “fuck spez”, but it’s deeper than that bc of the chasing after profits to the expense of all else that led to that, as in if it wasn’t him that did it then it would have merely been someone else instead.
It always amazed me that Reddit stopped adding new stuff to make it easier ; instead the only changes in years was all the stuff making commotions and scandals.
It’s like they purposefully exist in a frozen tech made years ago and innovation is not something helpful to their business model.
The enshitification and out of touch culture came from a deeply entrenched mindset in the Reddit offices years ago
Yes but… while they are greedy MFers, part of the problem is that they did need to find a way to make the whole affair profitable, not only for that goal by itself but also so that it could be sustainable. A lot of the controversy is in how he tried to accomplish that goal, not that he needed to do so - bc any company needs to be sustainable.
Reddit is likewise far from the only tech product that has been enshittified by chasing after profits to the exclusion of all else, so there’s that too. And I’m not even going to go down the rabbit hole of how much of this chases back to some changes in USA governmental policies at the time (Republicans were in charge of basically everything in ~2019).
Ultimately, Huffman has set himself up as the fall guy - the effigy to hold our attention and hate despite how he merely carried out the will of his masters, the venture capitalist bros behind him. So fuck spez, but also… not just him.
Though his ideas and execution of them were really fucking spectacularly BAD, so yeah, maybe him more than capitalism even. e.g. the Musk is really dumb, but then along comes Huffman who worships at the guy’s feet, thereby making himself somehow even dumber!?!?
So yeah, all their changes were designed to get profits. They didn’t work bc again they are REALLY dumb, and did not understand the slightest thing about
humanitytheir userbase, but that didn’t stop them from trying to fleece people of as much money as they could. i.e., their stupidity was only outpaced by their greed. 😞i get the same “frozen” tech feeling from google products. like, there’s issues that any dev that actually uses their own product would want to fix.
I like Lemmy’s feel. It feels much more of a community because of small size. It’s easier to catch up, like there’s not as much of a FOMO because you maybe get 1-2 new things every hour instead of having 400 posts shoved down your throat after refreshing. At least that’s how I feel
Congrats. This is my last remaining form of social media, but once I got my feed and block lists curated, it’s been pretty great here.
Yeah, I need to still need to work on it, some subs seem pretty inactive with low user engagement, but I am here to change that.
Welcome! People are kinder here, overall. You’ll find yourself less defensive, more willing to engage, less snarky, easier to be around irl - man, Reddit was (is?) toxic AF, and whether or not I came here I was definitely leaving there.
Remember to block early and often here - back there that was almost pointless bc a never-ending stream of Reddi-trolls was ready to take their place, but here that actually works!:-)
Check out !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca for many more tips. You are going to like it here:-).
Also, since you mentioned PixelFed, check out PieFed as well as a Lemmy alternative - it has e.g. “categories” of communities rather than making you find and subscribe to each one individually, so it’s a whole different style compared to Lemmy where you have to browse by All to find new content. I’m speaking to you from it right now.:-)
But either way, I find that (most of) the people here are more worth talking to than Reddit:-).
Kinder??? How DARE you. I’ll have you know I only kissed 2 puppies instead of 3 this morning
I kissed four so the universe is now back in balance and there’s nothing you can do about it.
People are kinder here, overall.
That may be because there aren’t troll bots, stoking the fires, to drum up ‘discussion’ which makes it look good to advertisers that it is an active pool of users.
Did no one see the all the bots around 2015/2016 learning on Reddit?
They would say all sorts of non-sensical stuff as they learned, until there would be a hit or two that would get responses out of people, and it would re-enforce the bot to say more things like that.
Guess what kind of stuff/topics gets a plethora of responses?
Yeah that, but also the humans there too were a bit much. The entire culture is like “entertain me, while I shit on your efforts to do so”. People (don’t) wait to speak rather than actually listen.
Here we are allowed to have an older crowd of people - who use Linux btw - and do more to step up to be the change that they want to see in the world rather than merely vent like children.
I definitely would have left Reddit regardless of whether Lemmy existed to come to or not, so I get why so many content creators left Reddit - it just became not fun anymore. (And yeah, the chasing after profits is what originally made it that way, but also the sheeple consented too.)
I deleted my Reddit back in the API debacle (well I deleted all my content, still squatting on the username since I use it else where as well)
Being here shows that there really is no reason to go back to Reddit for the default subs which are just absolutely useless karma farms. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze for niche subs, I do hope that the fediverse will grow enough to support the niche interests without falling into the enshittification pitfalls of corporate social media
Future linux enjoyer spotted
I’m a Mac kinda guy 😅
Todays Mac’s are tomorrow’s Linux machines.
sure… but we are only day 1 haha
You must be one of those IT professionals?
Congratulations. I deleted mine earlier this year and it’s been a blessing. The community I used to be a part of has become so toxic. I go check it out from time to time and I can see I made the right decision.
Just make sure to follow tge rules.
- Whatch out for tankies
- Dont mention the ex reddit
Other than that we are glad to have you. Welcome to our little(for now) corner of the internet.
I used to be a tankie lol
I used to tolerate tankies :P
Congrats on getting out of it! Questioning one’s own set of beliefs is not an easy task even for people who genuinely believe they are doing it constantly. Cool stuff.
I’m glad you’re one of the smart and brave of Reddit to try out Lemmy! Too many people over there are such naysayers towards the project.
But the joke is on the them. As Lemmy has 46.6k users, the modlogs are public, the code is open source, the platform is decentralized, every instance has its unique culture, the servers are community ran and there are numerous great third-party apps.
It’s nice over here, it’s not the same 15 questions across subs every 3 days. It’s not the same recycled stories ad nauseam. And, there’s more Gowron.
