Asklemmy

9 years on Reddit and it actually felt quite cathartic to click the yes delete account! In the last 6 months that’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and now Reddit gone. I’ll miss some of the stuff but not enough to want to stay.

I have been on Reddit for the last 10 years, and a 3rd party app user for all of it. It feels like the end of an era, and that will be sad no matter what. I won't miss the vast majority of subreddits, especially the bigger ones. It's the smaller more niche subreddits I'm going to have a hard time not returning to and I'm hoping to find similar communities elsewhere.

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

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

I used Reddit a lot, but I always thought a foss alternative should exist. The thing is most don't care about if things are foss or not, so I thought nothing was going to change.

Just like with Whatsapp, Youtube, Discord, Instagram... You name it. There are foss alternatives out there that do the same thing, but most people just don't care about this issue.

Honestly, I'm glad they fucked up. We can build a strong foss community where there are no crazy CEO's or overall people that you don't even know getting rich from advertisements and shit, and no tracking or obscure algorithms / code too.

Let's hope Whatsapp goes next!

Foss is the way to go.

After going to mastadon from twitter, and now to Lemmy from Reddit, I feel like the fediverse is the future of the internet. The internet was always a very democratic place. It only makes sense it ended up this way. When people can choose a different option at the flick of a wrist it makes it hard to keep autocracies.

Right now, yeah. It had become part of my daily routine, and it's challenging. With a little effort, I'll release myself from their evil grasp.

I think a lot of us are going to be going through reddit-withdrawal/detox over the next month. It's going to be tough.

I'm sitting here having lunch and out of habit I went to open Reddit. Got confused for a moment and realised there's no more reddit for me. Was sad for a few seconds, opened Lemmy and now I'm happy again.

No. I first joined Digg and Reddit around the same time, but I rapidly came to the conclusion that Reddit was the right choice for me. I just loved Reddit's simpler and less cluttered interfaced, and the smaller (at the time) communities. Then, one day, proper Reddit became 'old' reddit, and it became clear that the end was coming. I started my search for an alternative almost immediately and now, finally, I found one. So, no, I am not heartbroken. To me, Reddit has been dying for years. And honestly, even if reddit survives, I do not want to go back. The feddiverse is a much better proposition, it is the way forward.

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

Honestly? Not really, actually I am glad things are getting mixed up again.

While twitter is slowly burning out, and with reddit just deciding to randomly self-destruct, this leaves a lot of space for this project which I find absolutely amazing.

This thing has potential to become so much more than reddit could ever become, and it feels so... Wild-west? Not 4chan style bs but like small communities can persist in a dark corner for a long time, and have less problems of exploding out of control with bots and frequent reposts...

Of course the 'main' instance is seeing some problems atm, but that'll push people away from it and toward smaller instances.

This is going to be great, I want to be a part pf this journey

Sure, but here's the thing. If we all just moved to another centralized system, we'd just be setting the timer for the next heartbreak. It's a matter of when, not if.

Lemmy's growth will be slow. It may even stagnate. But, unlike Orkut, Friendster, Google+, etc. it can't be taken away from us. lemmy.ml might even shut down, but the Fediverse will always be here in one form or another.

With how good the third party apps were, probably yes, to be very honest.

I love the browser version of lemmy but the app available simply isn't good enough. I hope the third party reddit app devs make one for lemmy as well!

Nah. I never liked using centralized monoliths like Reddit and other social media sites but stayed there due to lack of alternatives. I'm glad to see a federated network like Lemmy getting enough activity that I can ditch Reddit.

I've been a heavy forum user for well beyond half my life, and the social media boom ruined that whole world such that all I really have now is reddit, so I'm pretty upset about it honestly. I'm sure it'll eventually be fine, but the uncertainty sucks right now.

I'm used to the shit I do online eventually being replaced by something else that's better, as I eventually forget the old thing exists for a while. This is a much more harsh ending to Reddit, so I'm really hoping Lemmy becomes all it can be with a healthy community.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not at all, I wanted to leave reddit since Tencent bought their shares. Lemmy seems almost ready now. Good enough not to look back.

Yes Reddit was great before it betrayed its users with a level of discourse and creativity not seen anywhere on the internet

@Acetamide Reddit has been pretty terrible for years, I'm excited rather than sad to see their demise.

Totally agree. My reddit account is 12 years old, and I was only just now starting to gain confidence that there would already be a sprawling community for a new topic I found. I know it will take a long time to get that feeling again, but it's also refreshing to see the fantastic discussions on this platform.

I think it's exciting witnessing this platform take off almost literally overnight. The past few days I've been trying to figure out how lemmy actually works with little success. Tonight though it's actually clicking, there's actually content and discussion.

I remember the "narwhal bacons at midnight" phase of reddit when the great digg migration took place. It took years for the geocities from the 90s vibe of reddit to turn into the community it became. Content posts were so few and far between, at first, that I wasn't sure the site would last. Over time the 3rd party apps and general openness of the original dev team made it worth using but slowly, the bigger the site became, the bots and meta comments (and truly awful mods) kind of took over the main subs. The niche subs weren't valuable enough for it to be worth that kind of manipulation, so they were great (at many still are to a large extent).

It's a sad reality that I've watched evolve having been online for the rise of the web. the enshittification of commons seems to be the trend in every network as far as I can tell. That's the problem with network effects i guess.. You need people to have a network, but people are greedy. The more people in the network, the more tempting it is to try and exploit, which makes it lousy for the network. Too far, and the value of he network sinks and the people leave (digg, tumblr, slashdot, etc.). I wonder though, if Aaron Swartz had been around, if he would have been able to keep reddit more aligned with the original vision? Tragic we'll never know.

*edit: an even better deep dive, I hadn't read until lately, the takes the history of enshittification back to the roots - https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

Yes but I think more from a familiarity standpoint (10 year old account). I had my routine of subreddits to visit. I also liked the centralization on content.

This new federation of sites is going to take a bit of time for me to figure out. I used the reddit app and was ok with it. What actually pissed me off the most was the callousness of the admins. Fuck that.

Absolutely. Most of my 20s and 30s I've been on reddit. It was game changing for the early web. I decided today that I'm going to delete all my previous comments, posts, and accounts. It's time to move on.

I am not sad. It started to feel a bit like a bad addiction. The huge increase in casual users also brought a whole bunch of corporate accounts running heavy PR activity on reddit, and quality of discussion has tanked, probably from a lot of bots commenting.

I stayed on Reddit a lot for support forums that were prone to brigading attacks. I know how hard the mods were working to keep the spaces constructive. Reddit is not only trying to sell my attention as a commodity they own, but also under appreciating the mods volunteer hours for why the site was worth it.

Kind of cautiously optimistic at this stage, Reddit has been going steeply downhill for the last few years - if the "blackout" does nothing for Reddit then maybe it could succeed in drawing attention to alternatives.

In a way I'm a little sad but I'm also hopeful. I started on Reddit 13 years ago and it was a very different place than it is now. I liked it better then, and I think I'm sad and will miss it for what it was, not what it is. I'm hopeful for a fresh start here on Lemmy where it feels like I'm getting back to the actual conversation with other users, which is what I miss about the current Reddit. There's very little conversation there anymore, so much of it is just pictures and jokes and bots.

I miss how easy it is to find everything, even things that are very niche. Yes i'm talking about porn stuff

I guess it's Lemmy's turn to experience the eternal September effect. At least the "New Platform" is better resilient to greed this time. Long live ~~Digg~~ ~~Reddit~~ Lemmy!

I wouldn't really consider myself a "refugee".

I've been feeling like the internet has been become a more isolating and nonconstructive place for a long time, and I have been following the fedverise & other projects for a while, hoping that we might be able to build something better.

I am interested to see where things go.

I'll miss the r/place

Joining discords and forming alliances with complete strangers over a few pixels was quite a good time

I'm really hoping some of my smaller communities focused on specific novels or games make the leap over.

Nah, they were just a company after all. The strongest feeling I get is that it's just a bummer because I've grown to depend on the platform so much and now I've got to try and adapt.

At the same time, as this thing that was previously an interesting little curiosity on a corner of the web grew to be a big time suck and addiction, the dopamine hit returns and actually helpful interactions I was getting from Reddit were diminishing anyway so when there was finally a convenient push to make me try harder to either find an alternative or just ditch it, I was strangely grateful.

I do feel like I'm losing something that was very useful resource and which also filled a need, albeit one that it created in the first place, but at the end of the day, it's just a forum. I can't really feel betrayed or heartbroken by an entity that was only ever intended to make money and had no obligation to my approval.

I'm dissapointed, i loved reddit but seeing them go and make the changes i didn't like. It was heartbreaking for me, i loved Reddit but The Reddit of the Past is not the Reddit of today

I feel like it's a break up with an abusive partner. I'm relieved but also sad.