I really do like KBin and Lemmy and the fediverse on the whole, but development is still young and the userbase still growing. KBin is still basically early access, and Lemmy is buggy. I spent alot of time in reddit and I’m feeling the pain of trying to ween myself from it. Just wanted to here community perspectives and see how other’s are taking it.
For me, I feel a bit of a sore hollow spot for what reddit used to be and watching it implode is not fun for me.
Reddit was something unique and personal to each user. Some it was new, some it was the only place to find specific tech or other advice that wasn’t corrupted by ads and algorithms on goggle and other big corporations.
Reddit was my way of disengaging from world news before I knew about anxiety, and how things could affect me and become personal even though I had no way to help world events. So I used it to personalize my mental diet, if I was creative I could sub to many craft subs like leather or metal etc, it’s where I went to get other perspectives on movies and content that I didn’t fully understand.
End of the day, is all that possible still on Reddit, kinda, but it’s going away, and they pushed me personally to leave as I could see it was becoming google/Facebook, ad algorithms to push what people pay for or get paid for. So time to reset.
Become involved, I’m way more involved and adding to discussions on the new sites I’m on. Everyone adding comments and posts and perspectives and opinions are building this up from bottom up.
You are the future, make your perspective part of the future by helping guide these new sites to something we can be proud of.Well said @Bendermember
What I liked about reddit was its “googleability”. You had a question and found an answer without reading through an endless article that winds it’s way through rephrasing your question 5 times, adds extensive biographies of everyone mentioned, the wider history of the problem and the author’s grandmother, all to pad the article and have you scroll through more adds.
But now there’s ChatGPT, so most of my “googling” can be done that way, and I don’t have to scroll through walls of puns or “this is the way” or “thanks for the gold, kind stranger”, or “take my updoot and get out”. I wonder how much of that bullshit were bots, anyway.
While I feel a bit nostalgic to leave Reddit behind, I recently realised it had become stale for me. Time to move on.
I’m upvoting your comment because you bring up great points, but I personally disagree with the disengaging from world events aspect. I’ll miss the niche subreddits that helped you solve the most random of issues, but I think reddit was far from a great place to disengage from news and the political discourse brought by news. Ever since the 2016 election cycle, I personally saw a considerable increase of posts regarding politics that came from both established subreddits and new ones that popped up (like /r/enoughtrumpspam which simply added more spam to the pile).
I think Trump’s campaign and presidency really ignited a lot of this, and while I neither like nor support Trump, I miss when the biggest disruptions were from isolated events (like the Occupy Wall Street movement or the Ellen Pao fiasco) rather than 4 years of a presidential tenure.
After years of nonsense, it all just got tiring. You can curate your reddit experience, but what happens when all the political doom scrolling finds its way into your favorite subreddits?
Kbin and the rest of the fediverse will grow, and I’m aware that the same kind of posting will find its way here, too. Thankfully the fediverse lets you subscribe to multiple communities of the same name, so maybe /m/news isn’t up one’s alley but /c/news is, for example.
I didn’t realize how shit reddit was getting until I stopped using it. The constant barrage of political shit accompanied by low effort comments/puns did a number on my happiness. I stopped using Facebook for similar reasons.
I’m glad you’re also adopting the mindset of being an active contributor. For years I also just would scroll and seldom upvote, but if we want to make “this house a home”, we need to put in the effort ourselves! I look forward to seeing how this all plays out. So far, I am very optimistic. I hope you find your niche interested here sooner than later!
Some of it was also political activists or people paid to actively work to sway opinion on social media.
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I’ve seen what 4chan can cook up, so I think it’d hardly be fair to call you a loser for having the gaul to make friends online haha
Joking aside though, it really does sucks so much, and while I can’t say I built up friends on Reddit, I do I sympathise with your situation.
There are so many people I used to know from my time at Uni, but years later I now only keep contact with a handful on a semi-regular basis, because they just never reach out. It’s always me having to extend the olive-branch, and it gets tiring after a while of realising you’re the only one holding things up.
I’m a rather home-body person myself, so I can also sympathise with not wanting to lose the friends you have for fear of being unable to make more.
I’m hopeful to talk to all sorts of new people here, as everything does feel more personal than Reddit for the most part. Also given the size of the community I do find myself running into people I’ve chatted with before to gain more insight from. In fact, I vaguely recognise your avatar, so we might’ve even spoken before too haha
I found similar when I left my country of birth, that many people don’t keep in touch, even if I tried to maintain a connection. Out of sight, out of mind.
What did you bond over with your friends?
It’s a common thing for people who move (country) as kids. Sociological term is Third Culture Kid.
Third Culture Kid
Wow just knowing that it’s so common an experience that there’s a name for it is comforting.
Thank you so much for sharing that.
Read a book about it if you have time or a few articles.
I read the big one (Pollock, Van Reken) and it was honestly scary how well it described some parts of my personality, and the challenges I was dealing with in my life.
Thanks, added it to my to-be-read list. My preference is fiction these days, but I’m not above mixing in an academic book every now and then
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That sounds nice. Similarly I’ve been in a book club for about two years now that was started on Reddit.
Although we haven’t read a book in months, we still meet virtually every week, so I guess we’re just friends now.
The ultimate test of these kinds of groups seems to be whether they can survive transplantation from one social medium to another. I wonder how my little book club would fare if there was a schism over using discord…
Maybe there is a board here that would help you set up something like that? It can’t hurt to look around and put out some feelers.
They have my email but none of them have reached out.
I’m going to ask the obvious- have you reached out to them?
For as good a tip as that is, and @NumbersCanBeFun should definitely try it if they haven’t (or can), it doesn’t always work.
I did the whole reaching out thing for years for those I knew from Uni, and for almost all of them I was the only one reaching out. It felt tiring holding up a relationship the other person had stopped caring about, so I ended up dropping most of them and haven’t heard anything since.
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I’m sorry. That sucks
Yeah, that sucks, but you’ve done what you could in that situation
Damn, I hope you’re better now.
I think this has taught us there should be multiple ways of getting in touch with people. Don’t put everything in one basket (in this case, Reddit). Hopefully the Fediverse will be one of many ways to do so.
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Honestly, yes. It’s a pain.
But the good news is that, due to their sudden increase in popularity, they’re likely to mature much more quickly than they would have otherwise.
I feel like someone who has just woken up from cryo-sleep or a soldier who’s finally come out of the jungle after twenty years.
The 90s were great for the most part. The Internet was free and open, and there were zillions of forums and personal websites. I call this period the Genesis of the Web.
Then, things got bad. Microsoft monopolised the Web with its shitty IE 6 browser, websites were riddled with malware and popup ads, and you needed an antivirus and an anti-adware on your PC to be safe. I call this period the dark age of the Web. Most search engines died out, and Google became the king of search.
A couple years into the new millennium, Firefox and HTML 5 came about. There was hope again. Mozilla was fighting the good fight to keep the Web open, and new Web development techniques were developed (jQuery, CSS3, Dojo toolkit, Ajax became easier, etc). As a Web developer, this period was very exciting. You just couldn’t keep up with the new stuff. Firefox’s market share kept increasing, and new websites appeared on the scene: myspace, youtube, thefacebook (basically, proto-social media). Google released their Chrome browser, and IE was dying a slow death. This was the golden age of the Internet.
Then, things got bleak. Apple released their iPhone, and Google released Android. By this time, most personal websites were gone, social media was on the rise, Firefox became less and less relevant, and by the end of the 2010s, the Web had become just a shell of itself. The ‘Web’ was now just a dozen websites owned by powerful corporations. Engagement algorithms were developed to keep people hooked, and Google analytics tracked everything. Privacy was gone for good. This is the period we are currently in. I call it Corpo Web or the Dystopian Web. Some of us did not want to participate in this version of the Web, so we lived in a separate world (what we call the small web).
Finally, someone came up with the idea of Fediverse; platforms that can communicate with each other through open protocols. Corporate social media platforms are falling apart (reddit, twitter, facebook, etc), and Fediverse is exploding. Each Fediverse instance has its own personality, and it reminds me of web rings in a way. There is always something new to discover, be it a new community or a new instance of Lemmy/Mastodon/etc.
What I would love to see though, is a way to Lemmy instances more unique (custom designs, chat system, games, etc). This would encourage people to visit other instances. Also, we should be able to categorise communities and group them together (like a traditional forum).
I completely forgot about web rings, and that’s honestly a great example. It really does feel like we’re getting a little piece of the old Internet back; spreading out and bringing back that individualized experience. And yet the connectivity of the fediverse has the potential to give us some of the good parts of the modern Internet.
A few years down the road this will probably be looked at as a transformative time for the Internet, for better or for worse. Given the negative impact of so called ‘web 2.0’ social media, I’d say getting away from it could have as far reaching positive impacts as getting tied into it had toxic results.
Yes absolutely. I miss so many subreddits so dearly, and some of them aren’t leaving reddit and I feel too guilty to go back there even though I’m a PC user. I’m really sad about everything, and I feel really lonely and awful. I’ve been super active in both the /kbin and Artemis communities, and they’re both wonderful, so I’m making new friends, but nothing’s going to fill the void truly.
Everything is not awesome :(
Go back to your Reddit friends (e: if you miss them).
I hate Reddit as much as anyone else, but why make yourself miserable because of an API change?
Stay on kbin AND stay on Reddit. Evangelize!
I think it’s largely more than an API change. It felt miserable before Spez made his choice. This most recent choice was the end of a long line of bad choices Spez made. And I absolutely don’t care to see the trainwreck of that site after it’s IPO.
I mean, it sucks, but to some extent – I had hoped not to this degree – life was going to get worse when Reddit shifted over from growth to monetization.
And I used Reddit when it was far smaller and less-featureful than the Fediverse is today (not to mention with worse uptime…it used to die on a regular basis or start acting weird as the devs worked on scaling it up early-on.). It didn’t have subreddits then, much less all the niche stuff that exists today. Riding another network through growth is okay with me.
Unfortunately, the blond piggy was right; it’ll all blow over.
Most of the people getting riled up over reddit’s antics will remain there out of convenience and/or habit.It’s like with video games. People shit on EA and other AAA developers but still preorder their games.
At the end of the day, all of the internet’s content trickles from platform to platform, it’s just a matter of where in this chain you are.
The whole social media collapse has been crushing for a recluse like myself. I mean, I might as well come out straight and say that. I’m not tactile and I don’t socialize, so the internet is my main source of communication with the outside world. I’m guaranteed to find people who share my interests, people who “get” me, people who don’t act like I came from Venus when I finally open up to them. When that all folds in on itself, or mutates into something that would make the monstrous works of HR Giger look like HR Puffnstuff, yeah, it’s kind of painful. Like living through your own digital 9/11. That sounds dramatic, and I mean it to be, but yes, losing social networks that were trusted sources of discussion has been like a sledgehammer to my mental health.
TMI, sorry. I do leave my house when needed, but it’s more business than pleasure. (There’s very little pleasure involved.)
Hey, I know what you mean. As a teen I spent a huge amount of time on the local BBS scene, before moving on to the Usenet groups, IRC, and then various forums.
I’d say don’t despair. Interest groups will find a way to congregate somehow. We did fine socialising online before garguntan social media networks, and we will continue to do so without them. There’ll be a dip in the near-future, but others will come to take the place of these social networks. They may not be huge and all-encompassing, but maybe that’s what we really need: Smaller communities tailored to more specific needs and wants.
I hear you. I spent most of fmy social time as a teenager in those new-fangled chat rooms in the mid-late nineties and I don’t think I ever really learned to socialize properly in person. Lol. That said, I don’t find the newness of this platform too daunting. I was one of the people who left Digg back in the day too.
I do miss my May 2023 baby bumps group now that I’m on maternity leave and have a lot of down time feeding the little one though. It’s not like it’s easy for me to leave the house with a toddler and a newborn even if I was to join a real life parenting social group.
Taking my daughter to organised play groups several times per week was forced upon me due to needing access to the community nurses who attended, as she needed constant monitoring of a birth condition. However, I’m incredibly glad I went, and continued to do so long after the condition ceased to need such close attention.
I made friends with several other parents, our children bonded and made their first friendships and learnt the basics of social interaction. The shared learning and support we were able to offer each other smoothed over countless daily needs and little fears. Sure, these friendships didn’t all sustain themselves long past our kids starting at their various different schools, but by that stage they had already learned so much that I could tell apart many of the children who had benefited from a similar experience and those who hadn’t.
I say all this simply to encourage you to try these sorts of groups. You might not make friends who last forever, you might not meet people exactly to your liking, but that’s life and it’s a valuable experience for the kids for that very reason. People are never more welcoming and friendly than when you have young children and need some companionship, we’re all in that same exact boat.
go to an AFK group. you can’t do it once in the next 3 weeks?
half the people there (infants) def have less social skills than you.
unless you find the “platform” of baby group to be too daunting for you.
I’ve been on Reddit for 14 years now. I honestly don’t know where else to get tailored news and discussion on niche topics, particularly ones too niche to establish a userbase here on the Fediverse yet. I expect I’m just going to be out of the loop on things from now on as I live like a hermit in the mountains.
I just set up a rss feed of all my subreddits that I still lurk. Try it out!
