For me it feels like breaking up with someone after many years. At the same time, I feel a bit dirty mentioning the name in the post title.
Actually I feel excited, because Lemmy has sparked a new interest in news aggregators and the fediverse and I’m enjoying my time here a lot.
I agree, it feels a bit like the internet in the early days, where you can find mindblowing new things just around the corner with a single click
Exactly! And without being called names for asking questions or interacting with people.
Yup and no big corps were tracking us.
@mrmanager @Acetamide excited for this decentralization of user information! Is Lemmy.today accepting registrations?
Absolutely, I would be happy to get more users. It’s a decent server too with nice speed.
Fully agree, I’ve been TOO excited since I found out about Lemmy’s existence. I can’t wait to see how it progresses with so many people joining. :-)
Agreed! Reddit was just becoming a karma farming center. Honestly, it’s been nice to burn it all to the ground and start over
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I joined Reddit during the digg exodus. Before digg I was into fark and before fark, something awful.
It’s good that things die. it’s where new mediums come from. It also keeps the power with the user. It’s an important part of the internet life cycle.
I went from digg to Reddit during that mass exodus and will be doing the same from Reddit to Lemmy. It is a little bittersweet seeing what Reddit was 10+ years ago to what it’s become, but I’m excited for the future and to see what becomes of Lemmy, kbin, etc.
A little bit. What I hate is losing the communities related to my hobbies. Reddit is/was very very helpful for me. Finding new music, finding new games, discussing movies and TV, learning about weird movies or cult shows, sharing my stuff to people that find it cool… It was 11 years of that. I needed that site, so many very helpful posts. I hope whatever comes next is better. For now I’m here, waiting to see what happens.
I think it will hit harder when I want to search for something on google and have to avoid adding reddit onto the end.
It’s so frustrating that I often have to do this just avoid getting a lot of spam sites from google when I’m searching for something niche. I feel like the internet is getting progressively worse for user experience.
I would like to say we could just use another search engine, but what made Google top dog was because it hadnt succumbed to advertisers in a bloatware way until now. Everything on the internet is just bloat now, unfortunately.
Everything on the internet is just bloat now, unfortunately
Weirdly, Microsoft is the one company that seems to be trending in the right direction (granted, with many, many missteps along the way). Or maybe they’ve just kept walking while most other tech companies race to the bottom
Bing Chat is great
Time will help that at least. The reason google links to reddit is there were great discussions there. With time lemmy (or another federated instance) will likely take its place.
I went to results for reddit because I could see people interacting about the question. This looks to have that same allure.
TRUE
I hate reddit. But it feels like the library of Alexandria burning down (yea I know). All those google search results and educational subreddits that are shutting down forever, and because they are too small reddit won’t force open them again.
A lot are in the pushshift archive, but that cuts of at 2022. Also, it doesn’t include a lot of the smaller subreddits.
I have had my PC running 24/7 with multiple VPNs to avoid rate limits downloading as much as I can before the API dies, but with some blackouts moving forward a day I have already missed a few.
Like many others, I would often add “reddit” to the end of my searches to get better results, half the websites on web searches now are either AI generated, copies or are completely AD ridden websites that ask you to turn off your AD blocker.I think this is honestly the biggest issue. Web search has been garbage for years, with legit the only saving grace being Reddit users sharing their knowledge. This is gonna have a horrible effect on producing good search results.
Totally agree. I feel like this is the equivalent, to some degree, of Stack Overflow just suddenly going away. The history needs to be preserved, somehow.
Is there anything in the Fediverse that is like a Stack Overflow clone? Might be time to start working on the backup plan for those big websites that do not show a sign of going away yet to avoid the rush when they inevitably do.
People have been joking lately about productivity suddenly increasing as a result of the Reddit blackout, but honestly? That loss of information is probably going to result in a loss of productivity in some cases.
Because yeah, in the nightmare scenario where both Reddit and Stack Overflow were to disappear, a lot of programmers would be at a complete loss.
It’s valuable knowledge with how-to’s that made me create an account there. I learned plentiful with the people that cared to share.
Most i implemented into my daily life & conditions have become favorable for me.
It’s unfortunate that Reddit Company have refused to collaborate with its users, since years back. Otherwise we would have seen their web & mobile app develop/ innovate in great ways. But they have chosen one limitation after the other. Slowly over the years.
Reddit has answered almost every question I’ve ever had for years. The potential loss of all the knowledge is my greatest concern.
i getcha, but it was people who did that. it’s kind of hard to shut us up, we’ll answer more questions wherever we are
most knowledge has a shelf life anyway
how exaclty does this pushshift work? I downloaded some zsts from it but what do I do with them?
The file you downloaded is a compressed JSON file, it’s not something you can really just look at. But it contains all the data needed to build a nice UI around.
I don’t know what OS you are on but on linux you can runzstd -d -c file.zst | jq .and it will print everything in the file. It’s not really readable though. Also it doesn’t have any of the media content, only the text
The Archive Team has been working on reddit for a while now. I’ve had six workers running since imgur slowed down. If you can spare a little bit of computing power we could use your help! You can learn more here:
Subreddits are still private but there data isn’t lost so the knowlege loss isn’t irretrievable mods from the subreddits will be able to transfer knowledge from Reddit to Lemmy
That assumes the mods do. I fear reddit will turn into another tinypic situation. even if it isn’t an image host there will be pages of answers on forums and stack exchange pointing to dead reddit links. The fustration of finding a 10 year old forum post of someone having the same issue as you only to have the only answer point to a dead link is incredible.
Yes. I loved Reddit for a LONG time. They started to crumble in my opinion when the added these Snooavatars, which later turned into a NFT scheme. I never bothered with these. The promise of the website was awesome though. Being able to follow interests and communities instead of people was a completely new concept, which I had never seen before. Now it feels like the corporate greed has finally completely taken over.
Time to jump ship.
It’s that exact reason why I could never get into twitter or Instagram beyond personal friends. I want to follow topics, not people.
I had a ton of subreddits curated on my homepage, a lot of which were rather niche. I’m not super optimistic that most of them will be replaced, which is sad.
Reddit hasn’t really been the same for a long time anyways. I liked the feel of Reddit in the old days better, and this kind of has the same vibe
I actually feel more relieved. It has become toxic and dominated by bots. As soon as a real person posts anything, it’s immediately down voted
I’m enjoying Lemmy much more. Reminds me of the internet of old.
Reddit was always at its best in the smaller communities that were focused on a more narrow interest. Eg. The ones dedicated to a particular TV show, a particular type of humour, a particular game, a particular fandom, etc.
I think it will take time for Lemmy to develop enough that those sorts of communities can succeed.
It’s interesting, too, to see how small the subreddits need to be to maintain that community feeling. I helped found a political subreddit 9yrs ago; a non-partisan US state news & discussion subreddit. Political communities tend to be pretty spicy for obvious reasons, but when we had like maybe less than 500 sub (so maybe like <100 actually active users), there was a nice sense of community, even though people of different political persuasions would argue and debate. I’d see people tend to have fairly civil discussions. They’d chit chat and joke around in less controversial threads. It wasn’t always rainbow and unicorns of course, but for the most part, the active users played nicely together. We rarely had to bring out formal moderation tools. A simple “Hey, you two, chill out,” was usually enough to settle things. And it was like that for a few years.
As the number of subscribers and active users increased over the years, that sense of community started getting away from us. There was a lot more dogpiling. A lot more incivility. A lot more of the typical rPolitics style low-effort comments. The older active users started dropping off. Reddit tends to lean left, so the left-leaning majority started drowning out the right-leaning users. And my state is solidly right-leaning these days. Not that our sub had to be representative of the state political demographics, of course.
Today, the sub is like under 7,000 users, which is still a smaller subreddit, relatively speaking, but any sense of community is long gone.
I’ll admit, we – and especially me as head mod for most of our existence – could’ve done better to tamp down on that stuff. But I also think that that kinda thing is a natural part of growth of a community. That the sense of community tends to disappear. People can’t individually recognize and emotionally connect with that many people. It’s so easy, especially on the Internet, to simply say something mean-spirited to someone and metaphorically walk away. They may never see or interact with that person again. And if they do, do they really remember who they are?
Obviously my experience is just anecdotal. But it still makes me wonder how Lemmy (and similar sites) will deal with that. How can we maintain a sense of community, while also wanting to allow people in and grow communities?
I think the lack of sense of community occurring from both the increased size of the group and how long it’s been around lead to folks taking it for granted as a resource rather than a personal space they’re invested and involved in.
I think the same thing happened to Reddit overall - it reached a mass of size and establishment whereby the owners/admins were disconnected to the personal, special aspect of it and took it and the people for granted.
I feel the same. Just releif. Since the redesign and official app, deep down I knew where it was heading. It’s different this time (vs voat) where there is an alternative that has the spirit of why we all enjoyed reddit to begin with and without the commercialism that reddit has become. It’s early, surely lots of challenges ahead for this idea but the decentralized nature I think will be very interesting and will allow for the more mainstream community to create a pleasant experience for those that wish it. Also, Lemmy is need of some technical polishing and ease of use, bug fixes, etc. Instances will also need funding by providing transparency and decent moderation. It’s like reddit but without trying to monetize your content. Lol
It’s all very exciting!
While I hope Lemmy/Kbin takes off (heck, I’d love early internet forums to come back in style) and kicks off a second internet renaissance, the imminent collapse of Reddit legit is giving me anxiety. Hope y’all don’t mind if I vent a bit.
Firstly, there are a lot of “niche” communities on Reddit, mostly dedicated to individual games and the like. The kind of thing where fanart, announcements and discussions happen. In the short term, I don’t see them surviving the collapse. And if they do, they’ll probably move to a not-great platform like Discord or whatever Facebook comes out with.
Secondly, with SEO optimized AI generated garbage topping search results, Reddit has become an important reference when looking for reviews and opinions on things. As well as that, it has become somewhat of an archive of internet culture in a way. With subreddits moving to black out permanently and a push for users shredding their own data, there’s a very real chance that all of this content will be lost forever.
I guess I’m still in the denial phase. I haven’t technically left reddit yet. I guess during the blackout, then I’ll really know how I feel without it. I’ll definitely have to leave once RIF stops working.
I’m just having a really hard time getting used to kbin and Lemmy.
No, actually, I used reddit just to pass time, never really engaged in the community, and without this whole debacle I wouldn’t have found out about lemmy and the fediverse as a whole, which is really exciting and a new part of the internet (for me) that feels like a breath of fresh air after years of everything being so centralized around very few companies, I’m getting a vibe of the internet from 15-20 years ago, exploring the wild west of the internet.
Kinda. But I don’t care about Reddit itself. I care about a few communities and the people from there. I know a couple of them are here. But we are scattered and trying to figure out this site.
Time will tell if this sticks or not. I pretty much hope so.
If someone finds a Lemmy equivalent to r/Grimdank or r/40klore please let me know.
Yeah same. I have no real love for Reddit itself, but it has so many subreddits dedicates to very specific interests. They’re so easy to find and they can turn into such a treasure trove of information. I’ll stop using Reddit as my “main” social media, but I’ll probably still use it just for certain subreddits.
I also am looking for a replacement Grimdank. May the Machine God guide us to a new grimdark shitpost repository.
Yeah that’s basically how I feel too. There are/were some really good communities and content on there, but those things existed in spite of reddit as a platform, which seems determined to just keep being as hostile to its users as possible.
If it does end up going under it’s 100% because it did it to itself, so I don’t really have any sympathy for them over that tbh.
I’ve only found minipainting so far, but I’ll look out for 40k specific too
Haha, I found this comment because I was searching for a r/40klore replacement. I’ve spent a huge amount of time reading stuff there; such a great community.
I think replacements for the niche subs like that are going to be hard to get off the ground, especially in the early stages. Let me know if you find one, or start one, though, and I’ll be doing my part to subscribe and post immediately!
I’ve never ventured over to the Bolter and Chainsword forums (https://bolterandchainsword.com/), but I might have to look into it.
I feel just a bit heartbroken but at the same time I really love the concept of lemmy.
I’m just a little afraid that lemmy is just a short-lived alternative and the people go back because not everything is working perfect right now.
I do. Started using reddit in 8th grade and now I’m finishing my masters. So it’s been a while. Over the years, it has changed a lot and I’ve been pretty dissatisfied, to say the least. It used to be a great place for insightful and more-or-less friendly conservation, there was a sense of community. It hasn’t been that way in a long time, so I’m ready to move on. Still sad but it’s for the best.
I’m hoping Lemmy will have the same spirit as reddit had when I created an account all those years ago. I’m staying optimistic.
