Ask Lemmy

The API change, I still have RIF on my phone as a reminder of why I moved here.

API change protests. I am not giving up in just 2 days.

I used to use the official Reddit app, but you know, the more people that join the better.

I didn't care too much about API changes at first - I used an open source app on my phone, but mostly browsed desktop. Would have been fine going back to desktop only. As long as they keep the old site design around, I'd be fine to stay.

What killed it for me was the absolutely un-caring, not-budging response from leadership. I don't feel good continuing to feed the site my attention at that point.

I like quirky Foss stuff anyway, so I was already curious about Mastodon and Lemmy. But I'd always figured they'd be ghost towns. Twitter and Reddit deliberately being proudly, blatantly awful was enough to push me out to here, along with enough other folks.

I used to browse Reddit, and I was about to make an account there at one point, until one of my friends warned me that artists with certain art styles are getting banned and harassed due to mods accusing them of using AI, even in the face of proof otherwise.

If there's anything that AI image prompters cannot do that artists can, it's provide WIPs, timelapse drawings and Paint Tool SAI files. Which is why I always have them ready if I ever get accused.

I wouldn't say I switched because Lemmy isn't perfect and lacks a lot of the smaller communities that Reddit still retains, but:

1. API apocalypse. I didn't like Reddit's upper management at the best of times, but Spez showed how much of a money-grubbing snake he was.

2. Power mods. Many of them are sociopathic basement dwelling assholes who will banhammer you for breaking hidden rule #273, and then cry 'harassment' to the admins when you call them out. To be honest, the only silver lining to come out of the API purge was watching iBleeedOrange and AwkwardTheTurtle finally piss of Spez enough to get the banhammer. Fuck those guys.

3. Bots. Aside from automoderator being used to effectively censor and shadowban 'bad words' on a lot of subs, the fact that 95% of the chat requests I get are from spam accounts and e-girls mindlessly spamming their OnlyFans to every user in existence should say it all.

I left due to the abusive, lying mods over at /r/steamdeck, I got permanantly banned (reported me for harassing over and over even though I wasn't) simply for criticizing them. Eleven years, gone. But.. I wasn't even upset. Reddit is a dead site full of karma bots and abusive mods. The admins didn't even check me out, they just killed my account.

Got banned for joking that we could find out if old torture methods were real by trying them on child molesters. At the same time there was a thread about some shitty thing HP had done and 100s of the top comments were suggesting the same type of things for their executives. I appealed my ban and asked what the difference was between my comment and theirs and provided a link. All I got was a canned "fuck you". A week later all those comments were still there so I can only assume reddit admins care a whole lot about creating a safe space for child molestors. Not interested in participating on a site like that.

I've never used 3rd party apps, but I was planning to participate in the blackout in solidarity of the protest of reddit's API changes. Then greedy pig boy made statements about how it wasn't a big deal and everyone would be back, and I immediately started looking for a replacement. I do miss the super niche subs that Lemmy doesn't have nearly the population to support, but the overall experience is much better here and reminds me of ye olden days of the internet before corporations took over everything. I deleted as much as I could from my 10 year old account, but didn't delete my account itself because all that does is remove any control you have over comments that get missed for deletion.

I got permanently banned for suggesting that the fastest, most effective way to deal with someone hanging a Nazi flag on their front porch was through the ancient Nordic practice of hús-brenna. The ban ended up affecting all my electronic devices that I'd ever used to access Reddit, so that even new accounts got permanently banned within a few hours.

This was before the IPO, or banning access to their API.

Multiple reasons. I first started on Slashdot as a news aggregator/discussion forum. Also SomethingAwful, then Digg. I've moved from platform to platform as the enshittification spreads, until I've landed here. I think the fediverse has the best chance to not go down the same holes the others have. The final straw though was the API change and elimination of 3rd party applications.

Death of third party apps

Reddit just banned me, a moderator, for fighting bigotry just because one of my responses to bigotry looks like bigotry itself in a vacuum. The rest of the mod team is appealing for me but this could be the last straw.

I do 5x more mod actions than the second place mod so the community right now is headed to the dump.

I was kicked off Reddit for criticism of Israel

The API changes were the starting point but it was when Spez said something along the lines of "Meh, all these annoyed users will come back"

A year later and I haven't been back and have no plans to.

Their IPO was my line in the sand.

It just got too busy and corporate for me. The pace of Lemmy is better and more manageable, and I believe its structure is more resistant to commercialization.

Bots

Commercialization

Too much mainstream marketing honestly

I noticed that reddit stock has went up a lot and almost doubled. That shit company somehow managed to make everyone believe they have a future.

I left from Reddit after the AMA with u/spez and over the API. I knew at that point he wasn’t relenting on the third-party apps and the loss of access for me personally, but mostly for the deaf and blind community, showed me that the CEO had no intention of putting accessibility over profit. I was an Apollo user and I was looking for an alternative while continuing to browse Reddit - using them as a resource, as I always had - and I was seeing censorship abound. Reddit was blocking mentions of alternative sites and blocking discussion about Spez, which just solidified my decision.

I used those last few months of Apollo to help with the protests (John Oliver in /pics) while exploring other options (I started with Mastadon simply because they had an app). When that was over, I went full fediverse and never looked back (okay, I did participate in the r/Place that they ran soon after to contribute my pixels to “fuck spez” one last time).

Got banned because I approve of people killing Nazis before the Nazis try to kill them. Why was I contributing even shitposts to a site run by far-right lunatics? It was always a struggle to get blatantly racist subreddits banned, but if someone suggests killing Nazis is a good idea they are on it.

They banned me

It’s full of trash comments. I spent too much time arguing over obvious facts. High ranked comments often have nothing to do with the content of the story. It’s become too popular.

I got a lifetime ban on all accounts for no reason. It made me want to use a platform that isn't corporate controlled. Lemmy fit the bill. No power tripping mod can ban you from all of Lemmy. At most you get kicked off their instance which is fine.

I also generally hate corporations and capitalism so using non-corporate alternatives is always nice.

Not sure how many knew about "Compact Mode", but when that quit so did I. Was once as simple as appending ".compact" to the end of a Reddit URL to switch to a nice, simplified interface without ads.

Reddit API thing. After they announced the changes I was gone. I still use reddit for ~~porn~~ certain enriching activities but other than that - not really.

The way the API changes were done showed a disconnect between public best interests as a public commons and corporate interests to monetize. It implied that I was being targeted individually for monetization. I feel that anyone collecting individual data about any human and selling that data is a new form of slavery through an ownership of a part of that person with the intent to manipulate. The manipulation of information through the nondeterministic targeting of search results is a coup of a pillar of democracy and all governments of the world. The free press must apply to all information on the internet. With the monopoly of only 2 relevant web crawlers providing results directly or indirectly, there is no freedom of information in digital form. This would be no different than every news paper stand being owned by two companies a hundred years ago. Targeting the individual directly is what the API move was designed to handle. So, to me, it was an attempt to enslave my digital autonomous person. When faced with such a subtle attempt to subterfuge one's autonomy, I feel like the choice was obvious.

Everything I say here is scraped, but only the server host knows my dwell time, sensors, and various fingerprinting mechanisms. Ideally I would self host, but lack the skill and resources. This place is still hosted in a datacenter, but I'm using the API through a 3rd party, so it is even more obscure. I used reddit through an app with a scraped interface before, when that quit working, I quit using the site. Reddit proved it can only get worse, not better.

Reddit is unusable with its native app, so I used a 3rd party one (Joey). Once that was no longer possible, I migrated.