Reddit has been in decline for over 10 years. It has been slowly getting worse and worse. I have been seeking a replacement for a long time.
About three and a half years ago I heard about Lemmy and made an account to check it out. Promptly forgot about it for a few years until reddit pissed me off again.
Wasn’t Reddit openly okay with racism, homophobia and sexism until like 3 years ago?
They're still okay with all of those things. They just got better are pretending they are not. For example, if you say something obviously sexist, you will be called out and downvoted. But if you say something sexist against someone that the hivemind already decided they don't like, then it's A-OK to be sexist.
See: Amber Heard v. Johnny Depp.
Because his PR team was aces, it's apparently totally okay to say derogatory, sexist shit about her.
She's not a good person but Jesus Christ neither is he. Celebrity culture is the worst.
Pretty sure they're still openly okay with them. Not the reason I was looking to leave, though. Unlike a lot of people, I wasn't scared of the Lemmy developers politics.
Racism, sexism and homophobia is not “politics”, but okay 😂
What do you mean by “being going downhill for 10 years” then?
I think you're misreading me. Racism, sexism, and homophobia weren't the "politics" I was referring to, because you're right, those aren't politics, those are people being trash. I mean the Lemmy developers being socialists/communists didn't deter me from making an account here, because I'm not some capitalism worshipping pigboy. Their hard-left politics (the kind that led them to banning transphobic EMPRESS) are not scary to me, because I'm not a racist, sexist, homophobic douchebag.
As for Reddit and its decline. Reddit has been managed by State actors for a long time. At least since 2013ish.
Example:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.5644
This is far from the only research paper around controlling discussions online produced by Eglin Air Force Base. They were the "most reddit addicted city" because they're trying to massage the message into what they want it to be. They flood the site with persona management software and bots to influence the perception of what "people's opinions are."
If you're in any way a leftist, this alone should have been enough reason to pack up and bail on it, because they are openly going out of their way to try minimize and hide voices like yours.
EDIT: Here's another paper on the subject from EAFB, this is the one I 'member from long ago: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
The great reddit exodus of 2023 brought me here
spez
The phenomenal mod of @letterboxed@lemmy.world made a post on the subreddit letting us know that they were making a community on here because of the reddit insanity. Came over and joined same day and really haven't looked back since. Lemmy is amazing, and all the best parts of what reddit great, without the bull.
Permanent Reddit ban
After the start of the reddit API protests I stopped using reddit, except for occasionally checking r/savethirdpartyapps and similar subreddits.
On the subreddits I found that the creator of boost for reddit(the client I was using) was making boost for Lemmy. From there I searched for Lemmy on the google play store and then on google, where I found the join Lemmy website
Participated in the blackout protest and simultaneously spun up my own Lemmy instance for a play. Decided I liked it so much (and u/spez was being a pigheaded tool) so went back and deleted all my Reddit posts and comments, before deleting my account itself.
Haven't looked back. I've (re)discovered the joy of balancing my time with other hobbies and passions, rather than endlessly scrolling Reddit.
Was sick of reddit and how happy they were to coddle nazis.
Went to the first place big enough to sustain conversation.
The excuse was the 3rd party API shenanigans on Reddit. The real reason occured, as I expanded my stay here, and realised that without Federated Social Media and Open Source Software, humanity will turn into a neo-feudal barbaric age of cruelty sooner than later
I used to use RiF (Reddit is Fun). Then it died. I searched for an alternative to Reddit.
I'm so sad that RIF's creator decided to move over to tildes instead of lemmy. I would pay a lot of money for RIF on lemmy. Not that I dislike Voyager. It's great. It's just not what I used for the past 8 years.
The catalyst was of course the API thing. First contact when r/mujico (a more casual and hornier r/mexico) shutdown due to many differences between them vs Reddit and moderators of other Mexican subreddits. mujico in Lemmy was born as a results of those conflicts
Curiosity
Tbh for me the third party client thing was just the cherry on top of the constant barrage of corpo fuckery in general, plus the knowledge of reddit's IPO and inevitable decline with the way things were headed for a while.
I'm already balls deep in FOSS and started dipping my toes into the fediverse as a whole, so switching off Reddit for me didn't hurt in the slightest. It felt good. All spez did was give me the reason I was looking for to finally pull the trigger.
Sync. I moved to kbin from reddit, but missed having a convenient app and was a longtime reddit sync user, so once the app released for lemmy I moved again.
I jumped ship when Joey for reddit was discontinued. I downloaded connect first and now I'm solidly in the Sync camp haha. Loving it so far but like anyone else O miss the community structure.
Not enough content that I’ve found on mastodon. Twitter signal to noise ratio is destroyed now. And of course Apollo ceasing to work.
That dumb mother fucker u/spez
I used reddit exclusively in the browser, but the admins declaring their empty box full of free labor would not tolerate the slightest backsass from that unpaid workforce was a sign to head for the exits.
Not aided by how many communities there (and here) think "be nice or else" is a sane policy. Appropriate behavior often involves telling someone they're being an asshole and they need to stop. If moderators want to be the only ones who get to do that... they better be on that shit immediately and always. Otherwise the rule just shields deliberate abuse from conversational rebuke.
A community about knitting can expect "friendly." Politics are different. If you expect political discussion to be both polite and constructive, sometimes you are mistaken. If assholes can keep repeating 'well I don't see the problem!' in the face of repeated explanation, and you don't let people speak like adults in the face of that childish trolling, those assholes are who the forum is for.
I was already entertaining the idea of a Lemmy switch after they announced the imminent death of my beloved RiF. Lemmy was mentioned many many times in the 3rd party app threads discussing the api changes.
They went ahead and hastened my transition by permabanning me (and two of my alts) for "report abuse" since I dared to regularly report all the obvious spam bots that filled so many subs. Meh. I could have made more alts but really just didn't give a fuck at that point. Sure hope Spez's pedo ass enjoys his already failing IPO.
I have been perma banned twice on reddit and said fuck it. Also chapo got closed so i eventually saw hexbear and jumped ship
The Free Software
I heard about Lemmy with the Reddit debacle but didn't think much of it. Then I got a Pixel 7 Pro to run GrapheneOS on and while searching droidify I found Voyager and thought I should check out Lemmy.
Its taken some effort figuring out how this shit works but I think I'll stick around for a bit
Ex-Apollo user. I've witnessed how centralized systems are inherently fragile. One asshole in the c-suite (e.g. spez) can fuck the whole thing up.
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