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RULES (updated 01/22/25)
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The initial move feels a bit like you're giving up on an old friend imo. Many of us hoped reddit would change course or stop sliding towards what they've become but it's obvious now that there will be no turn around. The enshitification will continue until nothing recognizable is left.
With Lemmy and the fediverse you have the chance to make it your own and help shape it as it grows, hopefully avoiding the missteps of reddit.
Welcome to Lemmy mate. Have fun settling in to your new home.
Any suggestions? I haven’t deleted yet (1) because I already have stupid gold and (2) because I want to find replacements for some important to me subs I’m on. Fora forums are close but I’m not all the way there yet. Cheers mate.
The honest answer usually isn't what people want to hear.
Many people come to Lemmy thinking they can maintain whatever their habits were on reddit. For most people that means lurking and voting, not much else. Lemmy isn't really big enough yet for that to work unless you're only interested in the dominant topics here like linux and star trek, so people quickly get discouraged because Lemmy is "empty." As if every social media site hasn't started the same way...
For many/most of us the communities we were used to loitering in on reddit don't exsist or aren't active enough to lurk in without getting bored. That means we need to shift towards content generation/creation/sharing rather than just consumption. Not everyone is going to be comfortable doing that. It also isn't going to happen over night.
The only way Lemmy will grow and become what you/we want it to be is by sticking around and participating. For many of us that means doing different things than we were used to on reddit. Lemmy is still very much in the early stages of it's development and culture and it's up to the users to decide what kind of place it's going to be. It takes time and effort, and understanding that Lemmy is not and will never be reddit.
If people want reddit, it's still there for them. Lemmy is still forming an identity and we're all a part of it.
I kinda like the chiller vibes of the early stages of new communities. I just joined today, seems cool. I don't think I'll be missing Reddit.
Be the change you seek. I get it.
Feels more like leaving an abusive partner. There were a few nice corners with nice people in them but it feels like bots, AI and ragebait have taken over.
Yep it's got nearly as bullshit as facebook. FACEBOOK. That's something I never thought I'd see.
What helped me and my phone habits was the loss of Apollo during the API fiasco, and the immediate emergence of voyager, allowing me to simply replace the "check reddit feed" habit with "check lemmy feed".
Plus, since lemmy is less algorithms (and users) there isn't much urge to doomscroll.
I'm in the same boat from Reddit Is Fun, and I went with Sync, which in hindsight was a bad idea. Sync's creator abandoned it after getting an influx of donations. I'll have to find a new Lemmy browser soon as many of the year old formatting templates are outdated.
My personal favorite is Boost but it hasn't seen an update in quite awhile. Thunder is the leading contender to replace Boost if it doesn't update soon. Thunder is seeing very active development and has a ton of customization options to suit your needs. There are several options out there now though. Probably worth trying them all.
Voyager is nice. vger.app
Me irl too! Voyager replacement is the real deal, and I only search reddit for historical information (although less often than I used to)
New user here, that just came over because of the Voyager app. Do you know if it's made by the same person/people that made the Joey app for reddit? Similar logo/mascot and layout, my favorite part of Joey was the color coded parent/reply comments which is so much useful imo.
I just did the sign up and am having an easy time subscribing to similar communities I was browsing on reddit, and tbh I'm happy to just have an app to scroll thru memes and see updates on news stories without the constant raging and not knowing how many real people are behind the 500 comments of one post. It really does feel like what reddit was for me when I started browsing there over a decade ago on my shitty laptop, well before I ever got an app
I am on Lemmy only now because of the Luigi censorship, but I used Narwhal on Reddit since before the API fiasco and after I was happy to pay for Narwhal to keep the increasing enshittification at bay. Now I use Apollo with Lemmy and it is like the old days on Reddit, and very similar to the Narwhal experience, but with less content. We all just have to make the posts and feel assured that we will not be overrun by bots and corporate overlords.
Like everyone else, I miss what it was. Now i can’t connect with anyone there. The tone is so toxic. I largely stopped signing in last fall. It was feeling so gross. But I would still check in from time to time. With yesterday’s messages about censorship, I will not be signing in again. I don’t think it’s a coincidence this is happening at the same time as the take it down policy and changes in approach to cyber security
The switch isn't too difficult imo. I only lurk on reddit for certain communities, but much of the news/memes here are the same or better. The comment sections seem more sincere here too.
Most importantly, no ads and the ability to block users/communities/domains that you don't want to see/hear
The keyword filter also works just fine!
Welcome!
It's a weird feeling in the beginning. For me I was the same, I realized how addicted I had become to it, almost withdrawal from it. But after a while I realized what toll the constant firehose had taken on me.
You'll notice we have less here, I view it as a good thing. Less content, but it's higher quality. I check my phone less but when I do it's less mindless scrolling. There are actual good articles.
Plus as you see I can actually chat with people here, instead the insta-hate I got on Reddit.
So overall, welcome! Let us know if you need directions :)
Ugh I know. There's always been people online who just wanna fight but reddit just seems to have got nasty. The heart has gone, used to be you got random charity drives starting in comment chains and stuff like that, I've not seen that in ages.
I'm new so would you mind giving me directions? I've noticed there's duplicate communities on different instances. Some of them don't let me join or comment, is it cos I'm not a member of that instance?
Correct, not all communities are public and federated is the word. I think you're looking for, where you can join the community from any other instance. However, we do try to do those things as public and federated so anybody can join any instance. There are multiples on different instances. It's kind of up to personal preference. Which one you like. Or honestly you can join both, for example, there are multiple movies communities and I'm a part of probably three of them
I've been so disappointed with reddit over the last couple months. I put a decent amount of effort in to curate my feed so it was all low stakes stuff - hobby content, casual chats, local events, a couple help forums related to my profession. It was nice to log on for 5-10 minutes here and there and see someone's garden or read about someone documenting their pet's weight loss journey or whatever.
I can't get ragebait out of my feed any more. I block a subreddit and five more with identical depressing and/or rage-inducing content take its place. It's boring and it's bad for my brain. I won't participate.
New here too. Welcome :)
"r/allthatisintresting" on popular posts be like:
"THE ULTIMATE CHILD MURDERER. Is sentenced to only one day in prison, judge says it's fine enough punishment for murdering 900 kids"
"local man burned alive by the cartel dies in hospital"
I can't get ragebait out of my feed any more. I block a subreddit and five more with identical depressing and/or rage-inducing content take its place.
The way to optimize is to make a multireddit of only your preferred subreddits and check that over and over again. For example, for me, https://old.reddit.com/r/AutoHotkey+FreeGameFindings+news plus a bunch of other ones, whatever you're comfortable with and enjoy. Be highly selective about what you add to this multireddit and then Reddit becomes heaven because of your awesome filtering.
Because of my ultra-curated multi, Reddit was mostly fine, if not even excellent; I'm just wanting to leave because of its centralization and to support FOSS endeavors.
still doesn't change the annoying culture reddit has which is ultimately why I left.
I don't know what culture that is. I guess I have an extremely particular list of subs that dodges that for the most part.
Most of the content here is memes or world news. Glad to see more people joining and looking forward to more niche communities!
I'm deleting my account right now after 8 years and its kinda scary. Its good to know other people are doing it too
I feel like I'll be deleting my reddit account soon. 90% of the feed is anxiety inducing
For me the final thing was ubiquitous CCP propaganda and gaslighting even in non political subreddits
There is something very bad happening on the web and I hesitate to think about future consequences. We really need to get that EU army up and running pronto der Leyen.
Yep it's out of control. There's a lot of research showing extremist groups utilise social media to help spread propaganda, misinformation and recruit people. Cults can be political. It's really scary
It's kind of disturbing. Usually wars are something we think of as distant, then we go to the web and realize there are state actors, possibly with blood on their hands, doing social manipulation.
I got manipulated few times, maybe more times that I don't even know about. Sometimes I feel like we should turn off all the social media because we can't use them safely. Even knowing all this theoretically doesn't make it better.
One would think that if you are aware of possibilities you can use the internet but there are just tricks to human psyche that work every time and you can't really browse cat images and think constantly about some geopolitics or product placements
I know and it's scary. Lemmy seems a million times better and I'm so glad I found it
Well there is hope that Lemmy is too small thing to be worthy of such actions. I entirely avoid any news and politics groups and just read newspapers without comments. This feels like a more sane and mentally healthy approach for me because I can deal with just the news author bias. That's one person instead of judging thousands comments
The worst thing I ever done for my mental health was scrolling and participating in r/colllapse, quitting that made me much happier person almost instantly
If you want positive space you might also check tildes.net (it is actually run by old Reddit admin and it tries to reassemble Reddit from 10+ years ago)
beehaw is also very positive.
Hey, congratulations! This place has its flaws, no doubt, but it's a much improved community over what Reddit has become - especially in the past 2-3 years.
Can you elaborate?
I feel like using old.reddit and subreddits that I was following since long ago, shielded me from those changes.
I used old.reddit as well, but I noticed a marked decline in the already-not-stellar quality of comment sections and an increase in karma bots posting.
I see, I'm right now mostly check news and worldnews on Lemmy it is a bit more spread out. I wish Lemmy had an option to maybe logically combine multiple communities into one.
That still depends on which subreddits you visit. If you only go to a specific set of 20-or-so subs and never anywhere else, it's fantastic.
I'm having a hard time giving up Reddit yet. I mostly follow smaller subreddits with very niche interests and I really enjoy the community banter. Lemmy is not quite here yet, because you need a critical mass of people to make even the smaller communities feel alive. I'm really hoping Lemmy will take off so I can eventually get rid of Reddit altogether.
I had this as a mindset too until recently. I think what helped me move was realizing that interacting with Reddit was incredibly low stakes and I was only going there for hobby and community reasons.
until I sort of realized that the negative outways the positive. it sort of happened recently where I was a mod of a subreddit and people kept acting like idiots after I took a break from the role, and I realized "realistically, nobody will ever actually give a shit about my efforts here." and I took one look and left. I don't really think I lost anything by leaving besides my year old account and 20k karma but, it's superficial at the end of the day.
First comment here, doesn't look like my third party app is working anymore. I really liked it compared to the default Reddit app
Boost?
Mine too, Thankfully there's a Boost for Lemmy that I like using.
I stopped contributing to reddit after the API shit, but still lurked and saved links. Now I don't use it at all, exported my saved links so I can figure out how to curate them.
I had the habit to delete my Reddit account after a few months. I couldn't care less about history of posts, likes and so on. So I had a few dozen Reddit accounts over the past years. What strikes me is how easily the "funnel" starts to build up. In the first week you get a fresh view on how Reddit is really like, a few days later you are pulsing with like minded people, amplifying the opinions.
Reddit is still a great source for "how to", but you don't an account for that...
Yep. Was on reddit since like 2012 or 2013. Site was so different and a lot better back then. You subbed to a specific sub, you saw the shit you wanted to see. Now everything is completely overrun with politics and they're banning people for absolutely no reason.