Honestly, reddit drove me away. I got tired of being hounded by engagement bots asking inane questions, and in the wake of reddit going public, the comment police regularly were nitpicking my comments, reading into them intolerance that simply wasn't there. I was just sick of it all. Reddit has a much bigger userbase, but lemmy is more friendly. There are occasions where it would be nice to post something niche and have a robust discussion, which requires a site with more mass appeal, but I'm not interested in all the drawbacks of dealing with reddit.
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That is what happened to me.. the bots banned me within a minute for a metaphorically based - though salty - post. 14 years.
Thing is, I noticed a change in the algorithm not too long after the IPO since my homepage started in with more rage-bait subs and many were ones I'd not visited or even heard of. It was subtle but also kinda disheartening. I decided to manually delete all of what I could and as I was going through the posts I noticed that the art subs I used to go to had all but disappeared on my home page.
I used to go to photoshopbattles all the time and as I was scrolling my home pages, it was nowhere to be seen. Nor was AppleHelp, VintageApple or MacPro..
It's a bummer because reddit used to be really cool. It's like when you discover a cool little cafe or something that you love going to. Eventually more and more people discover it, and it becomes a bit more crowded, but you still go. Then it gets written up in some magazine or something, and the crowd becomes nuclear. It becomes a tourist trap flogging merchandise, and they turn it into a chain, with the food semi-preprepared for mass consumption. The experience sucks and what was a special spot is ruined.
I never really posted on reddit. The apps I used to lurk all stopped working to one degree or another, and more and more of the content on reddit is just bots karma farming with AI slop and reposts.
Made it pretty easy to stop going there.
What are you missing?
My best is: just stop. Yes, Lemmy is like the rural version of Reddit. It’s slower, more niche communities, and not a lot of people making content. But screw Reddit. I was a 15 year reader. They’ve destroyed it for corporate greed. I’m all set.
spite, anger.
Reddit banned all the subreddits I actually enjoyed so I stopped participating altogether. It’s helpful to recognize that reddit’s structure leads to total stagnation in the content. I haven’t been active for years, but I still end up on a reddit thread from time to time to get answers to questions that Google should be answering (that’s another topic altogether) and I see the same stake jokes being made, the same arguments being had, the same mediocre insights from the same dull people, and it makes me so glad that I left. I don’t begrudge younger people going through the process of figuring out how to engage with the world, but I also don’t want to participate.
It was quote easy tbh. It imoroved since the First Wave actually.
Also people are more honest and caring from my pov. That doesnt gonfor everyone, but thats society.
It feels more Home than what reddit became.
It was straight up half broken during the APIcalypse when I came over.
What part are you struggling with? Not enough content? I get it, but also that's a feature. If you dislike centralized platforms more than you want to rot your brain, it takes zero effort.
The API blackout. I said when blackout I'd quit, and I did.
If you're feeling the itch for more social media just keep it off the corp owned stuff, piefed, mastodon, etc. If it's for news and current events rss feeds are great for that.
my itch is for thoughful debate and discussion... usually on place I find it anymore is podcasts. i miss being able to participate in it, but reddit was great for it years ago. social media basically is anti-thoughtful because it all designs to appeal to raw emotions and bias confirmation.
If you're using the app, uninstall it. Delete your bookmarks, etc. Make it more than an idle thought to be on the site.
Use the time you would normally spend doomscrolling on reddit to do something productive on Lemmy. Look for new communities to join, reply to posts you would normally just upvote, post something to a community that could use a boost, etc. The place is far from empty but more interaction really helps to drive growth and build friendships.
See you around mate. 💚
I just don't care for Reddit, or it's redditisms.
Just by keeping at it. Lots of posts don't get a lot of comments, seems like a lot of lurkers. My front page only has one post with >10 comments and the rest are at 3 or fewer. But Reddit is still in the top ten more-visited web sites in the world. So can't expect the same number of comments compared to the bigger subs there.
Join a bunch of communities that you may be interested in to fill up your feed with a bunch of stuff to read. That way, if you want to take a break and read stuff, you can look here rather than on Reddit. You can look for communities here that are a close match to what you had on Reddit. Over time, you can dial them in and hopefully not feel the need to go back to Reddit.
I never go back and just to read Reddit. I only go there if a web search looking for something in particular takes me there.
The API charade was more than enough to push me over. At that point, I was banned multiple times because that platform had become a cesspool of its own toxicity. You just couldn't escape it for long, no matter where you posted. When you got people dogpiling you just for complaining about work in a subreddit where it is completely warranted and acceptable to do it in, then that's a problem.
I just made the account, subscribed to all the equvalent groups and nothing else
Lemmy just isn't that good, you need other stuff too. I highly recommend finding independent niche website forums (the old school ones) for your interests and joining them. These are WAY less likely to have bots (unless political based) than Lemmy, Reddit, etc etc. They have real people, sometimes parroting bot stuff they saw elsewhere, but they are at least real and you can talk to them. And you get to know them because normally there's only like 50 active users on those websites at a time anyway. But damn do those 50 people know a lot about vaccuums, or trains, or magnet fishing or whatever the dedicated topic is for that site. It's the most unfederated you can be
It’s been 2 years on Lemmy for me. I was on Reddit for 12 years prior.
I never looked back. I didn’t have a hard time at all really. Comment sections are so nice here usually. I only spend maybe 30 mins on here daily and never run out of content. But I’m a reader. I read articles and comments fully so I only get through a dozen posts or so.
What are you having a hard time with?
Reddit kept being shittier and shittier, the people got dumber and dumber, and I kept getting more and more worried about being about to say what I really wanted about magas being fucking terrorists. Then they killed third party apps, and while I tried to make it work for a little while, eventually they killed the workaround, and that was the last straw.
Fediverse/kbin/lemmy has been such a constant breath of fresh air, even if that breath continues to be bad news, that I have literally no reason to go back. The queer techie and neighbor tankies and based non-Americans just make this place so much healthier and positive in a time in history when we really need people who aren't giant assholes and who are awake at all and who make a conscious decision to at least try to do the right thing.
Getting permabanned on my main and any secondary accounts I had helped. The app on my phone I use for Lemmy makes it look pretty much exactly like the Reddit app so the only difference for me is less people which means some communities I'd like to talk to people in just has nobody in them.
I deleted my account and the app
I used to feel dread when I logged into reddit and saw that someone had replied to something I wrote. I no longer have an account there, and I even went for the nuclear option of overwriting all my old messages,
then deleting them in case they chose to restore them, because:
fuck spez
For me personally it helps that I'm on a dedicated instance for Danes, so that's kind of like a safe haven, or like a kiddie pool where it was easier to get to know lemmy at first.
I no longer dread when someone replies because most of the people here on lemmy aren't assholes. I think it's because there's this barrier to entry which filters out a lot of people, or maybe it's that the assholes are looking for fights to begin with and is therefore attracted to the biggest platforms?
For the Reddit communities that are important to me I use their RSS feeds to keep an eye on new posts though I've logged out of my account and stopped participating. All actual browsing and participation was switched entirely to Lemmy.
I didn't, really. Barely ever used Reddit to begin with. I just wanted a platform to chat and engage with every now and then, and this federated, decentralized alternative is principally superior and is a historical necessity. The reason you "struggle" is because Reddit wants to keep you trapped in its ecosystem and addicted by centralizing online communication spaces.
Already wrote this somewhere else, but might well share it here: Reddit is a cesspool US deep state cut-out propaganda and censorship platform like all of these US-based platforms are, they answer to the US state dept and empire and we all know it. Doesn’t matter if it’s META, X or Reddit (and fuck, Google and YouTube obviously) - they all follow the same line. They’ll crack down on leftist subs, even r/russia due to the official US position, yet keep racist Western subs around (like r/europe) and other liberal shitholes of all kinds I don’t give a shit to even name or remember, even fascist subs and of course the genocide apologists on r/“israel”.
Got permbanned last year for saying tthat NeoNazis like Stonetoss aka Hans Kristian Graebner should be named and shamed. Tbh fuck that place. Reddit admins are Nazi sympathizers.
Signed up for Lemmy, participated in things I was interested in.
If you're that addicted to Reddit just stay there. I hate this "please beg me to stay" crap that goes on pretty frequently.
I went from full lurker to participant since I felt like I'm not completely drowned out by others. That made it more fun, since Lemmy all feed is pretty small relatively speaking and lurking gets boring if you're expecting an endless feed of random junk. Plus, since it's small, you can also feel like you're contributing to the Lemmy community, since without your comments and posts, it won't exist.
Although get to the bottom of the all feed and things get wild.
The way I switched was getting banned from Reddit for 7 days wrongly. It then took me two days or 3 days to get unbanned and for them to apologize for the original band. By then I said fuck it and decided to come over here and search for alternatives since I've been on Reddit for like 16 years now or something like that and it's getting a little old and repetitive. Then fortunate part about this place is that there's not enough post and so it's a lot of repetition. But it also allows me to go visit other sites because there is so much repetition here.
don't worry. if you go back to reddit you'll get banned again in a few months anyway for the same reasons.
this place is rapidly become reddit though... same folks who who just want to harass and ban anyone whose comments they disagree with. good news is here you can see someone falling you around downvoting all your comments and block them.
at least people aren't sending me PMs constantly on this site about how i should die and/or trying to get me to sub to their onlyfans. for now.
I miss the finance communities on reddit. But everything else I looked into on reddit I can mostly find here. I also put the effort into posting when I can't find an existing topic. You have to have a pioneer mentality here to establish your community.
Build a community about something you love! It takes little effort. :) Then when you browse Reddit occasionally, you can steal memes. In fact, do that anyway if you end up browsing and post them here!