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Hondolor @kbin.social

Is there any one else who feels like their life has been disrupted by this whole debacle with Reddit.

I really do like KBin and Lemmy and the fediverse on the whole, but development is still young and the userbase still growing. KBin is still basically early access, and Lemmy is buggy. I spent alot of time in reddit and I'm feeling the pain of trying to ween myself from it. Just wanted to here community perspectives and see how other's are taking it.

For me, I feel a bit of a sore hollow spot for what reddit used to be and watching it implode is not fun for me.

161 comments

  • Reddit was something unique and personal to each user. Some it was new, some it was the only place to find specific tech or other advice that wasn't corrupted by ads and algorithms on goggle and other big corporations.
    Reddit was my way of disengaging from world news before I knew about anxiety, and how things could affect me and become personal even though I had no way to help world events. So I used it to personalize my mental diet, if I was creative I could sub to many craft subs like leather or metal etc, it's where I went to get other perspectives on movies and content that I didn't fully understand.
    End of the day, is all that possible still on Reddit, kinda, but it's going away, and they pushed me personally to leave as I could see it was becoming google/Facebook, ad algorithms to push what people pay for or get paid for. So time to reset.
    Become involved, I'm way more involved and adding to discussions on the new sites I'm on. Everyone adding comments and posts and perspectives and opinions are building this up from bottom up.
    You are the future, make your perspective part of the future by helping guide these new sites to something we can be proud of.

    • @Bendersmember

      @Hondolor

      I’m upvoting your comment because you bring up great points, but I personally disagree with the disengaging from world events aspect. I’ll miss the niche subreddits that helped you solve the most random of issues, but I think reddit was far from a great place to disengage from news and the political discourse brought by news. Ever since the 2016 election cycle, I personally saw a considerable increase of posts regarding politics that came from both established subreddits and new ones that popped up (like /r/enoughtrumpspam which simply added more spam to the pile).

      I think Trump’s campaign and presidency really ignited a lot of this, and while I neither like nor support Trump, I miss when the biggest disruptions were from isolated events (like the Occupy Wall Street movement or the Ellen Pao fiasco) rather than 4 years of a presidential tenure.

      After years of nonsense, it all just got tiring. You can curate your reddit experience, but what happens when all the political doom scrolling finds its way into your favorite subreddits?

      Kbin and the rest of the fediverse will grow, and I’m aware that the same kind of posting will find its way here, too. Thankfully the fediverse lets you subscribe to multiple communities of the same name, so maybe /m/news isn’t up one’s alley but /c/news is, for example.

      I didn’t realize how shit reddit was getting until I stopped using it. The constant barrage of political shit accompanied by low effort comments/puns did a number on my happiness. I stopped using Facebook for similar reasons.

      I’m glad you’re also adopting the mindset of being an active contributor. For years I also just would scroll and seldom upvote, but if we want to make “this house a home”, we need to put in the effort ourselves! I look forward to seeing how this all plays out. So far, I am very optimistic. I hope you find your niche interested here sooner than later!

      • Some of it was also political activists or people paid to actively work to sway opinion on social media.

      • After years of nonsense, it all just got tiring. You can curate your reddit experience, but what happens when all the political doom scrolling finds its way into your favorite subreddits?

        I'm not much into US politics, but you know, this reminds me of why I started disengaging from my own country subreddit. At the start it was mostly about the people and the community, and I liked talking to people and hearing their problems. I was hosting regular get-togethers and eventually became a mod. As Reddit got more mainstreatm, the anti-government political people started coming in and well, I don't want to be hearing about moaning all the time. These people also had a terrible persucation complex (not helped by my country's history of surpressing opposition views), so any attempt to moderate these people when their posts and comments got excessive and off-topic was met with fierce pushback. I just wanted a more positive place for people, instead of endless political bickering.

      • I always stuck with front page and never was on popular or all, I feel that was my saving grace. Also reposts and crossposted content drove me batty, so overtime unsubbed from groups that got political or negative. I wasn't subbing to just kitty cat pictures, more so hobbies, movies, and specific YouTubers like rlm etc. That's why I mentioned that everyone's experience was different, just a few different subs and the whole experience is different.

        I'm in a demographic that people actively try to push and radicalize as well, so even if I am frustrated with things and how they affect me, I always keep one foot out and try to be super aware of that. I feel some, not all obviously get caught up over time and it erodes who they are and normalizes some really crazy things. So when I realize something like American politics is affecting me and my day, as a Canadian, I step back and look at what I'm letting into my mental diet.

        End of day I hope we all learn from the past and can improve on what worked and avoid what didn't. There's no reason to not learn from the past and try to grow in a positive way.

    • Well said @Bendermember

    • This is a great answer.

      I feel like I can do away with the doomscrolling and time-wasting, but it's the specific advice and hobby subs that will be difficult to tear away from completely.

      • I'm also going to have trouble avoiding my city's local subreddit. It's definitely a hub for everything going on here, and I've made some real life friends on there who I plan on keeping up with.

    • While I feel a bit nostalgic to leave Reddit behind, I recently realised it had become stale for me. Time to move on.

      • Absolutely this. It got very homogenized. I joined reddit for the variety of people and their ability to understand topics I'd like to understand better. Then it all turned to bots and reposts. Then I would unsub from one subreddit and migrate to the new sub that was similar to the sub I just abandoned until the new sub became infested with bots and reposts, then rinse and repeat.

    • What I liked about reddit was its "googleability". You had a question and found an answer without reading through an endless article that winds it's way through rephrasing your question 5 times, adds extensive biographies of everyone mentioned, the wider history of the problem and the author's grandmother, all to pad the article and have you scroll through more adds.

      But now there's ChatGPT, so most of my "googling" can be done that way, and I don't have to scroll through walls of puns or "this is the way" or "thanks for the gold, kind stranger", or "take my updoot and get out". I wonder how much of that bullshit were bots, anyway.

      • First thing I did when I got chat got was use it as a search engine, it's not perfect, but google should wake up, when something is better at its own game accidentally, imagine what's possible if they don't fix their algorithm

  • Yes, I'm not afraid to admit that all my friends were on Reddit and I have missed them a lot. They have my email but none of them have reached out. It's understandable but it kind of sucks since I was close to so many people there.

    Before you cast stones and call me a loser. I was in a really bad accident last year and I got terribly hurt. I'm still recovering and a lot of that recovery was in either a bed or on the couch. All I've been able to do for almost an entire year is stay inside, work on my laptop, go to the office, watch anime and talk to my friends on Reddit.

    It was really hard to let go of Reddit because it meant cutting off the only real socialization I had left outside of work. I have met some awesome people here on Kbin though, so I am hopeful I'll make new friends and connections again. Change is good and I'm open minded to the Fediverse and everything it has to offer.

  • I mean, it sucks, but to some extent -- I had hoped not to this degree -- life was going to get worse when Reddit shifted over from growth to monetization.

    And I used Reddit when it was far smaller and less-featureful than the Fediverse is today (not to mention with worse uptime...it used to die on a regular basis or start acting weird as the devs worked on scaling it up early-on.). It didn't have subreddits then, much less all the niche stuff that exists today. Riding another network through growth is okay with me.

    • i remember the 'sub'reddit announcement!

      it feels like with the distributed nature of this system, i have better chance to be technically involved. im on attempt 3 of my own instance of kbin... feels exciting again for first time in a decade

    • Yeah, I seriously hope Spez's $10 million worth of greed compounds into losses greater than what he could have made on API calls if RiF and Apollo had bent the knee.

  • I feel it for sure. I’m kinda using it as an opportunity to take a break from socials for a bit to be honest. I’m excited about kbin and lemmy but I’m also happy to have the clunkiness of the sites be a reason for me to be outside more

  • I felt this way at first but the more time you spend away from reddit the more you realise how toxic of a place it is. I initially had planned to stay on there because I have communities on reddit that don't exist here. But I just couldn't do. The vibe on kbin / lemmy is just so much better and it feels refreshing to explore the internet in a new way. Reddit feels stagnant and gross in comparison now.

  • I feel like someone who has just woken up from cryo-sleep or a soldier who's finally come out of the jungle after twenty years.

    The 90s were great for the most part. The Internet was free and open, and there were zillions of forums and personal websites. I call this period the Genesis of the Web.

    Then, things got bad. Microsoft monopolised the Web with its shitty IE 6 browser, websites were riddled with malware and popup ads, and you needed an antivirus and an anti-adware on your PC to be safe. I call this period the dark age of the Web. Most search engines died out, and Google became the king of search.

    A couple years into the new millennium, Firefox and HTML 5 came about. There was hope again. Mozilla was fighting the good fight to keep the Web open, and new Web development techniques were developed (jQuery, CSS3, Dojo toolkit, Ajax became easier, etc). As a Web developer, this period was very exciting. You just couldn't keep up with the new stuff. Firefox's market share kept increasing, and new websites appeared on the scene: myspace, youtube, thefacebook (basically, proto-social media). Google released their Chrome browser, and IE was dying a slow death. This was the golden age of the Internet.

    Then, things got bleak. Apple released their iPhone, and Google released Android. By this time, most personal websites were gone, social media was on the rise, Firefox became less and less relevant, and by the end of the 2010s, the Web had become just a shell of itself. The 'Web' was now just a dozen websites owned by powerful corporations. Engagement algorithms were developed to keep people hooked, and Google analytics tracked everything. Privacy was gone for good. This is the period we are currently in. I call it Corpo Web or the Dystopian Web. Some of us did not want to participate in this version of the Web, so we lived in a separate world (what we call the small web).

    Finally, someone came up with the idea of Fediverse; platforms that can communicate with each other through open protocols. Corporate social media platforms are falling apart (reddit, twitter, facebook, etc), and Fediverse is exploding. Each Fediverse instance has its own personality, and it reminds me of web rings in a way. There is always something new to discover, be it a new community or a new instance of Lemmy/Mastodon/etc.

    What I would love to see though, is a way to Lemmy instances more unique (custom designs, chat system, games, etc). This would encourage people to visit other instances. Also, we should be able to categorise communities and group them together (like a traditional forum).

  • Trying figure out solving tech issues , wasn't ready to stop wit (.) site:reddit.com . Just wasnt ..

  • Reddit in general has been in a fairly steady state of decline. Certainly recent events haven't made things any better, and I've been openly critical.

    However, I more or less gave up on participating on Reddit during the pandemic. The sheer number of people constantly online at that point while actively in the era of brigading, having any kind of counter opinion on Reddit ended in you just getting shamed and downvoted. I'm not talking about unpopular, right-wing stuff, but stuff like having an opinion on a hockey player leaving a team for another was enough to garner literal death threats.

    I more or less resolved to stop actively participating when I went to a support forum and got buried and (again) shamed for trying to get help with a question. Instead they dangled the answer in front of me. The answer, by the way, wasn't possible in any of the ways they were trying to suggest, as the method no longer worked. So not only were they actively being jerks, they weren't gatekeeping valid information. Forget it, why bother?

    Reddit WAS amazing. But like everything else, it gets ruined. I don't want to be all negative, but history has consistently repeated itself. Hopefully the Fediverse can withstand it's own weight, especially if big players like Meta plan on getting involved. I hope it's robust enough to withstand, I WANT it to be robust enough.

  • Unfortunately, the blond piggy was right; it'll all blow over.
    Most of the people getting riled up over reddit's antics will remain there out of convenience and/or habit.

    It's like with video games. People shit on EA and other AAA developers but still preorder their games.

    At the end of the day, all of the internet's content trickles from platform to platform, it's just a matter of where in this chain you are.

  • ok, some of you apparently need to get outside more.

    • They do, but there are good reasons for people to become reliant on social media to fulfill their human need for social connection.

      There's a comment from someone who had an accident and was literally stuck at home, I know of a few reddit moderators who were severely handicapped, there's people who moved country or town and don't have their childhood/uni social network anymore, people with mental health issues, people stuck living in the middle of nowhere, the gay kid who lives in a homophobic town, the atheist who lives in a deeply muslim country, etc.

      Obviously it's not ideal, but social media are their way to connect. Often they have no real alternative.

      It's easy to look down on them, and assume it reflects poorly on them, but often you have very little choice in these things. Shit happens and you end up with few real life friends.

      It all happens to us anyway, especially men. Wouldn't be surprised if the majority of middle-aged men have no friends at all.

    • Yes, we do, but not everyone can. There's a person upthread who had an accident and was literally stuck inside.

      I recognise your username already, so I think you're as "terminally online" as the rest of us. But maybe you're posting from outside... :-)

  • I actually kind of feel the opposite way. While Kbin is young, and will certainly be more optimised with time, it works more than well enough to satisfy my want to interact with the world the same way I would through Reddit - though interactions feel more personal. Just in this thread I recognise a couple of names of those I've chatted with before.

    Additionally, moving to Kbin finally gave me a chance to do some spring-cleaning on my browsing habits. Where I used only stick to my subscribed feed on Reddit, I find myself much more on All on Kbin, exposing myself to more (though I do stay away from NSFW, unlike what I did on Reddit).

  • Yes. Reddit was a huge part of my life—spent a lot of time there. Seeing the admins, and much of the Internet, turn on the mods was certainly trying.

  • I've just realised that I haven't viewed a single tiktok video since leaving reddit. So I guess I haven't missed them. I never posted anything on reddit, I mostly lurked - as a passive consumer of other people's content. That's the biggest difference I guess. Here I have several different logins on various servers, and I've posted a few times in niche communities. It feels like a mini adventure!

  • You're not alone. People have a natural propensity to form groups and create connections with other people. Historically those connections have evolved from small and localized tribes to communities, and eventually to cities, city states, and regional/national cultures. It's in our DNA to want to be with other people, even if we joke about how we sometimes do not. We are a social species, and that quality has played a critical role in how our species developed.

    We have all done this before, and we'll all do it again and again. Our interests change over time. We move to new communities. Where (and with whom) we spend time changes as we live out our lives. The way we socialize, and the people we socialize with, will change many times. The communities with which you belong never really stay the same. Change is genuinely one of the only true constants. Rather than facing it as an impediment or a loss, we can view it as an opportunity.

    Change is difficult, but it can be a very good thing. Change is really the only way we grow. If we retain what's familiar and comfortable then we will never experience anything new. You're better than that. We're all better than that. This is an opportunity that is so rarely afforded to a community like ours to do something different. Don't lament on what was lost, but seize this as an opportunity. Let's make this new community everything you'd hoped the last one could be but wasn't.

    This isn't a time to think about what has been lost, but the greatest of opportunities in front of us. Seize it. Seriously. The sooner we turn our other cheek on where we were and focus on where we are and where we can be, the faster this community will begin to truly emerge and transform from being quite simply a refuge for former Redditors, to whatever it is that we want to make of it. It's all about perspective. This is an opportunity for us all. Let's make something of it. Let's do it together.

  • I was seriously addicted to Reddit at some point, but in the meantime I got a perma-ban there. So I gave up and here we are.

  • First, I’m still new here so having to scroll past all the other comments to post a comment is lame.

    Most relevant and importantly though, if you feel like your life is “disrupted” by the actions of a social media company, you might want to reassess your life.

    I mean, are you serious? Think about the nature of this “issue”. Anyone of this mindset (aside from the developers who were not given enough time to deal with changes) strikes me as exceptionally childish.

    What people should have a problem with is the vast number of bot accounts posting content to drive engagement. Reddit is trash. It’s full of click bait and rage bait just like very other “social media” entity.

    What’s awesome here is the segment of people searching for smaller more supportive communities built around their hobbies and interests.

    Hail to those who’ve been maintaining Vanilla Forums, etc and creating communities in the fediverse. You’re doing it because you care and believe in passions shared by your community.

  • Honestly, yes. It's a pain.

    But the good news is that, due to their sudden increase in popularity, they're likely to mature much more quickly than they would have otherwise.

  • At first I did feel that way. But as my engagement with reddit went down it felt like my life improved.

  • I was very active on Reddit for a long time so it's really hard for me to let it go. But let it go I will. They're fully on the path of enshittification and I'm not going down that one with them.

  • I definitely get it. Reddit provided a gateway into a lot of communities that either sparked my interest in, or gave me information on the various topics I'm interested in. Hell, some of the communities provided me with support during some rough times

    From a developer standpoint, Reddit was the first platform that I used which had an open API that I could play around with (such as Python + PRAW) so seeing the (what is basically) a shutdown of their API felt like a stab in the back. I never ended up creating anything substantial for Reddit, but my heart goes out to the devs of the various third party applications who practically had their hard work and labor snuffed out for no good reason.

    But as the years started to pass, Reddit became a place that I started to withdraw from. There were countless times where I'd felt like there was just no point in engaging anymore with people, I'd step into a conversation looking for a well thought out argument just because it went against the "hivemind" and that pretty much always turned out to be a mistake. The gaming community on Reddit was especially terrible for this...

    That's fine though, I walked away learning that I don't actually have to put up with "fights" anymore. If I think that someone is responding to me in bad faith, I'm just not going to further engage anymore.

    There are some communities I'll miss though, and while I do not think I'll completely withdraw from them if there are no alternatives, I will more or less just be an observer rather than an active participant.

    I am a bit surprised however as to how far the drama with Reddit has reached. My mother asked me today whether I was aware of what was going on, I was even more surprised to hear that she uses old Reddit and she told me she knew that they'd be going after that next and when this happens she'd be dropping Reddit as well. I briefly brought up the Fediverse and gave a very quick explanation of Mastodon, Lemmy, and Kbin (and how they can all talk with each other) - I don't know if she'll pop up somewhere on the Fediverse anytime soon but maybe one day.

    Oh well, time rolls on. We'll all just have to mark this chapter, turn the page, and move on (if that is what you want of course) to the best of our abilities.

  • I lost faith in Reddit after Aaron Swartz died. The biggest lesson I learned in HS was that knowledge was real power and trust fundies will always try to take access to it and that’s what’s going on in the social media sphere these days.

  • Nah, I was already on the way out of Reddit, so this just gave me an excuse to delete my account entirely.

  • I guess im just gonna help less people with their 3d printers now. I mostly want to keep up with arcade sticks and the subreddit didn't really seem to move unfortunately. So I'll still need to check back in every blue moon.

    • arcade sticks

      Like, stuff like Happ Electronics stuff for arcade cabinets, or you mean more-broadly non-flightstick joysticks for modern computers? I mean, I've already seen people on here somewhere talking about their arcade cabinet builds, though they may not be so high-traffic yet as to need a dedicated community just for the sticks.

      • Fightsticks as in custom controllers for modern (or retro) systems that are often associated with the fighting game community but also used for schmups or other arcade associated titles (or even just games that use digital controls only). Its got a modestly active community on reddit for sharing builds and mods and just projects or discussing parts. I do all of this over discord as well so its nbd.

  • My life has been enhanced actually. Some disruptions in life are good, they cause us to re-evaluate ourselves and our goals, and send us in directions we might never have anticipated. Honestly i'm excited for the future of the Fediverse and it's potential.

161 comments