1y ago

There's nothing wrong with using Reddit, Twitter, and other mainstream site still while being active on fediverse.

I see a lot of posts on fediverse trashing reddit, Twitter, spez, musk and so on, and rightfully so. But like it or not, the mass majority of users on the internet still use these sites, and some of us still want to interact with the friends and communities we are a part of on those sites. And there's nothing wrong with that either.

Personally, I want fediverse to grow, and I post on kbin and mastodon constantly, and try to grow the communities on them. But I still pop over to reddit for r/splatoon, r/casualconveration, and my hometown sub, because either the communities haven't grown enough here yet for constant fresh content, or the content is different enough between both to justify me checking in.

I get many are here as a protest against reddit, Twitter, or where ever else you came from, and that's valid. But there are many of us who are simply casual users who want to include fediverse into their drives of other social media, and that's totally fine too.

53 comments

Some of the people who came here as a form of protest no longer want to support Reddit in any form, whether it be by creating content/comments or just seeing ads. "Nothing wrong" is very subjective; if a person believes that Reddit is detrimental and should die, then they won't agree that there's nothing wrong in going there. Realistically, Reddit isn't going to go away anytime soon, but this is an argument about principles and values, and we don't all share the same ones.
- Spot on. I don’t care if Reddit continues to exist or fades away; my interaction with it stopped with third party apps.
  And with Lemmy, I don’t feel any need to engage with Reddit using their mobile site/app.
  To each their own, but Lemmy has been far more interesting, even in smaller communities.
- This feels like the correct take to me. I still view the occasional Reddit post but only as an absolute last resort for information I can't find anywhere else. Even though I don't post, comment, or vote, I'm still aware that my mere presence there is helping them in some form.
  It's similar to the recent Harry Potter game. Lots of people decided that it's far enough removed from Rowling to be okay to buy even if they were pro-trans. But everyone who bought it DID give some of their money to Rowling. It's your decision to weigh the cost/benefit of such a thing, but it was a little shocking to see how many supposedly pro-trans people straight up deluded themselves into thinking they weren't directly supporting Rowling and her anti-trans views.
  So yeah, use Reddit still if you must; I certainly understand how much important/useful content and information lives exclusively there, and the overzealous Reddit boycotters may be missing this (or just don't care). But don't pretend like using it isn't also supporting them.
  
  Reddit does still have the advantage of being highly indexed by search engines.
  A Lemmy instance on the other hand probably wouldn’t have that same benefit.
  How often do people search for “how to [insert thing here]. Reddit” to find a worthwhile source of info that isn’t clickbait?
- Exactly - there are many shades of grey here. Since I've been on Kbin I've rarely checked Reddit at all, but I've been on it once or twice to check a few of the health support communities I'm in which is something Reddit really does have the lead on at the moment until more people come over here

In my mind, the protest isn’t over and anyone still using Reddit is a scab, crossing the digital picket line. Though the people still sabotaging Reddit through malicious compliance are sort of an exception, but I doubt those are the majority. There’s a lot of communities I still miss on Reddit, but I’ve turned my back on it and I’m not returning unless they were to make major changes.
Twitter has always been hot garbage even before Musk, so I’d look down on anyone who used that anyways.
- Agree with everything you said, but there’s nothing Reddit could do to win me back. They’re a corporation and stopped pretending to give a shit about their users. Reversing their decision to go public would catch my eye, but there’s an ice cubes chance in hell of that happening. And even if they did, they’re 1 threat from VC away from pulling similar scummy shit again a year down the line.
  The way I see it, fediverse is the only way forward.

Like people can totally do what they want, and I’m not sure how to best articulate this, but if you want lemmy to supplant reddit it’s better to not use Reddit at all.
Main issue being (most) people who browse both will almost always stop checking one eventually. And since Lemmy is the currently the smaller of the two it has very high fizzle risk.
- Lemmy (shorthand for the fediverse at large) was never going to supplant reddit in the short term, but the API boondoggle helped lemmy to grow at a huge rate since mid-June.
  Does anyone think Reddit is done doing dumb shit? I don't, and thr next time they do a dumb Lemmy will be much closer to a true alternative to reddit than it was a month ago.
  It will probably take multiple missteps by Reddit (or one huge one), but each one will chip away and then eventually I think lemmy will be in the spot reddit was in when digg did their final dumb.

For me, the issues with reddit and Twitter are moral ones. Twitter consors whatever fascist leaders ask them to, and harmful misinformation is highlighted. Reddit has intentionally excluded disabled people from their site. Both of those I don't want to support.
I understand some people see it as "the websites are just worse now but I'm a casual user so it doesn't bother me", but it's a bigger issue than that for some of us.
I'm not going to go out of my way to shit on anyone for still using those sites, and I haven't seen any of that on the fediverse either. This post comes off as you trying to make yourself feel better. If you feel bad about it then ... stop using them? If you don't then continue on with your life.
- This is where I’m at too. Thoughts don’t matter beyond your own self, only actions propagate into the real world. Stand by your convictions. Under its current leadership, Reddit deserved none of my engagement.

I have crawled back to Reddit, but only out of a need to keep up with my wrestling news, and insert random game i'm playing, and I want to be part of the ongoing whatevers, 7daystodie for example.
I'm only using it on PC and with RES, so hey no adverts. Not installing it on my phone tho, screw that blasted app.
There's just not enough scatterd and active game communities here yet, hell we don't really have an R/Gaming equivalent which is staggering to me considering the base-of-nerds we have here.
- Excuse the shameless self-promotion, and it's not quite /r/gaming where it's nothing but memes, nostalgia-bait and cosplay, but myself and the rest of the /r/truegaming mod team are here: @truegaming / !truegaming
  If you weren't familiar with the subreddit: it's a discussion-focused community for having more high-level, in-depth conversations about games and their design. Think essays and random deep-dives rather than memes, questions, gameplay footage.
  I agree that the lack of more specific, focused communities - like game-specific ones - here is the biggest drawback compared to Reddit right now. With time, I'm sure that'll change, and right now, jumpstarting communities you want to see here is a good idea if you have the ability to.
  
  Oooh awesome, thanks mate
  
  Loved your community when I was on Reddit. I remembered when it used to be absurd having to wait an entire month just to even post there. r-gaming is some of the most toxic gaming-based subreddits on there. The mods are ban-happy on that subreddit if you're not regurgitating content in the same vein as the rest do. What I got tired of on there particularly, was the circlejerking outrage porn that happened at any instance whether it's a game company's decision or whatever. It was just down to the fact that some fanboy is simply unhappy so they've gotta go on a tirade to rile everyone up and go review bomb something.
- There are gaming communities/magazines over here, though. They’re just not as active as Reddit because there aren’t as many people over here. I think it’s precisely because there are three gaming communities/magazines split over kbin, lemmy, and beehaw that no one has quite settled on which one is the main one. Unless you join all three, you miss stuff.
  
  Yea I think i'm on all three too, early days I guess :)
- Yeah my mobile has Memmy and Surfboard for Tildes; between the two I get my doom scroll fix. I have almost never used reddit without RES on the desktop but Ill still browse probably once a day between my feeds and /all for a great deal less than I used to.
  
  Ahh I keep forgetting about Tildes, I hate the PC experience but I have surfboard installed, which is much better. It's a decent place, I just haven't totally clicked with it yet.

I left Twitter and Facebook a long time ago and Reddit recently. We should be trying to convince everyone we know not to use any of that trash.

My personal stance is to use Lemmy for everyday browsing and scrolling, but if google searching for something like product reviews, tech support etc end up taking me to reddit, then that's ok. I don't agree with Twitter either, but sometimes you get linked to a tweet or something. Reddit is now for incidental, research purposes only. Going from a everyday reddit user to 'only when google takes me there' user is still quite the downgrade in my eyes and I feel like I'm not really supporting them anymore and no longer a 'customer' of theirs.

You vote at the ballot and with your dollar and data. It's easy to stand by your values once every 2 or 4 years and cast your vote, but it's harder and, I'd argue, possibly more important, to withdraw support from corporations that you disagree with. It's impossible to get this right all the time, but in the case of Facebook, Twitter, and reddit they make it easy for us to see if we want to support them.

I have put in place a number of restrictions for my "rudimentary" use of Reddit. Most of these restrictions have to do with using Reddit to promote its alternatives, deleting/rewriting old posts/comments, decreasing my usage of Reddit overall and increasing my use of Kbin, and countering and deplatforming bigotry on Reddit. Some people can argue that even "rudimentary" use of Reddit is too much use, and maybe it is, but it's still a pretty good improvement compared to the alternative of not being on the fediverse at all. I think that's what matters in our current landscape.
Regarding ad blockers, which I've seen mentioned a few times in this thread: Ad blocking doesn't really "stick it to the man" like a lot of people seem to think it does. The people who block ads are those who'd never click an ad, anyways, and if ad blocking is what it takes for them to use a website and build its value, then that's what it takes. So ad-blocking doesn't really decrease the click-through rate — I've actually heard that ad-blocking can sometimes increase the click-through rate, since ads are only shown to those most likely to click them.

Unfortunately many if not most of the subs I use on reddit dont have active equivalents on here. But once they do, I'm a goner. I epect this to take some time, so in the interim I'm using both

I think people are expecting what happened to Digg to happen overnight. But that's not even what happened to digg right?
If Social Media is to die, it'll be through apathy long before anger.
- Yeah Digg was a little more popular than Reddit, but Reddit was pretty comparable alternative to before it’s collapse. Reddit had a sizeable user base that didn’t even touch Digg.
  
  I think it's gonna take a few more incidents on Reddit if we really want users to migrate to the Fediverse. Right now a bulk of the migrations are happening as the 3PAs had died, but we'll see how much of the momentum will be kept.

Unfortunately some of my niche interests are non-existent here...so I am going to lurk reddit from time to time. Not through their app though, just the site.
- My own rule of thumb is - I'm going to lurk on reddit if I need to, but I'm only going to participate in lemmy and whatever other platforms I support. It's undeniable that reddit still has a treasure trove of information.

Yeah, I had to go back to Reddit.
To be honest, I never had issues with the official app as I barely used it since 95% of my Reddit time was via Safari on my iPad Pro. Slide for Reddit was the only iPadOS app anywhere close to Sync for Android, which I adored, so after trying multiple times basically every single app, I never could stick with any but the official.
I deleted my 30K karma account in solidarity with the people who used third party apps and because I was incredibly angered at the stance that moronic rat-face of a CEO took, but so far the demographic of the Fediverse is huge on topics I couldn't care less about. My Kbin frontpage was filled with LGBTQ+, US Politics, Ukraine, shitty meme communities, people mourning about their deleted Reddit accounts, and massive circle jerks regarding Reddit, while the communities I used to follow are non-existent here or are depressingly abandoned.
The biggest Solo RPG community on the Fediverse has been running for over a year, and it has 40 posts, mostly made by a single dude. Others have said "Be the change!" but I'd end up repeating the Solo RPG case of posting literally for my own eyes. I'd definitely do it once Ernest can figure out how to make Kbin show embedded images on posts, instead of just creating hyperlinks to them, but in the meantime, all my communities are still on Reddit and I doubt that will change for a long time.
- I mean ideally, you should be able to customize the communities you see, and on kbin at least, there is a setting where you see your subscribed posts as your default front page, which is what I use. You can also block communities that you don't wish to see much like filtering from RES.
  I've actually appreciated the LGBTQ stuff and memes, but I know that isn't what everyone wants to see all of the time. The reality is there isn't as much variety on the fed yet because most of the people who have stuck around are like minded nerds who enjoy the same stuff and align with the same views.
  
  Having kbin.social direct straight to your subscribed magazines just started working since this last update, and yeah, I spent my first day curating my subscribed/blocked mags, but even after weeks, it's like playing wack-a-mole. You block one community and the next day you go to "All", and it is there, except now it's from another instance. Right now, I have six "196" magazines blocked, but what the hell... that's the current way of the Fediverse, and I'll accept it.
  It's cool to witness how Kbin takes shape, and hopefully it becomes an easy and attractive platform for the regular Joe, so we have all kinds of neat and diverse communities over here. 😁

ImIt’s like during break up: If you keep checking in with your ex somewhat, going back to them will be so much easier than going in through the emotions of break up. That’s why it’s important to do a clean break and teach yourself to live without them (the ex or reddit).

this is a self fulfilling opinion.
- If it means anything to you, I have been using reddit less and less these days because the content and the community culture there has degraded since the protests and the API hikes. I was never an active participant in the protest, but I want to encourage the growth of other platforms, which is why I come here in the first place.

I mean, I probably would use them on the side if third party clients still worked properly. instagram and facebook don't really have a reliable client to view it's pages anymore and reddit/twitter clients are either pay-walled or just don't work anymore because of their crackdowns. Either way it's not like I'm losing sleep over it, especially when discord and the fediverse exist.

I'm here to replace my reddit use. I've had to do subreddit cullings in the past just for my sanity. I'm really enjoying everything here. The novelty/hype is still in effect for me, but I still don't see myself going back to reddit when that wears off.
That being said, the amount of knowledge that everyone has compiled and REFINED on reddit will not, and possibly cannot be, simply be ported to another place. The amount of bullshit I've cut through by having the ability to find a niche subreddit devoted to some arcane shit I need help with is invaluable.
I'm not too worried about the niche communities disappearing. I'm bummed that it's harder to find them. When the retro-games tracker UndergroundGamer went down, the community never left. Sure, we had to flee to some refugee forum page, but a new tracker was setup. The community rebuilt/returned. The files have already been downloaded.
Imma pour one out for the many subreddits that will inevitably be ehnshittified. Maybe the fediverse will be a more resilient place for different communities to organize themselves. Fingers fucking crossed.

I feel like it's healthier to check on those sites every now and again. It helps you realize how refreshing for example Mastodon is compared to Twitter.

I still have my Reddit account and will check in briefly, but I'm not posting or upvoting. Mostly I check subreddits that I haven't found a similar alternative here.
Somewhere I came across https://teddit.net/ which is kind of interesting. It shows Reddit r/all; you can't login to your Reddit account, but it keeps traffic away from actual Reddit.
So far, I'm having a (more or less) fun time figuring out kbin/Lemmy!

I have deleted 2 accounts on reddit, uninstalled app and fucked u/spez. I open reddit only when I desperately seek answers or want to sight see battle field (like r/cyberpunkgame :D). I cant use twitter, because Elon Musk limited private viewers and I wont create my account, because I fuck Elon Musk

I agree with this unpopular (around here anyway) opinion. People should do what they want to do and post/read where they want to, but I have 100% stopped using Reddit (after 12 years of Reddit - Old Reddit - Alien Blue - Apollo. Overwrote comments and will delete the account once I’m sure no reversion of overwritten comments is taking place. Reddit’s gotta go, man. Even Twitter has a place in the world now, but I can’t forgive Reddit, it’s just gross.

I don't think it's wrong, but I think that part of not using Reddit anymore is that it also means that friends/communities that want to interact with you are going to be similarly drawn towards the Fediverse.
This may be a pessimistic take, but content here won't grow if everyone goes back to their comfort zones, waiting for Something to happen that results in an influx of users and content. Every person that chooses to interact exclusively here and not on Reddit is a pull factor for others, and I think that's the philosophy that drives this idea that we should use Kbin/Lemmy exclusively.

It's okay to still use these sites, I'll admit that right now, I have a reddit account again. But that's out of spite for the simple fact that I refuse to have my voice be silenced. I may have been banned multiple times on subreddits and reddit itself for petty dumb opinionated reasons (no I'm not a racist, sexist, bigot...). But, I kept coming back because again, I refused to be silenced and let them have the 'victory' of snuffing a voice out.
It's another thing though, to have a Reddit account and going around to people wanting to be done with Reddit, by trying to convince and lure them into coming back on here. People have made up their mind about Reddit and everything that has happened within the past two weeks, cemented those choices. Quite frankly, if you ask me, getting blown up over the porn/NSFW situation is a little silly in comparison to the third party issue.
People have an assortment of reasons to still use these platforms, it's fine, except the ones who're Pro-Spez, Pro-Musk .etc Then I say - you have problems.

As much as I'm mad at reddit for the decision they made it's the only place that I've felt like I have any sort of community. I'm downloading the reddit app because I'm desperate for that feeling again.
- Don’t download the app it’s not that it’s bad (it’s ok) but man it’s infested with ads and “Suggestions” on what subreddit you’d like.
  But the worst part of the official app is that it’s a legit massive battery killer.
  Download red reader if your on android, or commit or dystopia if iOS

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