It’s not even June 12 for me, yet I suspect many subreddits went dark based on UTC.
I moved to Reddit during the Digg migration. Thus, I got the default subscriptions from back in the day. Over the years, I’ve unsubscribed to things I felt were crap, and I’ve added a number of subreddits.
Already, many have gone dark. My old.Reddit.com homepage already looks much different than normal, and I know that a few subreddits that do show have announced they’ll go dark. I assume they are US based and timing that locally.
I’ve spent more time in the Lemmy fediverse than on Reddit since joining, but I’ve spent time on both.
I’ll admit to cynical skepticism of the impact of the darkening. I still don’t think it will make a difference in Reddit policy, but I now believe it will have a larger impact on Reddit traffic than I imagined.
I still expect it to have no change in Reddit attitude or really in Reddit users.
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Most people will go back to reddit in two day. I just hope the whole ordeal seeds Lemmy with enough of a community to grow so one day, it will have feature parity with reddit and an actual community. This probably won’t be a Digg like migration, but maybe it’s the beginning of a myspace to Facebook like migration.
Digg seems like it went down overnight lol.
Sowing the seeds is what I hope happens. I’m not moderator material, I don’t normally post content and I normally prefer to lurk. Yet I’m going out my way to cultivate a successful migration so the real guys who know what they are doing can take over and allow me to once again doom-scroll lol.
yeah, i am doing my best to actually comment more, and make a few posts. probably more posts in the last couple of days than all of reddit’ing.
#rexxit
I too posted more, not more than in total because I was 11 years there and sometimes posted daily, but I do participate more
I feel called out lmao. I’ve been more active on fediverse apps in the last week than I was on normal social networks in the last year.
Not those of us who exclusively used the 3rd party apps. Former RiF user here, reddit for 12 years. Not doing it on their app, you couldn’t pay me to tolerate that experience. Using Jerboa right now and with a couple tiny improvements, I got no problem switching.
100%, I was almost 12 years and have always used RES and Apps. Reddit has been going downhill since they “had” to make money and this was the last straw.
Lemmy seems to be doing pretty well so far. I don’t expect nor want lemmy&fediverse to completely dominate world of social network. That would only make spam/bot worse imo. I want it iust enough for me to enjoy.
Digg went down fast because there was a well known alternative other people could use. And Digg made far more mistakes than the reddit admins. But I hope now, every time the greedy reddit board does something people do not like, it shakes loose a few more people willing to use alternatives.
Similar to shaking a fruit tree, and getting apples to fall to the ground here and there
Idk I think more people will stick around then won’t. But I don’t think it will be immediate. It will be a slower migration as Lemmy gets better and better and easier to use and there is less and less of a reason to go back to reddit for anything. I’ll only ever go there if I have to for some reason but over time those reasons will become less and less as the communities here grow.
Best thing we can do is add as much content and comments/posts as possible over the next few days!
I’m doing my part.
Same! I’m into camping and found this place https://links.dartboard.social/c/campingandhiking It’s small but people are nice and I’ll keep contributing :) idk if that link will work im still learning
Yeah only problem is fragmentation of groups (same community name over different instances).
A good solution would be something like multi-reddits, but multi-communities. So a user would create a curated list of communities that are combined into a single feed.
It’ll be a pretty big feature and take time to develop, but it’ll help a lot.
I left, I dont plan to go back. Joined Lemmy today, spun up an instance last night.
I just hope that most of the people who migrated here to Lemmy will stay and not just go back to Reddit like nothing ever happened.
The huge activity in even small communities is what always kept me on Reddit, and I really look forward to see if Lemmy continues to grow to become what we all hoped Reddit would be for us.
I’ll be abondoning Reddit completely and deleting everything as soon as RiF stops working.
I was a Sync user. Decided to not even wait. Account deleted, app uninstalled. Fuck em
Did the same this morning, down to the same app
Heard a rumour that the Sync dev was thinking of making Sync for Lemmy. Just read it in a comment on here and can’t find any proof so don’t get too excited yet, but that would be fuckin awesome.
That would be amazing, he could probably even reuse a lot of the UI elements even.
I’m sure there are many like me who have not had fun on Reddit for a long time and were sticking around because they weren’t aware of a better alternative for relatively anonymous social media. I’ve been wanting to step back away from the internet monoliths for a long time and the fediverse has been pretty promising to me so far.
I’m probably going to end up back on Reddit to some extent, but I think Lemmy will stay in my rotation of stuff I open when I’m bored. Or until they inevitably kill old.reddit.com, then I’ll be outta there for good…
based on mastodon servers blowing up when people “left” twitter, like 90% of new users will be gone in a couple weeks
I followed George Takei on mastodon when he announced he was leaving Twitter and I haven’t seen a post of his ever 😔
I see his stuff all the time: https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei
A weird side-effect of Lemmy being 1000x smaller than Reddit is that I lurk less and contribute more. So there’s that!
I feel the same way. I think it’s a little less intimidating as most postshave less comments so I feel like I’ll be lost in the crowd less. I also feel like if we want to make lemmy the reddit replacement we have to use it so other people thinking of switching will see that it is active.
It’s more the latter for me. Lemmy (and navigating the fediverse) is a UX disaster for normal folk, so contributing content is the best thing I can do to make up for it haha
I actually… recognize you! Lol. I never got that familiar with other users on reddit
Wait what? How? Shiiiet
Maybe its time to use Lemmy less lol.
Maybe its the avatar support.
I think there is a good balance to be had. I find after 600 or so comments, a thread on reddit is just difficult to navigate.
Unless you use… Apollo!
RIP 😭
Totally agree with that… just how there continues to be enough discussion going on here.
Completely agree! I think I’ve made more comments here in the last twelve hours than I made on reddit within the last two years! I love chatting with you all!
Yeah but why do you think that is
I’m surprised no one has mentioned it yet, but Reddit can be pretty hostile almost everywhere other than small niche subs with consistent communities. Before posting a comment, I would always have to consider whether I was willing to fight about it with someone likely to snidely dismiss it through the most paper-thin lazy rhetoric. Sometimes the answer would be yes but too often it would be no.
Oh for sure. There have been countless occasions where I’ve written out a reply, only to hit
Cancelwhile telling myself “Nope, its just not worth it”.Honestly just a good practice to have anywhere, thinking about what you say before you say it.
I agree with that! Sometimes I feel like I overthink it, if anything. I try to make it a principal of mine to have some sort of logical process that determined anything I write/say (even if said logic doesn’t make sense to everyone at first glance).
Works great in some cases, and not so much in others… but that’s a whole other spiel to go over more later on haha.
Oh man so much this. I felt like I could never post a comment without getting into an argument with someone about it.
For me it’s the same reason I’m more likely to contribute in smaller subreddits and that is noise.
Kind of pointless in replying to something that has been active for 8 hours and has 2,000+ posts. And god help you if you sorted by rising and got in early then you get 100 of the same reply or irrelevant stuff latching onto your comment for visibility.
Even if you wanted to discuss on larger subreddits the content of comments would be people falling and tripping overthemselves to make the same low effort shitty joke.
Lol true. As it is right now out comments aren’t just a piss in the ocean. I prefer smaller communities and am not sure how I got sucked up into reddit considering I can just get that content from imgur and if I can’t find it here… to think I left imgur for reddit because their app was garbage but it’s nothing compared to the reddit app. And at least blocking ads makes the imgur app usable lol… Anyway, I like this way better lol.
It feels much more like reddit did during the digg migration. Every thing still feels like you’re interacting with real people and a much smaller community.
I first started browsing reddit in late 2011 and even by then it felt a little like I was arriving at a party that had already been going a while and people had their in-jokes and cliques (to a way lesser extent than today).
In the best possible way, Lemmy/kbin feels a lot like we all arrived early and the host is still running around trying to make sure everything’s ready.
I’m expecting the CEO to push back the date of the API implementation by a month or two (still a bit doubtful) but I don’t see him changing his original stance given his narcissistic attitude.
I’m expecting the API change to happen exactly as planned. As a result all 3rd party apps will die by the end of this month, and the user count will take a severe hit. Many essential mod tools will stop working, so those who actually found the default app tolerable, will get to see all subs go downhill since they aren’t really being moderated anymore. As a result, the user count will continue to decline in the following months as people come to terms with Reddit sucking harder than before. Oh, but then it gets even worse when the spam bots and official ads start taking over every sub. Most likely the next year is going to be very rough in terms of user count.
Unlike other social media sites, where people stick around because of family and friends, at reddit-like sites, people stick around for the content and discussion. Once the content gets taken over by spam-bots, it’s over.
There’s some apps I hate like Instagram and WhatsApp, but stick around because it’s the only way I can contact some friends and family. The network effect is strong and I can’t really leave.
With Reddit, I don’t care. If there’s enough content somewhere else, even if it’s a fraction of the volume (there was no way I could get through everything on Reddit anyway) then it’s an easy switch.
I just revolted and said, if anyone wants to communicate with me, they need to use e.g. Signal.
I’m absolutely not installing this spyware on my phone
A good chunk of my close family all use iPhones and iMessage to communicate with each other - but they won’t add me to any group conversations because “green bubbles bad”… I spun up a Matrix server, created an account for everyone, pre-joined them to a room with all of us in it and sent everyone their credentials along with a link to Element for iOS so that all they had to do was download an app and copy/paste into two fields.
This worked great for about two or three months until most of them went back to their group chats over iMessage and I was back to being excluded. Only one of them still uses Element to communicate with me, but I suppose that’s still somewhat a victory since previously we were using Facebook Messenger (bleh) to chat.
I guess there are some sayings that still ring true, such as “Old habits die hard” or “Humans are creatures of habit”… 😮💨
It sucks, because it’s incredibly difficult for me to not take that personally as “They don’t seem to care about me to try to meet me half way to keep in touch”. I don’t know what more I could do aside from purchasing an iPhone, which is just not going to happen.
maybe I’m just very stubborn, but I already let the complete family of my girlfriend switch to Signal, because else I wouldn’t communicate with them.
I think, I’m just projecting some work frustration into my private life and don’t want to eat shit anymore. so, if I’m not worth enough for them to choose a medium, I’m fine with, I accept, that they don’t want to talk with me. I do have no problem with less communication - it’s their problem, when I don’t show up to happenings.
But I understand you, I also take it somehow personally, when people tell me “what do you have to hide?”
As I was part of the founders of a pirate party in my country, I’m maybe more loaded with arguments, but I’m just fed up with this shit and I just don’t take it anymore.in situations of being left alone, some lovely Punk music always helps me - and my girlfriend is on my side, so that’s a major influence as well of course
but hey, if everyone is just looks for convenience, I can do too
Oh, hey Punk is my favorite type of music as well! I get it though - honestly I feel like I’d be a little more at ease if I could just explain it logically. If there was a feature that iMessage had that no other platform had then as much as I’d still have some disdain for Apple and the situation they’ve created, then I could still explain it. But no, I specifically chose Matrix/Element because it could do what iMessage does (well aside from the weird “apps/games” thing they’ve got, which to my knowledge no one, let alone any of them, use…) and no one pointed out any issues with it. I wouldn’t even mind if they had another preference like Discord or What’sApp - just something cross platform…
I just hate it so much. One of my siblings just got married and I was the last to find out because of this. Another one just graduated from high school last month. I also have had so many issues with my health over the last few years and have had a terribly high amount of time spent in the hospital, and during those times it’d certainly be nice to talk to them and let them know I’m okay directly, rather than by proxy of one person.
Its so strange just how far we’ve come with tech, and yet still run into such simple roadblocks that should be easily avoided… but no.
I’m sorry, that really sucks. :(
As far as I’m concerned, Reddit just died today. It’s game over now. Time to start over somewhere else.
Judging by the amount of activity on here versus even yesterday, I suspect you are right.
Just came from reddit after 12 years. Deleted all my comments and then my account.
Hoping Lemmy can continue to grow and doesn’t grow stale and stagnate. I’m really digging the whole Fediverse thing. Deleted my Twitter after Elon bought it and joined a Mastodon instance as well.
If we can realize this trend of decentralized social networks it would be huge.
Personally, I believe that keeping the social media platforms federated is the way to go in the long term.
Honestly, this does seem like the better way to go. Back in the myspace days, we probably should have gone down this route instead of jumping ship to facebook. It would have been really cool to see how things would have turned out if it had been federated between universities from the get-go
I didn’t reddit will go away for a while. It’s almost too big to fail. The large reddit run subs are still live and active. Users who don’t sub to any subs that went dark may not even know anything happened. I have to imagine reddit knew they would lose users of 3rd party apps so it likely isn’t a large portion of where they make money. I think there will probably be a decline in content for a short time, then we will see new subs emerge with people who don’t care about the API lock down, ads, Chinese investors, bots, and reposts.
then we will see new subs emerge with people who don’t care about the API lock down, ads, Chinese investors, bots, and reposts.
Let’s regard reddit as a honeypot to keep this crowd away from lemmy :]
You’re probably right. Consumers barely care about anything outside of their own media consumption and comfort. After nixing password sharing, a blatant anti-consumer move, Netflix experienced the most signups they’ve seen since keeping track of that data. For a service that’s also jacked up their price and lost a massive portion of their catalogue over the past decade.
Most people just don’t care lol. It’s pathetic and irresponsible, but it’s the truth. Reddit will probably be fine, sadly.
Agree, there is very low friction to switching off reddit onto another site offering a similar service with a better experience. Lemmy seems to be offering exactly that, and if we continue to see growth in posts and engagement, it will be very successful.
I don’t think we’re at a better experience yet. Reddit experience declining while Lemmy improves might get there, though. Right now, most of the activity on Lemmy is from those of us who are pissed at Reddit.
As others have been saying, though: Reddit is less “sticky” because you don’t really build connections or followers like on other platforms.
I can’t believe that they didn’t do at least some research on how many people use 3rd party apps and account for those losses. The question is really how many will leave vs how many will just switch to the official app. I suspect most will just switch. It’s sad really. Hopefully Infinity for Reddit (and other 3rd party apps) will support Lemmy. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
I think they did do research and third party app users make up a small enough portion of their user base that losing them is okay to Reddit.
Keep in mind how popular Reddit is – for the most part the people left will be content with the karma bots reposting memes for the thirtieth time and there’s always going to be somebody racing to be the first to post some news to a related subreddit.
I doubt it’ll affect their bottom line too much and in a week it’ll be back to business as usual for most subreddits.
I think they did do research and third party app users make up a small enough portion of their user base that losing them is okay to Reddit.
users maybe, but i don’t think they considered mods in that. of course they can just replace mods as necessary, but the mod quality will go down for sure.
I don’t have any faith they’ll even push it back. That “ama” was such a disaster, spez is a complete narcissist.
I think so too. Spez will delay the change to get everyone to calm down, then implement later, or possibly roll it out in smaller chunks to control the outrage.
I really dont want to go back
I have no intention of going back. I’m much happier here.
I love how many of the subreddits are going dark for this protest. The community IS reddit. It is NOT the assholes who took VC-backed money to fleece crypto bros out of money. It’s idiotic. I hope everyone understands that you can find quality discussions in the fediverse and leaves reddit accordingly. They’re not the gatekeeper of good conversation online.
Yeah, the past two days on reddit have been quite barren from my perspective.
Just switch to lemmy(this is my first comment!) And I’m still figuring it out.
I used RiF for years, so there’s gonna be a bit of adjustment. But I can say without any doubt it already better than the official reddit app, functionality wise. Would like some more customization options. Hopefully in the near future!
I know Lemmy has a bit of a learning curve, but I think you may have typed your password into the username field…
Even a change in atmosphere with communities from this would be substantial, though - even if there isn’t a day and night change with active users, if enough of the power users have left and discussions don’t really meet the “vibe check”, that’ll just naturally kill off user activity and it’s pretty much the same result
I think Reddit will just accelerate its descent into low-quality spam and repost bot hell. Half of it will be Facebook Memes posted to Twitter posted to Reddit. Or Tiktok videos posted to Instagram posted to Reddit.
Not everyone will leave and many subreddits will return but unless there’s a MAJOR walkback, concession and promise then Reddit will remain as a husk of its past. Every move Reddit has announced since April just sounds like they are trying to wring out every penny from users that care to use their platform.
I’m weaning off of Reddit mostly, the blackout helps with the transition.
You know thinking about it, so much of its content had already become this. Basically half of all posts I’d seen had replies like “this is a karma farming bot, ignore it.” And the other half were just reposts from TikTok.
I certainly don’t think Reddit is going away forever, but I do think it will push a lot of the OG users out for sure. I just deleted my 10 yr. old account tonight and am just finding out about Lemmy.
I’m hopeful Lemmy turns into something near what I used to love about Reddit. It needs critical mass for that to happen. FWIW, I kept my Reddit account but I deleted all of my posts and comments.
Do a request for all your data first! https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
Mine’s been pending for two days. No automated process should take that long, so now I worry it’s in the queue of some recently fired employee.
If you want, you can also use a script like Power Delete Suite to overwrite all your old comments and posts with whatever copypasta you want, or to mass-delete (it does miss a few posts/comments though! be sure to double check), and/or you can use Redact to overwrite them with nonsense and then delete.
It used to be recommended to edit all comments at least 24 hours before deleting the account so that reddit would only have the edited, useless versions of the comments stored, but I don’t know if that works anymore, they might keep the pre-edited versions anyway now. I’m not sure.
Anyway, regardless, be aware that when you delete a reddit account they keep all your posts and comments, without the option to delete them after you account is deleted. If you want those deleted, you have to delete them first, then delete the account after. Also, if you want to use one of these deletion scripts, use it by June 30th, before the API change breaks them.
Digg is technically still around even though it doesn’t resemble anything close to the “Digg” I used before the migration. I suspect Reddit will go in the same direction. They will keep pushing ways to monetize it, pushing out a lot of people who just want to chat and argue with strangers on the internet until it basically just becomes a website with a bunch of sponsored links and articles and no real user engagement.
Yep. Places like Reddit don’t “die” by going from existing to nonexisting. They “die” by going from “Reddit” to “Did you know Reddit still exists?”.
The official Reddit app reminds me of that vibe in that it’s trying to be an algorithm-based feed of /r/all garbage to piss you off in the name of engagement and doesn’t resemble the Reddit I originally fell in love with years ago.
Algorithmically directed social medias such as Facebook are repulsive to me, so when I started using Reddit, I chose that place precisely because you could control what’s in your feed. It felt refreshingly different. Now Reddit is trying to become the next Facebook, so it’s pretty clear that it’s no longer the place for me.
The same thing seems to apply to the history of YouTube as well. Nowadays that site is trying to become just like TV, so perhaps sooner rather than later that site won’t be for me anymore.
Delete your history and be very selective in what you watch, and YouTube is pretty decent… At least for a few months. After that, either you stuck to your preferences and end up looping over the same content, or you branched out and now it keeps trying to feed you rants full of dog whistles
I use Firefox and containers along with unlock origin - by using the containers strictly for several narrow interests, YouTube acts like ad free tv for me - perfect background noise
I’ve also noticed that compartmentalizing my youtube experience has improved it significantly. For instance, science and technology will stay in one container, while scifi, anime, games, movies etc. goes into another container. It used to be possible to do this in Youtube by making dedicated lists of subscriptions. I used to have a list for all the computer stuff so that when I want to see computers, I would go there. When I felt like watching tea related contend, I would go to the tea list instead and I would se no computers at all. It was great… until YouTube decided to get rid of this feature.
Nowadays it’s just one big bess where the algorithm decides what you should watch today.
This is why Apollo was the only thing keeping me on the site. I took advantage of its filters. I had an extensive list of keyword filters, and over the years had filtered probably several thousand subreddits. I could actually browse r/all and find interesting and unique new to me subreddits. It was great.
I solved that problem by using multireddits, and never visiting r/all. I had one for uplifting stuff, another one for science stuff and so on. In Narwhal and Slide, and they both made it possible to put multireddits in the center stage. Then I tried the default reddit app, and multireddits were hidden behind so many taps, that they must be about remove that feature soon.
I had multireddits for my subscriptions, but I liked discovering new things. With the extremely amount of trash filtering I did to r/all, it allowed me to discover interesting places I’d have never found on my own.
Yea, similar to Tumblr, they fell hard and now people use it dramatically less than before their NSFW decision to the point that now that they’ve allowed that content again no one really cares. Tumblr will always be seen as “the website that died after banning NSFW content.”
It’s quite possible Reddit will be seen as “the website that died because they backstabbed third party developers.”
Funny I know somebody who has decided to switch back to tumblr mad their time sink because of all the Reddit drama.
Yeah, my hope is the small learning curve to join the fediverse means we don’t end up with the bulk of the active posters on reddit.
My fear is that Lemmy is about to see some attacks the fediverse isn’t ready to defend against.
Incidental ddos is a possibility as well if the hype builds enough.
Ddos is the least of its worries.
A coordinated astroturf attack by various interests will be it’s real telling moment and has already claimed previous attempts like Voat.
Voat died because it was a cesspool of the worst of the internet. I checked it out a bit after it’s formation and the last thing the world needed was another haven for pedos and alt-right sorts.
What is “Voat”?
A Reddit alternative that had a chance but couldn’t handle the influx so it ended up with just the hatorade free speech absolutists as reasonable people just went back to Reddit.
Important to note the influx in question was caused by reddit banning hate subs and reasonable people also saw there was a forum to leer on children and left on the spot.
hey dude, I did this in Friday night and spent all weekend getting in deep with Lemmy. If you are coming over from Apollo, try the beta iOS app, Mlem.
I really like the communities I found in beehaw but have been steadily exploring.
Same. However something about Beehaw and their adnin/moderators unnecessarily overt political views really puts me off and I do not know what nor can I point my finger on it why.
I quite like Beehaw and their Be(e) nice philosophy. Angry online arguments aren’t for me personally and it’s nice to be part of a space that promotes a more chilled out vibe. Plus it seems there are plenty of other instances that are OK with the usual online bickering we’ve all become accustomed to over the years so if I ever want to read another heated argument about what constitutes a grilled cheese I know where to go haha!
A whole bunch more just went dark at midnight eastern time.
Yeah, I’m only seeing plumbing and homeimprovement subs. :)
And a lot of people posting “hey, what happened to <sub>?”. Like… have you been living on the sun the past two weeks?
Crowds of people can be incredibly clueless. Before the blackout, there would be stickied posts explaining the whole situation in plain language, and then dozens of comments like “What’s going on I don’t understand???”
I think part of that’s also that stickied posts don’t stick to the top when you sort by new, iirc? And if you only check reddit once a week, or less, I could see missing all of it. Perfectly normal one day, leave, then you come back a week later and it’s a desert. Must feel weird and startling without context.
And some apps give you a setting to not show stickied posts altogether (which is just dooming yourself to problems like this, but people apparently get annoyed enough by them that they don’t care, I guess?)
I meant somebody would be commenting on the post itself asking questions answered by the post.
Looks like Reddit is down at the moment. I wonder if they’re making any large changes today to take advantage of the blackout distraction.
5497/7047 subreddits are currently dark.
Absolutely amazing show out so far. Actually pretty proud of the Reddit community
It’s probably even more than that. reddark is only measuring which subs are marked as private; subs like r/ELI5 have instead blocked posting and made sticky posts about the blackout. reddark will show them as public because, for those announcements to be visible, they have to be.
Yep, though this fork of reddark does take into account restricted subs!
It’s astounding how consensus can be achieved on certain topics. Our planet is burning, yet we struggle to come together and agree on the urgent need to take action. However, when it comes to a change in Reddit’s API plan, we suddenly find ourselves capable of mobilizing en masse for a common cause. Humans are truly peculiar beings.
It’s unfortunate, but I think it’s because in this specific instance, there is a clear and immediate impact on people’s lives. Meanwhile, climate change is a gradual change over a longer period of time and a much larger area. Climate change also requires action beyond stopping visiting a website and actual cooperation among the entire human race. It’s short-sighted, but it’s also an example of how hard it is to get people to care about things that don’t clearly and immediately affect them (see also: people who are militant homophobes until someone close to them comes out).
Yup. Climate change is too big, and the changes we would need to make to save ourselves from it are too drastic, and the consequences are “too distant”. (Though we’re already experiencing the consequences and have been for decades, they have come upon us gradually. We are boiling frogs.)
On top of that, there are plenty of people who justify their inaction by either assuming that humanity is going to spin up some last-minute miracle solution (these are the “technology will always prevail!” folks), or that they will personally devise some last-minute solution for themselves (“I will escape to a climate-controlled New Zealand bunker!”)
Climate change is such a big problem precisely because of the way it is enabled by our short-sighted, self-serving nature.
…anyway.
I just deleted both my reddit accounts but overwrote years worth of comments and posts first
