In the last 3 days I’ve been paying attention to r/all, expecting several posts about it and…
Yeah
Wasn’t expecting the website to literally shut down nor to monopolize r/all, because 3rd party users are the minority, but I hoped for more than whatever this was.
At least there’s a silver lining, I discovered new alternatives that have healthier communities
To be honest, I’m happy with how it went. I am excited to be off of Reddit and part of the Fediverse now. I never expected Reddit to fail, but I think there will be a drastic decrease in quality content.
What I’m most happy about is that the Fediverse so far seems to be mostly actually pretty good people (though I’ve been largely chilling in kbin since the blackout started – it only just turned on federation). Most past attempts to abandon reddit only saw the most toxic, horrible people leave. Sites like Voat were never an option because the users were awful. It’s nice that so far, I haven’t really seen any of that. In fact, it feels the opposite, with the people who left reddit being disproportionately great people, with the toxic people being more likely to stay on reddit.
I wonder if it’ll last? I hope so. I wanted to leave reddit in the past but never felt like there was anywhere comparable to go that wasn’t shit.
I will echo this. I was skeptical that any reddit alternative wouldn’t just be deplorables. I’ve browsed some sites with the most unbelievably racist stuff spewed. Pleased with kbin for now.
Kbin has been really great, everyone here is a lot more civil. I remember when reddit was like that prior to digg v3. And then eternal September. It took a while before reddit got to where it is now with almost everyone with any expertise on the website. But I think for the most part, decent people and decent communities are more fulfilling.
There’s a decent chance it will. The fediverse is—generally speaking—a fairly friendly and welcoming place. That’s in part to it’s decentralized nature and individual moderation tools. Bad actors can be blocked on an individual level (I just blocked /u/donaldtrump last night because I do not want to see stupid parody accounts and just like that he’s gone) as well as on an instance level for anyone not following the rules.
Each instance has their own rules about how to behave, so the bigots and whatnot get booted if they cause problems. Eventually they find an equally terrible server that will have them and once they start up again, that instance can be defederated, which is basically like cutting off the bridge to their island… no way to communicate. Eventually they end up alone or with equally terrible people on other instances.
That’s not to say that the fediverse doesn’t have it’s share of problems or is perfect, but we’re working hard to try and keep this a decent place to be.
