I stopped using reddit when Apollo went down, and 2-3 hours of scrolling and active posting in some niche subs turned into ~30 mins of Lemmy per day, which I find much more healthy.
I didn’t start doing yoga, painting, or a side business, just feel much better having cut back the last big pillar of my social media addiction.
So thanks Steve!
(If it’s not too much to ask, please take a look at how you could improve instagram, you could save another 15 minute of my day)
I agree! I’ve been wasting time on reddit since 2008 or so, to the point that now and then I’d block it on my router to avoid going there from habit. Not all bad of course, but it’s been increasingly futile and counterproductive in the past few years.
I’ve never used third party apps, but I stopped going there when it became clear the management has zero respect for the userbase.
The thing is, literally all big tech companies also have zero respect for their userbase but people keep using Google, Meta, Insta and all those things.
I think us geeks have started to move away from it more and more, but the majority couldn’t care less.
I gave up on facebook, twitter and instagram years ago, but just because I did of course doesn’t mean everyone else did. I ended up replacing them with nothing… more reddit, I suppose, but it doesn’t fulfill the precise same purposes.
It’s heartening that finally significant amounts of people are moving to alternatives because the alternatives do exist now. When people were ticked off with reddit in the past, your choice was pretty much… fuck off, i guess. Same for Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and IG. At least there are good alternatives to Twitter and Reddit now. They don’t need to be huge, merely big enough.
Absolutely. And I hope Lemmy stays rather small actually… Too big is not good since it brings corporate interests in monetizing the entire thing. And then we are back to having ads and data mining and not being allowed to use certain words again like on reddit or other big tech sites.
At a certain point you just have to keep doing what you’re doing and hope people join you. :/
There are so many scary topics today that “hey this is really important to get right” just doesn’t really hit bottom unless someone already cares about a particular issue, and we all know how incentivized those big platforms are to providing actual critiques of their products.
I’ve settled on just telling people what I use and why, and sometimes they look thoughtful, and I do what I can with my own limited knowledge and time. More a minimization of harm than going for broke.
While Lemmy is significantly less engaging, it is a lot better at that. I’m glad, especially knowing the algorithm isn’t run by some money hungry people.
Reddit saved my life through making the service literally unusable. I was finally able to break an over decade long addiction to the service. Doc said if I had continued, the cancer would spread through the computer into me.
Curing instagram addiction is easy. Just unfollow everyone you don’t know in person. Cut my instagram time from ~2h/day to 5 minutes every other day
I also don’t have reddit addiction syndrome anymore.
Now I have Lemmy Addiction Syndrome…
Nah, only Lemmy. I don’t like the Mastodon system where you follow users instead of communities. Like why would I want to follow some random internet strangers I don’t know, instead of an actual community of people with similar interests to have a meaningful discussion with? Any Twitter-like system where you follow users is just not my type of platform to use.
Much easier to search for “Technology” and have a full community instead of finding a Mastodon User equivalent of LinusTechTips, which is just one person. I’d have to search for every tech person to get all the tech stuff. I prefer just one community for everything.
Nah, only Lemmy. I don’t like the Mastodon system where you follow users instead of communities. Like why would I want to follow some random internet strangers I don’t know, instead of an actual community of people with similar interests to have a meaningful discussion with? Any Twitter-like system where you follow users is just not my type of platform to use.
Yeah, I think there’s great benefit in our mental too from that standpoint. Like you have more active to interact digitally and have more diverse idea to talk rather than passive scrolling the content without any engagement or just leave short comment. At least for me, Lemmy push me more less seeing the contents and focus what people’s mind in the comments section and trying to make meaningful discussion from that…
I’m glad I’m not the only one, lol. I’m just sitting here like, “I think my addictive behavior is coming from the inside, because if I get the same kind of stimulus, I have the same response…”
But, on the plus side, Lemmy is doing a much better job of delivering dopamine hits than Reddit was. Reddit is like the dealer who gives you good stuff at first, then starts cutting it with something else, raising the price, refusing to answer the phone for a month while you’re having withdrawals, and generally making your life miserable for no good reason.
