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.
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.
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.
Not at all. I’ve been more productive at work too.
Nah, I was already on the way out of Reddit, so this just gave me an excuse to delete my account entirely.
At first I did feel that way. But as my engagement with reddit went down it felt like my life improved.