I’m using Memmy for Lemmy and the dev has said they were inspired by Apollo. There’s even a shoutout to Christian on the github page. It’s just had it’s official app store launch, definitely worth giving a try.
Yeah I feel the same way. I'm on here and it's working but I also do miss my years and years worth of subs I joined that made my feed perfect to what I liked, especially the smaller ones that I hope make it over here someday. Right now my lemmy feed just mostly feels like meme after meme or some politics post which is not really what I like at all so I may have to spend some time and figure out how to narrow my interests more on here.
That’s definitely the worst part for me too. But if people make the switch here and the user base grows and over time you curate your feed here, it could eventually be that again.
I’m just ready to sacrifice that to say “screw you” to Reddit. Finding this platform has just been a pleasant surprise
I'm lucky that my curated feed was mostly open source coding, AI tech and solar punk so I've been able to find even better communities than Reddit had. The less tech adjacent subs will take longer to build but you can see them starting to establish - I guess the best way to help that is to participate in them and to introduce other people to them.
Welcome! You've probably seen it around already, but just in case, you can search at lemmyversenet/communities and may turn up some of those niche communities that are just difficult to find otherwise. Ofc, maybe they don't exist yet, but always worth a look!
I will. But I do want to say that it’s my personal opinion, that yes, we definitely should grow as a community with more reddit refugees, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to grow relatively slowly. On the technological side, we need the infrastructure growth to match the user base growth. Maybe even more importantly, I think most of us will agree we want to take the good of reddit with us, but definitely not the toxicity. Copy pasting the whole user base to the fediverse could lead to also copy pasting the culture that exists over there now.
The thing I most enjoy on Lemmy is definitely the general vibe over the content for now, and that is pretty special on the Internet.
Ok, just went there. My home is full of smaller subs reposting old high-quality stuff. I could even mistake that for good activity if I haven't seen it already.
Popular is full of useless shit... so no visible impact.
I guess one has to subscribe to the correct subs to see the implosion.
Im still using my custom app patched with my own API key. But it's slowly not becoming worth it with most of the smaller subs I follow only having 1 or 2 posts in the last week. Opposed to the 2 or 3 posts per day.
They also haven't actually kicked off third party clients for mods. If you moderate any sub (even just create a private sub now) and the client didn't purposely kill their own API key (Apollo and RIF did I believe) it will still work even without the patch.
It's getting pretty bad though. With most people who were truly pro-protest gone, average sentiment is "oh well protest failed let's get back to normal". I was pretty heavily downvoted in the Ask Historians meta thread about next steps for suggesting the mods/experts were fairly irreplaceable and they should look to move content off of reddit to their own site.
I think it really depends on what subs you are subscribed to, some people are almost noticing nothing at all. Other places are a real dumpster fire.
Just went back yesterday to see if my GDPR request had gone through already
Some smaller niche subreddits have been fractured pretty bad. If you’re someone who mainly used Reddit for hobbies and such, you’d notice more than somebody who just lurks the default subs.
We really already doing this? Really about to start the whole "I'm going to insult you because you have a different opinion than me, and I'm not actually going to contribute to the conversation at all" shit?
I don't "like" that it got this bad, but I do like that the worse things get, the more we can collectively organize and pressure reform to fix these things.
It'd be great to see a true social revolution take place in my lifetime. Social for the sake of social, not controlled by a single corporation with a business model that's designed to exploit its users.
This already exists it's called face to face communication. You can do it in private spaces like living rooms or bars. You can also find public spaces like parks and transit. If you're shy look into activities related to hobbies.
Yeah, just let me head over to the local 20k-member community for a mobile game that hasn't been updated in 5 years real quick. You know, the one that every city has.
I just checked it out, because of your claim, but found it to look just like it always did. r/all is still the same, my subsribed subs are still the same. Still a lot of people posting content, asking questions, sharing stories. Not sure in what kind of bubble you live :/
I only joined Lemmy yesterday and I plan on using both for now but this site and app are already a so much better experience without ads and everything loads lightning fast. And then I open reddit and I have to look at the spinning circle everytime I click on something. For some reason, it's even worse on desktop. That shit feels so unresponsive.
If you're gonna use both for now, I would recommend downloading an ad blocker. AdGuard and ublock origin (the word origin is important, there is a knockoff called ublock) are both good. It was greed that motivated Reddit to pull this shit, might as well deny them ad revenue.
I never knew it was a knockoff! I always thought it was just an inferior version but still them! TIL about people stealing the name of a free ad blocker (presumably) for profit 🤦
Do these actually work for Reddits android app? I've tried a few blockers over the years including adguard and I don't think any have stopped these ads because they're coming from Reddit like a normal post
Start posting. Really. I've been posting to keep communities I like going and others have started posting too. It's slow growth, but the more content a community has, the more people will sub to it and eventually post to. Anyway, that's my opinion.
I tried to give the official app a shot after using Boost for years. Absolutely no customization options other than light/dark theme, ads everywhere, different interface for video comments, and it drained my battery. Felt so good to uninstall.
The difference is that this is an open source community driven effort. Reddit is a for profit business. On that basis, I give Lemmy a lot more leeway when it comes to bugs. Reddit just turned into a slog over the last few years BECAUSE they try to monetize it to death.
Several subs that I frequented are gone. The biggest pain to me is probably caused by the loss of Transcribers for Reddit. The group behind it basically disbanded at the end of june.
I wouldn't call reddit thriving given that its flagship r/iama is now completely dead as a result of the mods packing up and saying that they will no longer do the work of verification or soliciting celebrities anymore. One of the biggest draws to the site historically as well as consistently producing positive media.
Yeah so there is still a lot of activity.
However, >2000 subs are still dark, 18 others have gone full john oliver and many more are less moderated than before. BotDefense are leaving. So it’s definitely not that nothing out of the ordinary is going on, although I think that is exactly experience that reddit as a company tries to give you when you visit the site.
Eitherway, I am a lemming now and very happy to be here and not there.
Exactly! Last I checked, sure there was a lot of activity BUT as you said, many subs are still dark. The major subs that reopened with new moderation have definitely had a major dip (imo) in quality. I was still seeing John Oliver everywhere. They did use quite a few users, maybe not enough for them to flinch too hard but, how active were those users? I consider my old account there a "power comment account" I rarely posted but was extremely active in the threads, spending hours each day replying to comments of my inbox, so much so that I rarely even viewed actual content. Makes me wonder, how many accounts like mine did they lose? Many just lurked. The comment sections were fueled by active commenters and imo it wouldn't take losing too many like me for the threads to take a noticeable hit.
Anyway I don't care much about how it is over there rn, just glad I have this place so I don't have to support that platform in any way. Plus now that I've found a cool app, jerboa or whatever it's quite enjoyable! Connect and liftoff are also great but my phone doesn't play well with many apps.
Yup. Just like Spez predicted. The site is maybe less popular, but it will survive. The protests will die off eventually. The Reddit clones will never be as popular and active as Reddit once was. Maybe eventually the investers and advertisers will return, and it will be seen in hindsight as a smart move. The quality of the content may take a drop, but it was a calculated risk of making it more profitable.
It was a pretty safe bet. Most of the people on this planet don't give a shit about principles or corporate hostilities so long as they get what they want.
The real problem was always a lack of alternatives imo. A "protest" can't work on the website you're literally using. What should have happened is those people all moved to another platform, but there isn't one. There isn't one canonical alternative to reddit, so they had to "protest" there.
Yeah, I know that, but on Reddit you could go to /r/Firefox and be almost guaranteed that that was the main place that people interested in Firefox would congregate. If you started scrolling, you'd see pretty much everything that anyone posted. For bigger subs there generally was one place to go to find that content.
While here, I could be on .world and see some stuff, but then I'd have to go to .ml or some other instance to see other stuff. Then you've got almost duplicate posts on different instances.
It's just kind of messy. You can't be on .world Firefox community and also see posts from the many other Firefox communities on the other instances, at least if you can I don't know how you do it.
Sure, you can view all and see everything from everywhere, but that's literally everything from everywhere, not just Firefox related stuff.
Don't get me wrong, I like it here, and it's good to have a potential viable alternative to Reddit. I'm just not sure how it's going to catch on with Joe Public unless there is a way to tie the same/similar communities from different instances into the one view while still keeping them separate.
It doesn’t help that Firefox will still be at different places with different contents. They should do something about user experience. It’s very confusing for non tech savvy people.
When reddit had the same amount of content that lemmy has right now it was already its user's main timewaster
It's just a matter of time
There's also power in just existing and becoming an increasingly more viable alternative to reddit. Between disappointment in the mods and how centralized things are, racist stuff invading the front page, ads, admins, ... the less painful the transition becomes from one timesink to another the more the risk to Digg their own grave becomes threatening
The only thing I'm scared of is whether lemmy is capable of standing up to bad actors with its decentralized architecturr because if we imagined it becoming, say, half as popular as reddit; we'd start getting astroturfing campaigns and spam. And vote-manipulation is way easier here, and so is ban evasion
I kinda feel like usage quirks like these are something that could become cultural knowledge overtime. Usenet was hardly user friendly but managed to get a huge user base and still does I think (although probably mostly because it was first)
I can see that not driving people away but confusing people that aren’t massively tech savvy.
This is a disadvantage early, but it also weeds out a lot of the critical mass ignorance and a lot of the people who are unwilling to make any effort to think critically.
I'm really looking forward to how it grows. The more popular it gets the more the pressure will be to have it be user friendly. Right now it feels like reddit from about a decade ago.
That's like saying you signed up on both GMail and Yahoo Mail so you can get email from both Google and Yahoo users. I don't understand why federation is such a difficult concept for people.
You can choose more freely your subscriptions and info, not based in a unique-centralized and biased source, but from a community of servers which resist to the monopoly of the internet.
The split instance thing is actually great, if you don’t like a site that’s fedded with lemmy.world then you can just find one that blocks it- or make one yourself and put your communities there.
yeah, this is not true. some subs are gone. there are still tons of people there. HOWEVER, the level of shitheadedness is increasing across all subs, even ones that were once relatively free of it. I'm seeing fewer thoughtful responses and more of the kind of reactionary kneejerk bullshit you expect from the front page subs or youtube comments or something. As ever, niche content remains your best bet, but I'm noticing a sharp decline in quality. This has been happening for a long time now, but this event has certainly been a(nother) tipping point. People have constantly compared reddit to digg in this instance, implying that the same kind of replacement is nigh... but I don't know. We are kind of in uncharted territory on this. In the earlier days of the www there was always a new thing, but the Digg collapse happened (or started happening) like 15 years ago, the internet is an entirely different beast now. I don't know what's going to happen with reddit, but I'm on permanent lurker status over there until I suss it out.
I agree with everything you said, but I have a few additions that I've noticed in terms of Reddit going downhill. I'm seeing a ton of anti-copium in this thread, but ngl, I Reddit has gotten a LOT worse for me as a whole as someone that uses it regularly. it's the reason I came here, even though I actually didn't stick with Lemmy originally after the blackout (due to lack of content).
-Like you said, shitheadedness has gone up
-Reposts and unserious posts have gone up (replacing actual interesting and varied content, which has gone down)
-Content farming has gone up (related to the above point)
-"Subtle" advertisement like astroturfing has gone up (once again, reducing visibility of any actual worthwhile posts)
-The NSFW side of reddit is legit worthless at this point.
In addition the the app being unusable and the APIs no longer allowing for third party apps. I'm a bit surprised there are so many people in this thread that claim not to have noticed. Like, Reddit has legitimately turned into IFunny quality material seemingly overnight from my perspective. I'm not sure how people could not notice, but maybe I just use it differently from others.
This may not affect the shareholders at the end of the day since it will probably just turn into a low quality garbage machine that still makes money, but from an actual social media perspective I think there will be a significant number of others like me who need to find a new home that's not full of shit content.
To be honest, when I was back there yesterday I missed Lemmy. I either had forgotten about the amount of toxicity that is over there, or it has gotten worse because of all of the issues.
I mean, the toxicity is definitely noticeably higher. I’d bet good money that it’s a direct result of tons of mods just going “fuck this noise” after having basically all of their 3rd party moderation tools turned off.
Google has led me there a few times since I joined Lemmy. Haven't really looked at it outside of that. It has actually popped up in searches more often recently for some reason. That reminds me that I have to switch my default search provider to something that is not shit.
I'll offer you something that might make you switch to DuckDuckGo and never look back: "bangs".
It saves me a full step, searching almost anywhere right from DDG. If I need Google, then !g (search query). If I need wikipedia, then !w (search query). If I need Youtube, then !yt. AZLyrics, !azl. Google Maps? !gm. Google Images? !gi... And so on and so forth. It's worth giving a try.
I just want a search engine that indexes the way google and others used to index because honestly I find google's quality has gone down immensely since their focus on corporate names and on-page SEO. It's getting worse and worse with every damn search result just being completely polluted with pages 100% written for robots instead of fucking giving human beings the answers as quickly as possible.
This, 300%.
If DuckDuckGo had no search capabilities, it would still be my default search engine just due to bangs, they're amazing.
For non English speakers, you can use your language for Wikipedia bangs. So a search with !wen will take you to English Wikipedia, and a search with !wit to Italian, for example.
I'll add that Brave Search also supports bangs -- !ddg to use DuckDuckGo.
I used to use DDG a while ago but Google was loads better...at the time. Now I get nothing but ads and video suggestions. I will likely just switch back to DDG again
Any way to get a Lemmy bang? It seems like that might be difficult to get a Fediverse wide one instead of individual servers.
Wow you just made it so much easier to permanently switch. I have my work set to DDG but have to switch to Google pretty often for more obscure things. Now I should be able to set it permanently using bangs.
Yep I second this! Switched to duckduckgo a few years ago and never looked back. Didn't even miss Google! Google is too intent on selling me stuff while monitoring damn near everything I do on my device. No need for them. Did love Google photos and how I could easily sync it to my PC but they've done away with that as well which is amazing to me because people loved it and there's really no alternative that works as well as it used to.
Hey, as someone who uses DuckDuckGo, they do unfortunately also engage in some cringe tracking. I think it's a bit less than Google, but honestly I don't think it makes much of a difference. They collect information about what you search for.
I might switch to Qwant or something. Not sure yet.
Really? I've been using it for a while and haven't noticed tracking.
What sorts of tracking have you seen them engage in?
They display ads in search results, which they presumably do need to track clicks for. But you can literally just switch the ads off in the settings. And then you'll never see them again. They're on by default, but not mandatory.
Content is slowing drastically, r/all isn't updating for most of the day from low engagement, reddit uses a differential for upvotes which doesn't reflect total users well.
I agree, I studied abroad with a 12 hour difference and during the day there, when I browsed Reddit, most of the posts were lower quality because most people were asleep. (Sorry euro peeps)
It's when the evening came that the posts picked up quality and engaged me.
Now that I'm stateside, I feel like Reddit posters are completely and perpetually asleep (or just gone).
It's really wild to see reposts over and over. Like some Redditbot constantly spamming the same thing hoping to get some traction going for conversation.
It's some sort of weird percentage once you get past a certain number. I'm fuzzy on the numbers but 1.2k upvotes shown on the website was worth a different amount than actual. Something like 1.5k = 1.2k upvotes for your personal karma.
Yeah when spez falsely accused Apollo Dev of blackmail, I knew I wasn't going back after the blackout. Used the remaining 2 weeks of API to run scripts that deleted all comments across my last 2 Reddit accounts.
The smearing he tried to do towards Christian was the moment I decided I was packing my bags and going. What a piece of shit. Only subs I truly miss are r/HobbyDrama and r/Eurovision.
Not sure what this place will evolve in to but it seems like a nice replacement for Reddit. There is a lot of work to be done for people to re-build the communities and transfer the information but if enough people buy in to it... years down the road this could be the place to be.
I use old.reddit and will continue to use it. However, since they killed 3rd party apps. I no longer use reddit Apollo on my phone. If they eventually kill old.reddit. That will be when I stop desktop usage.
To be fair, quite a few subs I enjoyed a lot were permanently shut down and disappeared :-( Makes that website a lot less fun for me now. Such a shame.
I go on Reddit for one sub and one sub only. Other than that, I don't care about the site. Notifications are blocked and I've hidden my bookmarks from myself.
Same, but the one sub is my profile to delete whatever decides to show up on that day...! Sucks not being able to control your own data easily - but I understand why they'd engineer it this way.
I did, I only check the very niche subs once very few days, but it's like returning to the still smoldering ruins of your burnt down home town, talking to the survivors...
I’m just glad some mods are smart enough now to realize that putting subs in nsfw mode is the way to go. The subreddit shutdown, John Oliver spam, etc, really didn’t accomplish anything. Like, why would Reddit admins even care you’re spamming John Oliver? You’re still getting them ad revenue.
apparently reddit has been cracking down hard on that measure, and lately they even unilaterally set every sub back to sfw, after threatening moderators with vague consequences if they start posting or approving nsfw to justify the label
Great, permanent nsfw worked. Their next move is to run an active campaign to get people out of Reddit and onto better alternatives. That’s all that’s left now.
That's when Cyberpunk 2077 decided to encourage people to take screenshots of fully nude models in the character creator and start posting them in the sub.
Super quick and low effort way to stay on topic and stay NSFW.
I stopped going to Reddit for the most part when RIF died. I only hit r/ukraine now because of whats happening there and its one of the best to get information. If there was any where else I could go, then Reddit would be dead to me.
Funny enough, my phone told me on Sunday that I used it 9 hours less than I had the week before, which was down about 4 hours. So I really need to thank Spez for giving me that much of my life back.
Yeah, for me it's the various subs like Ukraine, ukrainewarvideoreport, combatfootage, ncd I visited that I miss the most. Here on Lemmy these subs exist but the have maybe 10% of the activity.
Maybe some bigger subreddits are dying, but the UFOs and Experiencers subreddits are as active as ever, if not more. I guess these remain big there because these subjects are very censored in other social media (e.g. youtube) and never show up in search results (they show only videos from tv news). Reddit also censors them (e.g. some posts that contain more info than usual), but you can still see these posts when you go to these subreddits directly.
Americans are the only people that give a shit about that stuff it's so weird. Everywhere else it's as fringe as like flat earth morons but for whatever reason UFOs have constant massive interest among americans. I'm convinced it's because US gov is involved pushing it for whatever reasons whereas elsewhere other govs aren't pushing it.
they're a cultural phenomenon, but rest assured it's not really a thing here either. the vast majority of people either don't care or reasonably think supernatural/extraterrestrial uap's aren't really a thing. there's just a shit-ton of people here so it feels like it is.
It doesn't seem like it's actively collapsing but there is definitely a slow decline in its early stages. There's a noticeable uptick in the number of bots and they aren't being caught and deleted as quickly. There's also a lot of subtle protest going on such as r/DIY making their automod be as obnoxious as possible. It's still working and there's still content but there's a noticeable pallor over the place.
This got a good chuckle out of me, and I was gonna comment something else. But when I clicked on the thread and saw your username, I snorted so loud I forgot 😂
I think it’s also a boom and bust factor here. Take Elden ring for example, that subreddit popped off when the game released and still has a decent yet not nearly as active user base as before. It’s unlikely that cultural influences (aka meme potential) is strong enough currently to move that here to Lemmy. That might change with the exspansion coming out later. I think this example applies to most other organic communities on platforms like Lemmy. There needs to be some type of “buzz” and social interest in a given topic. Over time, I think we will see that happen more and more on Lemmy as well. Reddit was not built overnight and had to undergo the same process taking many years to be as robust on content as it is today.
tbf Boost was still working until yesterday so today is my first day without reddit and this time using both plataforms I really came to apreciate Lemmy.
Yeah, I moved over on the 30th when the app I'd been using for over a decade (the only way I ever accessed reddit) shut down and haven't felt the need to discuss it. Until now, of course. It's really silly and as newcomers to this place, we should be mindful that there are many longtime users that have made this space what it is. Here's hoping the pollution ends soon.