I see a lot of posts on fediverse trashing reddit, Twitter, spez, musk and so on, and rightfully so. But like it or not, the mass majority of users on the internet still use these sites, and some of us still want to interact with the friends and communities we are a part of on those sites. And there’s nothing wrong with that either.
Personally, I want fediverse to grow, and I post on kbin and mastodon constantly, and try to grow the communities on them. But I still pop over to reddit for r/splatoon, r/casualconveration, and my hometown sub, because either the communities haven’t grown enough here yet for constant fresh content, or the content is different enough between both to justify me checking in.
I get many are here as a protest against reddit, Twitter, or where ever else you came from, and that’s valid. But there are many of us who are simply casual users who want to include fediverse into their drives of other social media, and that’s totally fine too.
Some of the people who came here as a form of protest no longer want to support Reddit in any form, whether it be by creating content/comments or just seeing ads. “Nothing wrong” is very subjective; if a person believes that Reddit is detrimental and should die, then they won’t agree that there’s nothing wrong in going there. Realistically, Reddit isn’t going to go away anytime soon, but this is an argument about principles and values, and we don’t all share the same ones.
Spot on. I don’t care if Reddit continues to exist or fades away; my interaction with it stopped with third party apps.
And with Lemmy, I don’t feel any need to engage with Reddit using their mobile site/app.To each their own, but Lemmy has been far more interesting, even in smaller communities.
This feels like the correct take to me. I still view the occasional Reddit post but only as an absolute last resort for information I can’t find anywhere else. Even though I don’t post, comment, or vote, I’m still aware that my mere presence there is helping them in some form.
It’s similar to the recent Harry Potter game. Lots of people decided that it’s far enough removed from Rowling to be okay to buy even if they were pro-trans. But everyone who bought it DID give some of their money to Rowling. It’s your decision to weigh the cost/benefit of such a thing, but it was a little shocking to see how many supposedly pro-trans people straight up deluded themselves into thinking they weren’t directly supporting Rowling and her anti-trans views.
So yeah, use Reddit still if you must; I certainly understand how much important/useful content and information lives exclusively there, and the overzealous Reddit boycotters may be missing this (or just don’t care). But don’t pretend like using it isn’t also supporting them.
Reddit does still have the advantage of being highly indexed by search engines.
A Lemmy instance on the other hand probably wouldn’t have that same benefit.
How often do people search for “how to [insert thing here]. Reddit” to find a worthwhile source of info that isn’t clickbait?
I have put in place a number of restrictions for my “rudimentary” use of Reddit. Most of these restrictions have to do with using Reddit to promote its alternatives, deleting/rewriting old posts/comments, decreasing my usage of Reddit overall and increasing my use of Kbin, and countering and deplatforming bigotry on Reddit. Some people can argue that even “rudimentary” use of Reddit is too much use, and maybe it is, but it’s still a pretty good improvement compared to the alternative of not being on the fediverse at all. I think that’s what matters in our current landscape.
Regarding ad blockers, which I’ve seen mentioned a few times in this thread: Ad blocking doesn’t really “stick it to the man” like a lot of people seem to think it does. The people who block ads are those who’d never click an ad, anyways, and if ad blocking is what it takes for them to use a website and build its value, then that’s what it takes. So ad-blocking doesn’t really decrease the click-through rate — I’ve actually heard that ad-blocking can sometimes increase the click-through rate, since ads are only shown to those most likely to click them.
Like people can totally do what they want, and I’m not sure how to best articulate this, but if you want lemmy to supplant reddit it’s better to not use Reddit at all.
Main issue being (most) people who browse both will almost always stop checking one eventually. And since Lemmy is the currently the smaller of the two it has very high fizzle risk.
Lemmy (shorthand for the fediverse at large) was never going to supplant reddit in the short term, but the API boondoggle helped lemmy to grow at a huge rate since mid-June.
Does anyone think Reddit is done doing dumb shit? I don’t, and thr next time they do a dumb Lemmy will be much closer to a true alternative to reddit than it was a month ago.
It will probably take multiple missteps by Reddit (or one huge one), but each one will chip away and then eventually I think lemmy will be in the spot reddit was in when digg did their final dumb.