I’ve been doing the Internet social thing since #hottub and alt.religion.kibology. My services were thus federated before it was cool.

I came to Reddit from Digg after migrating from Slashdot. Made a lot of comments and answered a lot of questions about a lot of different shit; posted a lot of pictures of foodporn. Some of it was pretty handy to a lot of people over time, if the upvotes were any indication.

About 2 weeks ago, I Power Delete Suite-ed the whole of it, editing everything to ‘null’ ahead of time. Since then, I’ve been waiting for straggler subs to re-appear (and there’ve been quite a few!), so I could give my comments within the same treatment.

Today I finally deleted my account.

Looking back, I feel like it’s a another chapter of my life closed. My relationship with the collective Reddit userbase has been more significant to me than have been several of those with people with whom I’ve had sexual intercourse, and certainly more so than with most of my past Internet relationships (never forgot you, though, lara (@umn); PM me if you see this ;)). I now feel vaguely adrift, hoping that Lemmy “makes it,” as it seems to satisfy the majority - if not the entirety - of my immediate technical and entitative specifications, but also acutely aware that I’m really after the interaction with the high points of the Reddit userbase.

That’s really the thing: Reddit did a really good job of making the Internet social thing doable, both for us net-native, “socially awkward” folks for whom Lemmy is a snap, and for everyone else at the same time. Through occasionally-careful regulation and monolithicism, Reddit did much both to establish the modern incarnation of the venerable BBS and to make it accessible to more everyday, less weathered/jaded folks than I, while still providing a relatively no-nonsense interface for those of us with a more directly functional bent.

I hope that on this, my round 2 (or is it 3 now?) of the federated/monolithic cycle, the good guys win, i.e. open Internet culture gains enough momentum from the Reddit implosion to make something in the Fediverse the new crowd favorite long enough to keep it safe from corporate compromise in the long run.

  • @CascadianBeam
    50•1 year ago

    I did the same thing, granted I had less tenure. I had about 8 years. Reddit had grown more and more tiresome over the last couple years. I was never a super user or much of a contributor. I had maybe 60k total karma, so not a total lurker but not exactly coming in clutch for Reddit content.

    Being that I’m on iOS, I truly loved Apollo. Apollo was Reddit for me. I realized when I finally decided to confront the realty of using Power Delete Suite, that I didn’t really care about what was deleted. I used to think I had some kind of kindred relationship with my saved posts and Reddit history. What I realized was that I had never actually reflected back on any of that, so what was the point in clutching my pearls over deleting it.

    I did finally go through with it, but it was mostly symbolic. I haven’t been on Reddit in quite some time. My main issue right now is needing a reasonable replacement for Reddit. At first, lemmy seemed like it scratched the itch. As I went on, I started to realize the itch was being scratched primarily by memes. Then it continued to dawn on me how long it would take to build a community like what Reddit had.

    I have mixed feelings about the emulation of Reddit. I do think we have the early adopter crew currently, and that crew has, time and time again, proven to be a good crew. I feel like Lemmy needs to come into its own organically, as Reddit did. I see a lot of copy and paste communities based on subreddits, and that’s fine, but some are a little on the nose. I think we as a community need to get more creative and take ownership of Lemmy apart from Reddit. That may just take time.

    • danielbln
      3•1 year ago

      I’m not sure I agree that the copy&paste communities are per se a bad thing. Those communities came to be on Reddit organically due to demand and trial and error, nothing wrong with not reinventing the wheel here and continue to use and provide what worked (in addition with innovation that the early adopter crowd can bring, of course).