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.
Well said. I’ve got 11 years under my belt but I remember joining at an early time and it just seemed very fresh. I went to meetups, met some cool people and had some awesome experiences along the way.
The past 6 or 7 years that kinda vibe fizzled - maybe mostly cuz of my own apathy or life changes but I never saw anything about meetups anymore. Not like I would’ve went anyways - I was already somewhat of an older person when Reddit started!
Anyways for me, it’s mostly just been a lurking scroll fest for a long while. I miss all that fun content that’s just somewhat of a mind killer, but I have enjoyed myself over in the fediverse and feel more inclined to interact - which is probably a good thing for me.