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.
I first nuked my comments – “Comment removed - No IPOs without APIs” – and then let it sit there for a week. Right now I’m removing all my comments from all but 2 subreddits where I’ve been an admin (r/electricvehicles and r/vwid3owners). I’ll likely leave the second as I started that and there’s a lot of curated work there for new EV owners. Unsure about the first - it’s gone from an open EV discussion to a US/Tesla party - most everything else gets downvoted and it sucks (admins are mostly North Americans and Tesla owner(s) and there’s a clear bias).
My problem isn’t only /u/spez, but how the race for growth and “engagement” has created petty little wars everywhere. So sick of it, I’m having a hard time getting the will to restart or engage here.