I wanted to get an outside perspective on my Lemmy experience, so I go on /r/redditalternatives and bring up my experiences that I’ve described elsewhere here (tl;dr Lemmy communities are either filled with non sequitur ragebait or completely empty).
I get plenty of responses echoing my sentiment and offering suggestions like blocking and filtering. Plenty of others pointing out how Reddit sucks in its own way and how Lemmy addresses those issues (no creepy AI bots pretending to be real people). I feel my OP and the ongoing discussion is constructive and in good faith, and most people myself included express a desire to see Lemmy and the fediverse succeed despite our frustrations. But oops out of nowhere I get muted and banned with no explanation.
Fun times.
I get what you’re saying but I think your analogy kinda backfired, at least on me specifically. For a good 20 years there was this unused plot of land near me that we played around in as kids, but it eventually got turned into a municipal pocket park, and now instead of just teens smoking there are kids playing on the playground, people playing various sports, jogging and cycling on the track, grilling at the pavilions. I still use it, too, just in a different way from when I was a kid.
But in the above case the community gained tremendously from the change. Reddit going public, especially all the stuff it did to get there like the APIcolypse, is only making the experience worse. That’s enshittification. The users give stuff up without getting anything in return. All the extra ads aren’t paying for new features, in fact they’re taking them away. I would have gone crazy for the JSON (interface? API? IDK the correct term) but didn’t know it existed until the announcement that they killed it a few days ago. They also got rid of private messages and (really petty IMO) subscriber counts on the old site.