I really do like KBin and Lemmy and the fediverse on the whole, but development is still young and the userbase still growing. KBin is still basically early access, and Lemmy is buggy. I spent alot of time in reddit and I’m feeling the pain of trying to ween myself from it. Just wanted to here community perspectives and see how other’s are taking it.
For me, I feel a bit of a sore hollow spot for what reddit used to be and watching it implode is not fun for me.
Reddit was something unique and personal to each user. Some it was new, some it was the only place to find specific tech or other advice that wasn’t corrupted by ads and algorithms on goggle and other big corporations.
Reddit was my way of disengaging from world news before I knew about anxiety, and how things could affect me and become personal even though I had no way to help world events. So I used it to personalize my mental diet, if I was creative I could sub to many craft subs like leather or metal etc, it’s where I went to get other perspectives on movies and content that I didn’t fully understand.
End of the day, is all that possible still on Reddit, kinda, but it’s going away, and they pushed me personally to leave as I could see it was becoming google/Facebook, ad algorithms to push what people pay for or get paid for. So time to reset.
Become involved, I’m way more involved and adding to discussions on the new sites I’m on. Everyone adding comments and posts and perspectives and opinions are building this up from bottom up.
You are the future, make your perspective part of the future by helping guide these new sites to something we can be proud of.I’m upvoting your comment because you bring up great points, but I personally disagree with the disengaging from world events aspect. I’ll miss the niche subreddits that helped you solve the most random of issues, but I think reddit was far from a great place to disengage from news and the political discourse brought by news. Ever since the 2016 election cycle, I personally saw a considerable increase of posts regarding politics that came from both established subreddits and new ones that popped up (like /r/enoughtrumpspam which simply added more spam to the pile).
I think Trump’s campaign and presidency really ignited a lot of this, and while I neither like nor support Trump, I miss when the biggest disruptions were from isolated events (like the Occupy Wall Street movement or the Ellen Pao fiasco) rather than 4 years of a presidential tenure.
After years of nonsense, it all just got tiring. You can curate your reddit experience, but what happens when all the political doom scrolling finds its way into your favorite subreddits?
Kbin and the rest of the fediverse will grow, and I’m aware that the same kind of posting will find its way here, too. Thankfully the fediverse lets you subscribe to multiple communities of the same name, so maybe /m/news isn’t up one’s alley but /c/news is, for example.
I didn’t realize how shit reddit was getting until I stopped using it. The constant barrage of political shit accompanied by low effort comments/puns did a number on my happiness. I stopped using Facebook for similar reasons.
I’m glad you’re also adopting the mindset of being an active contributor. For years I also just would scroll and seldom upvote, but if we want to make “this house a home”, we need to put in the effort ourselves! I look forward to seeing how this all plays out. So far, I am very optimistic. I hope you find your niche interested here sooner than later!
Some of it was also political activists or people paid to actively work to sway opinion on social media.
“Some” is a huge understatement.
After years of nonsense, it all just got tiring. You can curate your reddit experience, but what happens when all the political doom scrolling finds its way into your favorite subreddits?
I’m not much into US politics, but you know, this reminds me of why I started disengaging from my own country subreddit. At the start it was mostly about the people and the community, and I liked talking to people and hearing their problems. I was hosting regular get-togethers and eventually became a mod. As Reddit got more mainstreatm, the anti-government political people started coming in and well, I don’t want to be hearing about moaning all the time. These people also had a terrible persucation complex (not helped by my country’s history of surpressing opposition views), so any attempt to moderate these people when their posts and comments got excessive and off-topic was met with fierce pushback. I just wanted a more positive place for people, instead of endless political bickering.
Until I got to the part about your country’s history of suppressing opposition, I thought you were talking about my country’s subreddit!
We went through the exact same trajectory from being a small friendly place with meetups, getting bigger, becoming negative and political arguments all the time. In the end I stopped dropping in there at all.
Yea, it’s a shame. Thinking about it now though, maybe should’ve created a separate sub to dump those political posts to.
Might have worked. They created one for my country, and also we could filter out politics on the main sub, but some people still just bring it up in other threads.
I always stuck with front page and never was on popular or all, I feel that was my saving grace. Also reposts and crossposted content drove me batty, so overtime unsubbed from groups that got political or negative. I wasn’t subbing to just kitty cat pictures, more so hobbies, movies, and specific YouTubers like rlm etc. That’s why I mentioned that everyone’s experience was different, just a few different subs and the whole experience is different.
I’m in a demographic that people actively try to push and radicalize as well, so even if I am frustrated with things and how they affect me, I always keep one foot out and try to be super aware of that. I feel some, not all obviously get caught up over time and it erodes who they are and normalizes some really crazy things. So when I realize something like American politics is affecting me and my day, as a Canadian, I step back and look at what I’m letting into my mental diet.
End of day I hope we all learn from the past and can improve on what worked and avoid what didn’t. There’s no reason to not learn from the past and try to grow in a positive way.
Well said @Bendermember
While I feel a bit nostalgic to leave Reddit behind, I recently realised it had become stale for me. Time to move on.
Absolutely this. It got very homogenized. I joined reddit for the variety of people and their ability to understand topics I’d like to understand better. Then it all turned to bots and reposts. Then I would unsub from one subreddit and migrate to the new sub that was similar to the sub I just abandoned until the new sub became infested with bots and reposts, then rinse and repeat.
This is a great answer.
I feel like I can do away with the doomscrolling and time-wasting, but it’s the specific advice and hobby subs that will be difficult to tear away from completely.
I’m also going to have trouble avoiding my city’s local subreddit. It’s definitely a hub for everything going on here, and I’ve made some real life friends on there who I plan on keeping up with.
What I liked about reddit was its “googleability”. You had a question and found an answer without reading through an endless article that winds it’s way through rephrasing your question 5 times, adds extensive biographies of everyone mentioned, the wider history of the problem and the author’s grandmother, all to pad the article and have you scroll through more adds.
But now there’s ChatGPT, so most of my “googling” can be done that way, and I don’t have to scroll through walls of puns or “this is the way” or “thanks for the gold, kind stranger”, or “take my updoot and get out”. I wonder how much of that bullshit were bots, anyway.
The whole social media collapse has been crushing for a recluse like myself. I mean, I might as well come out straight and say that. I’m not tactile and I don’t socialize, so the internet is my main source of communication with the outside world. I’m guaranteed to find people who share my interests, people who “get” me, people who don’t act like I came from Venus when I finally open up to them. When that all folds in on itself, or mutates into something that would make the monstrous works of HR Giger look like HR Puffnstuff, yeah, it’s kind of painful. Like living through your own digital 9/11. That sounds dramatic, and I mean it to be, but yes, losing social networks that were trusted sources of discussion has been like a sledgehammer to my mental health.
TMI, sorry. I do leave my house when needed, but it’s more business than pleasure. (There’s very little pleasure involved.)
I hear you. I spent most of fmy social time as a teenager in those new-fangled chat rooms in the mid-late nineties and I don’t think I ever really learned to socialize properly in person. Lol. That said, I don’t find the newness of this platform too daunting. I was one of the people who left Digg back in the day too.
I do miss my May 2023 baby bumps group now that I’m on maternity leave and have a lot of down time feeding the little one though. It’s not like it’s easy for me to leave the house with a toddler and a newborn even if I was to join a real life parenting social group.
Taking my daughter to organised play groups several times per week was forced upon me due to needing access to the community nurses who attended, as she needed constant monitoring of a birth condition. However, I’m incredibly glad I went, and continued to do so long after the condition ceased to need such close attention.
I made friends with several other parents, our children bonded and made their first friendships and learnt the basics of social interaction. The shared learning and support we were able to offer each other smoothed over countless daily needs and little fears. Sure, these friendships didn’t all sustain themselves long past our kids starting at their various different schools, but by that stage they had already learned so much that I could tell apart many of the children who had benefited from a similar experience and those who hadn’t.
I say all this simply to encourage you to try these sorts of groups. You might not make friends who last forever, you might not meet people exactly to your liking, but that’s life and it’s a valuable experience for the kids for that very reason. People are never more welcoming and friendly than when you have young children and need some companionship, we’re all in that same exact boat.
go to an AFK group. you can’t do it once in the next 3 weeks?
half the people there (infants) def have less social skills than you.
unless you find the “platform” of baby group to be too daunting for you.
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Hey, I know what you mean. As a teen I spent a huge amount of time on the local BBS scene, before moving on to the Usenet groups, IRC, and then various forums.
I’d say don’t despair. Interest groups will find a way to congregate somehow. We did fine socialising online before garguntan social media networks, and we will continue to do so without them. There’ll be a dip in the near-future, but others will come to take the place of these social networks. They may not be huge and all-encompassing, but maybe that’s what we really need: Smaller communities tailored to more specific needs and wants.
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You’ll find a community somewhere again. Just hold out, buddy.
Same. I have friends and people I socialize around in real life, BUT not many people IRL that I know has the same interests I have and some of those people I’ve only been able to connect with via subreddits. Losing that is hard and a few months ago would’ve been unthinkable, but I’m proud of myself for having gotten as far as I have. I was afraid I’d relapse and go back to reddit, but having sites like tildes and Lemmy have actually made it easier. Even if the size and content isn’t there yet, they’ve given me some place else to go that’s not reddit. We’ll rebuild new communities, it’ll just take time.
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I found similar when I left my country of birth, that many people don’t keep in touch, even if I tried to maintain a connection. Out of sight, out of mind.
What did you bond over with your friends?
It’s a common thing for people who move (country) as kids. Sociological term is Third Culture Kid.
Third Culture Kid
Wow just knowing that it’s so common an experience that there’s a name for it is comforting.
Thank you so much for sharing that.
Read a book about it if you have time or a few articles.
I read the big one (Pollock, Van Reken) and it was honestly scary how well it described some parts of my personality, and the challenges I was dealing with in my life.
Thanks, added it to my to-be-read list. My preference is fiction these days, but I’m not above mixing in an academic book every now and then
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That sounds nice. Similarly I’ve been in a book club for about two years now that was started on Reddit.
Although we haven’t read a book in months, we still meet virtually every week, so I guess we’re just friends now.
The ultimate test of these kinds of groups seems to be whether they can survive transplantation from one social medium to another. I wonder how my little book club would fare if there was a schism over using discord…
Maybe there is a board here that would help you set up something like that? It can’t hurt to look around and put out some feelers.
They have my email but none of them have reached out.
I’m going to ask the obvious- have you reached out to them?
For as good a tip as that is, and @NumbersCanBeFun should definitely try it if they haven’t (or can), it doesn’t always work.
I did the whole reaching out thing for years for those I knew from Uni, and for almost all of them I was the only one reaching out. It felt tiring holding up a relationship the other person had stopped caring about, so I ended up dropping most of them and haven’t heard anything since.
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I’m sorry. That sucks
Yeah, that sucks, but you’ve done what you could in that situation
Damn, I hope you’re better now.
I think this has taught us there should be multiple ways of getting in touch with people. Don’t put everything in one basket (in this case, Reddit). Hopefully the Fediverse will be one of many ways to do so.
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I’ve seen what 4chan can cook up, so I think it’d hardly be fair to call you a loser for having the gaul to make friends online haha
Joking aside though, it really does sucks so much, and while I can’t say I built up friends on Reddit, I do I sympathise with your situation.
There are so many people I used to know from my time at Uni, but years later I now only keep contact with a handful on a semi-regular basis, because they just never reach out. It’s always me having to extend the olive-branch, and it gets tiring after a while of realising you’re the only one holding things up.
I’m a rather home-body person myself, so I can also sympathise with not wanting to lose the friends you have for fear of being unable to make more.
I’m hopeful to talk to all sorts of new people here, as everything does feel more personal than Reddit for the most part. Also given the size of the community I do find myself running into people I’ve chatted with before to gain more insight from. In fact, I vaguely recognise your avatar, so we might’ve even spoken before too haha
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KBin is fairly intuitive as well, in spite of it’s lack of some quality of life improvements they need to implement. I am using it pretty active now on it.
I can’t speak to old-school Reddit because I joined fairly late to the party (2018-ish), but this does feel a lot like the old-school forums I used to frequent.
I’m glad you’ve already had the chance to integrate with folks around here, and I’m sure you’ll have plenty a chance to carve out a niche to hang out in.
Yeah, I think a lot of people feel that way. I certainly do - the blackouts and moving to Kbin gave me a chance to reflect on how I used Reddit, the habits I fell into, and to make what I think are healthier choices about them. For one, less doom-scrolling, and more attempting to interact more meaningfully with threads.
I feel you with this. Covid has made me completely bed bound and social media of one kind or another has been my only socializing for 3 years. Though Reddit isn’t one of the main ones for me, it does pain me to see some areas of assistance has gone away.
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I had a really bad back injury a couple years ago and still can’t be out of bed for more than an hour a day. It sucks hard and you have my sympathy.
You should reach out to your friends if you haven’t. It’s possible they’re also lamenting that no one has reached out to them!
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When the convenience melts away you find out who your friends really are, and most of the time our friends are friends of convenience. Feel free to message me if you ever want to talk, I think we all have this strange disruption of our life and routines from all the reddit goings on. It’s hard on people, as pathetic as that sounds, it’s true.
Sorry to hear about that, I don’t think you’re a loser, sometimes you don’t find out how close your bonds really are until they’re tested, or maybe some of those friends will eventually make their way off reddit and reach out again.
I myself was actually the exact opposite with Reddit. 12 year user, I specifically didn’t want to know anyone on Reddit or for anyone I knew from real life to know my reddit details. The great thing was the freedom of anonymity and being able to say whatever without the fear of someone I know reading it. Not that I had anything crazy to say, but I write differently if I know others who know me are reading vs if I’m just a stranger in a sea of strangers. I would hate to have an actual audience.
I’ve been on Reddit for 14 years now. I honestly don’t know where else to get tailored news and discussion on niche topics, particularly ones too niche to establish a userbase here on the Fediverse yet. I expect I’m just going to be out of the loop on things from now on as I live like a hermit in the mountains.
You touched on what is the biggest thing for me. I’ve been on Reddit for about the same amount of time. That said, I’m a habitual lurker, so much of the participation and community interaction comments don’t hit as close to home for me, but I’ve been off Reddit since the protest started and I just feel out of the loop. Most of what I was reading every day was trivial nonsense but it was trivial nonsense that I at least felt somewhat informed about, now between getting off Reddit and Twitter I just feel like I’m living under a rock.
Honestly, I think I was spending too much time on Reddit. This debacle has forced me to find some other sources of info.
I am hoping to seeing the fediverse turn into something special. That would be a real gift to the future if we could pull it off.
I just set up a rss feed of all my subreddits that I still lurk. Try it out!
Are you using something like IFTTT for that? I’d like to compartmentalize the local subreddits so I can stay up to date on news and events nearby, but I want to avoid the distraction that is reddit in general.
Yes absolutely. I miss so many subreddits so dearly, and some of them aren’t leaving reddit and I feel too guilty to go back there even though I’m a PC user. I’m really sad about everything, and I feel really lonely and awful. I’ve been super active in both the /kbin and Artemis communities, and they’re both wonderful, so I’m making new friends, but nothing’s going to fill the void truly.
Everything is not awesome :(
Go back to your Reddit friends (e: if you miss them).
I hate Reddit as much as anyone else, but why make yourself miserable because of an API change?
Stay on kbin AND stay on Reddit. Evangelize!
I don’t have any interest in contributing to spez’s prosperity. He destroyed the modern Library of Alexandria.
Consider my comment here as a rebuttal. If you want to stay on Reddit, that’s OK, but I see this as an opportunity for you to be a part of doing something different.
I think it’s largely more than an API change. It felt miserable before Spez made his choice. This most recent choice was the end of a long line of bad choices Spez made. And I absolutely don’t care to see the trainwreck of that site after it’s IPO.
Oh absolutely, Reddit’s value was partially due to its years of user curated content. It’ll take a while to build the alternatives up to a similar level.
One benefit at least is that this shift allows for changes to be made that Reddit never would have done.
I feel it for sure. I’m kinda using it as an opportunity to take a break from socials for a bit to be honest. I’m excited about kbin and lemmy but I’m also happy to have the clunkiness of the sites be a reason for me to be outside more
Yeah, I’m gonna miss the level of community engagement from my favorite subs. NCD, RoughRomanMemes, and Shermanposting. We likely won’t get that level of activity here for a long time. Also gonna miss updates from r/Ukraine, though I get most of the big news from ISW, the human interest stories shone most on Reddit.
I still have my reddit account to keep track of a few niche communities that can’t survive the move, but I haven’t commented or doomscrolled since I left for Kbin.
I think it maybe important for us to all collectively shift our views on commenting on “old” posts. I’m going to give myself a 2 week window on commenting on threads. If everyone had this kinda attitude it may help with engagement short term til things start picking up long term.
Do people have something against commenting on old posts? I’d do that all the time when I had reason to on Reddit
I didn’t have a problem with it, but in a large sub, anything more than a couple hours old that hasn’t attracted much attention is not going to be seen by many or get much conversation, and anything 24 hours old is usually gone.
Small subs could have older posts see activity for much longer.
As long as the original poster is still active, I don’t see any reason to not comment on “old” posts if there is something to contribute and/or ask. I’ve had people comment on posts that were older than a year (and of course I answered).
Also gonna miss updates from r/Ukraine, though I get most of the big news from ISW, the human interest stories shone most on Reddit.
[email protected] and [email protected] are both relatively active, though I realize that that’s still less-so than Reddit.
(As of this writing, the auto-hyperlinking of the above magazines is still broken, but using that format as I understand that it’s supposed to be fixed in the next update).
NCD
NCD was like the first magazine I saw with actual activity that was clearly explicitly from Reddit. I mean, it doesn’t have the volume yet, but it’s definitely a thing already.
Or until kbin’s auto-hotlinking is fixed in the next release, for kbin.social users:
I mean, it sucks, but to some extent – I had hoped not to this degree – life was going to get worse when Reddit shifted over from growth to monetization.
And I used Reddit when it was far smaller and less-featureful than the Fediverse is today (not to mention with worse uptime…it used to die on a regular basis or start acting weird as the devs worked on scaling it up early-on.). It didn’t have subreddits then, much less all the niche stuff that exists today. Riding another network through growth is okay with me.
i remember the 'sub’reddit announcement!
it feels like with the distributed nature of this system, i have better chance to be technically involved. im on attempt 3 of my own instance of kbin… feels exciting again for first time in a decade
Yeah, I seriously hope Spez’s $10 million worth of greed compounds into losses greater than what he could have made on API calls if RiF and Apollo had bent the knee.
I feel like someone who has just woken up from cryo-sleep or a soldier who’s finally come out of the jungle after twenty years.
The 90s were great for the most part. The Internet was free and open, and there were zillions of forums and personal websites. I call this period the Genesis of the Web.
Then, things got bad. Microsoft monopolised the Web with its shitty IE 6 browser, websites were riddled with malware and popup ads, and you needed an antivirus and an anti-adware on your PC to be safe. I call this period the dark age of the Web. Most search engines died out, and Google became the king of search.
A couple years into the new millennium, Firefox and HTML 5 came about. There was hope again. Mozilla was fighting the good fight to keep the Web open, and new Web development techniques were developed (jQuery, CSS3, Dojo toolkit, Ajax became easier, etc). As a Web developer, this period was very exciting. You just couldn’t keep up with the new stuff. Firefox’s market share kept increasing, and new websites appeared on the scene: myspace, youtube, thefacebook (basically, proto-social media). Google released their Chrome browser, and IE was dying a slow death. This was the golden age of the Internet.
Then, things got bleak. Apple released their iPhone, and Google released Android. By this time, most personal websites were gone, social media was on the rise, Firefox became less and less relevant, and by the end of the 2010s, the Web had become just a shell of itself. The ‘Web’ was now just a dozen websites owned by powerful corporations. Engagement algorithms were developed to keep people hooked, and Google analytics tracked everything. Privacy was gone for good. This is the period we are currently in. I call it Corpo Web or the Dystopian Web. Some of us did not want to participate in this version of the Web, so we lived in a separate world (what we call the small web).
Finally, someone came up with the idea of Fediverse; platforms that can communicate with each other through open protocols. Corporate social media platforms are falling apart (reddit, twitter, facebook, etc), and Fediverse is exploding. Each Fediverse instance has its own personality, and it reminds me of web rings in a way. There is always something new to discover, be it a new community or a new instance of Lemmy/Mastodon/etc.
What I would love to see though, is a way to Lemmy instances more unique (custom designs, chat system, games, etc). This would encourage people to visit other instances. Also, we should be able to categorise communities and group them together (like a traditional forum).
Engagement algorithms were developed to keep people hooked, and Google analytics tracked everything. Privacy was gone for good.
The explosion of privacy data tracking algorithms have destroyed the modern internet.
I completely forgot about web rings, and that’s honestly a great example. It really does feel like we’re getting a little piece of the old Internet back; spreading out and bringing back that individualized experience. And yet the connectivity of the fediverse has the potential to give us some of the good parts of the modern Internet.
A few years down the road this will probably be looked at as a transformative time for the Internet, for better or for worse. Given the negative impact of so called ‘web 2.0’ social media, I’d say getting away from it could have as far reaching positive impacts as getting tied into it had toxic results.
Reddit in general has been in a fairly steady state of decline. Certainly recent events haven’t made things any better, and I’ve been openly critical.
However, I more or less gave up on participating on Reddit during the pandemic. The sheer number of people constantly online at that point while actively in the era of brigading, having any kind of counter opinion on Reddit ended in you just getting shamed and downvoted. I’m not talking about unpopular, right-wing stuff, but stuff like having an opinion on a hockey player leaving a team for another was enough to garner literal death threats.
I more or less resolved to stop actively participating when I went to a support forum and got buried and (again) shamed for trying to get help with a question. Instead they dangled the answer in front of me. The answer, by the way, wasn’t possible in any of the ways they were trying to suggest, as the method no longer worked. So not only were they actively being jerks, they weren’t gatekeeping valid information. Forget it, why bother?
Reddit WAS amazing. But like everything else, it gets ruined. I don’t want to be all negative, but history has consistently repeated itself. Hopefully the Fediverse can withstand it’s own weight, especially if big players like Meta plan on getting involved. I hope it’s robust enough to withstand, I WANT it to be robust enough.
Meh.
L’enfer c’est les autres.
I’ve adjusted my expectations accordingly.
I felt this way at first but the more time you spend away from reddit the more you realise how toxic of a place it is. I initially had planned to stay on there because I have communities on reddit that don’t exist here. But I just couldn’t do. The vibe on kbin / lemmy is just so much better and it feels refreshing to explore the internet in a new way. Reddit feels stagnant and gross in comparison now.
I have a hole in my heart, absolutely. I moved over to kbin on June 12, and I hoped that my grief would have subsided over the following 2 weeks, but I feel just as displaced.
I echo what others have said that at least here in the Fediverse, it feels safe enough to comment without getting trolled or dogpiled, so I have been much more engaged here than the last 6 years of my time on reddit, combined. But there are barely enough users here to even have a repartee. 😓
Some of that is servers not keeping up with load or smashing into various other scaling problems. I’ve seen posts on both the Lemmy and kbin side with people trying to work load issues out, but if I look at either kbin.social or lemmy.world, the largest kbin and lemmy instances right now, I see a bunch of activity on each instance that hasn’t yet propagated over to the other.
That being said, it beats early Reddit, where the whole shebang would go down for a day or two sometimes as they tried to scale up. At least here there are always more working instances that one can fall over to.
I don’t mind server hiccups or very slow load times, though that has been the case for both kbin in the past two weeks and huge swaths of reddit’s history.
Although I’m not a programmer, I keep up a little bit with the threads for kbinMeta and other magazines that are direct links to Ernest and his patch notes. Kbin defedded temporarily after the first big migration push from June 12-15. During this time, everyone was also being auto logged out for being inactive for more than 2 minutes at a time, and captcha was a requirement nearly every time you tried logging back in.
I have seen a big uptick in activity on a lot of topical and current events magazines, but my hobby communities don’t exist here. I’ve subscribed to every magazine accessible to me across kbin and Lemmy for knitting and crochet, and I still have yet to see any of those threads on my m/sub > sort by hot page.
I still have my Reddit account with ~20 multireddits and countless subs. I enjoy the new experience on kbin and Lemmy, but I also miss my niche subreddits and the weird awe that I get occasionally from the mainstream subs.
I hope the typical offsite humour and the in-depth discussions will also migrate to kbin and Lemmy.
In the meantime, I urge everyone to create magazines for their niche interests to prepare this platform for more exiles and give them a homely start 👍
You don’t even need to quit reddit. Using ublock origin already ensures they’re making less money off you.
Hell, copy good content from reddit, and make a magazine to post it to.
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