I freely admit that I got banned because I replied to some cringe ruzzian moskal vatnik psyop on r/ABoringDystopia with actual facts.

Went looking for a news aggregator that wasn’t trying to cater to propagandists.

Same reason why I left Digg years ago…

Realistically, I just thought it would be slightly better, just because it was a little bit lesser known as a website, and I am consistently longing for older styles of internet engagement. The de-federated nature is nice, sure, but I really don’t tend to care about that shit too much. Reddit had their whole api debacle, I’m sure old-reddit getting canned is on the table if not for apparently necessary moderation stuff that’s still locked behind it. But I dunno, I still have browser extensions on mobile firefox that send me to a perfect libreddit redirect that works almost every time, so functionally it’s sort of identical to what I was already doing, if not more convenient, because I don’t have to deal with a reddit app substitute’s search engine when I want to find stuff, I can just look it up, click on the link, blam, redirect. Not a big issue. The biggest problem for me with the API shit is that everyone decided to throw a bitch fit and completely delete their posts, so like a quarter of the things saved to this useful compilation of internet knowledge is kinda just gone. Except for unddit, but that shit’s probably going to die at some point now that it doesn’t serve a non-archival purpose.

With that said, I think I’ve found lemmy to be basically the exact same as reddit, give or take. It is just as relentlessly annoying as reddit is, and it has less diversity in terms of subject matter, as a whole. There’s basically politics, i.e. inevitable “both-sides”-ism and vote shaming, technology stuff, i.e. stuff that is just linux, and like, assorted general posts, which are going to be comprised of either of the former two categories of thing, and gen-x pop culture references. Any other topic that comes up is a complete toss up, and will probably get commented on by a bunch of brainlets who think they know more than they do, but are actually just parroting the super standard talking points, or whatever they learned in high school.

You also get reddit posting habits, where people tend to mostly respond to the lowest effort meme posts, or horrible headlined news articles, rather than well-written posts or longer writeups. You also get that annoying thing where people just reply with sarcastic remarks that only serve their own self-satisfaction, instead of being critical of their own engagement for a half-second. I guess those are mostly just modern internet phenomenon in general, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying, for sure.

The problem you will inevitably find with any forum organized around topics is that there’s really just not that much to talk about, for most subject matters, so you either prevent communities from forming wholesale, or, more realistically, you just get insular garbage communities where people end up repeating almost the same exact conversations over and over. I think probably the unsung reasons that most old forums died isn’t because of centralization, you know, digg and reddit, but it’s because they all talked about everything already. Have a post? Oops, someone already asked that question in 2009, here’s the thread, should’ve looked in the catalogue, you should go there, looks like it also never got answered and it’s inactive, fuck you have a nice day. Reddit’s only addition to that is the ability for people to post le relevant xkcd link, and we kinda already had/have somethingawful for that, for when you want to just talk, more than you wanna actually talk about something specific.

More seriously, I think my biggest problem is just that reddit, and by extension lemmy, kinda breaks the conventional format of the forum, in favor of something that kinda works less well but is more low-rent to engage with. Used to be that you would just browse a bunch of post titles, click on one, and get greeted with likely a huge customized post, maybe a compilation of all the past posts on a topic, maybe a couple links and natively hosted images thrown in there for good measure. Most reddit posts are just like, a single article, or a single video of something stupid happening. That’s a major downgrade, imo.

deleted by creator

Being banned from Reddit

The reddit IPO.

I admit it should of been sooner, but I had to make two emails just to sign up for this. (I wanted to try Protonmail and for some reason you need a email to get email with them so you can email your emails.

I enjoyed posting on/reading Mastodon, so I decided to create an account. I think I’m unique in that I never had a Reddit account.

So far it’s been an interesting diversion.

Saw a working link aggregator with good comments on a lot of topics. Thought it’d be fun to follow. Seems to work pretty well.

Regreddit made me do it (the API bullshit).

Fuck spez

I liked the fact that it was smaller and filled with like-minded individuals

Reddit being stupid. Specifically, they killed 3rd party apps. RIP RiF

I had almost exclusively used reddit through the Relay app since 2012 or something like that. Relay is still available actually, and I’d even be willing to pay for its subscription if most of the money went to the dev. I didn’t like the idea of reddit making money off of a negative change they forced on me, it was bad enough that they trampled on the goodwill and efforts of the community.

Also I had used reddit since 2010, when it was much smaller. Most of reddit had grown too large, leaving only niche communities at a size where I felt it was worth interacting. I still miss some of the cooler small communities (and occasionally check on them through the API bypassing apps Geddit or Stealth), but Lemmy is generally at a size that I’m much happier to interact with.

Sync switching, aka the reddit APIcalypse

Came over (first to kbin) the day the blackout started. Never left.