I saw Jerboa while scrolling through random apps to potentially install, and became excited that finally there’s a REDDIT alternative as well, instead of just Twitter. Mastodon might be nice, but I don’t use Twitter, and I probably won’t use Mastodon, either. Reddit, on the other hand, oh man…

Reddit is honestly so important to the internet at this point that you’re trolling if you do web searches without “reddit” appended at the end (be it technological, physiological, historical, political, or any other type of topic that you’re looking for information or opinions about).

However… Reddit is going towards a terrible corporate direction, and something like Lemmy has been desperately needed for a while now, and I hope it can eventually somehow become the new “reddit” at the end of web searches eventually, as nobody knows what could happen to Reddit soon…

I find the most random, but also INCREDIBLY important and crucial bits of information deep within Reddit thread replies, since each one can go anywhere, no matter what the original post was about, such as finding out that fabric softeners are damaging for everything, especially humans, and that they should just generally not be used… on a gaming-related subreddit. Of course I start doing my research afterwards as well, now specifically regarding what I just learned to make sure and verify I know the correct information from multiple sources, but even just that initial random warning is great to start off with.

And the worst part? We might lose ALL of these things since we’re at the mercy of Reddit’s shareholders (even more so in the future, most likely), and these incredible resources and HUMAN EXPERIENCES that one shares, and MANY others learn from, could just… disappear…

A quick major policy change, and goodbye Reddit…

I’m looking forward to Lemmy taking off!

  • @shortwavesurfer@lemmy.ca
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    142 years ago

    This is the reason the fediverse is so damn important. Companies and oeople are totally misalligned. The goal of a company at the end of the day is to make money at any cost. Online that places them in a situation where they collect users and try to build a wall arounf them. Eventually they all fail and people batter down the walls from within to escape. Compuserve, yahoo, myspace, facebook, etc are all examples.

    • @Mert@lemmy.mlOP
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      22 years ago

      Yup, corporations hire psychologists, analysts, statisticians, and more in order to create a walled garden and keep users engaged with their service or platform for as long as possible (see the addictive Instagram browsing UX loop, for example).

      It’s pretty evil just how far they’re willing to go to drive a profit…

      I’m new to the Fediverse, but I’m looking forward to its future!

  • Dessalines
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    112 years ago

    @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I are the main devs for lemmy, but we’re pretty bad about telling ppl about it… probably the reason we’ve had slow but steady growth, except for moments like these. It’s a huge help if ppl can tell others about it, so we can spend more time coding.

    Glad to have you aboard!

    • @Mert@lemmy.mlOP
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      22 years ago

      Oh wow, it’s an honor to meet you - thank you so much for your hard work!

      I had already started talking about Lemmy to people as soon as I heard about it myself, and I’ve seen many discussions about it in the most random comment sections on Reddit continuously popping up within the past day or two, so it’s definitely starting to receive more and more attention!

      • Dessalines
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        32 years ago

        I’m super excited too!

        My main fear, is that people will just accept reddit’s APIs going down, and go back to reddit anyway. It happened with twitter: a lot of the people who wanted to migrate to mastodon, left after a few days and went back to twitter, even with all of the shitstorms it has.

        If reddit is to be believed, I think >80% of their users use the official web app and mobile app. That’s shocking considering how bad both are, and shows that a lot of people just accept it because that’s where the users are.

        • @Mert@lemmy.mlOP
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          22 years ago

          Yeah, honestly, that’s what the majority of everything does. An insane amount of people freely download malicious apps without any further research or anything, let alone know about open source being a thing.

          However, I think certain communities, such as SelfHosted or DataHoarder, would start gradually using Lemmy more due to the nature of their knowledge and awareness about things, which might slowly bring over more people.

          I’ve also seen Lemmy mentioned in a lot of threads about the subreddits shutting down in cooperation as a protest against the Reddit API change. Most are casual users and won’t care, and that’s unfortunate, but if more and more start spreading awareness and migrating, maybe there’ll be a better chance of more of those 80%+ coming here…

  • @nachtigall@feddit.de
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    92 years ago

    Yeah, it is pretty sad what happened to Reddit. Aaron Swartz would be disappointed.

    I think it is cool that content is replicated among the Lemmy instances so that if a server goes down the content is still available on other servers that fetched the content before.

    • @Mert@lemmy.mlOP
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      62 years ago

      Exactly! It’s a real shame when a subreddit with lots of content, history, and human socialization and activity just gets taken down, and it just becomes… gone.

      Also Rest In Peace Aaron Hillel Swartz, you were done wrong, and you improved the world with your existence and intentions!

  • SmokeInFog
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    2 years ago

    Reddit was my main content aggregator. I’ve had a Diaspora account for ages (I left FB years ago) but hadn’t gotten into the other #fediverse flavors outside of it. With Reddit gone from my life now, too, I’ve found that having a set of mastadon column feeds, a Diaspora stream, and now a Lemmy feed as well (alongside Hacker News and Phys.org) I think I’ve got enough standard content aggregation happening without it. Unfortunately that means my pinned tabs count is high (for me anyway), but oh well

    • Adda
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      32 years ago

      I see that I am not the only one with plethora of pinned tabs to fediverse and otherwise FOSS platforms for content aggregation. But if you were trying to find any proprietary centralized platforms for this, you would come out empty-handed.

  • @cavemeat@beehaw.org
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    32 years ago

    I’m hoping not that lemmy goes necessarily mainstream, I don’t think that is good for a small platform. However, I am hoping that it develops a smaller but dedicated database ala tumblr.