Same exact situation for me, down to putting Jerboa where RIF used to be. I think the appeal to Beehaw for me is its emphasis on community. I've been on the internet for a hot minute, and I didn't realize that I actually missed having a sense of community online. Reddit was basically a source of content for me, and I would lurk almost exclusively. With Lemmy, I'm finding myself commenting and responding far more often. I'm not entirely sure what the difference is here, but I just feel more inclined to actually participate here.

100% agree with you there. It’s been a nice change on here this weekend :)

Welcome to the Fediverse! I've found that people tend to have a little more realness when they're part of something they co-create vs merely participating in a company's space. Even if the server this "sub" is on dies, Lemmy and the Fediverse will continue.

Make it meaningful and sell your reddit account!

Lemmy is the whole of federated instances. Beehaw is one specific instance. Jerboa is an app that allows you to navigate and interact with others on Lemmy.

Think of communities like beehaw as neighborhoods. The actual community groups are houses in those neighborhoods, and the town made up of all the different neighborhoods is Lemmy. Jerboa is the vehicle you use to visit different neighborhoods and houses.

And quality of interactions. So far, anyway, this place is missing the familiar hostility.

I think we've got some good momentum! Definitely a more relaxed environment, I'm liking it a lot so far

Elon’s Twitter: coming soon to Reddit

With all due respect and empathy to reddit's employees who do deserve gainful employment:

Does a link aggregator really need a huge labor pool? In terms of functionality Lemmy is already on par with how I remember Reddit 10 years ago (compared to which the experience of Reddit today is actually worse). And Lemmy achieves it with what, an extreme fraction of the labor cost?

Props to all the devs, admins, etc who are hosting all these Lemmy instances for us, btw :)

That, or the fact that they employ 700 people.

Nah Steve isn't smart enough for that.

From my perspective as a user that has been on reddit for a while, its been on a downhill slide for a long time now. The moderation mechanisms there are really becoming the downfall. Its like police or politicians, the position attracts the very qualities that would make you unsuitable for such authority.

This really is a bigger and more complicated problem than I think most people realize. I helped moderate some larger subreddits for a while, but I burned out hard and will definitely never be doing it again.

You've got the people who really did care, at some point, but all of their empathy for the people they're supposed to be serving got ground down by the insults and derision that moderators always have to put up with, until issuing bans and removing posts and comments becomes rote and they don't see the humanity or the nuance anymore.

You've got people who seemed reasonable when they applied to become a moderator, but as more trust and autonomy is afforded to them they change and become outright abusive. Presumably because it's the only thing in their life that makes them feel powerful. And if they've been around for long enough and moderated actively enough, then removing them can be a whole stressful ordeal that blows a big hole in a team's ability to keep up with the mod queue.

And you've got people who do care, and who are able to take abuse from the community without it affecting their approach to moderation. But for these people, all the drama that arises in trying to work on a team with the former two kinds of moderators becomes increasingly demotivating, until they burn out and step away.

And god forbid you try to help moderate a subreddit that actually matters. On top of everything else, you will have bad actors actively trying to infiltrate the moderation team, to bring in new moderators with a certain agenda and to push out old ones. Or you'll have those who are determined to find a way to personally profit from having a position of power in a large online community, even at the cost of the community itself. I still don't know how one keeps these people out, once they've taken an interest.

I think there are some things that can help. I've seen that, on reddit, having a top moderator who is disengaged from normal moderation but who will keep tabs and step in like a benevolent dictator to arbitrate internal disputes and ensure that there are decisive resolutions can keep larger moderation teams more stable for longer. This way the top moderator isn't so involved and won't burn out, and everyone below them on the moderator list knows that there is someone they are accountable to. (Of course, this all hinges on the top moderator being suited to this kind of role.)

But even so, once a community grows past a certain point, I think it's just not viable to run it off the backs of volunteers anymore.

It's my experience that it's gotten better. T_D, way of the bern, brigading etc we're all horrible in 2015ish. There were some truly awful subs like jailbait. You'd routinely see NSFW videos on the front page that were not properly tagged, like people violently dying.

Imo Reddit is much more pleasant to use. I think a lot of their decisions have worked pretty well

All your points are very true, unfortunately. It just saddens me seeing companies hurt the very community that even allowed them to rise to popularity

At some point reddit stopped deleting comments and instead edited them [Removed by reddit] that's when it really started slipping.

It's sad to see this happen but I'm (unfortunately) not surprised. Whenever a site/software/etc becomes the main/only thing most people use it starts taking advantage of that. I just hope it happens less in the future with the rise of decentralized nd federated social media

It's because investors don't care about profits - they care about the promise of profit growth.

You could make an investment, and normal valuation is like 3-5 years to break even. But if you're rich already, breaking even does nothing for you - what you care about is what the value of your share of the company is worth in 5-10 years.

They'd rather risk it all and push for 100x ROI - anything from 0-5x is basically the same for them. Only exponential growth will matter for them financially, so at every turn they'll push for you to take on more debt and reinvest everything in the hopes you become the Google (or get bought by them)

Spez answered a total of 14 softballs, and 7 more questions were answered by other employees with ultimately no satisfactory outcomes or answers. You didn't really miss much unless you like watching people pour gasoline on dumpster fires.

that's a plot twist i'd pay to see

If true, that actually speaks volumes. Like what kind of guy removes a dead man, at some point revered, from the list of co-founders. What do you lose by not doing it? What did you win by doing it? I mean, the odds are you lost more than anything. Besides, he should have been your partner. Even if you did for the cash, what about all the moments you had with him? Was Aaron such a piece that you'd rather have him erased?

I seriously can't get it.

Aaron Swartz will always be the real spiritual founder of what Reddit was at its best for me. Huffman will be the fool that didn't understand the ethos of it and drove it into the ground in his greed.

Whoa. I missed this tidbit of information. Aaron Swartz's memory defiled by their actions just reaffirms my decision to leave.

There was never serious competition to threaten Reddit before. Voat was the closest, but when legitimate redditfugees got there it was already full of a critical mass of Nazis (actual Nazis, not “everyone I don’t like is a Nazi”) and people who thought spamming slurs was peak free speech. Not exactly a solid foundation for popular new site.

Those who forget history are doomed to get downvoted to oblivion.

Just run it 3 times! :)

I didn't use a fork and it ran without issue for me

And imgur charges Apollo's dev $166 for the same amount of load reddit asked $20m for

I paid $5 once for a lifetime of ad free Reddit. I probably have a negative net value to them. I imagine they have only a few outcomes for a user like me:

• the app I use stays with Reddit, and I generate some income via their new pricing model
• I switch to Reddit official app, maybe even pay for ad free
• I leave altogether, and become a 0 instead of a negative

Yeah, only thing missing are the amount of people but that's a problem that's being fixed every passing day.

I’m actually curious if there will be a spike on Wednesday and after with people logging in to look at the “aftermath”. Remember: Negative engagement is still engagement!

Even if we forget about advertising, 48 hours is just not enough to achieve anything and might actually be worse than no blackout at all if people want to see change. Louis Rossmann made some great points about that in his latest video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U06rCBIKM5M

Many people won't come back tho.

Especially if they block mobile browsers as well.

I'm sure plenty of people will use both.

An example of this in the real world is how 4chan has lots of similar sites that are much smaller, but still thrive due to filling some niche that 4chan does not.

Check out Jerboa.

Signed, former RiF user

I wonder how much we could get selling old accounts with karma like that? I mean it's highly unethical, but they like ads and spam... (I'm kidding, they only like the ads and spam THEY push)

I think it probably won't cause the site to collapse now, but will ultimately be a major contributor to it doing so later. The biggest problem for many people leaving reddit is that the various alternatives all lack the most important part of a social media platform: all the users creating new content to consume. Many people are okay with moving to tiny platforms of course, the growth of Lemmy in the past days is an example, but quite a few people on Reddit are not going to be, missing more niche communities or just not knowing much about these underpopulated places. Of those people that do leave, or move to using a new platform alongside reddit, many will probably end up eventually giving in an going back. But some people really will stay, and the alternatives will grow massively compared to their humble origins as a result. Some might die out and fail after awhile, but the ones that don't will become small but viable communies that have enough content and users to at least be usable, if not as developed as they could be.

Inevitably, reddit will, someday, do something to anger it's userbase again. But that time, or a few cycles of this down the line, when people start looking to alternatives, one or more will actually be big enough for the majority of redditors to actually be willing to move there. At that point, the site may collapse, the damage reddit does to itself with this incident will become apparent: motivating people to build it's own competition.

The blackout won't, but surely the lack of porn on mobile after June 30th is going to cause a major shake-up. Reddit's mobile app is really unpopular, even among casual users. You can't view it in browser reddit (popover tells you to either use the app, or back out the page). Literally the only way to view it on mobile is in their shitty app, which is horribly optimised and chews data like nobody's business.

Humans are creatures of habit, they'll struggle to change or move on without sufficient deterrent. The announcement was deterrent for the principled, the blackout is deterrent for the casual consumer without their content; the lose of 3P apps will be the deterrent for the visually-impaired...
...but the June 30th NSFW changes will be the deterrent for the horny, and Reddit is nothing if not unrelentingly horny.

Same old story...

Not just big tech. It's the story of capitalism as a whole. When we suffered the one two punch of decoupling the cash supply from a tangible asset, and the tax brackets for the Uber wealthy dropping from 90/100% to less than 10% in some cases. We were always destined for this.

And keep in mind I'm not arguing against Fiat currency. But combined did not being locked to a fixed tangible asset. And the basically supreme Court decided profit above all else ruling. It's turned it all into a giant unrelated untamed game of abstract numbers.

Yep. I think the community that comes after Reddit needs to be under the umbrella of a nonprofit, whose mission in life is to keep the community alive, fundraise for resources, keep a moderation system in place to keep out difficult people, etc. Nonprofit because while a for-profit business is required by law to maximize profits for owners & shareholders, a nonprofit is required by law to do the beneficial thing for the community.

I have the same hope but they're probably going to make the changes, make spez the fall guy, pay him fuck off money...and they'll go about their merry way. It's sad that Reddit trying to become a generic social media platform rather than just do it's own thing.

Yeah, I'll keep my account but my eyeballs aren't going to be there nearly as often. Just like I still check Fark out once in a while but don't stick around long.

Yeh well. Maybe one day reddit simply becomes one of the larger lemmy instance.