Warning: This is a rant.
I don’t really know how to describe it but the content isn’t quite where reddit had been for me. Also the comments are kind of weird at times, like they type of person here doesn’t quite seem as ‘normal’ as what I’m used to from reddit.
There’s a lot more open source and privacy focused people and conversations. A lot of people seem to hate on big tech and big companies in a sort of toxic-ish feeling way to me (not to say the other relationship isn’t toxic… just saying). Random conversations go into: “omg your privacy is lost cause you used a Google service.” Then we have the ‘if we don’t defederate with Meta the world ends’ conversations. I personally would like to see what Meta does in the fediverse… maybe it will make it more normalized…idk. Then the: “if your app isn’t open source its awful and terrible for the world” people.
Like that stuff is all fine, but it just isn’t quite my cup of tea.
These things remind me of that one person in my comp sci classes in college who I just couldn’t stand talking to. He would try to make you feel like an idiot by trying to sound all self righteous and smart. (Honestly he would fail and would generally look like a dingus).
The bulk of the content that gets comments seem to be mostly meme atm. At least on all (7/10 of the current top for me are memes). I like my memes, but would like some more breadth/depth.
Like I hope Lemmy continues to grow and hope it gets better, but it leaves me missing reddit at the moment.
In a perfect world I wish reddit corp wasn’t such assholes and this whole thing didn’t happen the way it did.
I’m completely skipping the UI and stuff not being as familiar and the various outages/bugs/etc since that’s to be expected with something at this stage.
Please don’t hate me :) Just sharing my unpopular opinion. Though I genuinely wonder if others feel the same way.
/Rant
It’s mostly the technically adept people here, we’re naturally more aware of security/privacy issues present in tech spaces and are angry that the masses are so oblivious or uncaring of the problem. Especially when that problem keeps ruining our online spaces or putting us at real world risk by letting apps use their cameras/mics/locations all the god damn time
Privacy is always a trade off. You have to find a sweet spot that fits your convenience and willingness to share.
A good example is home automation. I can get a camera from someone like Nest and it’s cheap, feature packed and simple to use. But it’s going to harvest all your data and videos.
Instead I could go with Logitech and Apple. Now the price is 4x higher but the videos only exist on my Apple cloud. This is more secure but still could have security concerns, and increased costs and effort.
Lastly I could go with something like ubiquity. Another drastic increase in cost, with less features for remote access. But you host your videos locally and are in complete control. This option is by far the most complex to set up as well.
None of these are inherently bad if you understand the trade off. I am accomplished in tech and I choose the middle option because it best fit my lifestyle even though I could have went with the last option.
Yup, the privacy-convenience trade off is the best explanation, and not everyone goes the extreme route. I too went the middle route with Apple.
Not everyone that is technically adept agree with your statements.
Not everyone but probably most people that are technically adept, and even more so those that have switched from reddit to lemmy
True. Not everyone agrees. Since I’m just me, I can only speak for myself.
With this in mind, I would like to hear reasons why you or others don’t agree. I ask in good faith.
Having an opinion is as natural as being human. I see the world through my eyes, think about in my brain, color it by my life experiences. So there’s always the possibility that I might be missing something important. Perhaps you were persuaded by some strong and much valid point or points.
If that’s the case, and if you’re willing, can you please share why you disagree?
To start with, I don’t think privacy is that important. I think that most open source end-products aren’t good and they are only made better when money gets involved.
I will reply as someone who in 2015 had 340,000 followers overall in the big social media of the time (tumblr, insta, fb, flickr etc). I was the world’s most popular collage artist at the time (not an exaggeration). I even got selected by NYTimes for having among the “best book covers of the year” in 2016, among other works for many magazines etc.
Long story short, for an artist to make it without a gallery (I despise the whole idea of galleries because they force you to make the same kind of art all the time), they must base their business via social media. There’s no other way. And so I did, and did well. Well, come 2017, the enshitification of these platforms started happening. Nothing was chronological anymore. And since I’m not a person who shows what they ate today, or making it all about myself (I was only posting art, not personal stuff), their new recommendation algorithms destroyed my business. I used to make thousands per year to sustain my life, because each time I’d have a sale, people would SEE my post about it and if they liked my art, they’d buy. Now, my posts are served to about 1/10th of my followers, and no new users find me, because hashtags aren’t embraced for finding new users anymore, everything’s just recommendations. Within 5 short years since the big algorithmic, I was now making only about $100/month via my art. And that was not just for me, but 95% of other artists and photographers out there too. The recommendation system of all social media (including youtube now) only promotes a few superstars in any given field, not everyone is getting their share fair of exposure based on chronology. Many online small businesses don’t work anymore because everything is not a fair field anymore. Even buying ads doesn’t make a difference.
So, I have no interest in using things like Threads, where you are literally bombarded with celebrity and brands content, but almost none of the people you follow.
Reddit has followed the same line, it’s just that we see it less, because it’s more discussion-driven. But similar changes have happened to it – in spirit. I still use reddit only for 3 sub-reddits that are too specific and don’t have enough people for here yet. I don’t use the rest of reddit.
On top of that, I’m not interested in trackers, ads, and everything that eventually lead to enshitification of these platforms. So now, I only use federated services. I have accounts with lemmy, mastodon, pixelfed, peertube, nostr, matrix, etc.
No, none of my friends are there (my husband has a mastodon account, and that’s it). And I don’t care if they aren’t. When I’m with my mom next time I’ll install a matrix client for her too, so she can call me for free (so we don’t have to use fb messenger, the only big app I still use, so I can talk to her in Greece for free). Then, I won’t need of these big social media apps.
As for my business, it will never come back (especially now with AI art). But at least, I have MORE eyes here on the fediverse than I have on the big social media. I posted a new painting on my pixelfed yesterday, and it got 17 likes, out of just 27 followers. On instagram I usually get 70 likes out of 3600 followers (that’s on my illustration account, my other, collage account, had nearly 170,000 followers in its hey day). And consider that Pixelfed only has 160,000 users (plus federated via mastodon by some instances). Given that amount of likes on the fediverse, if Instagram was still chronological and hashtags were still bearing importance as they did in the past, my posts there could have about 5,000 likes – given their 2+ bn users. Instead, with their recommendation engine, I get only 70 likes, and no new followers. So proportionally, I get more eyes on the fediverse, than I do on the big social media. So why would I want to go back to big social media? Just to be served Kim Kardashian content that I never asked for it? I won’t.
This is a refreshing post. I get really tired seeing the same shit again and again, Meta this, Elon that, Linux is great, FOSS is religion, fuck capitalism, etc. I agree with a good percentage of the things I see here (although there are many cases where people go to extremes) but I need to see some “normal people” content. I feel like a depressed social outcast reading the same nerd stuff without any other content, no offense.
Glad to know at least a few others share the opinion.
It really does feel like a majority of people are just older tech nerds.
trailblazers are always ‘weird’. Open source and privacy people BUILD all this software for everyone. As soon as millions of people rush in, you won’t even notice the weirdos anymore
The weirdos… being us?
Excuse me I go by freak
Reddit turned into a cesspool in the last 5 years or so. The admins reinterpretation their own TOS multiple times to appease popular audiences. The site got too big for itself, just like most social media, and the quality of its users and content went way down. But hey, if you want to continue to use a site that makes you prove your skin color to join subs then thats on you. Its still there, but personally Im done with reddit. It had its time and the company showed it true colors when the 3rd party app debacle happened. For years theyve been cutting services and censoring more content in hopes they can sell reddit for mucho dinero when they go public.
Asshole about open source anti big tech here. Point taken. You can choose your communities you see on your home feed. Seriously, use the block user feature too. Block me if you want. It is not personal. I have a half dozen people blocked just because they have been negative and I don’t want to see it any more. With around 150k people here rn the total communities are still developing. There are several I miss but don’t want to mod or churn content by myself to get started. This is still mostly unsettled early adopters. Everyone here is going through the same series of breakup withdraw emotions, and everyone is a weird asshole user to someone. Most of us mean well. You are able to steer the conversation too. Post, and help making the conversation you want to participate in.
In a perfect world wish reddit corp wasn’t such assholes and this whole thing didn’t happen the way it did.
A lot of us here, are here and have the opinions you don’t like (FOSS, privacy is important, big tech is bad) because we too wish Reddit wasn’t such assholes.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but it sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too. Lemmy users are jaded. We have come to accept that big tech companies will continue to act the way they do because it is in their nature.
The free ride is over bub. The walls are closing in as venture capitalists squeeze users for profits (especially in this economy). With big tech, you are the product. You don’t get a say in how you use the product. Instead you are cattle, to be hearded. If you want to be a sheep and mingle along with all the other sheep and just keep your head down and accept whatever the big tech companies tell you to do (and that’s fine if it’s what you want), then maybe Lemmy ain’t for you. But one thing is clear Lemmy must shed the ills of big tech and investor interests and privacy harvesting business models if we are to not return exactly where we ended up using Reddit.
Sorry, I don’t have better news for you.
Also a lot of us users are older and this isn’t our first social media company failing us.
Raise your hand if you came from digg, myspace or somethingaweful
In fairness. i don’t consider myself tech adept, I don’t know how to run a server but I know the importance of privacy and open source. Maybe take it as a good thing that these are being openly talked about here, otherwise the mistakes of reddit will just be repeated. Supporting closed source is a ticking time bomb.
Companies can and will betray you in the name of profit.
On to privacy and security, they ARE important. You have no idea how many people lost money in their banks or have to deal with lengthy lawsuits and procedures just to get their life back after someone impersonated them by stealing their data or ID.
In our area, OTP scams are very rampant. And people constantly fall victim to random calls asking for OTP and other details ; then have their banks withdrawn huge amount of money precisely because the issue of security and privacy aren’t openly being talked about.
Please don’t take it as a negative, but a good thing that these types of things are being discussed.
As a popular quote (paraphrased) says “those who fail to learn the past is doomed to constantly repeat it.”
We don’t want another reddit or twitter.
People are still healing from reddit’s bad decisions. Let them mourn. Let them be angry, let them go through the stages of grief in their own pace.
Obviously also new here. What you are seeing, honestly, is that the communities that have the most activity. This is what the majority of the users here want. Can you really blame them? You came to a preexisting community that had one thing in common. The federated social networks are explicitly anti-faang, that’s their reason for being. We’re just here because Reddit took away our stuff. It’s on us to make the content and the community we want. They welcomed us.
I deleted my Account as soon as I learnt that Apollo would no longer work. I did continue to lurk on some subs until they wall went NSFW and I couldn’t access them in a browser any more, but I was getting more into Lemmy and Mastodon, so I didn’t really mind.
There is still one subreddit that I do miss; I had noticed some Astroturfing from commercial interests in the months leading upto the API price change, but I had just blocked those users and moved onto real user content.
I try to access it every few days to lurk, but it is always inaccessible without logging in.
I did manage to get into it this morning for a few minutes (Mods must have been doing some spring cleaning) and noticed that the content that I previously enjoyed was no longer being published. It was full of Astroturf, Ads and an occasional uninteresting post.
Which sub?
Edit- you can replace www with old to see subs that require login (even nsfw) without logging in:
Viewing in https://old.reddit.com/r/jimny reminds me that I have made the right decision. Both the new and the old websites are completely unusable to me and the official App is just as bad.
Although there doesn’t seem to be as much Astroturf today, which is a good thing.
A community for a niche/cult off-road vehicle doesn’t have much traction (pun intended) on Lemmy at the moment. Unfortunately not many internal combustion engine vehicle enthusiasts on Lemmy just yet…
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Ok, Zuckerberg. You can just go back to reddit.
Okay, this is a redditism that should be avoided.
A community that’s opinion-based, yet people run into it just to rant. There is a difference between the two. We already have a venting community here on Lemmy.
Unpopular opinion: if you miss reddit then get the fuck off lemmy and go back to reddit. Nobody is holding a gun to your head to stay here. I have been on reddit aince 2009 and lemmy is as old reddit as it can get. Fuck this new reddit crowd who grew up doom scrolling as a 2 year old