I’m still a skeptic. But Reddit is dead as far as I’m concerned

So anyways here I am I guess

Sir, ma’am, I have no idea what I’m doing. Everything was fine and now both reddit and twitter are dead and I’m just trying to keep up with cat pics. Don’t really care to learn about the intricacies of whatever a federated social media is.

I don’t think people are skeptical, but what I do see is people expecting a new system to be the same as the old one, with all the same bells and whistles and activity. That is where skepticism kicks in. Those users are basically followers of the tech and probably should not jump in on the new stuff until they have no choice because the crowd moved over.

I’m still very sceptical. While I love the idea of the fediverse, I honestly don’t think it will ever be more than a niche platform. It will probably remain active among “enthusiasts” but I can’t see it ever going mainstream.

It’s just not simple enough. If some non-tech person wants to join Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or Instagram, they just go to the site or app, sign up, and that’s it. No decisions need to be made, there is nothing to understand. My 70 year old mother could do it.

Joining lemmy is a commitment. And more importantly, it requires decisions to be made. Which server should I join? What difference will it make? Am I doing it wrong? Why are there different communities with the same name but on different servers? Why is there no ‘lemmy’ app? Etc.

Those of us who are here have made the effort to understand these things, but the general population won’t bother.

Client software. It’s been the turning point for me each time so far.

Ivory turned Mastodon from quirky interest/hobby-tier to something I’ll actually use.

For Lemmy https://wefwef.app has had the same effect for me.

I was skeptical of Lemmy and Mastodon thinking they will never become mainstream. It’s like able to run your own phpBB forum does not mean there will be a community. Businesses are wary of obscure software that are hard for customers to understand.

That was before the recent Reddit protest. Seeing how Reddit handles the protest, I have a feeling that this will work, especially when u/spez said he follows Elon footsteps.

In the last week, I started to see communities forming and I’m now sure there’s no going back for Reddit and Twitter.

I am fueled by my deep, loathing hatred for the snoo site. Plus I found a really great local instance where people are pretty chill.

I was only a skeptic because the UI of Lemmy is hot garbage when you first get here, and they are crippled by the fundamental point of the infrastructure: That there’s no single “correct” place to go. Lemmy the software can’t really endorse a single instance.

But it seems like lemmy.world is that one. They should honestly just self promote as if they “are” Lemmy, and let people figure out the rest after they’re here.

For me, I just really wanted to stop using Reddit and forced myself to figure it out. It hasn’t been an awesome experience, but it feels like the right thing to do. Getting Liftoff on my android phone has helped. I’m still skeptical. And would happily ditch Lemmy if something better came along.

I had tried mastodon a while back and didn’t like it. It felt like it was trying to copy twitter, but didn’t really have any of the good points, and the “many small instances” thing put me off entirely from it.

Once kbin showed up I gave it another chance and actually really like kbin. It’s very similar to how reddit works so it isn’t jarring at all to use, and for the first few days federation wasn’t on so it was possible to really get acclimated to it as it’s own thing. It’s easy enough to just think of it as “using kbin” and not really stress about the federating aspect.

The community on mastodon is pretty progressive which is kinda a culture clash for me, and a lot of the content I’m after really isn’t on there. Whereas most kbinauts and lemmy users seem to have come from reddit, so a lot of the content/culture was brought over as well, making it an easier transition.

tumblr and reddit and twitter shit the bed (and it looks like youtube’s reaching for the exlax), if it was only one, i don’t think i’d have made the jump. I’ve also discovered that I don’t actually care about the difference between a handful of people and a few hundred thousand in mini-communities like these.

Time will tell, but it’s working for me at this point. I actually had Lemmy bookmarked on my desktop browser for quite a while and never used it. Mainly because it just wasn’t very active. However after the exponential growth resulting from Reddit’s shenanigans, it’s busy enough to keep my interest.

There was a bit of a learning curve in understanding how instances work and how communities are addressed. It didn’t take long to get used to it. I don’t see where that would be a show stopper for anyone willing to put in a modicum of effort. I don’t know maybe that’s a good thing, filter out the lazy ones.

The big positive for me is not being beholden to corpo profit mongering. We’ll never see corporate enshitification here (assuming we keep the Meta and Twitter types out). The Fediverse may suffer some growing pains, Lemmy and kbin in particular, but it seems to be coping so far. My main concern is scalability. If exponential growth continues things could get overwhelmed. Though It will probably settle down to a low roar pretty quick here.

To be honest I’m still skeptical of the Fediverse as a long term endeavor, but I’m going to give it a fair shake in the meantime.

That said, I was never much of a heavy user of twitter or reddit anyway, so watching the Fediverse explode while various corporate entities implode is just popcorn entertainment.

Wefwef was easy to use. It was an easy choice.

Things will get Reddit levels before too long, too.

I first joined Kbin a few days before the blackout, and I found it a little confusing (magazines? microblogs?), and didn’t use it much. But Reddit was going downhill, so I downloaded Jerboa from F-Droid and gave Lemmy a try. I liked the UI and found it less confusing than Kbin, so I made an account, and here I am.

Honestly, the loss of Reddit is Fun. I’d say that roughly ~95% of the time I spent on reddit was through mobile, I hardly ever used it on the computer anymore (although funnily enough, years ago it was the opposite, I almost exclusively accessed it via computer). Opening up RIF repeatedly on the day it died, just from muscle memory, is what made me finally decide to look up how to join Lemmy. I had been considering it for awhile, but sticking with Reddit was juuuust easy enough to keep me from doing it, even with the drastic quality drop in reddit over the years. But by blocking RIF/etc, they removed that “easy enough” part, which meant nothing was really keeping me from deciding to finally make the jump.

Still can’t say I fully understand the fediverse, I definitely don’t. But I do understand it slightly more than I did before, and certainly enough to at least try to interact and comment!