For me, it’s a few things.
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A way to burn time that doesn’t feel like a digital sugar rush.
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Support, camaraderie, and kindness, primarily from /r/stopdrinking.
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Niche stuff, like ideas for local hiking and backpacking trips, propaganda posters, and kayaking info.
I love the communities for my hobbies. I hope they will be just as active as on reddit.
Hobbies are really the thing. And a source for funny videos. I don’t need the big subreddits for politics and news, much as I tend to get sucked into them, but I do really like having a wide range of subforums for my niche interests. It’s much easier to find someone to talk to about a small tabletop RPG on a large aggregate site than it is to search for sufficiently active independent forums.
This so much. And if you’re thinking of starting a new hobby, there is a sub for it to help you get started. Not only do you have a group of veterans to ask your newb questions to, but lots of them have curated FAQs and starter guides to get you rolling. Reddit honestly improved my life in many ways for this reason.
Same here! Crossing my fingers hard and commenting and posting way more than I did for years on Reddit.
Yeah! I’m all here for that. Feels good to be a part of something like this
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thank you! that’s how we gonna make this work
I think I need to find communities that were closer to what I subbed on reddit before I post. I mostly liked meme subs and a lot of the main communities aren’t fragmented enough yet for me to post memes on specific shoes/movies/gnaew I like yet. But I’ve been commenting a lot! ✊🏾
It’s going to take time. Reddit took many years to develop that level of niche communities. We’ve got a really nice surge of momentum right now, so it makes it easier to keep commenting when everything is exciting and growing. But when we do have a lull in activity, try to keep that same energy and stay active. I’m also commenting like 10x more than I used to in Reddit.
It’s important to enjoy the journey, right now we still don’t have many of the communities we were used to on Reddit, but we do have an environment that is way more positive and hopeful than the jaded feeling of Reddit in 2023. I’m trying not to worry about the niche communities too much and just enjoy the things I couldn’t do on reddit, like poke my head into a wide variety of groups and be welcomed in by other users who are happy to engage. On reddit people were much more hostile to each other by default. As long as we maintain these positive vibes, the communities will organically grow back over time.
I have to say that I totally agree with the notion of looking for something that isn’t. ‘digital sugar rush’.
I enjoyed the deeper and harder discussions around politics, theology and philosophy. However, I only ever posted when I had something to add to the conversation as a lot of the subs I was in were modded by experts, and I’m at best an interested layperson.
I think for the moment at least, I need to brave commenting more. I guess we will have to so is we can attract the same experts to this platform, and get the same level of discussion.
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I am looking for curation and durable content here.
For me, Reddit was a curated source of information. You have these communities full of knowledgeable people. If you went into that community you’d either find the info you need, already asked and answered, or you could ask and get a good answer. Discord is just real-time chat. It has virtually no search engine find-ability, no categorising, tagging, or reasonable way to go back and find something someone asked a year ago that was answered perfectly. Many of the social media are really personal and ‘now’ oriented. I’m eating a donut. This person pissed me off. I’m getting married, etc. Video streaming platforms have individual creators, who often have a theme, but they don’t have communities or top-down categorisation. And video sucks as a searchable archive. It’s really hard to know that 17 minutes into this video with a clickbait title, there’s a really useful nugget of information. But Reddit (and now its federated clones) is user-curated and categorised. If I jump into a Windows-oriented community, I won’t find a bunch of Linux stuff. If I want to look at a sport or a hobby or politics, there’s a place to go. But it’s not one creator/curator. It’s organic.
You just distilled and clarified into text exactly what I was feeling. Thank you.
Yes. I like Mastodon, but Reddit was exactly as you described. I got real value out of it, and I hope that something coalesces to take its place.
Cats and news
Reddit was my biggest source of news. Not just because it was usually pretty up to date, but I greatly appreciated being able to check the comments as a bullshit detector. That and the article being in the comments instead of news sites’ paywalls.
I’m old enough to remember the earlier parts of the internet. I’m talking Prodigy and AOL keywords–the era of “You’ve Got Mail!” and 14.4k modem speeds. The era of if someone picked up the phone inside the house (the one that was tethered to the wall with a wire) you’d get disconnected and have to go through the logon process again.
At the time, just being able to access anything was a marvel. Then the internet exploded, and in just a couple of years modem speeds were 56k and it was wholly impossible to see it all. Then we saw the rise of one of the first iterations of a link aggregator in a browser tool called StumbleUpon.
I absolutely time-traveled with SU. One click and I was brought to the next quasi-random site that was generally within my predefined interests. This was about 2004-2009.
Then SU stumbled (I can’t remember why) and I made my way to reddit. It had done a lot of what SU did, but condensed onto effectively one single page, and the community could vote on whether or not it was “good” and discuss nearly any aspect of the content.
It was that juncture I liked. It was part BBS, part StumbleUpon, and the entirety of the internet conveniently laid out. It didn’t try to do too much. At the time, it didn’t try to link us together, harvest our data, generate avatars or any of that other goofy shit. It just served all of the internet quickly, and simply.
My oldest reddit account is 11 years old and as reddit grew, I grew with it. I was there for the Chuck Testa memes. I was there for poop knife. I was there for the Coconut. I was there for /u/Hornswaggle rise to fame with 1985 Sweet 1985. That was big deal reddit news at the time.
And I was there for the rise and fall of Alien Blue, from whose ashes rose Apollo. I grew into a heavy mobile user that only third-party apps could keep up with.
I found reddit through the the fall of Digg because I was wandering from the demise of SU. Now it seems I’m cast into the Fediverse.
SU stumbled (I can’t remember why)
They attempted to make a social network out of it, and I think a link aggregation site like Fark.com or Reddit are more engaging because you don’t generally leave the site - or at least not for long. With SU you were constantly on a new site.
It’s not terribly dissimilar to what Reddit is doing now: trying to force through a change that nobody wants, nobody asked for and one that’s making the experience worse.
I do often miss SU, but sometimes really great information hides in the comments section on Reddit. SU’s shoehorned comments section just wasn’t the same thing.
Oh for sure, the means of discussing a particular site on SU was clunky, but so was all UX/UI. The thing reddit did right was to flip that particular experience around. Make the discussion the focus and let us visit the site at our leisure, rather than the site being the focus and letting us find the discussion. With reddit you find the content through the discussion.
I miss SU nostalgically, but modern link aggregators provide a superior experience. SU did it’s job well for the internet at the time.
100% concur that what reddit is trying to do is a similar echo to SU, Myspace, and Digg.
A massive search engine registered database containing years of knowledge from millions of people. Its going to be hard to replicate that.
Unless we copy it onto here.
So this is the third time I’ve brought that up. I should probably specify I’m willing to do all the necessary work myself, I just don’t have any money for it.
can you elaborate?
So, there’s people that have used the Reddit API to make basically a backup of it. If you could get a copy of that, you could very likely translate it into something Lemmy can read. Then, you go somewhere with protective laws in case Reddit gets involved and set up a special instance that just serves old Reddit content.
Afterwards, to re-use an example from one of my earlier comments here, you could seamlessly go to !SpeculateEvolution@fediverseredditclone.ru and see u/CanadaPlus101’s post about metal and aquatic aliens.
So sort of create a read-only Lemmy instance that re-creates the accounts and posts from archived Reddit?
Oh hey, look, here’s the exact software for doing it already written!
I wonder if someone started this already. It would be great if we can search through old Reddit for collective knowledge even post-Reddit Inc.
The trick is just hosting it. I don’t know how much data that would be. I guess it might not be too bad since it’s just text. Again, if anyone wants to fund it I’ll make it happen. Otherwise we’ll have to wait for the next person to set it up.
Exactly!
Google AMP cache reddit ?
Reddit and it’s users are good at hyperfixating on a topic and building a community around said topic, with different skill levels. Therefore if you want to also participate, you can simply look up a subreddit for that topic and nearly instantly get answers to your questions and tips on how to start.
I’d say these three
- Sharing memes and clip highlights with the streamer communities I care about
- Learning new things from tech specific communities
- Troubleshooting to figure out if there’s a solution someone already derived or share my own for those who end up with the same problem
This is how I’ve used Reddit
I definitely used Reddit for troubleshooting and finding information. It was extremely helpful that it was indexed by search engines, I worry that instances won’t allow themselves to be indexed so the useful information will be harder to discover.
It was porn. All porn. All my interests, all in a multi Reddit.
One second I’m a big adult doing very responsible reading news things.
The next am goon.
u win prize for being radically honest.
probably true for lotsa peeps. but they never say it like u did.well lemmynsfw.com seems to be trying to recreate that experience at break neck speed. Their communities keep getting bigger by the hour.
If the Lemmy dev’s add a multireddit feature you’re on your way lol.
I’ve been sending the devs several flavours of bagel in the hopes of them adding a multi community feature. Let’s see if it pays off.
Excellent shitposting memes, I hope that community proliferates here
ur mum proliferates in the community here. lol
I went from the rough equivalent of graduating with a 1.5gpa in high school and suicidal to making a grand total of 1 application and getting into a top 10 CS university in the States, literally giving me a second shot at life.
Diversity and exposure to new ideas.
Whether I agree with the idea or not, breing exposed to so many different points of view changes how I look at various topics. Sometimes it reinforces and strengthens my position and sometimes I change my stance.
I feel like Reddit (and now Lemmy) allow me to engage / listen to discussions on an issue. Discussions that involve a wide assortment of different viewpoints. It’s hard to find that in most places on the internet.
1000%. I really enjoyed that aspect of seeing completely different world views. Sometimes they were bat shit and unrelated and other times it showed me that I had an error in my judgement that I didn’t even see. My opinions and understanding of other people changed a great deal over the years.
Agreed. Through discussion, I learned more about how to empathize with trans people and completely changed my view on trans minors. It turns out I just didn’t have all of the information, and in some aspects had incorrect information. I’m looking forward to learning and correcting further thoughts and behaviors.
Hobbies, learning and hopefully a place I can share things I make with people without being called a spammer… At least for a few years.
music discovery/discussion. I found so much cool music on reddit communities for bands or genres I like
resources for learning about & discussing some of my hobbies and interests like FOSS software, Linux, gaming, guitar etc
communities for people local to the city/state I live in
communities for people local to the city/state I live in
Yep. Those communities on Reddit always seem to be a bit on the pessimistic/angry side compared to the general public, however they definitely had their usefulness and were great to keep track of local happenings. Local paper journalism being what it is now, it’s a good way to keep a pulse on things.
definitely, the doom n gloom attitude on my city’s subreddit really bugs me actually. hoping when a Lemmy community for it pops up we can avoid that. but regardless it’s a great way to find out about local events or cool restaurants to try or just fun stuff that’s a little more off the beaten path
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It’s the niche stuff that made Reddit useful. For example, Amazon reviews are no longer trustworthy, but there were really good recommendations in reddit threads about which devices or products worked. The DIY subreddits were incredibly helpful. I got good recommendations for motorcycle tires and ultralight backpacking gear and Android apps and hotels in particular destinations from reddit. I got walkthroughs on how to set up a Plex server or do a particular project with a Raspberry Pi on reddit. With so many subs, there was almost always a thread for what I was looking for. That was the value. I expect it will take a while to rebuild that elsewhere, but I’m sure it will be recreated.
There’s an app called Fakespot that you can use to see what Amazon products are legit and which ones are scammer garbage. Not positive how it works but it was recommended on reddit a while ago. Not the same but may help.
