This is not true. I’m so sick of people here obsessing over reddit. Just get over it.
Yeah, I moved over on the 30th when the app I’d been using for over a decade (the only way I ever accessed reddit) shut down and haven’t felt the need to discuss it. Until now, of course. It’s really silly and as newcomers to this place, we should be mindful that there are many longtime users that have made this space what it is. Here’s hoping the pollution ends soon.
Maybe some bigger subreddits are dying, but the UFOs and Experiencers subreddits are as active as ever, if not more. I guess these remain big there because these subjects are very censored in other social media (e.g. youtube) and never show up in search results (they show only videos from tv news). Reddit also censors them (e.g. some posts that contain more info than usual), but you can still see these posts when you go to these subreddits directly.
Almost the only category that keeps saying it is being censored to gain credibility lol
Americans are the only people that give a shit about that stuff it’s so weird. Everywhere else it’s as fringe as like flat earth morons but for whatever reason UFOs have constant massive interest among americans. I’m convinced it’s because US gov is involved pushing it for whatever reasons whereas elsewhere other govs aren’t pushing it.
they’re a cultural phenomenon, but rest assured it’s not really a thing here either. the vast majority of people either don’t care or reasonably think supernatural/extraterrestrial uap’s aren’t really a thing. there’s just a shit-ton of people here so it feels like it is.
there’s just a shit-ton of people here
There’s a shit-ton more people in India and they don’t have a significant UFO freak crowd. They have one like I’m sure every country has some small group but there’s a huge difference between a fringe vs what america churns out. There’s more to it that is uniquely american. Like, as a percentage of population there’s way more of these people in america than here in britain, it’s like weapons-grade shit for brains was poured into the population by something but it’s incredibly hard to determine exactly what.
My suspicion is that a lot of UFO sightings have been military tests of sorts that are then covered up with crank conspiracy stories, and that making UFOs a popular phenomenon benefits in covering up actual sightings of test aircraft or military psychological tests of population reaction to certain events. All of these things happening significantly less in other countries because america’s fascistic military shit dwarfs most of the world combined resulting in such a stark difference.
I just checked it out. LOL no they aren’t. Reddit is still thriving.
Yup. Just like Spez predicted. The site is maybe less popular, but it will survive. The protests will die off eventually. The Reddit clones will never be as popular and active as Reddit once was. Maybe eventually the investers and advertisers will return, and it will be seen in hindsight as a smart move. The quality of the content may take a drop, but it was a calculated risk of making it more profitable.
The real problem was always a lack of alternatives imo. A “protest” can’t work on the website you’re literally using. What should have happened is those people all moved to another platform, but there isn’t one. There isn’t one canonical alternative to reddit, so they had to “protest” there.
Ironically enough, these Reddit clone instances are now obsolete ghost towns. The ”protest” failed and most people don’t want to post on knockoff Reddit when the real thing is right there. The more focused instances will survive with a small, dedicated userbase, but there’s zero chance any of these will take Reddit’s place. The Beehaw losers wanted so badly to be the new Reddit too, lmao.
Oooh, there are Reddit clones? I’d love to check one out! Surely if they’re cloning code or outright copying something proprietary, they’d get shut down immediately though right?
You’re on one right now. Don’t know if you’re joking or not, but no idea how anyone could get the idea from my comment that it was about instances that literally clone Reddit.
yeah, it’s some pretty serious copium to think reddit was massively affected by the protests. Sadly, they were not
but all I can do is leave and enjoy lemmy so fuck em
Same. One vote may not be much but I’m not the only one who nuked a decade old account and will not be returning.
Yeah so there is still a lot of activity. However, >2000 subs are still dark, 18 others have gone full john oliver and many more are less moderated than before. BotDefense are leaving. So it’s definitely not that nothing out of the ordinary is going on, although I think that is exactly experience that reddit as a company tries to give you when you visit the site.
Eitherway, I am a lemming now and very happy to be here and not there.
Exactly! Last I checked, sure there was a lot of activity BUT as you said, many subs are still dark. The major subs that reopened with new moderation have definitely had a major dip (imo) in quality. I was still seeing John Oliver everywhere. They did use quite a few users, maybe not enough for them to flinch too hard but, how active were those users? I consider my old account there a “power comment account” I rarely posted but was extremely active in the threads, spending hours each day replying to comments of my inbox, so much so that I rarely even viewed actual content. Makes me wonder, how many accounts like mine did they lose? Many just lurked. The comment sections were fueled by active commenters and imo it wouldn’t take losing too many like me for the threads to take a noticeable hit.
Anyway I don’t care much about how it is over there rn, just glad I have this place so I don’t have to support that platform in any way. Plus now that I’ve found a cool app, jerboa or whatever it’s quite enjoyable! Connect and liftoff are also great but my phone doesn’t play well with many apps.
I occasionally open RIF just to see if it’s still working which it is but it doesn’t let me login, meaning I can only access the front page of /r/all and man, it is abysmal. The content there doesn’t even motivate me to stay there any longer than for a quick glance, lol. Tbf, if I open old.reddit on PC while logged in (which I now almost never do and I haven’t posted anything there since June 31), it is better but it still doesn’t feel completely the same. Plenty of subs still missing, some other that I didn’t use to see much are now more present instead, and then there’s /r/videos which still requires profanity in titles but now also, hilariously, only allows text transcripts of videos with no link to them.
I wouldn’t call reddit thriving given that its flagship r/iama is now completely dead as a result of the mods packing up and saying that they will no longer do the work of verification or soliciting celebrities anymore. One of the biggest draws to the site historically as well as consistently producing positive media.
Really cringe 2011 style humor.
I only briefly browse old.reddit, my mobile usage is zero now Apollo is dead.
Lemmy is okay but it’s kind of a chicken and egg, less content means less users, but less users means less content.
It also doesn’t help that users are split between instances, so Firefox on lemmy.world will have different content/users than Firefox on lemmy.ml.
I can see that not driving people away but confusing people that aren’t massively tech savvy.
That’s like saying you signed up on both GMail and Yahoo Mail so you can get email from both Google and Yahoo users. I don’t understand why federation is such a difficult concept for people.
What if I want to browse the Firefox subreddit in one place, where all its content is gathered in a single location?
You can browse all across both instances though since they are federated.
Yeah, I know that, but on Reddit you could go to /r/Firefox and be almost guaranteed that that was the main place that people interested in Firefox would congregate. If you started scrolling, you’d see pretty much everything that anyone posted. For bigger subs there generally was one place to go to find that content.
While here, I could be on .world and see some stuff, but then I’d have to go to .ml or some other instance to see other stuff. Then you’ve got almost duplicate posts on different instances.
It’s just kind of messy. You can’t be on .world Firefox community and also see posts from the many other Firefox communities on the other instances, at least if you can I don’t know how you do it.
Sure, you can view all and see everything from everywhere, but that’s literally everything from everywhere, not just Firefox related stuff.
Don’t get me wrong, I like it here, and it’s good to have a potential viable alternative to Reddit. I’m just not sure how it’s going to catch on with Joe Public unless there is a way to tie the same/similar communities from different instances into the one view while still keeping them separate.
Major software foundations like Mozilla, and other large institutions, should be hosting their own instance and have official communities. Even on silos like Reddit, you’d have several alternate subs for the same topic. Before multis were a thing, it was in the same boat.
I would like to see instance features like “see this story in x other communities” links for reposted link posts though.
It would be nice if there was a way to group communities across instances so you can view them all at the same time. I would love to create an “Android” group that has all the different Android, Google and Google Pixel communities on one page.
When reddit had the same amount of content that lemmy has right now it was already its user’s main timewaster
It’s just a matter of time
There’s also power in just existing and becoming an increasingly more viable alternative to reddit. Between disappointment in the mods and how centralized things are, racist stuff invading the front page, ads, admins, … the less painful the transition becomes from one timesink to another the more the risk to Digg their own grave becomes threatening
The only thing I’m scared of is whether lemmy is capable of standing up to bad actors with its decentralized architecturr because if we imagined it becoming, say, half as popular as reddit; we’d start getting astroturfing campaigns and spam. And vote-manipulation is way easier here, and so is ban evasion
I can see that not driving people away but confusing people that aren’t massively tech savvy.
This is a disadvantage early, but it also weeds out a lot of the critical mass ignorance and a lot of the people who are unwilling to make any effort to think critically. I’m really looking forward to how it grows. The more popular it gets the more the pressure will be to have it be user friendly. Right now it feels like reddit from about a decade ago.
