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.
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.
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.
Yeah! I’m all here for that. Feels good to be a part of something like this
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.
Selfishly - A place to essentially have content delivered in an easy to find/use format 24/7.
Less Selfishly - A place to take part in discussions on shared interests & hobbies.
Unrealistically - A Reddit-like archive of posts to help in troubleshooting or recommending things. Pretty much impossible to replicate what Reddit has at the moment, and, if I understand how Lemmy works well enough atm, not something that’s going to happen on Lemmy.
The smaller communities for specific interests (music genres, hobbies, etc).
Reviews and opinions. With Google results becoming worse by the hour, fake reviews flooding Amazon, paid reviews in almost every site/blog, when I’m about to purchase something I’m not 100% sure about I just search reddit to see what actual people are saying about it.
And last but not least - mostly sane discussions for news/articles with nested comments and a voting system. Lemmy already offers everything needed for that, what remains to be seen is how the community develops and grows.
I’m looking for community engagement without the homogenised superculture. I’d like to be able to discuss books on a small book community without someone jumping in with “I also choose this guy’s dead wife” or “not my proudest fap” because it’s a low effort way of garnering meta-points. I also like the lack of an account-based point system.
So far Lemmy is delivering and so I’m engaging here a lot more actively than I ever did on Reddit.
Exactly, it wasn’t like this before. But the past couple years in every post in every subreddit I keep colapsing the same top comments until I find a decent comment tree with meaningful conversation.
There was also a huge problem with people posting the same comments over and over. After browsing for 10 years you could read the title and assume the top 5 comments.
Comments used to be the best part. So many different opinions, made me say “hmm haven’t thought it that way” but now I just say why bother.
I primarily used Reddit to get involved in niche hobbies/interests and learn more about them. After seeing a lot of my favourite communities jumping ship, I thought I’d jump too!
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.
The comments from knowledgeable individuals - frequently involved in the post itself. How often did I read of an astronomical paper, only to have one of the authors comment. Or read about some random fact about plumbing or medicine or whatever, and an academic or professional from the field would offer further insight
Not to mention the spectacular recommendations in various areas: whenever I’m in the market to buy literally anything, I’ll search for the best of it on Reddit. The amount of high-quality information available on Reddit is not easily replaced. For that reason, I’ll probably continue making such enquiries there, even if I do give up on Reddit in every other way
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.
Access to some really great knowledge combined with a friendly community … I think of subreddits like Picopresso and Selfhosting among many others
I just like a ‘digital public square’ aspect. I want to see what people are interested in today. I want to catch up on the latest news. Maybe I want to learn something new in a hobby community.
Reddit was okay at that at first, but it did start to feel ‘gamed’ over a decade ago now. People were starting to notice common reposters, ‘super users’, and its only devolved from there with sponsored posts, awards, and advertisements. That takes away from the public square aspect and instead makes it feel like you are consuming a product.
I’m looking forward to Lemmy becoming a useful DIY or reference tool. I always used to finish Google searches with ‘reddit’ because someone somewhere will have asked that specific question already.
On top of that I’m going to miss those really supportive subreddits like r/dadforaminute and r/momforaminute. Though, it does seem like a lot of the people who made up subs like that have migrated here, so I’m hopeful!
Cats and news
Advice on choosing between two things that are only marginally different.
Hilarious.
“A way to burn time that doesn’t feel like a digital sugar rush” - well said, that was definitely one of the main reasons I used it habitually. In my experience, reddit had a fairly unique balance of being able to facilitate both serious and silly content.
