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.
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.
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
thank you! that’s how we gonna make this work
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.
Recommendations and reviews about everything under the sun from actual users and not sponsored ad reviews.
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.
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.
In the twilight years I mostly just used Reddit as an information aggregate.
I’m primarily wanting a place where I can read information for both niche and general topics, as well as read the dissent to that information in the same space.
Maybe I become more engaged in the community. But going from:
Private forums > old reddit > new reddit
Each step felt like I knew and was known by fewer people. All while knowing less about the people I did recognise. I spent a lot of time in “off topic” sections of the private forums, commented and generated a fair amount on old Reddit, and mostly lurked on new Reddit.
I think the whole situation has me cynical about the idea of “internet community”, and maybe that’s something I need to work on.
I’m primarily wanting a place where I can read information for both niche and general topics, as well as read the dissent to that information in the same space.
Man, you nailed it, here. The thing I valued most about reddit as an information aggregate was the ability to go into the comments and expect that I could hear some different viewpoints, maybe get some additional information about the original article, etc.
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.
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.
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 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.
No longer the case on current day reddit, but in the past in the news subreddits, when an article was clickbait one of the top comments would usually point out that it was click bait and why. And that made reddit for me a very useful source to get news from all over the world because it was easy to skip through the biased/clickbait articles.
Then also the specific gaming communities. Lemmy is far to small to have a community for every single game so that’s a big loss for me.
This.
Plus the shitty humor. There was a time when the memes and shit-posts were actually fun (or at least somewhat creative.)
Then the Facebook and Instagram crowd moved in and reddit was reduced to 9gag re-posts and selfies with zero context.
I feel so old writing out those words…
That’s probably how this will end up too if it takes off in the same way Reddit did though.
You either die a 9gag or you live long enough to become a 4chan
I wonder how much interest there is in bringing /u/alternate-source-bot to the news communities/sublemmies/magazines/whatever we are calling them now. I feel like there could be some utility but I haven’t seen any bots in the wild yet, and I don’t want to spam or otherwise overload instances.
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!
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
Recommendations and reviews about everything under the sun from actual users and not sponsored ad reviews.
A lot of learning and reading. I spent most of my time on Reddit just lurking and reading things, but I can’t help but notice the overall higher quality of conversation here. I’m pretty happy.
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.
