I left due to the abusive, lying mods over at /r/steamdeck, I got permanantly banned (reported me for harassing over and over even though I wasn't) simply for criticizing them. Eleven years, gone. But.. I wasn't even upset. Reddit is a dead site full of karma bots and abusive mods. The admins didn't even check me out, they just killed my account.
Multiple reasons. I first started on Slashdot as a news aggregator/discussion forum. Also SomethingAwful, then Digg. I've moved from platform to platform as the enshittification spreads, until I've landed here. I think the fediverse has the best chance to not go down the same holes the others have. The final straw though was the API change and elimination of 3rd party applications.
API stuff and the general response to the community feedback and blackout. I used Apollo and wasn’t interested in switching to the ad-riddled official reddit app. Tried Kbin first and eventually found myself on lemmy. Liking it here.
I didn't care too much about API changes at first - I used on open source app on my phone but mostly browsed desktop. Would have been fine going back to desktop only. As long as they keep the old site design around, I'd be fine to stay.
What killed it for me was the absolutely un-caring, not-budging response from leadership. I don't feel good continuing to feed the site my attention at that point.
I like quirky Foss stuff anyway, so I was already curious about Mastodon and Lemmy. But I'd always figured they'd be ghost towns. Twitter and Reddit deliberately being proudly, blatantly awful was enough to push me out to here, along with enough other folks.
I actually originally was in the process of switching to Aether but that didn't pan out and lemmy was the next best thing when it came along. I wish they'd implement that 6 month auto-delete though. I understand the concept of things not being able to be taken back on the internet, but I think being able to trace back every single word a person typed going back a decade or more is silly. Like the aether creator said, if it was that important, it would've been saved elsewhere in that six month period. Beyond that we really don't need to know that pixiedust23 said "first" in response to a meme 3 years ago.
That would be a nice feature. Most users here are semi-anonymous, so it will eventually be important to be "forgotten." A long enough posting history is a threat vector.
The way the API changes were done showed a disconnect between public best interests as a public commons and corporate interests to monetize. It implied that I was being targeted individually for monetization. I feel that anyone collecting individual data about any human and selling that data is a new form of slavery through an ownership of a part of that person with the intent to manipulate. The manipulation of information through the nondeterministic targeting of search results is a coup of a pillar of democracy and all governments of the world. The free press must apply to all information on the internet. With the monopoly of only 2 relevant web crawlers providing results directly or indirectly, there is no freedom of information in digital form. This would be no different than every news paper stand being owned by two companies a hundred years ago. Targeting the individual directly is what the API move was designed to handle. So, to me, it was an attempt to enslave my digital autonomous person. When faced with such a subtle attempt to subterfuge one's autonomy, I feel like the choice was obvious.
Everything I say here is scraped, but only the server host knows my dwell time, sensors, and various fingerprinting mechanisms. Ideally I would self host, but lack the skill and resources. This place is still hosted in a datacenter, but I'm using the API through a 3rd party, so it is even more obscure. I used reddit through an app with a scraped interface before, when that quit working, I quit using the site. Reddit proved it can only get worse, not better.
The API changes were the last straw; but it had been heavily destroyed by astroturfing for years before the API restrictions finally just pushed me over the edge.
Technically, the fediverse would be even easier to astroturf. Luckily we’re early enough that astroturfing is foolish on Lemmy.
Maybe. I feel that Reddit cares little about bots and astroturfing. It drives up the engagement numbers. Independent server operators care more, but have fewer resources. Time will tell.
This seems to be the case so far. I hope it scales. Lemmy servers actually have an incentive to eliminate those things - they drive up server costs and could lead to defederation. Plus, they are usually running a server for the sake of enjoying giving people a place to socialize.
Ever tried getting an obvious bot/spam account banned from Meta? Good luck! Those accounts are generating ad impressions, so who cares if they're fake? Meta could invest the profits generated in 2 minutes and fix the problem for good, but their incentive is to keep the problem just below the threshold that people leave the platform.
Not sure how many knew about "Compact Mode", but when that quit so did I. Was once as simple as appending ".compact" to the end of a Reddit URL to switch to a nice, simplified interface without ads.
@partial_accumen had the same idea. i.reddit.com was too good of an experience for Reddit to keep around, despite hardly being maintained for almost a decade.