I saw Jerboa while scrolling through random apps to potentially install, and became excited that finally there’s a REDDIT alternative as well, instead of just Twitter. Mastodon might be nice, but I don’t use Twitter, and I probably won’t use Mastodon, either. Reddit, on the other hand, oh man…
Reddit is honestly so important to the internet at this point that you’re trolling if you do web searches without “reddit” appended at the end (be it technological, physiological, historical, political, or any other type of topic that you’re looking for information or opinions about).
However… Reddit is going towards a terrible corporate direction, and something like Lemmy has been desperately needed for a while now, and I hope it can eventually somehow become the new “reddit” at the end of web searches eventually, as nobody knows what could happen to Reddit soon…
I find the most random, but also INCREDIBLY important and crucial bits of information deep within Reddit thread replies, since each one can go anywhere, no matter what the original post was about, such as finding out that fabric softeners are damaging for everything, especially humans, and that they should just generally not be used… on a gaming-related subreddit. Of course I start doing my research afterwards as well, now specifically regarding what I just learned to make sure and verify I know the correct information from multiple sources, but even just that initial random warning is great to start off with.
And the worst part? We might lose ALL of these things since we’re at the mercy of Reddit’s shareholders (even more so in the future, most likely), and these incredible resources and HUMAN EXPERIENCES that one shares, and MANY others learn from, could just… disappear…
A quick major policy change, and goodbye Reddit…
I’m looking forward to Lemmy taking off!
I’m super excited too!
My main fear, is that people will just accept reddit’s APIs going down, and go back to reddit anyway. It happened with twitter: a lot of the people who wanted to migrate to mastodon, left after a few days and went back to twitter, even with all of the shitstorms it has.
If reddit is to be believed, I think >80% of their users use the official web app and mobile app. That’s shocking considering how bad both are, and shows that a lot of people just accept it because that’s where the users are.
Yeah, honestly, that’s what the majority of everything does. An insane amount of people freely download malicious apps without any further research or anything, let alone know about open source being a thing.
However, I think certain communities, such as SelfHosted or DataHoarder, would start gradually using Lemmy more due to the nature of their knowledge and awareness about things, which might slowly bring over more people.
I’ve also seen Lemmy mentioned in a lot of threads about the subreddits shutting down in cooperation as a protest against the Reddit API change. Most are casual users and won’t care, and that’s unfortunate, but if more and more start spreading awareness and migrating, maybe there’ll be a better chance of more of those 80%+ coming here…