Where to go after Reddit

1 Aug 2023

Diaspora of Reddit users searching for new homes in a dystopian landscape of abandoned technology

A big chunk of my mindless doomscrolling used to go to Reddit, but also, Reddit posts from the various communities were frequently the useful results when googling error messages. I lurked in many a sub-reddit, but only posted in a couple - usually r/self-hosted or r/Homelab.

The problematic treatment of the communities in the leadup to their IPO has been well publicised, and the short blackout by some subreddits seemed to have zero effect on the company’s approach to it’s users (which is in fact what they have to sell). Those subreddits, and many others are still working, but (and perhaps I’m imagining this) seem somehow thinner. Additionally, I feel like it’s a fragile arrangement - the company has shown how they will deal with their communities, so depending on them in the long term does not seem wise, or even, somehow, ethical - like I’m crossing a picket line.

It’s a great pity. The format of asynchronous chats around bite-size topics that are promoted or demoted based on user interests is a great format for technology questions.

In any case, if we are to abandon Reddit, in some sort of fuck-you to u/spez, where to go?

Currently for me, the answer is probably Lemmy. This is a ‘federated’ system like Masterdon. You can spin up your own instance, and other instances can decide to block you if they are not happy with your moderation policies - sort of the same as email. Communities (ie subreddits) live on a particular server, but you can subscribe to them from whichever server you have your account on. For example, I’m a member of the lemmy.world server where a lot of subreddits and redditors have washed up, but there’s a homelab community over at lemmy.ml/c/homelab . When I’m signed in at lemmy.world , I can access the homelab community - reading and posting - just as if it was hosted where I’m logged in.

The Lemmy system will be familiar to ex-redditors. There’s upvotes and downvotes, mods, a sidebar with rules etc. I have noticed that many Lemmy communities have decided to try and use the change to make things a bit more civil. Stackoverflow behavior was never an issue in the selfhosted or homelab subreddits, but it certainly has been an issue elsewhere on the site. This slightly-nicer-on-Lemmy phenomenon is interesting, perhaps Ryan Broderick will make sense of it. An extreme example might be that lemmynsfw.com has decide their rule number two is ‘respect and consent’. I don’t know (but it’s easy to imagine) this might not have been the case for NSFW subreddits.

Not all communities are translated directly across to Lemmy, an example of that, that I’ve followed is that Jim Salter (who was a r/ZFS mod) has set up a Discourse server for ZFS and Proxmox .

I mentioned internet technology journalist Ryan Broderick earlier. One of his theories is that the internet is going through a period where we will not really be having a common internet experience . With Twitter and Reddit being fractured like they have been in the recent past, that seems like a supportable theory. If it means the little different islands of, say, self-hosted fans are each smaller numbers of people, it does devalue the experience a little - expose each group of users to a smaller range of ideas and thoughts. The upside might be this opportunity to re-think what each community should feel like to be part of.

There’s been some speculation that the sudden decline in Stack Overflow is because ChatGPT has gobbled up all of it’s content, so it’s better to just ask ChatGPT your web development questions. It’s certainly the case that when I’ve been talking to it, ChatGPT has always been present to deal with, and never treated me like an idiot regardless of the noob mistakes I’m making. If new Lemmy (or other versions of) subreddits are going to be nicer, I’m all for it.

Doubtless users will slowly vote with their feet, and the situation will evolve over time, but for the moment, I’ll be at:

I’m still reading Twitter/X - not so much for the tech stuff - most of the tech folk I follow have moved to Masterdon, but for a couple of sassy-quipping influencers who haven’t made the leap, and for the education accounts I follow who don’t seemed to have migrated at all.