I found Reddit about 6 years ago, took a little while to understand what it was about but when I finally got it, I felt like I had found the best place on the internet. Somewhere I could be my true self without being myself. Every time I logged in, I felt free. Like solo roaming the streets of a new city in a foreign country for the first time. Intellectual conversation, assistance on vague problems, sharing life experiences, advice, watching porn you didn’t know existed, and then slipping out the back door when you were done.

As many here already know, those days are gone. The freedom is gone, it feels like a communist regime and it seems that their success is their downfall. The entire personality of Reddit has changed and will never come back, it even shows in the users. The community is broken, unauthentic and the Truth has left the conversation. Freedom is dead over there. What a shame. It’s like my favorite bar burnt down.

But the thing that really gets me is that it didn’t just change, it became the exact opposite. It has become the exact reason why someone built it, in the first place.

I read that it’s attracting the most new users of all the social apps. Best performing app, which means the end is near. Soon it will just be a limb of the pretend society that we used to hide from behind the walls of Reddit. And for some reason, I just want to see it burn.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    Hey friend, no problem!

    Yes, I am passionate about these things… got one degree in econ, another in poli sci, and a good deal of work experience in the tech sector… fun how all these things are increasingly intermingled and also unavoidable these days, eh?

    A lot of people who spend waaaaay more time online that normal people (I’m counting myself in that group)… often forget that most people have not spent the last decade or two having online political arguments… we get used to the idea of people using terms somewhat incorrectly as being a sign that they are doing so intentionally, as a rhetorical tactic to confuse a topic or argue in bad faith… as opposed to the possibility that someone just isn’t as well versed in the topic at hand and is more or less using terms very colloquially.

    But some of us can be friendly and at least pretend to be normal, lol!

    As for an instance recommendation?

    I’d go with .zip, my old, now inactive account is still sitting there, good admin and mod team, decently sized, and they’re federated with basically every other lemmy instance… which i think is good for a newbie to lemmy, as that way you can learn for yourself if there are communities or other instances you want to avoid or block, instead of having your instance have already done that for you preemptively.

    As for… losing your data, like your account data?

    Yeah I think that will end up happening. Though it may be theoretically possible to migrate a user account to another instance… I don’t think anyone ever actually does this?

    Basically, just make a new account on a new instance, and re subscribe to your favorite communities from your lemm.ee account, and/or block ones you don’t like, while your lemm.ee account still exists.

    Hopefully this won’t be too difficult as your account is fairly new.

    There… may also be some kind of thread addressing these concerns on lemm.ee somewhere?

    I’d think that if an instance is shutting down, the prudent thing for the mods to do would be to set up some kind of sticky or megathread to give general advice and answers to these kinds of questions?