What value did you get from Reddit that you hope to realize or expand upon here?
For me, it’s a few things. 1. A way to burn time that doesn’t feel like a digital sugar rush. 2. Support, camaraderie, and kindness, primarily from /r/stopdrinking. 3. Niche stuff, like ideas for local hiking and backpacking trips, propaganda posters, and kayaking info.
I’ll co-sign all of that! Niche stuff is why I was on Reddit.
Fitness for FTM guys, my city’s local page, subs for my dogs’ specific breeds, Jewish cooking. The communities that grew organically in n niche spots brought me a lot of joy.
Also hey! Kayaking! If you know of a Lemmy community for it, I’m game! Always nice to run into other paddlers.
That's great stuff! I really hope we can build Lemmy up so that it scratches our niche itch.
There's an unpopulated kayaking sub I found yesterday: https://lemmy.ml/c/kayaking (Not sure if I'm sharing that link correctly or in a way that makes it easy to navigate.)
I posted a photo yesterday. Would be awesome to help get it off the ground!
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 still be welcomed in by other users who are happy to engage with anyone. On reddit people were much more hostile to each other by default.
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.
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.
music discovery/discussion. I found so much cool music on reddit communities for bands or genres I like
resources for learning about & discussing some of my hobbies and interests like FOSS software, Linux, gaming, guitar etc
communities for people local to the city/state I live in
communities for people local to the city/state I live in
Yep. Those communities on Reddit always seem to be a bit on the pessimistic/angry side compared to the general public, however they definitely had their usefulness and were great to keep track of local happenings. Local paper journalism being what it is now, it's a good way to keep a pulse on things.
Community/togetherness -- Since leaving Reddit, I feel more 'lonely'? Being here definitely scratches the social-itch.
Positivity -- Wholesome people and productive conversations.
Humour -- Some of the comments/posts on Reddit were wonderfully dry and/or edgy. One that made me giggle recently: "Avoid being misgendered at checkout by not paying :)"
News -- Following centrist/neutral subreddits, and r/outoftheloop was great too.
Niche interests -- As said in OP!
I think the only issue we may have is niche interests -- the other points are not contingent on 'size'. Loving what's here so far <3
I'd say these three
This is how I've used Reddit
The communities or reddit gave me a lot of ideas and suggestions on how to improve my life. I hope that can continue here.
Also - product recommendations. Need a new router? Reddit was great for stuff like that. They would bring up pros and cons that I never would have even thought about on my own.
A lot of us are still learning, but I think I'm figuring it out here. I was/am on kbin too, but they aren't federated with anyone so it's just a reddit clone currently, and it was hard to understand without context.
If you go to magazines and search, you can see some with normal names and some with @ names. The normal named ones are here in Fedia, the @ names are a different instance (Lemmy, Beehaw, kbin when it federated). You can subscribe to communities there and see their content, interact with the users, etc like you would normally. You won't even be able to really tell the difference.
The part where it differs from reddit is that you will have multiple of the same sub, as each instance grows. Ideally, you would start with an instance you agree with 100%, but that's not realistic. So as you navogaye the Fediverse (hate that term), you'll see where you fit in best with instance rules and ideology. Assuming everything is still fairly similar, you would be able to federate with the same instances and still see the same content, but from the instance you choose.
Kbin is federated with Lemmy and other fediverse services, however to stop the Rexxit hug of death, the kbin.social instance of Kbin were forced to temporarily turn on Cloudfare protection which breaks federation. They're working on it though.
I'm commenting to you through fedia.io currently. It's a Kbin instance that is federating properly (probably because of the lower traffic levels as compared to kbin.social).
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.
these are the main things I care about, until a reddit alternative can provide this I'm going to stay mostly or frequently on reddit.
-somewhat reliable news headline feed from relatively neutral, serious center-right to center-left sources with little to no bad reporting/framing.
-reliably hear about social trends, but with some distance to them
-news discussion with some degree of different perspectives, some expertise, so it's not just all left to the popularity of the headline.
-discussion of movies and tv that is neither too fanboyish/popular leaning nor too indie/arthouse exclusive.
-collections of helpful pro-consumer information and resources, up to date megaposts in hobby communities
-a search function that will often enough lead to some helpful comments for most topics, googling "reddit xyz" was my go to for many years
-feeds for some types of videos, like publicfreakout, livestream clips.
-and some communities that are more personal to me, like from my country or a political meme community, for venting and more in-group discourse.
-control over what i see in my feeds, most recommendation algorithms and trending tabs just don't work for me
-control over where I engage with content and in what form it's presented, often I take a break from scrolling social media except for seeing some top posts in my rss feed. at some point I just want AI to read out summaries of all that stuff to me and actually visit website interfaces way less often myself.
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