Greg#freebsd subreddit is a cesspool right now, bunch of AI generated garbage ("here's a song I made for the new release with Suno" / "here's an image I generated of Beastie and Tux walking hand in hand" / etc) and now we're getting a video giving a Nuanced Take about how we shouldn't just call it all AI Slop, from some guy trying to get his youtube channel off the ground. Mods seem fine with it all. This sort of thing is why I feel it's a fundamentally anti-social technology - the only thing it does is displace real conversation and fill in any gaps like a bacterial colony
Graham PerrinSomeone from the FreeBSD Foundation @FreeBSDFoundation took a healthy interest a few months ago.
<https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1neo1s0/weekly_visitors_to_rfreebsd/>, and so on. I'll add a link to this post, so that followers of the topic can see the insights that are pictured here.
Some of the correspondence is, of course, private.
Benjamin Kwiecień 🇵🇸@greg no need to use Reddit! Join bsd.cafe
RE: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@grahamperrin/116342017987262446
@greg the closest thing to Reddit was probably BlendIT.
Amongst the captures that I took before retirement: <https://web.archive.org/web/20250714214211mp_/https://blendit.bsd.cafe/post/676760>, <https://web.archive.org/web/20250628094543/https://blendit.bsd.cafe/post/158549>, <https://web.archive.org/web/20250714214215mp_/https://blendit.bsd.cafe/post/821622>.
One of my BlendIT-related posts in BSD Cafe: <https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@grahamperrin/113774819393768120>
Stefano Marinelli@stefano thanks, and for for the record, this (fixed in 2025) was the main reason that I never really got into promotion of Lemmy when it was new to me:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2908
Attentions spans are short. Taking the reader to the wrong part of a page, in response to a click, was a major downside.
Commentary: permalinks: use the anchor (id=) to scroll to position · Issue #2908 · LemmyNet/lemmy-ui
Requirements This is a feature request and not a bug report. Otherwise, please create a new bug report instead. Please check to see if this request (or a similar one) already exists. It's a single ...
RE: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@announcements/116334572755031544
@ben BlendIT was an instance of Lemmy before retirement.
Cc @greg
Dear Greg
You're welcome 🙂
Yours sincerely
A co-moderator who, possibly, knows more than you about what goes on behind the scenes.
There's a big picture …
@grahamperrin ok then! that picture will not include me 👍
@greg I'm genuinely sorry that we can't please everyone.
I rarely look back at historic shots of the front page, today I found one from February 2026, maybe the last Wayback Machine capture before new Reddit became more AI-scrape-resistant:
Hi Friends!
296 votes, it rose to 302. A photograph of the Linux mascot was amongst FreeBSD's top thirty posts of all time.
<https://web.archive.org/web/20260204020956/https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/#t3_1qkyy5o
>
"… some guy trying to get his youtube channel off the ground. …"
@garyhtech has more than twelve thousand subscribers.
That's fairly good for a one-man-band, given that r/freebsd has less than forty-eight thousand after eighteen years.
Harshad SharmaThanks!
I made one about history of FreeBSD: https://youtube.com/watch?v=EpiiT_mgYAw
Daemon's Grit (FreeBSD)
RE: https://icosahedron.website/@greg/116790671827421036
For around five years, the most popular post of all time was a photograph of:
― a tomato.
https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/ozwhcs/look_i_grew_a_freebsd/
Tasty! I wept uncontrollably when it was toppled from the top spot. It's still in the top ten:
https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/top/?feedViewType=cardView&t=all