It wasn’t even about protesting anything for me. 90% of my Reddit time was spent on my phone, and I used RIF to read it. I’ve seen it through their app and I just didn’t see myself ever using it. As far as I’m concerned they played themselves, not because of disaffecting some users, but in forcing apathy toward their product for other bystanders.

I also was using a third party app all the time (Boost) since the official one was awful, just like their “new” web interface. It feels like they completely lost their touch with the original community, not even being thankful for people doing free moderation of the subreddits. The boost app is still not closed down, so maybe the author is OK with the costs, or is thinking about what he wants to do.

But I think back on all my time using the internet over the years, and I realize that the last several years or so have been stagnant overall. I remember joining BBS’s, and later AOL IMs and chats and IRC and ICQ. Geocities, Newgrounds, DeviantArt, Slashdot, LastFM, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Spotify, Twitter, Reddit, and probably a bunch of other places that I’m forgetting. There were new things always coming, and then the '10s came around and it all seemed to slow down; that excitement for something new. There was nothing else for me to join and experience.

I was also on BBS:es - so much fun! I ran my own in my local area, and it really got me started into writing scripts and making ascii user interfaces. Even some simple games (which i mostly never completed because it was hard to know how to do things - there was no google around).

I was downloading stuff from other BBS:er to fill my own, but that led to a huge phone bill and was not sustainable in the end. I didnt have my own money as a teenager, so that became a bit of a problem for my parents. :P

Of course being on ICQ (I had some 186xxx digit number so was pretty early user) and Slashdot, which was fun before it became bad.

I also felt like you that there wasnt that much exciting stuff with technology anymore. I think everything was kind of done there for a while.

Then last weekend came and I learned about the Fediverse. I’d heard of Mastodon, and I’d even heard of Lemmy, but I didn’t really look too hard into it. I wasn’t looking to help start something. There are a million places trying to start something all the time. What I didn’t understand is that all of that was related to one another, and that it was a lot bigger than I ever expected in that every social media space I’d ever experienced had a user-created version of itself in the Fediverse, and that it was all connected to one another.

Ive actually used Mastadon for a while and its good if you can find the right users to follow. I didnt really think that much about that it was federated when i was using it. Seemed to work like “one app” if you know what i mean, and the magic of federation was not that noticable for the user. You follow people and you see when they post and thats about it.

But it took until Lemmy arrived for me to realize that the fediverse is a huge thing, and all these apps can talk to eachother through a common protocol. Just like email really, but now its servers who are making HTTPS requests to eachother to send and recieve messages between users inboxes and outboxes. I think thats so fascinating.

Just the fact that we can sit here on this instance and talk to someone on another instance seemlessly, and there is no big american tech company in the middle, thats magic. Thats exactly what my ideal version of the internet is. And i remember how it was before the corps moved in with their ads. It was primitive but the internet had an amazing community feeling. And i hope that can be brought back with Lemmy for the ones of us who use it at least. :)

Reddit is a place for people to go to, but the people create its content. The people find the links and the stories to share, and the art, and the photos, and the glimpses into their personal lives. Reddit was its people, and I think the company made a mistake trying to control too much of it.

When looking at the front page now, it seems to be about jokes and other safe things to post and like. There are no deeper discussions because so much has become difficult to talk about. People get upset for someone having a different opinion. And they can be extreamly rude. Its just sad to be part of a community where people are fighting eachother. I dont want any part of that.

So here I am, and I’m feeling that lost wonder that I once experienced discovering new things on the internet. The stagnation is fading. I think the Fediverse is the way things are heading, and I find that exciting. I suddenly feel younger. And even if it never has the reach of all the established social media companies, I’m finding the more intimate communities to be refreshing. And who knows what this new Age of AI will do to our experiences. Reddit made me realize this, and they probably shouldn’t have, or at the very least they should have been a part of it.

I feel exactly the same. Im like a teenager again, spending hours reading comments and posts which keeps flowing in. I have subscribed to probably 50 different communities from different instances so its a lot coming in, and I recommend you try doing the same. Its fun with a lot of content, and people are so friendly here. I havent had a single person trying to be mean at all here. I guess because most of us here now are people with an interest in technology and just being friendly with other folks.