Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Honestly? No. I like Beehaw. But it's less convenient, with less content. I would rather stop using Reddit, but ultimately I'm just doing the same stuff here that I was there. Then again, I saw little toxicity in the subreddits I was in. Also, adult content is far less accesible.
Again though, I'm pretty happy with Beehaw/Lemmy. I'm sure they will only improve with time.
Same here. The lack of content is noticeable and it sucks that I have to participate instead of lurking. 😅
I've noticed I'm spending more time looking at content that I actually want to engage with.
I've also been on a huge FOSS hyper-fixation for the past week after replacing reddit with Lemmy. I've stopped using Youtube in favour of an open-source front end (Piped), I finally ditched Windows as my main OS and set up EndeavourOS, found an open-source Spotify front-end for desktop (psst) as well as an alternative for mobile (ViMusic).
If anyone has any other open-source software to recommend, hit me up!
For email, Thunderbird has done a complete re-write, and it’s excellent: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/download/beta/
Oh definitely, looking back I did a lot of doom scrolling and I didn’t realize how much it was affecting me. So happy to be off or Reddit
Yeah so did I. Somehow I got a kick / dopamin rush when reading /r/all and all the negative posts there. Glad to be gone!
What I liked about Reddit was the balance of content and community. There's nothing on the Internet that hits the same balance for me. Lemmy feels like the early days of Reddit, in that way it's refreshing. But I miss being able to read through dozens of comments.
Not sure if 2011 counts as early days or Reddit, but yeah this feels like that. I’m glad that I’m spending less time scrolling, and more time reading books, articles, and comics. But I do miss the endless stream of content, and putting ‘site:reddit.com’ in my Google searches.
This might sound weird, but bare with me!
I save funny stuff, goofy things, and positive content in a folder for my son to browse through, which keeps him from looking for content himself in parts of the internet unknown. He loves it, and I had been able to keep the folder updated with a good amount of new images daily, thanks to R×ddit.
However, lately that has changed. Posts deemed as "wholesome" and "made me smile" now increasingly have the edge of a dystopian nightmare ("look at this father reuniting with his son who he thought was dead amidst this war-torn country! Awwww! Wholesome!" and "this teacher was surprised when his students gave him something that his paycheck should have been able to adequately provide but he is not actually paid enough to afford it! Awww! Made me smile!"). I'll find animals doing something "cute", only to realize that behavior is caused by bad or abusive care.
Now I struggle to find things that are actually funny or nice without having a sexist edge, a horrifying implication, sexual undertones, or some kind of underlying dark tone.
I am finding less content here, but the content I am coming across seems to be much more genuine! I've actually saved quite a bit more things than I've seen on R×ddit within the past year.
I've been doing so many things for kbin, it has literally reignited my passion to code. I'm having a blast
Oooh, what have you been working on?
I've been working on a browser extension that makes easier the navigation between communities from different instances by adding an icon to the start of a community name or link.
So for example if you have !technology@lemmy.ml or https://lemmy.ml/c/technology clicking the icon will take you to https://beehaw.org/c/technology@lemmy.ml. It's a small thing but very useful for us kbin users, however it works with lemmy as well.
Also I'm working on a bot for kbin, specially made for subreddit mods that want to get content from their subreddits into a magazine, to help a little with the lack on content.
That's cool, good luck!
I am absolutely loving it. Truly does feel like the old days in a good way. Where communities were made of good people and chatted about whatever random stuff they were interested in.
I agree. At first, I felt bereft that I couldn't discuss xyz niche topic. Now, I'd rather find friendly people in whatever topic area.
Oh yes, absolutely. I spend a lot more time watching tutorials on YouTube, because I'm not having pointless discussions with people who automatically hate me and dismiss me as soon as they learn my age (I'm ten years too young to be a "Boomer", but to the kids on Reddit a "Boomer" is apparently anyone over 40). Also, of course, I've discovered Beehaw, which is awesome and far more chill. I'm not sure if I got away from ageism, but hopefully?
I've also done a lot more reading. I've finished two books in the last three days, which would have been the norm for me pre-Reddit. Recreational reading had fallen by the wayside for far too long.
got away from ageism
No way, old man winter!
Just kidding! I remember being on a gaming forum back in the early 00s and having a couple of "old" guys on (in their 30s-40s). We'd always give them shit, but at the same time looked up to them and thought it was cool they were still gaming.
They also had great perspective and wisdom to share with us teenage idiots.
Now I get to be the 'old' guy in my 30s. It's fun to engage with the younger crowd, and not dismiss them because of their age, because the younger generations have interesting perspectives too. I'm like paying it forward.
undefined> No way, old man winter!
I see the assumption "everyone is male on the internet, especially the ones with feminine avatars" hasn't gone anywhere. :-P
Haha! I didn't even notice the avatar. So I guess maybe ageism and accidental sexism are still a thing here?
My bad :)
I could always add 'Reddit' to a Google search and get information from real people. With the rise of bot sites/articles, this was my way of getting answers online.
Lemmy is great for learning new or interesting things, and I'm glad it's here. I just am not sure how to get answers from real people anymore
I really hope Lemmy becomes searchable. That's an amazing draw from Reddit. Other than Quora, I haven't seen it yet.
Man, I'm enjoying life since I got off Reddit, which was when they first announced the API changes. Deleted my account there and then. Same goes with Twitter.
Turns out all these places just churn dumb online drama that is so inaccessible to the general public, that I ended up being a bit withdrawn because I had all this online drama in my head and I couldn't really talk to folks about it.
Now I'm ironically much more sociable that I've moved over to the fediverse. Outside of the reddit drama, conversations have been much more human. And even with the drama, I've learned to stop caring about such things - everything is in change, it will be okay. Companies don't matter - people do.
This is gonna sound dumb but I love how much slower it is. I use to refresh R/politics sorting by controversial just to lurk and like get angry. I don't know why. But since switching to Kbin I haven't wanted to do that. Even the serverag has been kind of nice, I just click something and it takesonger so I might read a page or two of my book then check back.
It's a dopamine hit. That's why you did it. I'm finding myself reading whole news articles instead of the first paragraph and then two pages of other people's comments about it, so that's probably good for my overall mental health.
Honestly? It feels a bit mid for me. I keep reflexively opening the app, and there's still a lot of smaller communities I peek at. I try to keep time-burning scrolling here, but it doesn't feel the same.
I feel like if your someone who enjoys smaller corners of reddit, it might feel odd until you find a place on here. Because there is a higher chance what you enjoy isn't on here yet, or it might not have enough traffic yet.
Well, I'm enjoying the Internet now that I'm here on Beehaw. I stopped actively browsing Reddit years ago, only ever using it for web searches and the sidebar/wikis for niche topics. The vibes were bad. Normal subs had too many chuds and lefty subs had too many tankies, and comments felt insincere and sarcastic. So my social media usage has increased a little, but I like it here. Good project y'all are running.
Edit: /u/mochi@kbin.social - It keeps hanging up when I try to reply to you. Tankies are people who advocate for authoritarian governments that are "communist" in name only, like Russia and China. In reality they are essentially fascist. Genocide denial is a quick way to spot them.
Normal subs had too many chuds and lefty subs had too many tankies
Yep. I was initially attracted to the users that were present from 2014-2017. Over the years I noticed that the communities I had frequented, both leftist and tech subs, had hollowed out and become shells of their former selves. I spent a year and a half wondering where the users I liked had migrated to and searching for them. Search engines are increasingly useless these days as everything retreats behind walled gardens and SEO gentrification runs wild. I had been a Mastodon user for years and I recently noticed at the time that they implemented the ability to follow hashtags, so I tried that out and started building a feed. To my surprise, I found them at last. In hindsight, it makes sense. The Fediverse are FOSS platforms that are decentralized. Mastodon in particular also opts you out of search engine indexing by default. But yeah, feels nice to be reconnected with the demographics I liked.
Less content less advertisement and less time on the app
It’s good
@SemioticStandard I’ve felt a similar way since I’ve stopped using Reddit, Instagram, and Twitter over the last few years. I feel like those websites have so much petty drama that feels like it’s desperately trying to persuade you to be on the website all day for the next brief burst of satisfaction, and it unfortunately works on a lot of people. I’ve seen people run back to Twitter because people aren’t constantly arguing with each other on the Fediverse alternatives.
You know, I never quite realized that, in fact, reddit does front-load lots of petty drama to keep me on there. I've basically been little better than someone watching the Kardashians or something.
Crap.
It might be a coincidence, but this week I've been sleeping better than I have been able to for months.
Definitely in a better overall mood without the doom scrolling. Also, haven't had to see a single He Gets Us ad which is very nice.
Absolutely, I don't miss 99% of reddit but I have to admit I miss the smaller communities. Most game subreddits I follow are small on reddit in the first place so none of them have moved elsewhere, most don't even participate in the protests, the few that do just link to their discord instead. Many of these subreddits have devs commenting there as well so it's not something that you can replace.
I did until I got into Lemmy and tildes, now I'm mindlessly refreshing a different app now 🙃
I'm really enjoying it honestly - I didn't realize how many great forums were still out there.
I'm waiting for my data request to go through, then I might delete my account. Although there isn't much of a point if they are restoring comments..
I wouldn't necessarily say I am enjoying the internet more but I am using it less, especially the doom scrolling but to be fair I've hardly used much since April and have been watching Star Trek and reading since April instead.
I've noticed an improvement in my mental health overall and I really like how Beehaw operates Vs Reddit with the more polite discussions. Definitely has a positive impact.
It feels different to use fediverse-based forum sites, but they're growing rapidly, and you find new communities/magazines pretty much every day, and even though there's some fracturing going on (need I remind you of Beehaw defederating from .world).
I like this a lot more than the social media-esque approach of modern Reddit. It has very much become like Twitter, with it's endless feed of dopamine-inducing algorithms and whatnot. The blackout is a bit annoying, but I agree with the fact people should protest decisions if they ruin things for people.
I'm liking the experience so far.
Since April my social media usage has been 90% Fediverse 10% Reddit, and that 10% is dwindling fast. Once I settled into a corner I liked and got my feed set up to my liking, I found myself logging off in a good mood. This is in contrast with Reddit where I find myself surrounded by garbage content, garbage users, garbage admins, and a sense of feeling stuck because all the alternatives were either dead or regressive. The grass really is greener.
I'm glad there are other people out there that enjoy looking for content they want to see rather than having it fed to them from an endless scrolling pipe and from repost bots.
The downfall of Reddit has increased my usage of the Fediverse, namely Lemmy, but it has also reduced my usage of Twitter as I've moved to Mastodon. I barely used Reddit prior to the API announcement, but now I don't want to use it at all. I still have Infinity downloaded on my phone which I intend to delete on the 30th.
ETA: I pretty much only use Twitter to promote content things I'm doing and that's only because there are people still on Twitter.
I feel a lot less stressed overall and feel good about deleting my reddit account!
I think I have just been wasting less time. I usually check lemmy throughout the day. But just in bursts. I’ve for sure been more productive and happy with the new normal.
I have become addicted to exploring the Fediverse. I enjoy reading articles and interacting. I even love Mastodon now that I have been mysteriously banned from Twitter (after not using it for months).
I have been getting back into webcomics and RSS. Which, you know, works well, because most of hiveworks' comics still have rss. So much amazing stuff to catch up on and then follow forever.
Me and a friend are lazily trying to compile news sites rss feeds into an OPML, too. It's going slow but it keeps us busy.
It is like a treasure hunt, makes me feel like a kid again.
Definitely a hard habit to break but it does feel good removing my need for that screen time. Since things move slower here I don’t feel like I’m “missing out” per se - you can usually jump into a convo at any time