This morning, I had free time. As usual, opened my Apollo app, only to be greeted by the loud reminder that I am cut off from the community I have lurked, posted and lurked in almost a decade.
Days, even weeks before Apollo closed, KBin, Tildes, Mastodon and lemmy have been the talk of reddit. The fediverse is trending and just for the heck of it, I applied to lemmy.ml and vlemmy.net. My account wasn’t approved on vlemmy.net for days and only recently did my lemmy.ml account was approved, only to discover they don’t allow the creation of new communities.
I searched around and discovered lemmy.world. The sign up was painless, just like in reddit. As soon as I signed in I was able to create a community and started browsing right away.
As this day came to a close few more things jumped at me.
- The posts may be fewer but the quality and length is higher.
- The people I interacted with are more than helpful, positive and kind.
- No karma points
- The collective unity behind scorning the corporatization of the greater net.
As I browsed and scrolled, and discovered communities, I am reminded yet again of the bygone days of old, when the internet was young. When everyone had geocities website and phpbb forums.
Here, everyone is making the community into a digital home, built on ideals of a freer more independent internet. Here I felt something that I haven’t felt in a long time. And maybe it is nostalgia or maybe just a post trauma from the drama that is reddit.
But as I mindlessly scroll through the post here, I say to myself, this could be a good home. And truly, I am home.
Good day fellow lemmies. And thank you for reading through my long winded rant. I just want to express how happy I am to have discovered this place.
In time, may this grow into a friendlier, kinder reddit. And in time, may it surpass what it wasn’t intended to replace but took on the responsibility anyway; a testament to the enduring resilience of our love for all things free- an internet of the people, for the people and by the people.
Great write-up.
Forums definitely had, on the whole, a better quality discussion, friendlier discourse (but not always), and less spam. That said, I feel as though we are romanticizing them a bit as a knee jerk to the cess pool that reddit became.
The Achilles heel of forums, in my opinion, always was how disparate they were. Each one with different sign up rules and clunky interfaces. And you sometimes really had to go searching to find one that was appropriate for your needs!
Also, forum owners would shill out to vendors, and some members weren't always welcoming to newcomers. "We answered this four years ago so go rtfm" is not good for conversation and discussion, no matter how true it may be.
I'm not saying all this to be negative, but rather to say that the fediverse improves on all of these negatives. It can being everything to one place, apps are coming that will further improve the user experience.
And hopefully those managing the code behind the scenes tweak it along the way to minimize karma whoring and spamming (not sure what can really be done about AI).
In short, I too am really happy to be here and am thankful for the (probably inevitable) fall of reddit for making me realize how wonderful this is.
Well said. Aside from the obvious isolation the forums of old suffered the same weakness of reddit- power lies at the hand of the chosen few. And it rise and fall based on the action of its mods or admin. This weakness is, I believe, alleviated with federation.
Ugh so true. With federation, this too will slowly fade to obscurity. If one instance becomes too toxic, there’s always the option that a more welcoming instance or community exist in the fediverse.