Surprisingly not hard at all. I helped build tools for moderators on Reddit that were used by millions. When the API changes hit, it completely destroyed all of my work. I have no interest in dedicating my time casually or seriously to a site that treats me that way.
I’m a habitual person but switching to the fediverse was like trading cigarettes for a vape. Same addiction, different delivery, more flavor 😛
That’s the best analogy I’ve heard. Thanks, I’m gonna use it. And thanks for building mod tools since I probably used them.
Are e-cigarettes less harmful than regular cigarettes?
Yes—but that doesn’t mean e-cigarettes are safe. E-cigarette aerosol generally contains fewer toxic chemicals than the deadly mix of 7,000 chemicals in smoke from regular cigarettes.3 However, e-cigarette aerosol is not harmless. It can contain harmful and potentially harmful substances, including nicotine, heavy metals like lead, volatile organic compounds, and cancer-causing agents.
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/about-e-cigarettes.html
Hello, just want to chime in.
The only way to know the difference is to feel it. Once I started vaping my lungs felt clearer, I stank less, and spent less. I weened myself off of nicotine by reducing the content down every couple months to nearly nothing then began leaving the vape at home so that I wouldn't vape at work during breaks. Then spent days forcing myself to do other stuff to distract myself to kick the habit for good.
I wouldnt call it a healthy alternative. In my opinion it's an avenue to quitting. Disposable vapes are much worse and more addicting which made me falter a bit.
Haven't touched tobacco or vapes for a few months now.
@Cannibal_MoshpitV3 @consciouslyoblivious Honestly, super impressive that you stick with it and kicked the habit. Nice fucking job! Couldn't have been easy :)
Had a dad who could not quit and I grew up around second hand smoke and hating the smell despite begging him to quit for years.
Thank you, and yeah the smell arguably was the worst. I grew up around smokers as well
There’s still a core of easily offended people who ended up here on Lemmy. Kinda sad, but that’s humanity.
Not difficult at all.
Left Facebook in 2016, Left Instagram in 2017, Left Snapchat in 2018, Left twitch in 2021, Left Twitter in 2022, Left Reddit in 2023.
I could walk away from tiktok at any moment.
Honestly I thought it would be tougher than it really was. The first couple days I did miss it, it was my go to for over 12 years.
I'm thankful RIF suggested this place, it's a much nicer environment.
Seriously! I was pretty down at first as I was seeing so much bullshit Reddit meanness and drama around the time everyone migrated. Now it has calmed down and Lemmy is back to being nice but with a TON more content.
Me too. I felt kind of shitty deleting a decade old account where I'd had a lot of really good interactions with people, but I've already completed multiple craft projects that I never would've picked up if I hadn't stopped reflexively clicking on reddit every time I was even slightly bored, and now I'm here, which is nice. Not so busy I can spend all day doomscrolling, and mostly a better community.
Yeah, I had a social media coma for two weeks before deciding I finally wanted to try Lemmy out; and Mastodon, and I also downloaded Threads with the hopes of it being integrated into ActivityPub as well.
I still haven't fully abandoned reddit. Reason: There are a number of niche communities I'm part of that just have zero or near-zero population here. Fediverse just doesn't yet have the minimum critical mass of users necessary to be a viable alternative for anything but the most common and basic topics.
As far as making the switch for the common/popular stuff, there were difficulties that I ran into but I've mostly adapted. My first big mistake was trying to use Jerboa (I thought it was the 'official' app, but quickly discovered that it loves to shit itself if the app version is out of sync with the server version by even a sub-sub-dot version number. It also crashed a lot. Another early mistake was joining a small instance and not realizing that their view of "all" communities was not the same as the view of "all" communities from a bigger instance...and so my earliest view of the fediverse was pretty crippled until I started creating accounts on other instances. My next problem was the learning curve: I didn't see a lot of the communities I wanted while on that small instances and so I started creating them, only to later discover that many of those communities already existed on other instances and were well established. Fediverse has a MASSIVE community discoverability problem that needs to be solved before more of the masses will be attracted to it.
Now that I've got a good working client that I like, have local accounts on the main instances where most of the communities I participate in are located, have re-found replacement communities for the ones I lost access to when beehaw de-federated, I estimate that after about 2 more years at current growth, fediverse might also be a viable alternate to those niche communities I'm still going to reddit for. I'd estimate that I'm 70% fediverse + 30% reddit at this point.
I'm currently using Liftoff as my daily goto client, but I also like Connect very much except for the way it handles images and nsfw images. I'm also curtently evaluating Thunder, but I'm not sure if I want to try memorizing yet another gesture-based interface.
Thanks. I've been using liftoff too but have been finding it a little buggy at times.
Hoping Boost for Lemmy will launch soon
Not at all. Honestly getting rid of Twitter and Reddit has given me more free time that I didn't realize I was wasting constantly scrolling. There's less to see on Mastodon and Lemmy so I usually just run through it in the morning on my way to work and a bit at night if I'm bored (like right now.) I've gotten back into reading books a lot more and getting off the computer for a lot longer.
Honestly getting rid of Twitter and Reddit has improved my life if anything.
Switching from Reddit to Lemmy was easy because most of the major reddit communities exist here (albeit smaller) and have generally better post quality.
Way easier than expected. I used to spend hours mindlessly scrolling on reddit, occasionally learning something useful but that was the exception. I suffer from anxiety so I genuinely had concerns about quitting reddit, but also recognised it was an unhealthy way to spend so much free time. I left on the first day of the protests and haven't been back since. Was honestly surprised and impressed at myself for managing it so easily (rediscovered my love of crosswords and my kindle). Joined Lemmy 2 days ago, so still finding my feet but so far it scratches that itch of keeping a little bit in-the-loop with pop culture. (But with time limits firmly on this time!)
I could have almost written this exactly. I moved the reddit icon on my phone the day protests started, so while I went to open it a few times, I had physical barrier that made me stop and think about my action. I’ve checked it maybe 3 times to see some of the self-implosion on the site, but otherwise was shocked at how little I missed it.
I met many irl friends from reddit meetups. It’s been a huge part of my social experience for well over 10 years. It seems silly, but I felt pretty heartbroken when I realized I couldn’t in good conscience continue to use it.
Lemmy has been great and simpler to adapt to than I expected. The hardest thing was choosing what server to sign up on, and now I’m still testing out different app options.
Pretty much what you said except I joined lemmy the day of the blackouts. I gave up most of the other social media sites years ago but reddit was hard for me to quit until the protest. Now I am here and have a few groups on discord. My social media time has gone way down, I'm just finding other things to waste my time on now.
It was easy to start, but difficult to keep to. There were communities that had a special place to me, and while I've found the Lemmy analogues and they're amazing, I still sometimes miss seeing certain familiar names I grew to associate with my time over at Reddit.
I realize we were nothing more than ships passing in the ocean of comments, but sometimes, seeing a familiar name drop some good advice or just a cheery reply on a rough day was nice.
Reddit made it very easy. If I was going to have to deal with switching apps anyway and a lot of the best moderators were gone this likely destroying those communities' ability to resist bots and other spam attacks, then may as well move somewhere that has more likelihood of being around in a few years with content rather than just ads and spam.
Really easy. I assume when you say “social media” website you mean Reddit. Reddit was a website I’d browse to kill time when I was bored to find amusing content. Thanks to their recent policy change and their crappy treatment of their users, I torched my 10+ year old accounts and moved over basically overnight. Plenty of like minded individuals have done the same in the past couple months it seems. The fediverse has reached critical mass.
The core of Reddit were their users and the mods who volunteer their free time to look after the site, and they shat all over them. Killed the golden goose as it were. I’m a little surprised as to how many people (especially mods) are still hanging around over there.
I found an Android app similar to RiF so it wasn't hard at all. Still testing it out, but it's very similar and I like trying new things. FWIW the app is Connect.
For me I dropped my main account cold turkey the day before the protests started. Never logged back in and never felt a strong enough desire to. There were a couple of time I was curious but held out.
My porn account on the other hand I used until Boost stopped working.
I would love to say the switch was seamless but it was clear from day one there was going to be pain points with the exponential growth lemmy experienced.
All in all I feel better with the slow pace, the friendly genuine people. No more endless doom scrolling.
For me, it depends on the website.
Twitter to Mastodon is easy. I've never understood short form text social media. I never made a Twitter account but I have a Mastodon account so I guess that says something. But I still don't use it.
Instagram to Pixelfed has been a hard sell. I enjoy photography but have hated Meta. I hated Instagram and ended up making one just because it's the only real active community, even though it's compression, resolution, and aspect ratio garbage are all awful for actual photography. I've tried 500px, Flickr, Vero, and a bunch of others and they all have problems. Pixelfeds UI and community just both aren't great so I can't buy in yet. And I'm not even using Instagram much these days anyway.
Does YouTube count? I don't comment/post much, but I have very little faith in PeerTube or any of the others ever gaining reasonable traction. So many other attempts at this have failed and the content is too important.
Reddit to Lemmy has been a mix. I completely axed Reddit apps and don't check it daily and instead use Lemmy. Been having a hard time filling the content void. And when I want hive mind type feedback on obscure things / recommendations / tech problems, you just can't beat reddits 15 year history of content and opinions. But I am actively posting/browsing on Lemmy instead.
Reddit is the only social media I no longer contribute to. I have a private LibReddit instance I use to read from the smaller niche communities that I can't find elsewhere, and some I even have feeding into my RSS reader. I haven't had a Facebook in quite some time and I never signed up for Twitter/Insta/etc.
The Fediverse has actually encouraged me to take part more. Not having to worry about corporate interests, or me being used as a product was always my main gripe.
Facebook: “we’re now no letting you hide your profile and it must be public for sea—“
Cancelled as of 10 years now.
Steve Huffman: “I want to be like Elon M—“
And cancelled as well.
Thank goodness I don’t have addictive tendencies
A bit hard. That's very dependent on the alternative though.
Lemmy: I tried it a few days after the Reddit debacle and I never looked back. I really want this to work but the main thing is that I can still doom scroll anyway so I got that going for me, which is nice.
Mastodon: I didn't use Twitter anymore but then I wanted to again. So I looked into mastodon. It's been chaotic af. Couldn't find ppl I wanted to follow because no recommendations and you kinda have to know who you're looking for. Also there's no likes, so you don't even know which tweets were more interesting and that didn't help (I know this is controversial, but imo these are things that will always make it hard for the average social media person). I kinda just gave up and until this gets easier I won't try again. Don't have the motivation nor the patience for that. Not worth it.
Not hard once a leading contender for an alternative became obvious. Reddit helped by perma banning me for God alone knows what reason!
I’ve had multiple alts there (I am paranoid and switch accounts every now and again) that have actually never ever been permanently banned, even once after some boot licking mod found out that I had alts because I stupidly admitted it after getting shadow banned for using a specific word.
Seriously fuck that dysfunctional place, where the management are scum and trying to profit off MY posts, and the mods are bootlickers with so little going on their live they think volunteering free labor to a scum-grade mega-corp is some sort of achievement.
Pretty easy. Here's my two experiences so far:
I agree. I miss Reddit because there is so much more content there, allowing me to scroll longer. Until the user and post count increases here, I feel like I catch up in about five minutes once a day.
I agree, but I must admit a good chunk of my time was spent scrolling past familiar reposts, so to some extent the extra volume of content was a mirage and probably created by bots.
I'm still working on subscribing to a wider variety of pups so I'll have more popping up in my Subscribed feed, but it's probably healthier that I'm not here quite so much of the day.