I came here to write pretty much what everyone else is saying. Reddit is imploding.
I found Reddit about 6 years ago, took a little while to understand what it was about but when I finally got it, I felt like I had found the best place on the internet. Somewhere I could be my true self without being myself. Every time I logged in, I felt free. Like solo roaming the streets of a new city in a foreign country for the first time. Intellectual conversation, assistance on vague problems, sharing life experiences, advice, watching porn you didn’t know existed, and then slipping out the back door when you were done.
As many here already know, those days are gone. The freedom is gone, it feels like a communist regime and it seems that their success is their downfall. The entire personality of Reddit has changed and will never come back, it even shows in the users. The community is broken, unauthentic and the Truth has left the conversation. Freedom is dead over there. What a shame. It’s like my favorite bar burnt down.
But the thing that really gets me is that it didn’t just change, it became the exact opposite. It has become the exact reason why someone built it, in the first place.
I read that it’s attracting the most new users of all the social apps. Best performing app, which means the end is near. Soon it will just be a limb of the pretend society that we used to hide from behind the walls of Reddit. And for some reason, I just want to see it burn.
I know you didn't likely put too much specifically pointed thought into your phrasing of 'feels like a communist regime', but please do realize you are describing a hypercapitalist, shareholder driven, investment seeking and profligate monetization enacting regime, governance structure, moderation style.
Reddit is now the Pepsi Ad with cops and protesters getting their Pepsis and singing kumbaiyah... and then the after credits scene is the cops finish their Pepsis and beat everyone's heads in.
This is enshittification.
This is the relentless and ultimately brutish and stupid drive to extract as much wealth as possible out of anything, in a way that actually destroys the thing, manifest in an online message board.
Lure in the user base, lock down the market demographic, destroy competition as much as you can, and then squeeze every penny out of em when they have no alternatives.
Fuck Spez, RIP Aaron.
EDIT: Oh also, you are a lemm.ee user, your instance is shutting down at thr end of June, you may want to look at setting up another user account on another instance.
I'm being nice because this person is a refugee, the fact that they are here, describing what they've experienced and witnessed, realizing that it is bad and another place could be better... it means they've got a good head on their shoulders trying to escape the hivemind.
Please don't lose them in the pattern buffer, O'Brien =P
Yes, I am referring to you, as a refugee, I am glad you find it an apt description :D
I hope you do manage to poke around a few other instances on lemmy and find another one to migrate to again, rather bad luck that the one you recently joined is abruptly shutting down soon.
Its probably worth saying that... that doesn't happen too often (ever?) a fairly large lemmy instance just shutting down permanently... that's anomalous, not a thing you're probably going going to encounter often.
Everyonce in a while an instance will have some downtime during an upgrade, or due to accidentally misconfiguring something, but even that is becoming rarer.
Also, when you do quotes..
its based on line breaks
So you can't end them with a dash, you've got to hit enter, make a new line, and that new line will be non-quoted. :D
Yes listen, I got it wrong, I took art instead of history and my knowledge of politics and such terms is limited. I generally get my ideas across with emotion and action, but I can’t help admire those who can articulate themselves through words. I also sense the passion in your response, you care about these things, and I’m sure you’ve destroyed a few opponents in a debate.
I like that we both exist, and you shared something that is useful to me. Thank you.
Second part: any suggestions for an alternative to lemme.ee thanks for letting me know. Will I lose all my data?
Being wrong at some point is inevitable, if tried to pretend that I believed I was right I would have been destroyed by the people who actually know the subject. And made myself look like an ass. I also found it funny when reading how many people corrected me.
Yes, I am passionate about these things... got one degree in econ, another in poli sci, and a good deal of work experience in the tech sector... fun how all these things are increasingly intermingled and also unavoidable these days, eh?
A lot of people who spend waaaaay more time online that normal people (I'm counting myself in that group)... often forget that most people have not spent the last decade or two having online political arguments... we get used to the idea of people using terms somewhat incorrectly as being a sign that they are doing so intentionally, as a rhetorical tactic to confuse a topic or argue in bad faith... as opposed to the possibility that someone just isn't as well versed in the topic at hand and is more or less using terms very colloquially.
But some of us can be friendly and at least pretend to be normal, lol!
As for an instance recommendation?
I'd go with .zip, my old, now inactive account is still sitting there, good admin and mod team, decently sized, and they're federated with basically every other lemmy instance... which i think is good for a newbie to lemmy, as that way you can learn for yourself if there are communities or other instances you want to avoid or block, instead of having your instance have already done that for you preemptively.
As for... losing your data, like your account data?
Yeah I think that will end up happening. Though it may be theoretically possible to migrate a user account to another instance... I don't think anyone ever actually does this?
Basically, just make a new account on a new instance, and re subscribe to your favorite communities from your lemm.ee account, and/or block ones you don't like, while your lemm.ee account still exists.
Hopefully this won't be too difficult as your account is fairly new.
There... may also be some kind of thread addressing these concerns on lemm.ee somewhere?
I'd think that if an instance is shutting down, the prudent thing for the mods to do would be to set up some kind of sticky or megathread to give general advice and answers to these kinds of questions?
to this i'd like to add that when i browse there sometimes i keep seeing people saying things like "this is reddit libs are everywhere" "this is reddit even slight conservatism will make people call for a death sentence" or "this is reddit you can't say anything non-progressive" and those are getting many upvotes, whilst anything said that'd paint you as anywhere left of centre will get you downvoted.
it seems like the conservatives have taken over and yet they still feel like they're surrounded
Given that clarification, yes, I completely agree.
Conservatives tend to be the masters of projection, of seeing themselves as victims when they objectively are not...
...well, small caveat to that, as lately in the US they've become victims of the party and policies they voted for, but claim they didn't vote for, because they are too ignorant to understand how anything actually works, as well as too devoted to their orange cultic god to see any of his insane hypocrtitical nonsense as such.
But anyway yeah back to reddit: yep, the platform has gone fully corporate, anyone aware of ... what that means for a social media tech company bailed the hell out as soon as news of that broke, now the easily predictable enshittification has begun, and the less well informed but still generally capable of objectively assesing the world crowd is now also starting to stream out... and the people who are left are the asocial or antisocial conservative dullards who continue to gaslight themselves and refuse to acknowledge or understand what has happened...
... because for an insecure conservative, admitting you were ever wrong or uninformed about something is seen as a damnable sign of weakness and personal failure... instead of the learning and growing opportunity it could be with just a bit of a mindset shift.
I know this because I was raised that way, in that kind of a household, and was fortunately able to un-brainwash myself and realize that its ok to be wrong about things, to learn and grow.
Reddit is driving a lot right wing topics to site in order to drum up conservative users, because they love drama and conflic and are more likely to be exposed to ads