Caught myself googling “something something Reddit” today and realized this is gonna be harder than I thought. Really liking it here though and hopefully this gets the user base up to a point I can start googling “something something beehaw”
Yeah this is the main reason I won't be giving up reddit 100% once the 3rd party apps go down. I definitely won't be doom scrolling on my phone like I used to, but I 100% will still use reddit on my desktop as a research tool. There's just nothing else like it for the amount of quality niche information atm.
If I'm forced to the official Reddit app, I'll go from following 30+ subreddits to only 5 or 6. And even those, I'll likely comment less on.
There are communities like /r/LEGO that I don't know of a replacement for. (Maybe there could be a thread where people post the Reddit communities that they miss and people reply with alternatives. Someone could even keep a list to make it easy to search.
I don't know if you've ever tried the official app, but that strategy wouldn't even help most likely. Every 3-5 posts that you see from your subscribed subs, they throw in a "recommended for you" nonsense post to try and drive your engagement. It's infuriating
I've had multiple times when I launched Boost (my third party app of choice - at least until it's forced to shut down) out of force of habit.
Thankfully, I planned for this eventuality. I installed a "focus" app and set it to block Boost and the Reddit app for 2 days. (I've since also moved the apps away from their usual spot on my phone to prevent launches.)
Ooooh man, I was searching up something earlier today and out of reflex I clicked a Reddit result. Felt icky once I realized where I ended up and went Back fast 😅.
It'll be interesting to see if/how we'll come to adapt to a more decentralized getup in time. I wonder how we might quickly search through all the public federated platforms at once? It's gon' get old fast to type [x] site:beehaw.org OR site:lemmy.world OR [ad nauseum]. I think it'd be cool if decentralized platforms got popular enough that search engines would add something like site:!social.lemmy.
On the official app and site, subs that went private completely disappeared from search and subscriptions, even if you're still able to go to the url. I figure the same is true across various apps.