Technology

The fact is that there is some useful info that only is on Reddit. No shame in looking that stuff up since that’s where it is.

The main thing is to stop using Reddit as your go-to time waster/doom scrolling app

It’ll take time. I think eventually we’ll have enough knowledge on Reddit alternatives like Lemmy where we can add “lemmy” to our search strings instead of “reddit”.

Google has been pretty much useless lately because it just spits out this SEO spam (probably all written by LLMs, that's the only way to explain why it's never happened before but does happen now), so losing reddit as one of the best sources of non-AI-generated information would set us back a lot.

What we need is the current state of reddit, but frozen in time and just as searchable as reddit is right now. And since reddit won't want to lose SEO, they will be open to scraping.

I spent some time on mastodon, squabbles, kbin and vlemmy today subscribing.. it helped seeing many of the same communities in them. I’m 60.. so I know younger minds are nimble enough to make themselves comfortable elsewhere.

What I’m interested in seeing is if others are committed and tenacious enough to stand their ground - outside of Reddit. One thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older.. things change, and sometimes fighting over turf leaves the winner a ruined playground with bad memories for everybody.

We're all in rehab 😐

I feel like we need a Redditor's Anonymous community lol.

Hi I'm Swintoodles and I've tried to open reddit 3 times this morning. The site is sparse, so I only browsed for 20 minutes, but I know I can get better!

Muscle memory is also hard to break. I had to remove Apollo from my homescreen :D

It doesn't help the fact that depending of the question, every single answer ends up being only on reddit and nowhere else.

I'm using a pi-hole on my network and I added reddit to the 'blocked list' to cut down on myself clicking the links. I should find a way to filter out the links from my search results easily, but this works for now.

Absolutely. When I was having my first coffee this morning, I tried to browse Reddit out of a habit. Luckily, Apollo reminded my with a banner that I shouldn't do this. Now I am trying to change my "browse Reddit" habit into "browse Lemmy" habit. So far I it works great - not missing anything until now.

Fr, it is very hard to break. I instinctively add "reddit" to the end of every search.

Yep, same thing happened to me. Tried to figure out what the Fragile modifier does in Trackmania but I couldn't find the answer anywhere. /r/trackmania is shutdown (based) and i literally couldn't find the answer anywhere. I still don't even know what it does...

Quitting Reddit's hard, but it's heartening to see just how many people are posting from different instances here! I've got to admit, even after Mastadons limited success, before today I never seriously thought that federated social media would actually ever work. It just seemed to complicated for average person to grok.

Here we all are though! Decentralizing the decision making for who gets to post and host, what gets seen and what doesn't, seems to be worth fighting for. For enough of us at least to make this corner of the internet interesting for a while.

I've got a question though, are there any non technical people here? If you are interested in technology do you know non technical people who are participating in the black out?

I was going to ask in a full post, but as a comment on this topic would be better: what kind of modifiers would we type in when we want to narrow a web search scope to the fediverse? Like, it's easy to just add 'reddit' to any query, that instantly cuts out all the BS. Hoping there's some magic keyword in the metadata in the ActivityPub guts.

Someone feel free to start a full post on this, if you figure it's warranted.

I kept googling questions and clicking on the reddit posts. Reddit seems to be the only place to get some real answers sometimes.

Today, I've spent all the time I would ordinarily waste on reddit trying to figure out Lemmy instead. It's been fun! Honestly refreshing.

When Twitter seemed like it was going to suddenly implode last November (as opposed to the slow, slow death it opted for instead), I tried to hop onto Mastodon along with everyone else. My experience was bad. It was too slow. Too slow to use. Lemmy has been a great experience in comparison.

I'm keeping reddark open on another monitor as a reminder to stay away

I feel this, I was buying something this morning and I googled something about it and instinctively clicked on the reddit link that popped up. The subreddit was private because of the blackout. Gotta alter my research methodology!

Hahah, that exact thing happened to me, and I had to go through such tech article as well. Hopefully all the useful information from there gets preserved.

Hmm, somebody should make a Lemmy instance that just has a copy of Reddit in it. Probably somewhere hard to sue.

It is a shame because there is so much knowledge on reddit that can be lost. Whenever I had a problem I would append reddit to my google search. Bug fixes for games, advice on purchases etc.

I'm the same. I'm used to adding "site:reddit.com" to my searches to ensure that I get actual answers as opposed to those crappy blogs with 5 screens of nonsense and tons of blank space (supposed to be filled with ads!). Not to mention all the obscure problems that those blog owners haven't monetised.

Idk how helpful this is, but LibRedirect basically redirects all reddit links (and other websites like youtube, twitter, tiktok) in your browser to a privacy front-end that doesn't do any tracking or ads or things like that which is better than using the official reddit site.

every time I look at my phone I'm instinctively hitting the RIF app... this is gonna take a while to adapt to, but new communities are popping up all the time, new server instances appearing, and new users flooding in so perhaps we can continue to being unproductive procrastinators.

On the upside, I guess my productivity will go up by at least 5% for a few days.

I had to move Sync off the homepage of my phone to avoid the muscle memory of just clicking it mindlessly. I have caught myself once or twice wanting to type it into the URL.

It's pretty painful, but I have to admit: I'm a lot more productive today at work

You don't really have to quit cold turkey. When I stopped using Digg I'd go back now and then but Reddit had become my go to. I phased it out over a little less than a month.