I stopped using reddit when Apollo went down, and 2-3 hours of scrolling and active posting in some niche subs turned into ~30 mins of Lemmy per day, which I find much more healthy.
I didn’t start doing yoga, painting, or a side business, just feel much better having cut back the last big pillar of my social media addiction.
So thanks Steve!
(If it’s not too much to ask, please take a look at how you could improve instagram, you could save another 15 minute of my day)
While Lemmy is significantly less engaging, it is a lot better at that. I’m glad, especially knowing the algorithm isn’t run by some money hungry people.
I agree! I’ve been wasting time on reddit since 2008 or so, to the point that now and then I’d block it on my router to avoid going there from habit. Not all bad of course, but it’s been increasingly futile and counterproductive in the past few years.
I’ve never used third party apps, but I stopped going there when it became clear the management has zero respect for the userbase.
The thing is, literally all big tech companies also have zero respect for their userbase but people keep using Google, Meta, Insta and all those things.
I think us geeks have started to move away from it more and more, but the majority couldn’t care less.
I gave up on facebook, twitter and instagram years ago, but just because I did of course doesn’t mean everyone else did. I ended up replacing them with nothing… more reddit, I suppose, but it doesn’t fulfill the precise same purposes.
It’s heartening that finally significant amounts of people are moving to alternatives because the alternatives do exist now. When people were ticked off with reddit in the past, your choice was pretty much… fuck off, i guess. Same for Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and IG. At least there are good alternatives to Twitter and Reddit now. They don’t need to be huge, merely big enough.
Absolutely. And I hope Lemmy stays rather small actually… Too big is not good since it brings corporate interests in monetizing the entire thing. And then we are back to having ads and data mining and not being allowed to use certain words again like on reddit or other big tech sites.
At a certain point you just have to keep doing what you’re doing and hope people join you. :/
There are so many scary topics today that “hey this is really important to get right” just doesn’t really hit bottom unless someone already cares about a particular issue, and we all know how incentivized those big platforms are to providing actual critiques of their products.
I’ve settled on just telling people what I use and why, and sometimes they look thoughtful, and I do what I can with my own limited knowledge and time. More a minimization of harm than going for broke.
I also don’t have reddit addiction syndrome anymore.
Now I have Lemmy Addiction Syndrome…
It’s called Fediverse Addiction Syndrome
Nah, only Lemmy. I don’t like the Mastodon system where you follow users instead of communities. Like why would I want to follow some random internet strangers I don’t know, instead of an actual community of people with similar interests to have a meaningful discussion with? Any Twitter-like system where you follow users is just not my type of platform to use.
Much easier to search for “Technology” and have a full community instead of finding a Mastodon User equivalent of LinusTechTips, which is just one person. I’d have to search for every tech person to get all the tech stuff. I prefer just one community for everything.
To be fair, you can just follow hashtags on Mastodon if you don’t want to follow specific people. I still prefer Lemmy though.
Nah, only Lemmy. I don’t like the Mastodon system where you follow users instead of communities. Like why would I want to follow some random internet strangers I don’t know, instead of an actual community of people with similar interests to have a meaningful discussion with? Any Twitter-like system where you follow users is just not my type of platform to use.
Yeah, I think there’s great benefit in our mental too from that standpoint. Like you have more active to interact digitally and have more diverse idea to talk rather than passive scrolling the content without any engagement or just leave short comment. At least for me, Lemmy push me more less seeing the contents and focus what people’s mind in the comments section and trying to make meaningful discussion from that…
And increase your memorable moment in digital world I think? the cons of infinite scrolling imo is you can’t find anything to remember for mid to long time. Which means what we do are tend to meanlngless activity, Unless we create that mark on the internet (comment like this) so your brain not just only received many types of informations (till ur brain overload with it), but creating a dynamic to think in your mind. But yeah, that’s what I feel now for sure…
only good thing to come out of this tbh
For real. I miss the old Reddit. I recently took a digital walk down memory lane and found my first reddit link from 2007!
Good times. I miss Aaron Swartz too. Knowledge is power and he sacrificed himself for freeing knowledge.
Reddit to me is the digital Kowloon Walled City. Crazy place where you can find anything but also needs to be demolished.
The people here seem much nicer…for the moment.
There was more shitty behavior than normal for a bit, but it’s really calming down again. The vibe here is much more relaxed and accepting.
I started reading books much more. I’m glad about that.
Continue on doing that.
There’s Pixelfed, something of a fediverse Instagram. In many ways it’s actually better, even. But it’s pretty mature at this point and has a bunch of QoL stuff going on, such as mastodon signup/login thing.
Unfortunately I think ig crowd is much less likely to move on to fediverse alternatives than Twitter or reddit folks.
Hard to just quit ig for me too, when I have brand accounts to keep up and active, and it’s also actually the last social media I have family members and relatives on, and only thing allowing me to move would be for them to join fediverse somewhere, not necessarily pixelfed, but thats unlikely to happen very soon.
Cheers Steve!
Same here, I’ve found myself being more productive and having more time. It’s also a refreshing experience to be part of an early platform again and seeing it progress.
It bothers me when people think of social network use as addiction. If you went to a bar, restaurant, work or school you wouldn’t see it as an addiction. I think that seeing social media as addictive is especially harmful when Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok use it to do immoral things. They hide behind the “but they’re addicts anyway, so what does it matter?” Social networks are not addictive. They’re compelling.
Does this mean that married people are addicts, to each other? Think the absurdity of calling social media addictive. It devalues our online communities to use such words.That’s like saying playing video games for 10 hours every day isn’t a sign of addiction because it devalues the gaming hobby.
Social Media addiction is a real thing. Every single popular social media app is designed to draw people in and keep them using it. The “drag down to refresh” is literally copied from slot machines.
TBH: If you really are spending a lot of time in bars, several hours a day, you also have to face some ugly truths about addiction. And there are also people addicted to work.
They are addictive by design. They’re very much like slot machines in casinos. They want to take as much of your attention as they can to make profit.
Something becomes an addiction when you persist in doing it even though you know it’s not doing you good or even actively causing you harm. By that definition, excessive internet use IS an addiction, because many people will endlessly doom-scroll their favourite sites even though they know there are more important things they should or could be doing.
Does this mean that married people are addicts
Codependent relationships can be classified as addictions
Curing instagram addiction is easy. Just unfollow everyone you don’t know in person. Cut my instagram time from ~2h/day to 5 minutes every other day
Reddit saved my life through making the service literally unusable. I was finally able to break an over decade long addiction to the service. Doc said if I had continued, the cancer would spread through the computer into me.
