Hadn’t realized how reliant upon Reddit I’d become for news and interesting things until after it turned to shit and I quit it. I’ve rediscovered RSS for ex., using reader apps to scan sources directly and read without all the noise—that actually came from someone’s recommendation here in the comments. I’ve found several new sites with deep, knowledgeable articles and discussions, like https://theconversation.com/us (free! No ads! Also discovered through the comments here), and my engagement with articles and their sources has gone WAY up. I’ve stopped reading garbage comment sections, too, and I’m just feeling better mentally as a result, disengaging from the endless, low effort memes/jokes and the mean, toxic comments*. Anyone else?
(Thanks again, admins—really enjoying and appreciating how Beehaw is run!)
I could always add ‘Reddit’ to a Google search and get information from real people. With the rise of bot sites/articles, this was my way of getting answers online.
Lemmy is great for learning new or interesting things, and I’m glad it’s here. I just am not sure how to get answers from real people anymore
Well, I’m enjoying the Internet now that I’m here on Beehaw. I stopped actively browsing Reddit years ago, only ever using it for web searches and the sidebar/wikis for niche topics. The vibes were bad. Normal subs had too many chuds and lefty subs had too many tankies, and comments felt insincere and sarcastic. So my social media usage has increased a little, but I like it here. Good project y’all are running.
Edit: /u/[email protected] - It keeps hanging up when I try to reply to you. Tankies are people who advocate for authoritarian governments that are “communist” in name only, like Russia and China. In reality they are essentially fascist. Genocide denial is a quick way to spot them.
Normal subs had too many chuds and lefty subs had too many tankies
Yep. I was initially attracted to the users that were present from 2014-2017. Over the years I noticed that the communities I had frequented, both leftist and tech subs, had hollowed out and become shells of their former selves. I spent a year and a half wondering where the users I liked had migrated to and searching for them. Search engines are increasingly useless these days as everything retreats behind walled gardens and SEO gentrification runs wild. I had been a Mastodon user for years and I recently noticed at the time that they implemented the ability to follow hashtags, so I tried that out and started building a feed. To my surprise, I found them at last. In hindsight, it makes sense. The Fediverse are FOSS platforms that are decentralized. Mastodon in particular also opts you out of search engine indexing by default. But yeah, feels nice to be reconnected with the demographics I liked.
What’s a tankie?
Left wing person who defends authoritarian regimes.
The term comes from when the Soviet Union rolled tanks into Budapest in 1956 to crush the Hungarian revolution, which aimed to end bureaucratic despotism and place power with the workers. Many Western communists were horrified by the slaughter, but some supported what happened & continued to back the USSR.
Today “tankies” tends to refer to people who support China & Russia, and sometimes even North Korea & Iran, often because they take the view that anti-Western == good, ignoring that these are highly oppressive, exploitative regimes which have nothing in common with typical left wing values.
Some are just naïve about the reality of these governments, others just think of it as an “enemy of my enemy” utility against neoliberalism & Western imperialism, but some seem attracted by the idea of being authoritarian themselves or believe that a left wing future can only be achieved & maintained through authoritarianism.
Online, it is probable that some tankies are working for China or Russia and that others are working for Western organisations seeking to disrupt & discredit left wing movements. Others have just been persuaded by tankie arguments.
As a caveat: sometimes “tankie” is used to describe left wingers who aren’t like those described above, but who prefer the idea of imposing socialist reforms through force with a vanguard party at the helm, over achieving reform through anarchist organising without hierarchical enforcement.
I’ve noticed I’m spending more time looking at content that I actually want to engage with.
I’ve also been on a huge FOSS hyper-fixation for the past week after replacing reddit with Lemmy. I’ve stopped using Youtube in favour of an open-source front end (Piped), I finally ditched Windows as my main OS and set up EndeavourOS, found an open-source Spotify front-end for desktop (psst) as well as an alternative for mobile (ViMusic).
If anyone has any other open-source software to recommend, hit me up!
Absolutely, I don’t miss 99% of reddit but I have to admit I miss the smaller communities. Most game subreddits I follow are small on reddit in the first place so none of them have moved elsewhere, most don’t even participate in the protests, the few that do just link to their discord instead. Many of these subreddits have devs commenting there as well so it’s not something that you can replace.
This is gonna sound dumb but I love how much slower it is. I use to refresh R/politics sorting by controversial just to lurk and like get angry. I don’t know why. But since switching to Kbin I haven’t wanted to do that. Even the serverag has been kind of nice, I just click something and it takesonger so I might read a page or two of my book then check back.
@SemioticStandard I’ve felt a similar way since I’ve stopped using Reddit, Instagram, and Twitter over the last few years. I feel like those websites have so much petty drama that feels like it’s desperately trying to persuade you to be on the website all day for the next brief burst of satisfaction, and it unfortunately works on a lot of people. I’ve seen people run back to Twitter because people aren’t constantly arguing with each other on the Fediverse alternatives.
You’re right - I was one of those people (Not running back though) I sometimes fell into the trap of just going to Reddit /r/popular and scrolling. After many attempts of telling myself “No, I will just have a nice curated feed on home instead, with only hobbies and interests, and I’ll only look at the end of the day”
Next thing I know I’ve gone and clicked /r/Popular again and I’m scrolling down. And it was bad because while, sure, I sometimes saw some cool or wholesome stuff, I also saw a lot of bad. People being cruel, drama nonsense, even more extreme stuff like death and gore. It all bubbles up there in some way. It was not healthy for me to keep visiting it.
Once I ditched those platforms - things started looking up, and I’ve even gotten way more productive too.
How do you set up to receive RSS feeds on your phone?
Search the App Store for RSS readers.
