Some context: I was /u/Blackstar9000 on Reddit. You might know me from /r/TheoryOfReddit. Or maybe not—I ditched my account there a number of years ago. I’ve been on the Fediverse for about 6 years, primarily via Mastodon. Last October, I deactivated my Twitter account. I’ve been through a bunch of social media sites, and I’ve seen the patterns. This post is about those patterns.
A lot of you are trying out Lemmy or Kbin because of what’s been happening at Reddit. (Welcome to the Fediverse!) And a lot of you will be going back to Reddit as soon as things quiet down. You might not think you’re one of those people, or you might not be sure where you stand. I’m not here to tell you what to do, just to prepare you to decide. That’s the goal: a decision. As opposed to letting inertia decide for you.
There are a few factors at play here. One is that you’re accustomed to Reddit. You may not like what’s been going on there lately, but the platform is familiar, you know how it works, it feels like a broken-in pair of sneakers. Every bit of friction you feel here is going to nudge you back in that direction.
Another is that the Fediverse is different. Lemmy and Kbin are designed to do something very like what Reddit, Digg and other link-aggregating social sites do, but the fact of federating with the broader network makes certain complications impossible to avoid or ignore. And there are deliberate differences that have less to do with federation than with what the devs thing might work better. Some people adapt quickly, others don’t. Some people just plain don’t like it. In any case, there’s a learning curve, and that’s bound to be a source of friction.
A third is that Lemmy and Kbin are still finding their footing. These are independent, open source services, and they’re in the process of becoming the things they’ll one day be. Mastodon went through similar growing pains, and a lot of people bounced off of them during those awkward years when the UI was rough and the feature set incomplete. People’s ideas about Mastodon changed more slowly than the service itself, and it wasn’t until things got really bad on Twitter that adoption rates kicked back up again. Mastodon still isn’t what Twitter became, and probably never will be, but it’s a much more professional-feeling piece of tech than it used to be. Someone is building the airplane we’re flying on. Any Fediverse service that survives long enough will go through that process, and if you’re not clear-eyed about the need for patience, that too can push you away.
A fourth factor is social. If you’ve been on Reddit for a while, then you probably have a decent mental map of your relationships on that platform. You’ll probably reconnect here with some people you know from there, and maybe even carve out spaces where you can reconstruct some of the communities you were a part of there. But you can’t transplant your entire social map. To stay here—to even want to stay here—you’ll need to build a new web of relationships, one that might include some portions of the old web, and that’s more friction.
All of that friction adds up, and the only antidote, really, is resolve.
So you’ll hang out here during the blackout, when there’s friction on both sides of the line. A small minority of you will take to the Fediverse immediately and move most of your activity off of Reddit. But only a small minority. Some of you will get a taste for it and split your time between here and Reddit. For most of you, though, the gravity of your history with Reddit will win out in relatively short order.
No hard feelings. We’re happy to have the people who stay. But if you go back, let that be something you’ve decided to do, not just muscle memory taking over. Because that’s another thing I’ve seen happen time and time again: People try out the Fediverse, only to drift back to the corporate platform. Then six months later, a year, two years, something new comes up. The platform finds a new way to alienate users, and some subset of them will go hunting through their email to figure out which Fediverse server their forgotten account is on, and what login name they used. (Trust me: keep that info somewhere you can find it.)
Going back is a valid decision! I just want you to decide, rather than let muscle memory decide for you. And if you go back, set a limit for yourself. Figure out the straw that would break the camel’s back. Tell yourself, “If they ever do this, I’ll delete my account,” so that if they ever do that, you actually will.
I do actually plan on leaving Reddit if they go through with the API changes (which I’m sure they will at this point… u/spez is resorting to lying to justify his decisions). I know most people plan on just using the official app, but what gives me a little bit of hope is how many mods and active users use third-party apps and tools.
I am admittedly still active on Twitter, but their official app isn’t bad enough to bother me like the Reddit app is. I also never used a third-party app on that platform because their API terms were pretty bad for much of its existence with the limited API tokens.
I don’t know if anyone still remembers the whole “vote fuzzing” or “vote normalization” debate on Reddit. Basically, there was speculation for a long time that Reddit was artificially adding up and/or downvotes to post scores, and new posts claiming to have found the smoking gun showed up on /r/TheoryOfReddit on a weekly basis. It exercised us quite a bit, because the premise that the numbers weren’t accurate made it difficult to assess a number of things about how the site operated, which was kinda the whole point of that sub. The admins kept an eye on ToR, and would comment on things every once in a while, so we asked them, and they replied, on multiple occasions, that no, the votes weren’t “normalized.” Their main explanation for why it looked like votes were being artificially added was that the servers handled votes in batches to balance the load of requests on the system, and that led to a certain amount of jerkiness in how the scores changed. That was there answer, so that’s what we told others whenever the issue came up.
Then, one day, a relatively new admin chimed in on a discussion and said, yeah, the system is designed to add votes that no actual person had submitted. Wait, I replied, isn’t this the thing we’ve been calling normalization, and that other admins had told us wasn’t something that the site did? Yeah, he said, you could call it that.
That’s when I bailed on Reddit. Not being able to trust the numbers was one thing, but after that, I felt that couldn’t trust the admins. Because we had asked them directly, and were putting time and effort into explaining to other users what they had told us was the way things worked, and that had all been a waste because they had misled us for years.