Reddit has been a staple of the internet for years, but the recent shakeup at the company has led many users to question whether they can continue to rely on the platform. In this article, we’ll explore some of the alternatives to Reddit, and discuss what users need to consider when choosing a new platform.
I think many of us netizens have had sort of rude awakening with the recent shake up at reddit. For those not aware here is an article that sums it up: Reddit CEO lashes out on protests, moderators and third-party apps
Any time you rely to heavily on one company for a whole aspect of your life you are setting up an issue that sooner or later is going to come back to bite you. While I know this even I was not really thinking about it at the time to me it just seemed like a site that was a silly time waster. I would watch a few videos, maybe reply to a comment here or there. However I did rely on the site in ways I didn’t realize.
- as a news aggregator
- a way to connect to social communities
- for troubleshooting advice
- for advice on other topics ( cooking, parenting, vacations, etc. )
When the owners of a site act in a way that is unforgivable I think it’s imperative that we be able to stand our ground and leave that site if it’s warranted. However as reddit has been fulfilling multiple roles many of the ways we did these things before have languished. Stack overflow for instance is not nearly as useful as it used to be. Websites and blogs have largely gone to click bait and sorting through all that to find what is actually good has become a bit of a nightmare. Forums are basically extinct and usenet while not gone is not even on anyone’s radar as a potential replacement. Don’t even get me started on search engines and the issues those have now with providing relevant results.
Potential Solutions:
First of all a good feed reader is a must something where you can break up your news, discover sources, and I think most importantly control your rss feed in a local way. That way if a company loses their mind you can just ignore them because it won’t affect you at all. for this I am using feedreader which is a great app but really many of them have similar features so you will likely just need to play around until you find one you like.
Next you need ways to engage with other users. This is a lot trickier. The two best options I have found are mastodon and lemmy.
However both of these options seem to have similar issues. Mastodon isn’t broken up into communities it’s more of a twitter clone. Also the user base still seems low so it’s difficult to find people and things to follow. This is changing and user growth is exploding with user population in the whole fediverse already at nearly 11 million adding nearly 3 million in just the last month source the largest service by far is Mastadon.
Lemmy by contrast is laid out more like reddit and has communities but the user base is still small ( about 40,000 active users per month* ) some communities have no posts. However when you find an active thread the community is great. There are very few trolls and the interactions are mostly productive and fun.
This being a federated group of services means that all these services do interoperate to one degree or another. This federation is not as polished as you would hope. As you can see I can look someone up from lemmy that is on mastodon.
However you can’t see their mastodon posts on lemmy so that is unfortunate. I can conversely find people on lemmy from mastodon yet I also can’t see what they post :
I’m not sure what the point of this is but regardless it makes it so you do need to have accounts on multiple services even though they do interoperate to a certain degree. This makes the promise of federation not as great as you would hope.
Another problem all of these services have is because they are federated you need to find a server to sign up for and you need to wait for mods to accept you in many cases. I am still waiting for my invite to be accepted for the lemmy server beehaw. In fact based on a discussion thread it seems like many users have not been able to sign up for certain instances and just never get a reply. In the meantime I was able to find a server that just let me signup without a run around: https://sh.itjust.works . This concept of finding servers and even the whole notion of a federated service I worry scares people off because they don’t get it. Many users just want a social network they don’t want to be lectured to about decentralization. Sure they want something secure, private, and easy to use but I notice the language around a lot of this comes off as preachy. I really think these services need to find a way to make finding a server easier, more easy to sign up for, and a little less like you are joining a cult. I think picking a server based on common ethics is not a bad thing but most people on the internet want to just “set it and forget it” and don’t care about those sorts of things.
Finally for your general advice needs I have not found anything close to a good solution. If people figure that part out I am all ears. Maybe as services like lemmy grow they will become better at things like that but at the moment there is just not enough communities or participation for a reddit replacement. Maybe something like Discord could work but you definitely need to search around for the right servers to join and they are much more like a chat room then a forum for advice needs. I am definitely not advocating that people stick with reddit. I think if we got these federated service to play nicely together you could just have an account on whatever service you like and then interact with everyone else.
Weaknesses
After spending a few days messing about I discovered a few things that are weaknesses.
- logging in and maintaining multiple sites
- harder to find the communities your used to
it took me a bit but the best place to find communites is : https://lemmyverse.net/
It wasn’t intuitive at first but a way to make your life easier is by selecting the home icon and setting your home instance.
Once you do this you can just find a place, select it, and click subscribe.
Future Proofing
It’s really annoying but I think going forward many of us are going to just need to be more conscious about the communities we become involved with. What are their stances on things like free speech and censorship? Are they looking to just monetize their user base? Also we need to take a hard look at the communities we are already a member of and ask the same questions. I suggest leaving and looking for alternatives before they pull something awful because the temptation to is just far too high. For me the right sort of interface is somewhere between lemmy and mastodon though I find I tend to spend more time on lemmy.
Conclusion
right now there doesn’t seem to be a perfect solution. However we do have a few “good enough” solutions that can definitely become great over time. We have mastodon which is fantastic twitter clone already. We have lemmy that could easily replace reddit provided that it gets the userbase. There is also kbin.social ( which I did not try ) that could replace reddit like services as well. The question will be is the communities heart really in it? Are we willing to walk away from reddit and adopt these other platforms. Will federation move in a way where no matter what instance/platform you are on you will be able to interoperate with the others. If these things are not addressed the community will just become fragmented and it could takes years for things to shake out.
Doza Does it 