As I see it, Reddit still has a few use cases that Lemmy doesn’t fill as well, but maybe I just don’t know enough about Lemmy.
Covid information and resources. I’ve found very helpful information to help me improve my masking procedures there, find a good elastomeric, just all sorts of real material benefits. The covid communities are very active and reading them helps provide a bulwark against the gaslighting that’s everywhere instead. They also skew more leftist than the rest of – One of the few places on Reddit where you can say “I’m not voting for a genocidal piece of shit” and get people supporting a free Palestine instead of dogpiling you.
I know we have a covid comm but it’s not anywhere near as active just because there’s a bigger userbase on reddit, and it helps to have numbers for more diverse knowledge/experiences + the more people the less alone I feel. In my real life I know almost nobody who takes covid as seriously as I do except for a couple friends half a continent away.
Keeping up with some local news stuff for my city.
2.5: Using local white liberal racist genocidal Nazi Blue-Maga fascists as emotional punching bags, triggering them, upsetting them, making them feel negative things as they briefly grapple with the cognitive dissonance of being called a Nazi for supporting genocide while thinking they’re part of “the resistance”. I want them to know that their time is limited. I want them to be uncomfortable. I want them to be afraid. I want them to know that they aren’t “nice” or “progressive” like they think they are, they’re goddamned Nazis. And I want them to feel like the threat is close to them, not just some random stranger online but someone they may run into irl because I’m in the same city as them. They’re too comfortable. Plus it’s honestly helpful to see how many Liberals fantasize about putting brown people into death camps because we refuse to vote for their Nazi heroes.
Now you may say flaming strangers on the internet is not healthy, but it’s the healthiest outlet I’ve got and when I don’t have that outlet the urge to fight fascists leads me into riskier and still unproductive territory so I’m stuck with this til I learn something better. But therapy is hard and takes a long time and some things I’m not sure can be therapized away especially given that the systemic harms which drive me to feel this way are still ongoing.
I used to like /r/ShitLiberalsSay but it’s basically our c/TheDunkTank and it’s mostly become ruined because people keep posting screenshots from new.reddit, whose UI is so god-awful that it’s illegible so I don’t read those screenshots (I go out of my way to avoid that dogshit UI, I’m not going to read anything with it)
Keeping up on news about treats and fluff. For example, /r/AnarchyChess is absolutely bizarre but I enjoy it (yes I did just admit to cringe online). Another example: /r/Piracy is somehow better than the official lemmy sister site, dbZer0, which is overrun with cringey libertarians spamming genAI garbage. I thought I’d like mander.xyz for the science and nature but it’s federated with too many Nazi pages
Spite. Mostly, Reddit is familiar and organized and it tickles my fancy to keep using it in unapproved ways. Patching my mobile app was kind of just a game, something to do for the fun of it, a way to prove they haven’t won yet. Once they properly kill off third party apps I won’t be able to access it from mobile, and once they kill off old.reddit (or if they do something that breaks the RES extension) I will be done with the site completely.
I will also say that this hasn’t felt like an ungodly amount of effort – I put way more effort into trying to find a Lemmy mobile app with a good UI, getting used to using Lemmy, figuring out which instances were tolerable and which I couldn’t stand (basically, Hexbear and Lemmygrad are the good ones – any others that might have seemed promising have the fatal flaw of being filled with genocide-loving liberal nazis who may as well have stayed on )
Why go through so much effort for such horrible content? Is there anything worthwhile on reddit anymore?
As I see it, Reddit still has a few use cases that Lemmy doesn’t fill as well, but maybe I just don’t know enough about Lemmy.
I know we have a covid comm but it’s not anywhere near as active just because there’s a bigger userbase on reddit, and it helps to have numbers for more diverse knowledge/experiences + the more people the less alone I feel. In my real life I know almost nobody who takes covid as seriously as I do except for a couple friends half a continent away.
2.5: Using local white liberal racist genocidal Nazi Blue-Maga fascists as emotional punching bags, triggering them, upsetting them, making them feel negative things as they briefly grapple with the cognitive dissonance of being called a Nazi for supporting genocide while thinking they’re part of “the resistance”. I want them to know that their time is limited. I want them to be uncomfortable. I want them to be afraid. I want them to know that they aren’t “nice” or “progressive” like they think they are, they’re goddamned Nazis. And I want them to feel like the threat is close to them, not just some random stranger online but someone they may run into irl because I’m in the same city as them. They’re too comfortable. Plus it’s honestly helpful to see how many Liberals fantasize about putting brown people into death camps because we refuse to vote for their Nazi heroes.
Now you may say flaming strangers on the internet is not healthy, but it’s the healthiest outlet I’ve got and when I don’t have that outlet the urge to fight fascists leads me into riskier and still unproductive territory so I’m stuck with this til I learn something better. But therapy is hard and takes a long time and some things I’m not sure can be therapized away especially given that the systemic harms which drive me to feel this way are still ongoing.
I used to like /r/ShitLiberalsSay but it’s basically our c/TheDunkTank and it’s mostly become ruined because people keep posting screenshots from new.reddit, whose UI is so god-awful that it’s illegible so I don’t read those screenshots (I go out of my way to avoid that dogshit UI, I’m not going to read anything with it)
Keeping up on news about treats and fluff. For example, /r/AnarchyChess is absolutely bizarre but I enjoy it (yes I did just admit to cringe online). Another example: /r/Piracy is somehow better than the official lemmy sister site, dbZer0, which is overrun with cringey libertarians spamming genAI garbage. I thought I’d like mander.xyz for the science and nature but it’s federated with too many Nazi pages
Spite. Mostly, Reddit is familiar and organized and it tickles my fancy to keep using it in unapproved ways. Patching my mobile app was kind of just a game, something to do for the fun of it, a way to prove they haven’t won yet. Once they properly kill off third party apps I won’t be able to access it from mobile, and once they kill off old.reddit (or if they do something that breaks the RES extension) I will be done with the site completely.
I will also say that this hasn’t felt like an ungodly amount of effort – I put way more effort into trying to find a Lemmy mobile app with a good UI, getting used to using Lemmy, figuring out which instances were tolerable and which I couldn’t stand (basically, Hexbear and Lemmygrad are the good ones – any others that might have seemed promising have the fatal flaw of being filled with genocide-loving liberal nazis who may as well have stayed on
)
I’m scribed to all the “imaginary whatever” art subs. /r/EbonyImagination has some cool artists posting these days.