In many ways I was addicted to Reddit. I spent a lot of time on there. I needed an excuse to go cold turkey. I will go occasionally for specific information, but I've completely moved my idle doomscrolling to lemmy instances. There's less content so it takes less time, which is good in a way.
I am doing just fine without Reddit. If every social media site disappeared tomorrow (including Lemmy sites), I would go on living feeling just fine. Because I was alive before the internet growth in the 90s, before cell phones, during a time when pay phones and rotary phones existed, and got along quite well.
We don’t need these stupid sites. No offense intended here, but if a person is so addicted to a website, especially a social media site, that they feel FOMO after leaving it, they need to reevaluate their priorities in life.
And note: I created my Reddit account in May, 2008. I eagerly deleted my 15-year account in July, 2023 and have never looked back. And for all the bullshit he did to Christian Selig and others, fuck Spez, in perpetuity.
I'll preface this by saying that yes, I am an idiot.
I don't really miss anything about Reddit that I'm not getting here on Lemmy except for the constant attempts to convince me that I'm not actually an idiot for investing WAY to much money into GameStop. I used to browse Superstonk a fuck ton every single day in some vane attempt to convince myself I didn't seriously throw thousands of dollars of the only money I had, straight down the drain. So after almost 3 years of that constantly, I became addicted to it to some degree convincing myself that big money was always just around the corner and the dire straits I put myself into were going to be worth it in the long run; and at first I did feel like I was missing out on information.
I'm no longer concerned with seeing that info and with that, I'm completely released from the Reddit hold.
I do check one niche subreddit for a TV show about once every week when a new episode drops, but I hadn't used reddit at all until this season came out. I will go right back to not using it pretty soon here. I used to read reddit during the majority of my down time, but the attitude Spez had was so awful that I have no desire to return to regular use. I spend a lot of my time on discord, some on Firefish, and a little bit on Lemmy. I do more things offline now. I thought it would be difficult to replace reddit, but it hasn't been.
I "left" when infinity for reddit stopped working.
I check Reddit maybe twice a week, but only a couple of specific niche subs( like many others have said). For me it's /r/fragrance that I've had a hard time finding a good replacement for... Perhaps I should just frequent Basenotes.com more?
Hell, I miss LiveJournal more than I miss reddit. /old
I haven't missed a thing. I don't even get most of my news from Lemmy or Reddit communities; I get it from RSS feeds or books. I lurked /r/linux for a long time after I stopped actively contributing. It wasn't until a few months ago that I started contributing to Lemmy, the first collection of online communities I've been a part of in years. I'm of two minds about it.
I'm actually grateful for it because I started complaining about things that have bothered me for a long time, and The Great Lemmy Migration made me realize, well, there's no reason I can't do something about that. It helped me change my attitude. So, in a very real way, I've contributed to several upstream projects because Lemmy made me rethink things and I am now less annoyed. It's weird how Lemmy feels like an actual community in the way no other social site (including Reddit) has.
On the flip side, I think I spend too much time on Lemmy...but this week has been uniquely rough.
I got banned. But between Lemmy and mastodon I haven't gone back there.
I still Google reddit threads for stuff I know will exist there already. DIY, software, niche things. It can't be helped because it's easily accessible. While I appreciate Lemmy very much, the historical repository that is reddit still trumps many other places. For now.
I don't visit for any other reason.
I've gone back there from time to time because there's not the specialised subs here yet, or those that are don't have the traffic.
What I've found on the main dubs I used to frequent is that they are full of reactionary comments that have no grasp of history, context or empathy.
The specialised subs, maybe were like this and I was just more tolerant to it, are full of low effort "please look at me doing absolutely fuck all in any way of producing meaningful content" posts.
There's far too many to actually get to the content with effort so the signal to noise ratio is too low to fight off my general contempt of the place.
Here folks and interactions are better. Content is quite lacking. I have a few niche interests that are nowhere to be seen around here. I have not gone back to Reddit and I think my life overall is better for it. My 2 cents.
FOMO is a weird term to use here because it implies some anxiety that I could be seeing more stuff than I am.
I get bored sometimes. There isn't enough content here to keep me super engaged, and interesting niche subs about certain small games and whatnot are missed. I end up swapping back and forth between my front page here and my youtube recs, willing something interesting to appear.
But I'm not feeling the slightest anxiety that I'm missing some stranger's idea of wit on a site I don't go to. There's way too much internet for me to ever think I was seeing it all in the first place, so I'm more than fine with missing the latest lyric or pun comment chain or the hottest new AITA fiction.
Life is better. A few days after I stopped the urges to scroll like I did went away. Best thing I did on the internet besides scrub my Facebook.
the target sub is basically the only one I miss, just a bunch of other target employees commiserating about working at target
Yeah i'm totally going to get fomo for "LOOK at this IMMIGRANT STEALING from a STORE" Top comment "I hope they cut his hands off"
I nuked my accounts and I'm fully content with that. There's no fomo, I haven't even bothered to peek at how my old subs are doing.
I still use site:reddit.com
when making searches, but that's a different thing.
I go back occasionally to niche communities that haven't moved off yet but since I deleted my account, I can't interact and don't feel the need to stay long, and since I don't/won't use the mobile app my usage is even further reduced.
The things I miss from Reddit are mostly very niche. I left and haven't been back mostly because I refuse to use their BS app, and I refuse to see ads. I was a mobile Reddit user so I didn't use it on the computer much.
I do miss doing gaming giveaways of extra stuff for like animal crossing and so on. And I miss helping newbies with games (mostly retro gaming stuff). Other than that Reddit was a time sink for me and I have other places to use my time.
I don't get FOMO. I mostly miss interacting with other people. Talking about opinions. Finding people who agree with me about niche stuff. People don't seem to interact as much here and I don't think that's because of the lack of content.
But I don't see the point of going back to Reddit. The experience of trawling through the muck to get to a few grains of what I want just doesn't appeal to me. All reports I've seen suggest that it's just getting worse and I was struggling with the experience before the API debacle.
Lemmy is basically a full replacement. The only time I find myself going back is if I'm looking for information on a niche or obscure topic and reddit seems to have a lot of those communities while Lemmy doesn't (yet).
I also get Google search results from Reddit too, but the mass scrubbing of data has turned any thread older than a year or so into a mass grave of deleted comments and sometimes context is missing which is sad but I also hope that people will learn from this and Google will start actually getting their search engine algorithms out of social media for that reason.
Initially it was kinda barren but over time as more people switched there was more content. First it was just reddit reposts galore, but now i think it’s much less. Probably due to vote meaning even less here. I don’t miss it at all at this point.
I stopped using Reddit regularly after the APIcalypse, even though I had never used any Reddit apps (I only used it on a web browser on a desktop). I still have an account that's active there where I've only been using it to help and encourage people to move from Reddit to Lemmy and from Xitter to Mastodon.
I thought it was going to be harder than it actually was to abandon the many niche subreddits I was subscribed to there, but I just found other things to read. I will still occasionally visit Reddit, especially when it turns up on a search result with info I'm looking for, but to use it like that I don't have to even have an account.
I plan to eventually delete or scramble all my posting history from there on all my accounts, but just haven't had time to do it yet. I also haven't found a way to do what I really want, which is to replace my comments with different random text for each message, to mess as much as possible with any LLMs. In no way will I contribute any more of my comments to Reddit, except for what I said in the beginning, to help people move here, and even that I will probably delete/scramble.