cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/73406944

It all started when my main Reddit account was banned—simply because I posted a comment criticizing the banning of a subreddit—resulting in the immediate loss of an account I’d held for about 4 years, with 102k karma. I appealed, but I received no response—not even a reason for my ban, nor any notification that I had been banned in the first place. I’ve filed appeals repeatedly over the past few months, but today, I’m finally giving up. Fuck Spez and his pathetic, whore of a family. When I submitted my appeals, there wasn’t even any indication that they had gone through; I was just left in total silence, unable to do a thing. I started using an existing alt account for basic tasks, but today, that account was banned too—all because I recommended the non-profit, open-source "VPN Gate" project to someone who was complaining about the mandatory KYC (age verification) requirements being imposed in my country. The only reason I was still using Reddit was out of habit, and I’ve decided it’s time to change some of my habits. Ultimately, this is the inevitable fate of every centralized corporation—without exception. There’s no guarantee that some complete moron won’t end up in charge of any of them. I wish more people realized this. If four years of my effort are being sold off to AI data companies, and everything can be permanently wiped out overnight without a word of warning, then that is, quite simply, data theft. Once again, fuck you, Spez—you absolute piece of shit. If you had even an ounce of courage or integrity, you wouldn’t have imposed those damn API restrictions in 2023 and ruined Reddit. I truly regret the four years I spent here, but it’s better to cut my losses now. Goodbye, you son of a bitch Spez, and your puppet, Reddit...

Apart from habits, what were the sub-reddits that kept you there, and stopped from transitioning completely before? We can start making similar content and bring more people here.

Congratulations 🎊

Don't know what his subreddits were, but I still go there for guitar, and luthier (well 8 guitar related subs in total).

We have a NDP community here, but it's not very active, even though I suspect that the sub is mostly bots at this point.

Most of my habits stemmed from the fact that I found the general chaos of Mastodon overwhelming and too complex for daily use. For instance, while Reddit has its own straightforward website and app, Mastodon lacks a clear, simple interface—which made it seem overly complicated to me from the start. Consequently, I always found it much easier to quickly hop onto Reddit to post or leave a comment. Most importantly, the number of active users on Mastodon is, unfortunately, still far lower than on Reddit.

Thanks :)

Not OP, but there are a lot of niche subreddits where you simply can't get information anywhere else. I quit Reddit entirely after the APIocalypse, and I know around that time people started replicating the extensive network of Sports team subreddits in various places here. But, there are simply not enough people here to make that work.

I have not logged in (other than to manipulate the crypto out of my Reddit Vault and sell it before it crashed) since then. There are precisely four subreddits I monitor via RSS because the info simply doesn't make it here. But Reddit has already announced their RSS access is going away. When it does, I guess I'll just have get that info somewhere else.

That reddit shit slowly becoming Instagram 2, most of the origin community already gone ;(

The last straw for me was when RedReader stopped working

I wish I’d ​​had enough willpower back then to get out of this cesspool :(

Lmfao, that’s me here every month. Nothing changes when you switch groups of douche bags. Don’t feel bad, I lost my Reddit account when I called out an online stalker in the open. Apparently my words were “uncivil”

I went cold turkey after the third party app debacle but I really missed the home assistant subreddit. There is a home assistant community but it’s nowhere near as active.

Since Mastodon was mentioned I'll also add that a thoroughly hate that Mastodon doesn't even attempt to show you anything unless you enable Javascript. I'm a user of NoScript so websites don't run JS by default unless I explicitly opt in. For most sites that's not a huge deal since it's just a one time thing but because Mastodon is federated I need to opt in every instance individually which means 90% of the time on the rare occasion I visit a Mastodon link nothing loads initially.

I wish Mastodon did the thing most non-sketchy websitss do and renders at least a basic view of its content without JS so I could at least decide if it's worth enabling JS in the first place.

You're on the Lemmy version of the fediverse. Mastodon is like Twitter, whereas Lemmy and Piefed are like Reddit.

• Change up how you see stuff: Hot, Scaled, Every 6 hours. Active is the least active ironically.
• Remember, this is mostly not an angry factory like reddit, so you're going to go through withdrawal. I'm serious.
• Upvote if you like it an post stuff that interests you.
• Remember there are still trolls here. They brigade and fight with you for odd reasons. That should give you a heads up if that starts to happen.
• Not every instance is great.

The niche subreddits are really hard to adjust without. I would’ve gone cold turkey if it weren’t for those because you simply can’t find the info anywhere else. I was using RDX to browse those subs but now that’s gone too (for now, hopefully the dev finds a workaround)

I was able to use RDX up until a few days ago. Like you I was mostly out after the API debacle but I did use RDX to browse r/all for mental junk food. I started out just doing it once in a while but I got more in the habit even as the quality dropped. It’s for the best that I no longer have that crutch. I will miss being able to look up the post episode discussion of whatever show I’m currently streaming. I don’t see Lemmy getting the critical mass for those types of discusaions anytime soon.

I read reddit but no longer contribute in any way. Activity level is just way lower here, especially for niche interests. I've increased the amount of other websites I look at (here, hacker news, steam forums) overall

Similar thing happened to me. It was a near 20 year old account. Somehow it got hacked and banned. for my history I felt a sense of loss because I realized I wanted to be able to look back and see my old posts and comments. I appealed with no answer, it's like appealing into the void.

I still had the addiction to seeing content and reading comments, seeing something always new. But I slowly started coming around to fediverse. Not all at once, I created a new reddit account just to see the content. It pissed me off they gated the content to people logged in, pissed me off they keep trying to push you to use the app, but I eventually gave in because of my content addiction to seeing that new dopamine drip feed.

The final straw was when I started noticing a more hostile commenting environment. I would comment something innocuous, but then I would get people arguing with me on fairly un controversial comments. I would notice they would be accounts with private histories less than a year old. Some would have only fans- like ads in their profile.

I also noticed a vast uptick in rightwing trolling and right leaning comments. These accounts all seemed suspect. Reddit had always been a left wing space. I really think a lot of the money being funneled into these midterms is being used for troll farms and bot farms to astroturf narratives on social media platforms. That was the last straw. I was arguing with people who were probably bots on reddit, giving reddit the engagement they want and I had enough.

It really is an addiction, I had to cut it off but I still try to pull up reddit sometimes when i'm bored. But I think fediverse is really going to be the future and we have to keep getting people to gradually come here.

Congratulations leaving that trash fire. I went back a couple times out of curiosity and man did I regret it. It's way worse than it was in 2019 which was my peak reddit usage time.

I've been clean cold turkey from Reddit for over 3 years now since I made my Lemmy account but I still really miss active discussions about newly released games :(

You can make a post in one of the gaming comms here and sometimes you'll get a couple folks, but it doesn't really catch on the same. I had a grand old time reading tons of build discussion and memes when Elden Ring came out, but since Nightreign came out I effectively haven't interacted with its community at all.

I like Lemmy specifically because it is smaller and more close knit, usually. But it misses out on some of the bigger town-square types of discussion that reddit could enable because reddit had sixty five gorillion users, especially in the gaming space.

I expect that whatever discussion of this type doesn't exist on reddit probably exists on Discord but that also sucks for a completely separate, but similar, set of reasons. I still use Discord, as of currently, but I hate interacting in big public servers and never do it, and it misses a lot of the thread-and-comment structure that I liked so much about Reddit. (Discord does technically support threads, but they work differently and nobody uses them properly anyway.)

What was the likely innocuous comment that caught you a ban? I got IP banned for asking when they're going to launch Marjorie Taylor Greene into the sun. Apparently that was "promoting violence".

Yeah it’s probably better I don’t have the crutch either. I was using it a lot to read stuff like AMITAH and the amount of stuff that was either fake or AI was through the roof. I guess I just wish I had more lead time to wean myself off because being cut off just like that is a hard struggle.

Gone where though? I wish some of them atleast come here......

Whenever I see people getting banned from Reddit I always revel in the fact that I left on my own terms. I never go back there voluntarily since the API Epoch. Eat my shorts, Reddit.

I love that it says
"This account is banned"
Then immediately
"Jump back into explore communities"
Lol

So you didn't so much stop as much as you were stopped.

Someone was complaining that in their country, everything requires identity verification under the guise of "age verification." I mentioned the existence of "VPN Gate"—a completely open-source, non-profit, educational VPN project that uses residential IPs rather than standard VPN IPs. My account was likely flagged as spam.

Hear hear

That's ridiculous. Reddit went to shit fast when they stopped letting you use 3rd party apps.

Today I stopped using Bluesky because they suspended my account for suspicious activity. I'm sure it's because I use a VPN to bypass age verification. Oh well. Mastodon and Lemmy it is.

I left when the great conservatisation started before the API issues. When they basically wanted more conservative moderators in "liberal" places for fair and balanced approach. When people were being banned left and right for speaking out against the regime or telling LGBT people to arm up.

"we don't want you to participate anymore but we still want you to look at ads"

I miss getting help with all sorts of stuff, home improvement and repair and how to stuff, brewing, growing stuff, and the like. Plus they have way better animal videos, to say nothing of all the other video content not found on lemmy.

Can't be helped, reddit is unusable, politicians and rich dickheads are leaning on them to make moderation decisions and they are trhing to bend us over for them.

They have ads? Joking but I never saw any with firefox on ublock. So at least I screwed them back a little, but they got all my comments for free, no small thing adding up all of our contributions, worth more than the ad revenue in many ways.

I got a violation, (never banned yet but went through maybe 10 accounts in 3 years of use,) one of the later ones was for suggesting Musk should ride his spaceships up into orbit.

Apparently it's threatening violence. Appeal denied.

Plus when reveddit stopped working, at least with that I could see what comments were being auto removed by mods or admin without notice. And other details. That was in 2024 I think.

If it keeps happening, search your ip on the internet blacklits, just search that and click on the site and they will do it for you, there are several dozens.

After multiple emails and other sign ups were immediately frozen, leaving me unable to get an email even, I checked and found I was on one, all I did was read the news and comment on social media, and work stuff. I think Israel is putting people on there that piss them off.

Girl/boy dinner diaries is basically AMTAH-lite and consistently on the front page. Why is it like catnip to me? I was never gonna wean or taper. It just had to be cold turkey

Happened to me four times.
Fuck reddit

That might be it then. I'm definitely outspoken about Israel. Thanks. I think I'll just stay off. Been wanting to quit it anyway and just stick with fediverse.

So many pearl-clutching bootlickers. You never said you would personally strap him to his own rocket. That's also not violence either. Not anyone's fault if he can't breathe in space.

Leaving Reddit is like leaving an abusive relationship (kinda: stick with me on this)

1. Reddit makes the rules and tells you what you can and can't say
2. Reddit won't allow you to speak about controversial topics that could be upsetting to it's advertisers (i.e. Israel)
3. Reddit mods can ban you for no reason
4. Appealing to "authorities" (Reddit, when mods go crazy) does absolutely nothing
5. It hurts and is sad to leave
6. It gets better once you leave
7. You look back a while later and think, wow it is so much better now you've left.

I got a bunch of temporary bans but never cared, they were always undone. Then I got permabanned so I appealed and the last ban got removed but the permanent ban stuck. I took a couple of months before I decided the internet needed my hot takes once again.

I banned Reddit a few years ago. They broke my policy so they had to go.

Same here.

The other thing that makes it feel like an abusive relationship is how huge it feels. How grand it seems, and how you just can't imagine life without it. I'm still healing from when I recently got sitewide banned for some alleged ban evasion bullshit

And... as someone who's actually been in abusive relationships, I can attest to your analogy

Only difference is, I still hope to get back in, and am waiting on my second appeal. It's not a perfect comparison because it still has its occasional good uses, but still I agree

My account was banned but o never saw this and was able to continue browsing but not post.

it took you this long?

The first four of those also apply to Lemmy too though. Depending on the instance, Lemmy mods are even worse than Reddit mods. And there is no “authority” to appeal to here either. The only difference is that there aren’t advertisers that they’re trying to appease, it’s just whatever neckbeard you pissed off that will have a vendetta against you.

Alternatively reddit is done using you lol. Welcome to lemmy!