The true tragedy is when you get all the social signals and you have the thought “man I wish I could just date multiple people at the same time” and it doesn’t occur to you to try that because… ???

Now I’m old and have to work 1 1/2 full time jobs to pay my bills, so. That won’t be happening.

Lady with social anxiety here to confirm. Flirting is useless. Every time I’ve just given up and asked the dude to date after being extremely forward for a while and they’re always shocked 🤷🏼‍♀️ Once we get past that, it’s great.

We had a wood stove hooked up to our chimney. 😬

Nope, and I used to do a lot of Reddit - like several times a day, and usually entire evenings just browsing. I used PowerDeleteSuite and deleted my account, and I use an RSS reader with an adblocker for the 2-3 local subs I truly can’t find the same info for elsewhere. One is a university I teach at, and the only exception I’ve made to this was to create a throwaway to answer a question about salaries and point the person who was hoping to teach to our union contract. Worker solidarity > Reddit drama.

Corporations: get your booty back into the office so it’s not empty
Also corporations: we’ve laid off your team in favor of AI, it was a tough but necessary choice due to costs
The empty office building: ???

https://imgflip.com/i/7omf7c

Yup. I used to use Alien Blue heavily and the UI tweaks that Reddit did to it made it a subpar experience from what it was from the start. I preferred the greater information density, I didn’t need to see the thumbnail images as large as they were, it made poor use of space on the iPad, and I couldn’t swipe back and forth anymore. I continued to use Alien Blue as long as I could and then switched to Apollo.

Add to Home Screen + kbin is 🤌, all I need is a back button or the ability to swipe back and I’m golden.

Yes! I’m realizing how much I took that for granted when social media came on the scene. Not anymore. I’m not letting this version of the internet die out if we have the chance to bring that energy back.

Come to think of it, I’m surprised I didn’t learn my lesson with centralization when AIM died. I just accepted it as a natural part of the tech lifecycle and found a different centralized service. But seeing the decisions and actions of these companies over the past few years - platforms I trusted - hit differently, and hit even harder when I went to look for forums and RSS and realized my backup options were dying. You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone, or pretty close to being gone. It definitely makes me want to support federation and indie web efforts - it’s much closer in spirit to the web I grew up with.

This is where I’m at too. Reddit is my last non-Fediverse social media account, and I already had some reservations about keeping it. I don’t think I’m ready to delete it just yet, unlike FB/Twitter/Instagram.

Yes! I’ve really been missing message boards lately. I didn’t think I’d get to feel that joy again, and here we are! Just gotta keep the momentum going.

I definitely have this feeling too. I’m finding that memes and other picture-based posts are a little easier for me to start with because they do some of the talking for me.

AI image generation aside, this sort of thing might be genuinely useful for someone who is blind or low vision. It’s like alt text for the world.

Honestly - what happens to all the information on Reddit if this actually happens? DPReview just recently announced they were shutting down (thanks, Amazon) and the first question was - what happens to all the valuable information and knowledge in the forums? There was a serious wave of panic in the photography community at the potential loss of all that information, and it was too much for archive.org to reliably get. I wonder what the contingency plan for Reddit would be at this point.

All the more reason in my eyes to support the fediverse at this point - archiving a single instance isn’t going to be as terrifying as a decade-plus monolith forum.

I gave it a good, genuine try after they killed Alien Blue, because surely they bought that app to do something useful with it, right? Nope. Absolute garbage, and I begrudgingly made the switch to Apollo. Reddit is my last non-Fediverse based social media site and the only thing keeping me on it was the content and excellent app interface - the minute Apollo stops working, Reddit is dead to me. I’d rather post into the abyss than use the official app or website.