How difficult was it for you to abandon a social media website for a fediverse alternative?

Surprisingly not hard at all. I helped build tools for moderators on Reddit that were used by millions. When the API changes hit, it completely destroyed all of my work. I have no interest in dedicating my time casually or seriously to a site that treats me that way.

I’m a habitual person but switching to the fediverse was like trading cigarettes for a vape. Same addiction, different delivery, more flavor 😛

Not difficult at all.

Left Facebook in 2016, Left Instagram in 2017, Left Snapchat in 2018, Left twitch in 2021, Left Twitter in 2022, Left Reddit in 2023.

I could walk away from tiktok at any moment.

Honestly I thought it would be tougher than it really was. The first couple days I did miss it, it was my go to for over 12 years.

I'm thankful RIF suggested this place, it's a much nicer environment.

I still haven't fully abandoned reddit. Reason: There are a number of niche communities I'm part of that just have zero or near-zero population here. Fediverse just doesn't yet have the minimum critical mass of users necessary to be a viable alternative for anything but the most common and basic topics.

As far as making the switch for the common/popular stuff, there were difficulties that I ran into but I've mostly adapted. My first big mistake was trying to use Jerboa (I thought it was the 'official' app, but quickly discovered that it loves to shit itself if the app version is out of sync with the server version by even a sub-sub-dot version number. It also crashed a lot. Another early mistake was joining a small instance and not realizing that their view of "all" communities was not the same as the view of "all" communities from a bigger instance...and so my earliest view of the fediverse was pretty crippled until I started creating accounts on other instances. My next problem was the learning curve: I didn't see a lot of the communities I wanted while on that small instances and so I started creating them, only to later discover that many of those communities already existed on other instances and were well established. Fediverse has a MASSIVE community discoverability problem that needs to be solved before more of the masses will be attracted to it.

Now that I've got a good working client that I like, have local accounts on the main instances where most of the communities I participate in are located, have re-found replacement communities for the ones I lost access to when beehaw de-federated, I estimate that after about 2 more years at current growth, fediverse might also be a viable alternate to those niche communities I'm still going to reddit for. I'd estimate that I'm 70% fediverse + 30% reddit at this point.

Not at all. Honestly getting rid of Twitter and Reddit has given me more free time that I didn't realize I was wasting constantly scrolling. There's less to see on Mastodon and Lemmy so I usually just run through it in the morning on my way to work and a bit at night if I'm bored (like right now.) I've gotten back into reading books a lot more and getting off the computer for a lot longer.

Honestly getting rid of Twitter and Reddit has improved my life if anything.

I've left better things over lesser issues.

Way easier than expected. I used to spend hours mindlessly scrolling on reddit, occasionally learning something useful but that was the exception. I suffer from anxiety so I genuinely had concerns about quitting reddit, but also recognised it was an unhealthy way to spend so much free time. I left on the first day of the protests and haven't been back since. Was honestly surprised and impressed at myself for managing it so easily (rediscovered my love of crosswords and my kindle). Joined Lemmy 2 days ago, so still finding my feet but so far it scratches that itch of keeping a little bit in-the-loop with pop culture. (But with time limits firmly on this time!)

Really easy. I assume when you say “social media” website you mean Reddit. Reddit was a website I’d browse to kill time when I was bored to find amusing content. Thanks to their recent policy change and their crappy treatment of their users, I torched my 10+ year old accounts and moved over basically overnight. Plenty of like minded individuals have done the same in the past couple months it seems. The fediverse has reached critical mass.

The core of Reddit were their users and the mods who volunteer their free time to look after the site, and they shat all over them. Killed the golden goose as it were. I’m a little surprised as to how many people (especially mods) are still hanging around over there.

Leaving was easy.

Using the alternatives is hard.

I am was an Apollo user, and decided that Reddit killing it was too much. I switched to Lemmy, and while it has been an adjustment, I am reminded of the days of forums past. I dig it. Using Voyager (formally Wefwef) has helped preserve most of the UI of Apollo, which is nice. I had never heard of Progressive Web Apps before, and am super interested in the topic now. This makes me want to pick up programming again, in hopes of eventually being able to contribute to open source projects.

Quitting Reddit and switching to lemmy - easy. Quitting FB - not possible. I have no other way to keep in touch with remote friends and relatives and there are local FB groups that are useful for me. Dropping Whatsapp also is sadly impossible. With my nerdy friends I use telegram/signal but 99.99% of ppl are available only on WhatsApp.

So easy. Social websites are about the community, not the platform. If the people move, so will the discussion follow. Reddit now has no one that's worth talking to. Everyone worthy of having a meaningful discussion with has already left.

Now youtube... that's different... I don't think its possible for them to get replaced. Youtube is about the content created by content creators and I don't see any big youtubers moving to another platform, especially a fediverse one, since there's not gonna be adequete compensation to be worthwhile. I mean, maybe they can crosspost, but I'm not sure if the TOS allows that if you have like a special partnership agreement with youtube. Also, storage is going to be a big problem for a competing platform. Videos are much bigger than text. A text-based platform like Lemmy is going to be much easier to maintain than Peertube with videos taking up potentially terabytes of storage per day when the platform starts growing.

What’s been hard was that I left before the great migration. The issues were more technical and the fact that apps were just all at early alpha phases with many functionalities missing. Now it’s pretty much navy to normal. I actually even welcome the lower amount of content. Easier to keep track of instead of drinking from a Firehouse.

Easy. Deleted my FB 2016, never had a Twitter, Snapchat, vine, or anything else besides reddit. Didn't become a frequent on reddit until 2017. I think the longest thing I was on was myspace. That place I was always on and posting or using to communicate with friends. Was happy with squabbles but deleted account as well due to the knee jerk policy being thrown left and right. Will wait a while to see if they get their stuff together. Lemmy is ok. Still small so eh. Always hated people knowing about me or searching me up.

Once I figured out that it does not matter what instance you join, it was simple. I initially kept trying to join lemmy.world but it timed out for a couple weeks. Tried signing up with a smaller instance and they had to manually approve my account which never happened. Finally found lemm.ee which let me sign up.

The Lemmy site could do a better job in making it clear that the instance you join does not matter that much. Currently the site tells you to join one that matches your interest which is a bit silly considering there are a myriad of subs on each of them.

Pretty easy really, but the only "social media" I really used for at least the last 6 years was reddit

Completely effortless.

I first came to check out kbin/lemmy immediately after spez's petulant AMA, but it was really just that I happened across a link just as I was thinking that maybe I should think about trying to find an alternative.

But instead, I just ended up staying. I haven't been back to Reddit since, and don't miss it.

I'm still occasionally browsing spezworld in read only mode and I thought I was doing okay but I just found old.lemmy.world and now it feels like I've relapsed.

I still visit /r/ukraine and /r/combatfootage, but less and less lately and zero engagement. Propaganda has taken over the ukraine sub and the comments have become vile. Better discussion and analysis on /combatfootage. The /c/ equivalents are low traffic.

Otherwise I haven't had any issues and feel better. I've been reading more, either reading the actual linked articles or library books/audiobooks. Every morning I ask siri 'tell me the top news today' and it reads me a 1-2 minute podcast from CBC. I might pop into ground.news while I do my morning business, and then during the day at work I'll have a lemmy tab open.

The main problem is that I use reddit for work. I need to find another place, maybe stack exchange or some lemmy instances/communities. Haven't really spent much time looking.

Joining the fediverse alternative was easier than I anticipated. Abandoning the social media website is a bit harder, since there's still some communities that haven't migrated yet.

Same routine for Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit (in this order). I just stopped using them, deleted the apps, deleted them from the browsing history, and blocked them on my firewall. Other than some really technical things on Reddit (which I viewed on the archived pages), going cold turkey was not an issue at all. The relatively sparse content in the first weeks also stopped me from doomscrolling.

I didn't feel the need to abandon them because I don't mindlessly scroll them. Well, I guess I did for reddit but I stopped that easily enough by substituting for Lemmy. And since Lemmy is kinda barren right now besides the front page I've cut way down on phone time. I still use Twitter when I try to get news on something, I use reddit to get random people's thoughts on a purchase, don't use Facebook or Instagram at all. Snapchat I just use for a single groupchat.

I didn’t quit. They kicked me out when they killed my app. While I think lemmy is cool, fracturing communities is almost always the wrong answer, and I would go back if they restore access via the app.

Once I figured out how to make lemmy look a lot like what I was getting from Reddit and HN, I haven't been back to either. Now I have a single RSS feed in my reader to my personal Subscribed/Active page. The RSS link you can get from your instances website while logged in includes some kind of ID to your personal feed so there's no authentication needed and I never have to change anything there, if I join a new community, it starts showing up in my RSS reader, if I unjoin, it goes away. It's quite glorious. I've found good/active enough communities to replace what I followed at the old places and the comments sections are far less flooded with nonsense.

I'm on Mastodon a bit, and I do really like it, but it wasn't a replacement for me, I was off Twitter and the like for about 7 years already when I decided to try it.

Like a lot of other posters, not hard at all. I miss /r/Daddit. I miss /r/Datahoarder but the selfhosted community here is strong and seems to have absorbed some home networking, datahoarder, etc topics.

Leaving Twitter for Mastodon was very easy. I pretty much left and never looked back. Leaving Reddit for Lemmy is not easy. Been in the process for a couple of weeks and I still find myself spending hours on Reddit and very little on Lemmy.

It doesn't have to be difficult.. or even done at all.

Reminder to folks that being active in the fediverse does not mean you need to not be on traditional forums, social media, etc. It is perfectly fine to be active in both, either, or none.

As soon as RIF stopped working while I was in the middle of using it, I made an account on Lemmy.World and haven't looked at Reddit again since.

it was easy. I never had any social media.

I deleted my reddit account and never looked back. It wss an adjustment, but with a little patience I got used to how lemmy works.

Not hard at all. There's so much here to see and interact with.

About 2 clicks and few fingy taps on the keyboard.

So not too bad, unless you don't have fingies, might be a bit more difficult.