Reddit

Hey friend, no problem!

Yes, I am passionate about these things... got one degree in econ, another in poli sci, and a good deal of work experience in the tech sector... fun how all these things are increasingly intermingled and also unavoidable these days, eh?

A lot of people who spend waaaaay more time online that normal people (I'm counting myself in that group)... often forget that most people have not spent the last decade or two having online political arguments... we get used to the idea of people using terms somewhat incorrectly as being a sign that they are doing so intentionally, as a rhetorical tactic to confuse a topic or argue in bad faith... as opposed to the possibility that someone just isn't as well versed in the topic at hand and is more or less using terms very colloquially.

But some of us can be friendly and at least pretend to be normal, lol!

As for an instance recommendation?

I'd go with .zip, my old, now inactive account is still sitting there, good admin and mod team, decently sized, and they're federated with basically every other lemmy instance... which i think is good for a newbie to lemmy, as that way you can learn for yourself if there are communities or other instances you want to avoid or block, instead of having your instance have already done that for you preemptively.

As for... losing your data, like your account data?

Yeah I think that will end up happening. Though it may be theoretically possible to migrate a user account to another instance... I don't think anyone ever actually does this?

Basically, just make a new account on a new instance, and re subscribe to your favorite communities from your lemm.ee account, and/or block ones you don't like, while your lemm.ee account still exists.

Hopefully this won't be too difficult as your account is fairly new.

There... may also be some kind of thread addressing these concerns on lemm.ee somewhere?

I'd think that if an instance is shutting down, the prudent thing for the mods to do would be to set up some kind of sticky or megathread to give general advice and answers to these kinds of questions?

I'm being nice because this person is a refugee, the fact that they are here, describing what they've experienced and witnessed, realizing that it is bad and another place could be better... it means they've got a good head on their shoulders trying to escape the hivemind.

Please don't lose them in the pattern buffer, O'Brien =P

Expect some (additonal) really nice privately owned Federated instances to launch after Reddit finally dies. (Embrace - Twitter and Mastodon are far enough along that Bluesky exists, already.)

They will have all the usual features, but also a few surprisingly nice additonal (closed source, added by corporate sponsors) features. It will cost some mild annoyance when visiting from an open source truly free federated instance. (Extend)

Eventually the new features will result in lost compatibility with the rest of the fediverse. Users on the new platform can enjoy the rest of the fediverse, but other fediverse users cannot reach any content contributed by users of the new platform. So everyone needs an account on the new platform, to enjoy it. (Extinguish)

Then the new platform enshitifies. (Enshitify)

This prediction is primarily based on how Google managed "Google Talk" when it joined XMPP. Many feel XMPP did not survive it. I still use XMPP, but many folks I talked to on XMPP do not.

The recipe is: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, Enshitify.

Almost certainly yes, once lemmy gets big enough and people in power actually give a shit about it.

The nature of the internet is something has to be hosted somewhere, no matter how obscure eventually there's a source and assholes can apply pressure on the source / host.

Most people running an instance don't have the money nor will to fight governments and mega corps when they uncorck their bullshit attacks