Reddit would surely have to ban users from creating new subreddits for certain (previously allowed) topics, or else users would just create an alternative “free” subreddit and everyone would post there, right? This can’t work like something like YouTube Premium originals or else they’re going to have to pay certain popular people to post to the paywalled subs - but nobody uses Reddit to follow individuals.

I can confirm it’s greatly improved in terms of reliability in the last couple of years.

Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.

No, I’m not having that! That’s rewriting of history. I remember when Google came out, it was pretty much as good as Altavista and no more. It had the additional appeal that it looked (for the time) unique and fresh and had a weird name, I remember getting my friends to try this “weird new search engine that might someday beat Altavista” but it never revolutionised anything in terms of search results at the time.

Also Altavista was not getting progressively worse, I still remember the days when you could type a simple dictionary word into a search engine and have it return 0 results. Altavista is what changed that, not Google.

As much as I try to encourage alternatives, most people where I’m from use WhatsApp for everything these days and has been that way for the last ~5 years. I might get about 10 SMS messages a year but possibly thousands of WhatsApp messages.

It’s definitely a nicer experience around here if you block certain instances, I won’t mention names myself. The difference is that Meta’s instance is big enough to completely drown out everyone else which can’t be said about the above.

There’s a good argument for keeping it small and focused. Massive all-encompassing social networks are relatively new and not a good thing in my opinion.

My concern is that the toxic culture from Meta’s platforms will be imported here, and the only way to get away from it would be to not only defederate from Meta but to defederate from anything federated to Meta (essentially creating two fediverses). I hope it doesn’t come to that, but that’s my worry.

I want to be a good enough friend to encourage my friends to stay away from Meta. I don’t want to enable them.

Lemmy users be like „I fucking love decentralized freedom“, until someone joins they don’t like.

No, especially when someone joins that we don’t like. The ability to defederate is the freedom that comes with decentralisation. If there were no bad actors decentralisation wouldn’t be so important.

My experience: I initially came here from Reddit and mostly access Kbin via Lemmy instances. I quickly had to make the decision to unsubscribe from most Kbin communities/magazines because unmoderated Kbin magazines were the source of 90% of the spam in my feed. It harms the reputation and makes me hesitant to subscribe to anything on Kbin. I really wish Kbin success but I think it would be greatly beneficial if Kbin went and deleted its inactive communities.