Worst, up until the current fiasco, was having told a very deeply personal and unique story, but being torn to shreds because I wrote it pretty. That meant it had to be fake.
It taught me the lesson to never waste effort on reddit.
But the best was kinda the flip side of it. Similar thing, talking about death and dying, which was a large part of professional life, and despite writing it pretty, it resonated with people and I got some really nice conversations commiserating about the way that can change you.
I don't plan on going back to Reddit in a major way. After giving Reddit up, I find myself thinking over my experience on that site for the last few years. Engaging commentary was harder and harder to find, particularly in any sub of sufficient size, and I spent a lot of my scrolling through Reddit angry. Leaving Reddit has been a wake up call for me. It's a rat race on Reddit, and I don't need that in my life anymore.
The world's most popular fanfiction website, Archive of Our Own, runs entirely on donations so it's certainly possible to run a website with a big userbase on donations only, although the website in question does not host images or videos so the situation is of course a bit different. But a dedicated userbase can actually make a donation run website possible.
It doesn't make money. It's funded either by donations, or out of the pockets of the instance owner(s). It doesn't mean that in the future, an instance owner wouldn't just decide to start serving ads, I don't think theres anything stopping them from doing that other than the threat of being defederated by other instances.
For now it's mostly donations. I imagine later down the line some instances might start running ads. Or even a subscription model to have an account. Who knows?
That's the nice thing about the fediverse, all these instances can have their own ideas about how to monetize, and if one fails to stay upright another can always take its place.
Right now, this is a service being provided largely by volunteers, with some help from donors. For example, the lemmy.world instance is run by the same person as mastodon.world, who has posted some information here about the costs and donations involved in running Fediverse services.
As it turns out, it's not super expensive to run a public-facing Internet service with a few thousand users if you're interested in doing so as a hobby activity. And a lot of folks are willing to donate to help the project along!
More generally: Over the history of the Internet, new services have often been prototyped by researchers, students, and hobbyist volunteers. These folks are expecting to spend a little money to make the service work, and usually enjoy it when people using the thing they've built! They usually don't have an immediate need to monetize everything, but they often accept donations if you're enjoying their work and want to contribute that way.
My worst experience came just before the API disaster started. Someone posted on the ELI5 subreddit asking what autistic people experience when they are nonverbal. Now, I'm autistic and, while I'm verbal most of the time, I do have moments where I can't speak even though I want to. Typically in moments of high emotion or stress. (It feels like the words are in my brain, but the highway to my mouth has a twenty car pileup blocking all traffic.)
My comment was upvoted many times and many people replied positively to my comment. Then, suddenly, my comment was deleted. The mod said that because this was my personal experience, it was too subjective. Meaning, only an "objective" experience from someone who wasn't autistic would be allowed.
Needless to say, I was upset and needed to vent. I vented in the Autism subreddit about the situation and got people replying in support of me. Now, I did make a mistake where people started asking to see my original comment and I posted a screenshot. That was on me - especially because I forgot to blank out the original poster's name. (In my defense, I had nothing against the OP or their question so nothing lept to mind saying "better blank that out.")
The whole thread was suddenly deleted from the Autism subreddit for "doxing." I deleted the person's username and asked for the thread to be restored. Instead, I was given a 30 day ban. Then, I quickly got notified that I was permanently banned from ELI5 for "sh*t-stirring." My goal was never "raise an army of autistic people to attack the ELI5 mods," but just "blow off steam for something I felt wasn't just."
I decided not to contest either and just stop going to either sub. In fact, I was deciding to reevaluate my Reddit use altogether. And then the API debacle started.
Don't really know what the "best" experience was. I can't say there was anything life changing for me. It was nice to have access to so much stuff in a very well designed app (Apollo) that let me share that content super easily with friends and family via Whatsapp or Telegram.
Worst interactions? There were many...the groupthink can be real bad. There are a lot of people who take karma very seriously. There was one sub, dedicated to a podcast, and it was clear there was a person that had six or seven alts because of the language they used and the debate style, and they would get so upset and downvote any disagreeing comment. Other subs had plenty of trolling, transphobia, shitty moderators, etc. Other subs became basically unusable because of how large they got and how many people posted "hey, look at me!" low effort content. You know, "art I did of X character" with 2,600 upvotes for what was a 10th grader type drawing done on a notebook. That kind of kills the visibility of posts with the potential for deeper or more meaningful conversation that don't get as many upvotes.
In the end I think the main issue with Reddit is that it got too big. It attracted too many people on a superficial level, too many trolls, and most subs worth visiting at this point are dedicated to niche subjects and have smallish communities.
You don't have to think of the servers as different entities, all servers are Lemmy, each one slightly different sure but you can participate in every server equally so nothing changes to you
Manifest V3 will not prevent Brave from blocking ads. We built ad blocking into the browser itself so it will not be affected by Google changing its rules for extensions.
I'm keeping my account live so that I can still interact and ask questions in threads when I get taken there by search results. Reddit ultimately shows up a lot when looking for solutions to technical problems.
As far as browsing and contributing, I think I'm sticking with Lemmy. Things are just starting to get good.
i can't believe you've asked this! user voting is everything! without it there's no way to meaningfully rank the content. i prefer to browser top-day posts because i only want to see what the majority of people have decided is worth seeing. surely you can imagine that browsing a randomly sorted list would be full of boring and uninteresting posts!
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