My time on Reddit died simultaneously with Apollo. I’m doing what I can by not giving that place anymore traffic from me.
Found out about Lemmy yesterday. While it’s not there with niche interests at this point, it definitely cures the itch.
You want to stick it to the man? Quit going there altogether people!
Now try wefwef it’s like Apollo
My screen time was more than halved when Apollo went down, it’s slowly increasing with wefwef though which is probably bad for me but still fun
Shhh just gimme some of that internet copium and doomscrolling, I need my endorphins
I’m using Memmy for Lemmy and the dev has said they were inspired by Apollo. There’s even a shoutout to Christian on the github page. It’s just had it’s official app store launch, definitely worth giving a try.
I would say Mlem is also inspired by Apollo, so I would recommended it as well; I keep jumping back and forth between Memmy, Mlem and wefwef.
Tried Thunder and Liftoff!, but they feel very Material Design-y to me, so using them on iOS feels off. Which is a shame because both are pretty fast.
Lemmios is also promising, but it’s still on early development so it’s a bit rough around the edges.
I’m also on Memmy and I like it!
I’m using memmy; it’s pretty similar to Apollo as well.
Name was changed to Voyager, fyi
thank god, ive been avoiding wefwef just due to the name alone
Heads up it’s officially called Voyager now.
I like Memmy better. Inspired by Apollo also.
Same for me with Boost, and SAME for me with Lemmy lol. I’m using Liftoff now
Which app are using if you don’t mind me asking?
I recommend Voyager, basically a beat for beat recreation of Apollo for Lemmy.
Just using the Lemmy app
stock lemmy app does not exist yet on iOS publicly
My bad, Memmy
all good!
Yeah I feel the same way. I’m on here and it’s working but I also do miss my years and years worth of subs I joined that made my feed perfect to what I liked, especially the smaller ones that I hope make it over here someday. Right now my lemmy feed just mostly feels like meme after meme or some politics post which is not really what I like at all so I may have to spend some time and figure out how to narrow my interests more on here.
That’s definitely the worst part for me too. But if people make the switch here and the user base grows and over time you curate your feed here, it could eventually be that again.
I’m just ready to sacrifice that to say “screw you” to Reddit. Finding this platform has just been a pleasant surprise
This place is a lot better than I expected it would be tbh, and I’ve been here a couple weeks now. It’s encouraging to see.
Reddit is really killing itself with bot mods. Its less tollerant than ever. they will ban all human users wuthin a few months at this pace.
Good
You can get your multireddit and import it to some clients, like voyager/wefwef
I’m lucky that my curated feed was mostly open source coding, AI tech and solar punk so I’ve been able to find even better communities than Reddit had. The less tech adjacent subs will take longer to build but you can see them starting to establish - I guess the best way to help that is to participate in them and to introduce other people to them.
Welcome! You’ve probably seen it around already, but just in case, you can search at lemmyversenet/communities and may turn up some of those niche communities that are just difficult to find otherwise. Ofc, maybe they don’t exist yet, but always worth a look!
if you are on iOS, use Memmy. it’s really close to Apollo functionality :)
there’s also many iOS clients in beta right now too
Voyager on Android is good too!
just looked at it as well. it’s a web app but it seems cool! i also like how it’s self hostable too
They have an app link too, so it’s easy to use on the phone standalone.
Trying it out right now on my phone for a bit, i still like memmy a lot more tho :)
Im part off your Username Ü
You’re inside of me
If you’re still using Reddit, please be a homie and spread the fediverse gospel
I will. But I do want to say that it’s my personal opinion, that yes, we definitely should grow as a community with more reddit refugees, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to grow relatively slowly. On the technological side, we need the infrastructure growth to match the user base growth. Maybe even more importantly, I think most of us will agree we want to take the good of reddit with us, but definitely not the toxicity. Copy pasting the whole user base to the fediverse could lead to also copy pasting the culture that exists over there now. The thing I most enjoy on Lemmy is definitely the general vibe over the content for now, and that is pretty special on the Internet.
Also, we don’t necessarily need a big userbase. Just a good active one. More is not necessarily better in my opinion.
Smaller is also much more manageable.
We don’t need to be REDDIT big but…ayo you people need to post more so i can scroll an unhealthy amount all day.
I like the collective ‘we’ makes me feel all warm and federated inside.
Absolutely, I would be happy if we stayed where we are on the main subs with niche ones growing a bit. Game specific subs are still pretty barren with most of the content being three or four people. I could use some of that growth for sure.
A few hundred comments and consistent uploads are all I think we really need to keep chugging along.
Bluesky is super-fun right now, because it’s got just enough folks to generate varied content, and everyone is playing ball on the same level.
And that’s largely because they’ve kept it invitation-only, so the users are all approximately simpatico. That can’t last though. Eventually they’ll have to open it up and let in the shills, the grifters and the racist uncles.
Bluesky is proprietary garbage, not free and with limited access.
If we want to be free we have an alternative to twitter/bluesky called nostr.
Let’s not encourage golden cages and we won’t have to regret it later when the obvious happens.
The nostr community reminds me a lot of the current state of lemmy, I hope with the growth of both communities it doesn’t get lost.
The only thing I’m missing so far is the diversity. I used to follow lots of different ‘Ask’ subs for countries and regions around the world, and some others for different communities. So far I haven’t seen that here.
Also, we don’t necessarily need a big userbase. Just a good active one. More is not necessarily better in my opinion.
Unfortunately, the main benefit of having a large userbase is that you can always find a community for any obscure interest you have! That’s not really the case with lemmy now.
Every day of people still using Reddit is a day when a portion of humanity’s ability to communicate is controlled by one psychopath.
notes to self:
- no, that did not say “hornie”
- check system font settings on this computer
- maybe start a c/keming
also FUCK yeah markdown
I wonder if r/keming used to say “Currently 300 hornie online”
Hallelujah!!
Ok, just went there. My home is full of smaller subs reposting old high-quality stuff. I could even mistake that for good activity if I haven’t seen it already.
Popular is full of useless shit… so no visible impact.
I guess one has to subscribe to the correct subs to see the implosion.
Im still using my custom app patched with my own API key. But it’s slowly not becoming worth it with most of the smaller subs I follow only having 1 or 2 posts in the last week. Opposed to the 2 or 3 posts per day.
They also haven’t actually kicked off third party clients for mods. If you moderate any sub (even just create a private sub now) and the client didn’t purposely kill their own API key (Apollo and RIF did I believe) it will still work even without the patch.
It’s getting pretty bad though. With most people who were truly pro-protest gone, average sentiment is “oh well protest failed let’s get back to normal”. I was pretty heavily downvoted in the Ask Historians meta thread about next steps for suggesting the mods/experts were fairly irreplaceable and they should look to move content off of reddit to their own site.
Are you having to pay for those API calls?
Unless they changed their minds, personal use isn’t going to hit the requests per minute required to trigger needing to pay.
there is i think a personal key that stays on a one user basis within the free limit. From my knowledge reddit claims it as illegal but it still works
Why would it be illegal? That’s literally what the key is made for: to make API requests from the app you wrote.
If anybody could deny you from doing that, it’s the author of the app that you patched and I’m pretty sure, they don’t give a shit anymore.
Dude, tell me more about your custom app.
Take this as an opportunity to talk as much as you want about it. That sounds fascinating.
You can actually decompile any android app into smali code which is kind of a readable bytecode. Create an OAuth app on reddit and replace the developer’s API key with your own. Free reddit app with no ads.
Request your own API key from Reddit stating you’re an app developer, then use revanced manager to inject that key into any custom Reddit app.
Are they?
I think it really depends on what subs you are subscribed to, some people are almost noticing nothing at all. Other places are a real dumpster fire. Just went back yesterday to see if my GDPR request had gone through already
GDPR request?
Forcing Reddit, by law, to delete any and all data associated with your account. If you do this, make sure to specify that your request includes all posts and comments as you believe they contain “personally identifiable information” that you do not trust Reddit to keep safe. It forces them to use a lot of resources and kills any reason for you to relapse on your adiggtion
Can non-EU users also demand a GDPR?
starts VPN
I am now an EU user
No. Californians can though https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa#sectiond
Yeah, I started with this. I’ll do a GDPR after they reply to the CCPA. Gatta maximize that shit.
You can use Power Delete Suite. It’s what I used.
Yesn’t***
https://www.metaverselaw.com/does-gdpr-apply-to-us-citizens/
My guess is if you make a big enough stink, they won’t want to attract the legal ire of any organization.
In a general sense, GDPR is:
“The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), under Article 15, gives individuals the right to request a copy of any of their personal data which are being ‘processed’ (i.e. used in any way) by ‘controllers’ (i.e. those who decide how and why data are processed), as well as other relevant information (as detailed below). These requests are often referred to as ‘data subject access requests’, or ‘access requests’.”
It does seem to include your right to delete the data, but that’s not what most of us did.
It’s a European law which forces companies to delete your data if requested. They are probably deleting heir account.
Ah I did that. Didn’t know it was called that tho
Deleting your account isn’t the same as using a GDPA request. If you deleted your account, you should follow up: https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
I think that’s the right link? I’m not logged in… You might not even be able to request anything if you can’t log in, so try email. Make them work for it!
I did the data request, I just didn’t know it was called GDPR request
I think the low-effort subs are fine-ish, but the ones that took any actual effort to moderate are going seriously downhill.
It’s almost as if all the 3rd party tools and apps that mods used to automate much of the suck out of moderating just stopped working one day… hmmm…
Unfortunately a lot of the game communities are not budging. I guess I shouldn’t have expected more from people that pre-order everything that hits the market.
You mean Blizzard? I didn’t even check… But I bet they are one of them. Fuck Blizzard. They’d sell their mothers into sexual slavery if it meant a few more dollars in profit.
Mine hasn’t still. I find that pretty ridiculous… Pretty soon they’ll be breaking the law.
Some smaller niche subreddits have been fractured pretty bad. If you’re someone who mainly used Reddit for hobbies and such, you’d notice more than somebody who just lurks the default subs.
Found the actual Spez in this thread.
We really already doing this? Really about to start the whole “I’m going to insult you because you have a different opinion than me, and I’m not actually going to contribute to the conversation at all” shit?
Leave that dumb shit on Reddit.
My guy, it was meant as a joke…we’re in the shitposting community, calm down.
I really miss my community there 🥲It feels like breaking up with a shitty boyfriend, but his grandma was really nice to you.
This is oddly specific.
Well put!
I don’t “like” that it got this bad, but I do like that the worse things get, the more we can collectively organize and pressure reform to fix these things.
It’d be great to see a true social revolution take place in my lifetime. Social for the sake of social, not controlled by a single corporation with a business model that’s designed to exploit its users.
This already exists it’s called face to face communication. You can do it in private spaces like living rooms or bars. You can also find public spaces like parks and transit. If you’re shy look into activities related to hobbies.
Yeah, just let me head over to the local 20k-member community for a mobile game that hasn’t been updated in 5 years real quick. You know, the one that every city has.
Love it or hate it, the reality is that the genie ain’t goin back into the bottle.
So might as well make sure that genie is nice and friendly, open source, portable, interoperable, non-manipulative, and non-threatening.
Yup the fediverse is the best it’s been since social media consolidated online discussion and independent forums faded away. I still strongly suggest developing relationships within your real world community because it is very easy to be deceived and exploited online even if the technology isn’t doing it intentionally.
I only joined Lemmy yesterday and I plan on using both for now but this site and app are already a so much better experience without ads and everything loads lightning fast. And then I open reddit and I have to look at the spinning circle everytime I click on something. For some reason, it’s even worse on desktop. That shit feels so unresponsive.
If you’re gonna use both for now, I would recommend downloading an ad blocker. AdGuard and ublock origin (the word origin is important, there is a knockoff called ublock) are both good. It was greed that motivated Reddit to pull this shit, might as well deny them ad revenue.
I never knew it was a knockoff! I always thought it was just an inferior version but still them! TIL about people stealing the name of a free ad blocker (presumably) for profit 🤦
There’s a bit more history to it than that. The developer of uBlock wanted to walk away from the project and found some people to manage it instead. The first thing they did was strip out the developer’s name and start appeals for donations (note they haven’t actually done anything productive yet). This pissed off the original developer so much he came back but had to rename his version to ‘uBlock Origin’.
Do these actually work for Reddits android app? I’ve tried a few blockers over the years including adguard and I don’t think any have stopped these ads because they’re coming from Reddit like a normal post
I was looking into patching the reddit app with revamped manager. That might be able to help you. I decided to just leave reddit entirely.
One of us! One of us!
One of us, one of us
Gooble gobble. Gooble gobble.
ArOOOOga!
I used Boost which was a freaking awesome app. I flat out refuse to use Reddits own app because it sucks monkey balls!
I’m a bit skeptical of Lemmy though since lot of subs aren’t that active.
Start posting. Really. I’ve been posting to keep communities I like going and others have started posting too. It’s slow growth, but the more content a community has, the more people will sub to it and eventually post to. Anyway, that’s my opinion.
So what you’re saying is we need people to browse threads and post random comments that probably won’t be read?
My time has come.
Our hero :)
Removed by mod
I tried to give the official app a shot after using Boost for years. Absolutely no customization options other than light/dark theme, ads everywhere, different interface for video comments, and it drained my battery. Felt so good to uninstall.
The dev for Boost is making an app for Lemmy.
Good thing you didn’t join 10 days ago then, you would have uninstalled instantly 😀
The difference is that this is an open source community driven effort. Reddit is a for profit business. On that basis, I give Lemmy a lot more leeway when it comes to bugs. Reddit just turned into a slog over the last few years BECAUSE they try to monetize it to death.
I joined Lemmy about a month ago and left Reddit. I already new that it was still a work in progress so I was fully prepared for the inevitable hiccups. It’s already come so far in just a month! Apps are coming along nicely and everything is working pretty smoothly (besides the recent hacking situation). I really hope it continues to grow and thrive.
I just checked it out, because of your claim, but found it to look just like it always did. r/all is still the same, my subsribed subs are still the same. Still a lot of people posting content, asking questions, sharing stories. Not sure in what kind of bubble you live :/
I just checked it out. LOL no they aren’t. Reddit is still thriving.
yeah, it’s some pretty serious copium to think reddit was massively affected by the protests. Sadly, they were not
but all I can do is leave and enjoy lemmy so fuck em
Several subs that I frequented are gone. The biggest pain to me is probably caused by the loss of Transcribers for Reddit. The group behind it basically disbanded at the end of june.
100% same
Same. One vote may not be much but I’m not the only one who nuked a decade old account and will not be returning.
I wouldn’t call reddit thriving given that its flagship r/iama is now completely dead as a result of the mods packing up and saying that they will no longer do the work of verification or soliciting celebrities anymore. One of the biggest draws to the site historically as well as consistently producing positive media.
Yeah so there is still a lot of activity. However, >2000 subs are still dark, 18 others have gone full john oliver and many more are less moderated than before. BotDefense are leaving. So it’s definitely not that nothing out of the ordinary is going on, although I think that is exactly experience that reddit as a company tries to give you when you visit the site.
Eitherway, I am a lemming now and very happy to be here and not there.
Exactly! Last I checked, sure there was a lot of activity BUT as you said, many subs are still dark. The major subs that reopened with new moderation have definitely had a major dip (imo) in quality. I was still seeing John Oliver everywhere. They did use quite a few users, maybe not enough for them to flinch too hard but, how active were those users? I consider my old account there a “power comment account” I rarely posted but was extremely active in the threads, spending hours each day replying to comments of my inbox, so much so that I rarely even viewed actual content. Makes me wonder, how many accounts like mine did they lose? Many just lurked. The comment sections were fueled by active commenters and imo it wouldn’t take losing too many like me for the threads to take a noticeable hit.
Anyway I don’t care much about how it is over there rn, just glad I have this place so I don’t have to support that platform in any way. Plus now that I’ve found a cool app, jerboa or whatever it’s quite enjoyable! Connect and liftoff are also great but my phone doesn’t play well with many apps.
I occasionally open RIF just to see if it’s still working which it is but it doesn’t let me login, meaning I can only access the front page of /r/all and man, it is abysmal. The content there doesn’t even motivate me to stay there any longer than for a quick glance, lol. Tbf, if I open old.reddit on PC while logged in (which I now almost never do and I haven’t posted anything there since June 31), it is better but it still doesn’t feel completely the same. Plenty of subs still missing, some other that I didn’t use to see much are now more present instead, and then there’s /r/videos which still requires profanity in titles but now also, hilariously, only allows text transcripts of videos with no link to them.
only allows text transcripts of videos with no link to them
That was my favorite protest twist. I’ve only checked back to see that my ~2000 comments remained edited/deleted (they are). Otherwise, I am fine moving away just as I did with Digg. It’s a new experience and it’s just fine. I do agree that the niche subs are probably what keep drawing folks back there. It’ll take time to curate those elsewhere.
I had no idea /r/videos was doing that. Hilarious.
Yeah, I’m happy to be here too. Here’s to the future 🥂
Yup. Just like Spez predicted. The site is maybe less popular, but it will survive. The protests will die off eventually. The Reddit clones will never be as popular and active as Reddit once was. Maybe eventually the investers and advertisers will return, and it will be seen in hindsight as a smart move. The quality of the content may take a drop, but it was a calculated risk of making it more profitable.
It was a pretty safe bet. Most of the people on this planet don’t give a shit about principles or corporate hostilities so long as they get what they want.
It drives me nuts!
The Reddit clones will never be as popular and active as Reddit once was.
They used to say the same kind of things about Digg.
The real problem was always a lack of alternatives imo. A “protest” can’t work on the website you’re literally using. What should have happened is those people all moved to another platform, but there isn’t one. There isn’t one canonical alternative to reddit, so they had to “protest” there.
I mean, a priest didn’t have to leave the platform if it hits the ad revenue, which things like going NSFW have reportedly done.
I only briefly browse old.reddit, my mobile usage is zero now Apollo is dead.
Lemmy is okay but it’s kind of a chicken and egg, less content means less users, but less users means less content.
It also doesn’t help that users are split between instances, so Firefox on lemmy.world will have different content/users than Firefox on lemmy.ml.
I can see that not driving people away but confusing people that aren’t massively tech savvy.
You can browse all across both instances though since they are federated.
Yeah, I know that, but on Reddit you could go to /r/Firefox and be almost guaranteed that that was the main place that people interested in Firefox would congregate. If you started scrolling, you’d see pretty much everything that anyone posted. For bigger subs there generally was one place to go to find that content.
While here, I could be on .world and see some stuff, but then I’d have to go to .ml or some other instance to see other stuff. Then you’ve got almost duplicate posts on different instances.
It’s just kind of messy. You can’t be on .world Firefox community and also see posts from the many other Firefox communities on the other instances, at least if you can I don’t know how you do it.
Sure, you can view all and see everything from everywhere, but that’s literally everything from everywhere, not just Firefox related stuff.
Don’t get me wrong, I like it here, and it’s good to have a potential viable alternative to Reddit. I’m just not sure how it’s going to catch on with Joe Public unless there is a way to tie the same/similar communities from different instances into the one view while still keeping them separate.
Major software foundations like Mozilla, and other large institutions, should be hosting their own instance and have official communities. Even on silos like Reddit, you’d have several alternate subs for the same topic. Before multis were a thing, it was in the same boat.
I would like to see instance features like “see this story in x other communities” links for reposted link posts though.
This would be awesome. I followed nws on Twitter for my local area and wish they would migrate elsewhere, esp now that you have to log in. I follow via rss now but am not sure if or when that will be taken away.
I see what you’re saying, yeah you have to subscribe to the different instances of it which isn’t very intuitive if you don’t know you need to do that.
I think some of the app developers are working on solutions or multi subscribe though for communities.
It would be nice if there was a way to group communities across instances so you can view them all at the same time. I would love to create an “Android” group that has all the different Android, Google and Google Pixel communities on one page.
If you find such a thing, mind replying here? I want the exact same thing.
It doesn’t help that Firefox will still be at different places with different contents. They should do something about user experience. It’s very confusing for non tech savvy people.
When reddit had the same amount of content that lemmy has right now it was already its user’s main timewaster
It’s just a matter of time
There’s also power in just existing and becoming an increasingly more viable alternative to reddit. Between disappointment in the mods and how centralized things are, racist stuff invading the front page, ads, admins, … the less painful the transition becomes from one timesink to another the more the risk to Digg their own grave becomes threatening
The only thing I’m scared of is whether lemmy is capable of standing up to bad actors with its decentralized architecturr because if we imagined it becoming, say, half as popular as reddit; we’d start getting astroturfing campaigns and spam. And vote-manipulation is way easier here, and so is ban evasion
you can see stuff on ml from world with the “all” button
What if I want to browse the Firefox subreddit in one place, where all its content is gathered in a single location?
that’s what the “all” button is for.
but that gives you All of All, not just All of Firefox
I can see that not driving people away but confusing people that aren’t massively tech savvy.
This is a disadvantage early, but it also weeds out a lot of the critical mass ignorance and a lot of the people who are unwilling to make any effort to think critically. I’m really looking forward to how it grows. The more popular it gets the more the pressure will be to have it be user friendly. Right now it feels like reddit from about a decade ago.
That’s like saying you signed up on both GMail and Yahoo Mail so you can get email from both Google and Yahoo users. I don’t understand why federation is such a difficult concept for people.
But you send email to specific people/groups of people. You don’t generally browse for email.
The split instance thing is actually great, if you don’t like a site that’s fedded with lemmy.world then you can just find one that blocks it- or make one yourself and put your communities there.
You can choose more freely your subscriptions and info, not based in a unique-centralized and biased source, but from a community of servers which resist to the monopoly of the internet.
I’ve only been on there to search for specific things and I’ve noticed a lot more spam in the search results.
yeah, this is not true. some subs are gone. there are still tons of people there. HOWEVER, the level of shitheadedness is increasing across all subs, even ones that were once relatively free of it. I’m seeing fewer thoughtful responses and more of the kind of reactionary kneejerk bullshit you expect from the front page subs or youtube comments or something. As ever, niche content remains your best bet, but I’m noticing a sharp decline in quality. This has been happening for a long time now, but this event has certainly been a(nother) tipping point. People have constantly compared reddit to digg in this instance, implying that the same kind of replacement is nigh… but I don’t know. We are kind of in uncharted territory on this. In the earlier days of the www there was always a new thing, but the Digg collapse happened (or started happening) like 15 years ago, the internet is an entirely different beast now. I don’t know what’s going to happen with reddit, but I’m on permanent lurker status over there until I suss it out.
I agree with everything you said, but I have a few additions that I’ve noticed in terms of Reddit going downhill. I’m seeing a ton of anti-copium in this thread, but ngl, I Reddit has gotten a LOT worse for me as a whole as someone that uses it regularly. it’s the reason I came here, even though I actually didn’t stick with Lemmy originally after the blackout (due to lack of content).
-Like you said, shitheadedness has gone up
-Reposts and unserious posts have gone up (replacing actual interesting and varied content, which has gone down)
-Content farming has gone up (related to the above point)
-“Subtle” advertisement like astroturfing has gone up (once again, reducing visibility of any actual worthwhile posts)
-The NSFW side of reddit is legit worthless at this point.
In addition the the app being unusable and the APIs no longer allowing for third party apps. I’m a bit surprised there are so many people in this thread that claim not to have noticed. Like, Reddit has legitimately turned into IFunny quality material seemingly overnight from my perspective. I’m not sure how people could not notice, but maybe I just use it differently from others.
This may not affect the shareholders at the end of the day since it will probably just turn into a low quality garbage machine that still makes money, but from an actual social media perspective I think there will be a significant number of others like me who need to find a new home that’s not full of shit content.
I go on for the worldnews & the uk subs they don’t seem to be impacted too much but I’ve not seen the need since the uptick in traffic on lemmy
To be honest, when I was back there yesterday I missed Lemmy. I either had forgotten about the amount of toxicity that is over there, or it has gotten worse because of all of the issues.
or it has gotten worse because of all of the
issuesbots trying to direct a narrative.I gotchu.
Thanks, autocorrect must have gotten me again
Yeah it feels like a lot of the moderate voices jumped to lemmy or other alternatives which has allowed the toxic users to surge.
Also mods largely abandoned their posts so toxic stuff is ever more now.
I mean, the toxicity is definitely noticeably higher. I’d bet good money that it’s a direct result of tons of mods just going “fuck this noise” after having basically all of their 3rd party moderation tools turned off.
Google has led me there a few times since I joined Lemmy. Haven’t really looked at it outside of that. It has actually popped up in searches more often recently for some reason. That reminds me that I have to switch my default search provider to something that is not shit.
I’ll offer you something that might make you switch to DuckDuckGo and never look back: “bangs”.
It saves me a full step, searching almost anywhere right from DDG. If I need Google, then !g (search query). If I need wikipedia, then !w (search query). If I need Youtube, then !yt. AZLyrics, !azl. Google Maps? !gm. Google Images? !gi… And so on and so forth. It’s worth giving a try.
I just want a search engine that indexes the way google and others used to index because honestly I find google’s quality has gone down immensely since their focus on corporate names and on-page SEO. It’s getting worse and worse with every damn search result just being completely polluted with pages 100% written for robots instead of fucking giving human beings the answers as quickly as possible.
Summed up my opinion of Google perfectly. It’s getting more and more difficult to find actual results for my searches, just all crowded with suggestions I’m not interested in. I wouldn’t even realize how bad it was if I didn’t use DDG to compare it to
This, 300%. If DuckDuckGo had no search capabilities, it would still be my default search engine just due to bangs, they’re amazing.
For non English speakers, you can use your language for Wikipedia bangs. So a search with !wen will take you to English Wikipedia, and a search with !wit to Italian, for example.
I’ll add that Brave Search also supports bangs – !ddg to use DuckDuckGo.
Thanks for the heads up, I use duckduckgo and didn’t even know about bangs.
It’s not the most prominently advertised feature of DDG, but to me it’s the most powerful one. Glad to share it with my fellow Lemmings.
Agreed with the other commenter: I’ve been using duck duck go for literally years and did not know bangs existed. Thanks!
Thank you been using ddg for a couple of years now and had no idea, always opening a new page for Google search this is brilliant 👍
I used to use DDG a while ago but Google was loads better…at the time. Now I get nothing but ads and video suggestions. I will likely just switch back to DDG again
Any way to get a Lemmy bang? It seems like that might be difficult to get a Fediverse wide one instead of individual servers.
I guess one way they could do it would be to make a DDG server connected to the fediverse directly, then use federation to index the fediverse, so it can piggyback on the existing infrastructure and it doesn’t have to crawl all the servers and keep track of the network manually. Then I suppose individual instances could defederate and remove themselves from DDG searches, which wouldn’t be so bad if they really wanted to opt out.
on ddg’s website they have a list of bangs you can search through. Maybe someone’s added it already? There should also be a link where you can submit bang requests I think.
I checked and there is not. I’ll have to check more into making them but it seems domain specific which might be difficult to do across all of Lemmy without a bit of work.
I miss having bangs… Hell, I miss having any hair on my head.
You and me both buddy.
Wow you just made it so much easier to permanently switch. I have my work set to DDG but have to switch to Google pretty often for more obscure things. Now I should be able to set it permanently using bangs.
Great to hear. For myself as well, the rare time that DDG’s bing-based results turn up empty, I add !g at the front like it’s the sudo command.
Brave search support !bangs too, with pretty similiar terms
Thank you so much for this. Been using Brave for a long time and had never heard of this.
Yep I second this! Switched to duckduckgo a few years ago and never looked back. Didn’t even miss Google! Google is too intent on selling me stuff while monitoring damn near everything I do on my device. No need for them. Did love Google photos and how I could easily sync it to my PC but they’ve done away with that as well which is amazing to me because people loved it and there’s really no alternative that works as well as it used to.
Thanks for the tip! Been using duckduck for a while now, had no idea abour bangs
Wow that’s amazing!
Hey, as someone who uses DuckDuckGo, they do unfortunately also engage in some cringe tracking. I think it’s a bit less than Google, but honestly I don’t think it makes much of a difference. They collect information about what you search for.
I might switch to Qwant or something. Not sure yet.
I mean it is a search engine, why wouldn’t they track what people are searching for?
The question is are they actually tracking you or just the words you’re typing in?
IIRC they track your mouse movements on the search results page, and what links you click on. It’s not great :/
Really? I’ve been using it for a while and haven’t noticed tracking.
What sorts of tracking have you seen them engage in?
They display ads in search results, which they presumably do need to track clicks for. But you can literally just switch the ads off in the settings. And then you’ll never see them again. They’re on by default, but not mandatory.
IIRC on the search results page they track your mouse movements and which links you clicked on. The latter I could maybe see as legitimate; the former is pretty sus.
Maybe it’s time we start a decentralized search engine !
Content is slowing drastically, r/all isn’t updating for most of the day from low engagement, reddit uses a differential for upvotes which doesn’t reflect total users well.
I agree, I studied abroad with a 12 hour difference and during the day there, when I browsed Reddit, most of the posts were lower quality because most people were asleep. (Sorry euro peeps)
It’s when the evening came that the posts picked up quality and engaged me.
Now that I’m stateside, I feel like Reddit posters are completely and perpetually asleep (or just gone).
It’s really wild to see reposts over and over. Like some Redditbot constantly spamming the same thing hoping to get some traction going for conversation.
Ahahahah we know.
Best regards,
Yurop
reddit uses a differential for upvotes
ELI5? I’m genuinely interested - just wonder what this means? I’d always assumed +1 on a post meant 1 user clicking the “upvote” button.
It’s some sort of weird percentage once you get past a certain number. I’m fuzzy on the numbers but 1.2k upvotes shown on the website was worth a different amount than actual. Something like 1.5k = 1.2k upvotes for your personal karma.
They “fuzz,” votes, and it starts after only 10 or so. It will return a value within 10% or so of the true vote. It is to obfuscate the totals to make it harder for bot accounts to tell if they are shadowbanned or not.
I am not reddit geek so TIL
That was changed years ago
