I see a lot of posts on fediverse trashing reddit, Twitter, spez, musk and so on, and rightfully so. But like it or not, the mass majority of users on the internet still use these sites, and some of us still want to interact with the friends and communities we are a part of on those sites. And there’s nothing wrong with that either.
Personally, I want fediverse to grow, and I post on kbin and mastodon constantly, and try to grow the communities on them. But I still pop over to reddit for r/splatoon, r/casualconveration, and my hometown sub, because either the communities haven’t grown enough here yet for constant fresh content, or the content is different enough between both to justify me checking in.
I get many are here as a protest against reddit, Twitter, or where ever else you came from, and that’s valid. But there are many of us who are simply casual users who want to include fediverse into their drives of other social media, and that’s totally fine too.
This feels like the correct take to me. I still view the occasional Reddit post but only as an absolute last resort for information I can’t find anywhere else. Even though I don’t post, comment, or vote, I’m still aware that my mere presence there is helping them in some form.
It’s similar to the recent Harry Potter game. Lots of people decided that it’s far enough removed from Rowling to be okay to buy even if they were pro-trans. But everyone who bought it DID give some of their money to Rowling. It’s your decision to weigh the cost/benefit of such a thing, but it was a little shocking to see how many supposedly pro-trans people straight up deluded themselves into thinking they weren’t directly supporting Rowling and her anti-trans views.
So yeah, use Reddit still if you must; I certainly understand how much important/useful content and information lives exclusively there, and the overzealous Reddit boycotters may be missing this (or just don’t care). But don’t pretend like using it isn’t also supporting them.
Reddit does still have the advantage of being highly indexed by search engines.
A Lemmy instance on the other hand probably wouldn’t have that same benefit.
How often do people search for “how to [insert thing here]. Reddit” to find a worthwhile source of info that isn’t clickbait?