What the title says.
A certain Mr. Huffman is making Reddit, which was once the frontpage of the internet (it still is, albeit for different reasons) a living hell for us.
Being in the coding/development trade as my profession, I am a huge advocate of anything FOSS, so when I found Lemmy, I did not look back.
Thanks to PowerDeleteSuite, I got rid of all my contents from Reddit. I did hear reasonings like “leave them there, for the benefits of lurkers” - but nope. I do not trust the sorting algorithm of Reddit anymore, I do not believe people will get to see my content if needed. So yep, blow 'em up.
I kept a close eye for a while on whether my posts and comments get resurrected (yes I did read about people experiencing this) - but I guess PDS did a good job for me.
So there you go, Snoo - you are cute - but creepy Stevie is fucking with your cuteness, and fucking with all of us.
Mine is from January 2006 and I am very tempted to delete everything and nuke the thing.
Mine is from 2007, and I’m at the same crossroads as you are.
I’ve been making and burning accounts every 6-12 months since 2009 🤣
It’s like quitting smoking - it’s the easiest thing to do, smokers do it 5 times a year./s
If you wanna keep your bookmarks and the subreddits (communities) that you’re subscribed to before deleting your account, I made a free tool to help you store and offload that data.
It’s called Reddit Account Manager, and it’s 100% free.
You can also use it to manage your Lemmy account(s), of course.
Same. You should do it. It felt very liberating.
I enjoy posts like this. Thanks.
I haven’t deleted my reddit account, but I did delete several years of my comments and posts using PDS when they started charging for API calls. I’m surprised they haven’t disabled that PDS tool, but glad to hear it still works.
I almost never log in to reddit anymore. When I do, it’s to encourage folks to try lemmy.
I did go through a phase ( late August through early September) when I could not bear the sight of Reddit as a platform / corporation, but couldn’t deny the fact either that Reddit is a treasure trove of valuable content.
(Although in the end my hate for Reddit’s greed took over, and also the quality of the content there deteriorated slowly due to lack of good moderation - but I digress)
If you are going through such a phase - I might recommend giving Stealth app a try. It’s FOSS and available on F-Droid (I am obviously assuming you are an Android user, please ignore if not) , it is one of the most beautiful apps I have ever used, and if someone asks what that app is about, I say “Stealth is to Reddit as NewPipe is to YouTube”.
PS : I didn’t develop Stealth. I just liked using it when I was still giving Reddit a chance ( but fuck spez )
The people who say to leave your content there are just as bad as the corporate bootlickers who say not to leave in the first place. It directly benefits Reddit to have your content, whether you’re there or not. While I’m sure they’ll get their muffin somehow, no way I’m going to make it easy for them.
When I first heard about the API shutdown, I immediately overwrote all my comments and posts with randomly generated nonsense, then kept reading till RIF ceased to exist. Before I deleted the account, I ran a mass-deletion tool. Hopefully that prevented them from restoring the original content I contributed for free. Been on Lemmy ever since.
A certain Mr. Huffman
Lol. You still talk like a “Redditor”. Don’t worry, hang around here some more and you’ll sound like less of a dork in no time.
Lol
;)
After reading this, I just went and deleted my also 7 year old Reddit account.
I thought I’d feel “buyer’s remorse,” but really I feel pretty much nothing.
Happy to be able to inspire someone to leave that shithole !
PowerDeleteSuite is great. Weird thing, though, and idk if anyone else experienced this, but… my Reddit content is still posted, despite having obfuscated and then deleted using PDS. Anyone else?
For those who are interested in keeping their bookmarks and the subreddits (communities) they’re subscribed to before deleting all accounts, I made a free tool to help you store and offload that data.
It’s called Reddit Account Manager, and it’s 100% free.
You can also use it for Lemmy accounts, of course.
I think reddit is reversing all edits made using powerdeletesuite.
What I did was to sort by comments by top score of all time, and then manually edit the useful ones to paragraphs of gibberish (google “gibberish generator” or something. I left all the snarky comments and low-effort puns alone.
Didn’t take more than an hour
Just wrapped up following your lead and saying goodbye to my account. Lemmy is home.
That would make sense tbh. I might have to do it manually then. How many comments did you have on your account? I wanna gauge approximately how long it’d take for me to go through mine.
The other thing that concerns me is that I deleted my accounts, yet they still showed up (didn’t display as “deleted user”), and I was able to log into them.
One more thing: I recently came across this fork of PDS, which is slightly modified and supposedly works (though I’ve yet to try it): https://lemmy.ml/comment/3831970
Well… I don’t remember but I had about 2 years’ worth of comments across 3-4 accounts (I usually change accounts every few years), so about 6-8 years’ worth of comments.
Just editing the useful comments doesn’t take that long honestly - there were a lot of “hold my axe!” or pun chains that I left as is.
I don’t mean to give Reddit the benefit of the doubt here but PowerDeleteSuite does have issues with exceeding Reddit’s rate limit. If you don’t go through and confirm the deletions there likely will be some left intact.
Friend, where were you in June?!?!
Cool stuff, though. Now when I switch things up I have a tool!
Stuck in analysis paralysis and my perfectionist ways, unfortunately. 😓
Better late than never, I suppose. And your comment is really encouraging, so thank you. It helps.
Ooooh… so, not “your seven year old’s” account.
Anyway… as a person who searches the internet for answers, Reddit holds many of them. Some of them are wrong answers but some of them are actually helpful. It sucks that everything is consolidated into a handful of resources and people no longer publish their own content on their own sites. It makes for very few organizations holding the keys to “the world’s information”. So when organizations such as DPReview close down and threaten to remove decades of user created content, the community is disadvantaged. Still, I’m not sold on a decentralized system being a solution. The content is still housed on a sever with keys held by individuals. I don’t see how it’s possible for Lemmy to become a crawlable resource when ease of migration is built into the system.
with keys held by individuals
Emphasize on the plural.
These “individuals” are exactly that, independent individuals who maintain their own instances, but being federated would mean that the content in each Lemmy instance is visible by other instances (unless they are defederated, which as I understand happens very rarely, and only for irreconciliable differences between instances, which is serious).
And these independent “individuals” spend effort and money to run their respective instances with a common goal, share the info. That’s what Fediverse is all about.
Unlike the “individual” at Reddit (singular - looking at you creepy Stevie or whatever Board of
DirectorsFuckers you report to) - where the decision making powers lie really truly at an individual level.That’s no good.
So, unless I’m not understanding it correctly, the instance you’re a member of could possibly not exist tomorrow. The owner of that instance is responsible for managing the server and if they die or fail to make a payment, that instance is dead. Right? It seems to me that the “defederated” part of this isn’t any different than the world wide web. Possibly worse because it’s not corporate owned or backed by a large financier.
We’re interacting on these instances in good faith that the owners will continue to feel like maintaining it. I understand this is extremely unlikely, but logistically, this is how it works, no?
I have to agree with you on this. What the Fediverse is sorely lacking is a way to “port” our profile to another instance, or at least back our stuff up and restore our home in another instance in case the current instance blows up for whatever reason.
I guess this proposal has been floated already in GitHub but let’s see.
I was thinking more about the entire content of the instance rather than backing up or migrating a user account. If Lemmy.ml shuts down tomorrow, the content is gone forever, right?
As a public resource, it just seems less stable to me. The instance is funded by the generosity of the users. How sustainable is that? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years or more? How long should we as the internet community expect our data to reside online? Should there be a reasonable expectation that in 20 years we should be able to search for content from 2023? What about doing a research paper today about the early internet? How many “indie” servers shut down prior to 2003?
I don’t have the answer or any exceptions. I’m just wondering if anyone else is thinking about this stuff.
I, too, do not have answers to these questions.
What I do know, is that - “The internet is as Transient or as Permanent as you want it to be”.
Public resources like Community funded open source projects - e.g. GNU Project and Linux have long been established names - while inspite of being backed by heavyweight Corporations, people hardly remember Entities like Orkut, Myspace, Digg nowadays.
Yes, indie servers may go down more frequently than their heavyweight corporate competitors, but there will always be new minds cropping up who believe in FOSS philosophy and sharing - because lack of Monopoly is what makes Fediverse a nice place.
I made sure to edit all my post history to gibberish before I deleted my account the other day. cheers.
I only keep mine around to get the old interface when I get a search hit from Reddit. Once they get rid of that I’ll probably delete mine.
deleted by creator
Fwiw, you can just replace ‘www’ in the URL with ‘old’ and it will use the old ui.
Congrats and welcome
One of us, one of us
You’re making great progress.
I don’t know why we aren’t leaving the corpses of accounts lying around. Every dead account takes up resources that reddit has to needlessly have more of.
Have a cookie.
FYI if you misgender people on askreddit and other subs you are just banned and all your content is deleted for you.
Why not leave on my own terms instead? Lol.
