What gaps for content, news, or community currently exist for you?
I, clearly along with many others, recently left Reddit and have personally decided not to return unless it sees drastic, lasting change. However, this has made it clear just how reliant I was on the site for multiple aspects of my life, ranging from local and world news, to hobby related announcements, to perspective, advice, and memes directly from marginalized communities. In Tildes I've already found some of what I've been missing, and I'm sure I'll find more as the community continues to grow, but Tildes doesn't have the same setup to allow for finding the same niche communities that I once had (nor should Tildes ever need to have that).
With all of that said, what gaps are you currently experiencing? Have you found any good sites or resources that have helped you or might help others in the thread?
cars / performance driving, music (metal, hip hop, etc), home automation, self hosting, local city subreddit
The lack of a local city subreddit was fucking rough when I was trying to plan shit out yesterday.
One of the folks on the sub make a list of everything going on every weekend and it's so useful
Nextdoor would be an ideal candidate for me if it weren't chock-full of nimbys.
Meetup is OK, but while it has a lot of groups, none of them have a consistent forum.
There's Discord servers I'm a part of, but something about my old brain doesn't like how dynamic a chat client feels (even if there's channels devoted to more static updates) vs. a website-- I think it's a me problem, but it's the closest replacement I have right now.
Discord is a glorified chat interface, which isn't good at all for granular info.
My old brain doesn't like scrolling to find an answer in a group chat.
Sometimes I feel like I'm harping on about this too much, but this is another example of a consequence of the unification of the Internet. So much shit is on Discord these days, from support to documentation and beyond. There are even game development companies shutting down forums and moving to Discord, so good luck searching for things on the Internet these days.
Yeah, reddit's usefulness is 50% its archive going back so many years. It's like losing a shitty Library of Alexandria.
That part of the internet terrifies me. This shit can just vanish. It's not a physical good that needs an active force to destroy. All that has to happen is neglecting to host it, or losing the path to find it, and woosh it's gone. Reddit has an incredible amount of knowledge that is at the whim of a small company. If for no other reason, the democratization of information cries for some kind of decentralization.
I wish there were a way to straight up download the whole damn thing, like Wikipedia, just for the archive.
At the same time, the idea of just keeping all of reddit on a flash drive in a drawer feels horrific, like a Lovecraftian artifact waiting to be unleashed like the end of Ghostbusters
I stumbled upon an apparently rare issue that combines Windows 11, a WiFi driver, and a specific model of HP laptop back in 2021. I'm pretty sure my post on one of the tech support related subreddits is the only resource available on the (Googleable) Internet. Because the issue came and went whenever it felt like it, my post turned into a several-months long journey of things I had tried and reporting back when it didn't work. Because I saw that one XKCD comic. A few others arrived and were like "I have the same issue and found your post!"
But with so many private subreddits, I think that post is hidden. I can't even find it on my userpage.
Nextdoor is basically Facebook. I see some useful stuff in there occasionally, but the vast majority of it is full of dumb shit. Though, tbf, I'm also in Houston so that may be why.
I was on meetup quite a bit over the past four or so years, but have tapered off as of this year. It was good for meeting people, but the forums (at least for the groups I were in) were almost completely dead other than a thread here or there
Nextdoor is FB, but somehow skews even older than FB.
It’s like that up here near Ann Arbor as well. I see things like “have a blessed day!” Or “who does this car belong too?!?”
I wish old-school online bulletin boards were around for this reason. Towns or their chambers of commerce will have one, but they are never as comprehensive as one would wish. Maybe we should just bring back old-school flyering.
Same here - I was using my local subs (japanlife, Tokyo and to a lesser extent Japan) to conveniently access SO much info, and it left a big hole to fill. I speak Japanese, so I can still find a lot/most of it, but having recommendations, comments and suggestions from multiple people available almost instantly after anything is posted was quite useful, not going to lie. Unfortunately, it seems like most expats in Japan decided to stay on reddit, so there's nothing to replace those communities with...
Yeah, this is something I'm really missing too. r/germany had a bunch of trash comments all the time and wasn't best for suggestions necessarily, but their wiki was pure gold, and there's a lot of good info for common immigrant problems in the posts there (very handy for a google search with site:reddit). Last I checked they were still dark. Luckily my current issues aren't super German-specific but knowing about common pitfalls with the bureaucracy and getting news updates on the new citizenship law is gonna be harder for sure.
Cars for me as well. MechanicAdvice was super helpful, Justrolledintotheshop was often quite funny, and I had model and type specific subs that I was a part of. I was fortunate to find a discord server specifically related to my car which has been great, but it’s just not the same.
unfortunately, chat does not replace active forums. Car discords (of which i'm part of) are relatively useless if you're not actively keeping eyes on them
That's a fact. Fortunately, the folks in this one are very helpful and surprisingly willing to answer my stupid questions. I'm a serious beginner/youtube mechanic working on a classic car, so I'm running into a ton of issues and in a lot of cases, folks have been able to walk me through my issues in nearly real time. That's the only real benefit to this type of forum.
Unfortunately, that knowledge is now siloed into discord and more or less lost (since its not publicly indexable) :(.
I would really like a Home automation focused group as well! Seeing other people's solutions to problems I didn't even know I had is really inspiring.
Not only that, the home automation subreddits were a goldmine of information for integrating weird specific devices.
+1 for for cars and self-hosting.
I definitely agree on the niche video game subreddits. As an example, a space like /r/TheSilphRoad includes frequent updates due to the live nature of the game, as well as the community research and analysis, which would flood ~/games. It may just be that this content isn't a good fit here, but the quality of discussion and theorycrafting in many of the posts and comments does seem like a match to the type of content encouraged here.
Oh, that's an interesting solution. I guess it would allow ~gaming to be a space for all gaming content if you had no filters, but you could optionally filter to only the specific games you were interested in within this group if desired. This would to an extent help prevent game specific groups from becoming completely isolated echo chambers, because the posts would still be visible to those in ~gaming with no filters without users needing to have specifically subscribed to ~gaming.pokemon_go or similar.
Not sure if you saw, but for r/StarTrek there's now https://startrek.website/, a Lemmy instance created by r/StarTrek, r/DaystromInstitute, and r/risa. Here's the Tildes thread on it.
I have heard there are a lot of discord servers around printers. Obviously YMMV but the Voron discord was pretty helpful the last time I visited.
It seems the common denominator here is discord servers are what's becoming the norm. I've never really liked it as a platform, but I think I may have to learn to now.
Interesting, as someone involved in 3D printing, I’ve found that discord is usually significantly better than Reddit. I’m not a fan of discord, but that’s where everyone seems to be when it comes to 3D printing.
this is going to sound ridiculous....
I wish I had a place to argue with vegans. I don't care if someone is vegan, I just think arguing about it is tons of fun.
There appears to be quite a few vegans here! But the community generally frowns on petty arguments.
i also want to argue with democrats who think the green party is a russian front.
I would really like a group focussed on (mainly American) politics so I could unsubscribe from it...
Agreed! That is mostly what I am missing right now. I wouldn't even hate it if the moderation policies would cool the hell off a bit. I am a fairly liberal person, but /r/politics can be a bit much even for me at times.
I play Magic the Gathering... There's a subreddit for EDH (one of the formats people play the game in) that has remained dark. I'm working on a Council of Four deck. I didn't realize how much I was trying to get info from that sub until suddenly I couldn't read about this deck anymore.
If you don't know about it EDHREC is an amazing website for stats and helping you figure out your deck. Although there's no discussion, you can see what cards are commonly run in that commander's deck. Really useful resource.
EDHREC is my go-to for sure, but I've gotten to the point for this deck where there's a lot of potential cards and not much of a game plan!
There's a few of us who play floating around here. I'd be happy to take a look at a list for constructive criticism!
I don't really have a list because I'm still hacking things together/trying to decide where to go with it! I really want to lean more into the knights as a focus but it's tricky trying to balance that with the card draw, which is the more proactive approach (it's easy to force people to draw cards but more difficult to make them cast two spells). Prior to the blackout I was reading that it's a relatively strong commander but for the life of me I can't envision it, I don't even know what my gameplan is.
I'm also trying to avoid winning with approach of the second sun, that's just not exciting... But I'll probably slot it in
Going to give it a test run tomorrow and I might throw the final list together in the morning, I'll reply again if I do!
The Reddit MTG community is/was the single greatest way to find both Jank and Gems. Sites like EDHREC, Moxfield, ect. are the reason so many decks are homogenized now, I like playing cards nobody at my table knows even if they aren't the "optimal" choice.
This is honestly a bad habit, but I'm going to miss r/gadgets.
I never subscribed to it. I go there because it's just so incredibly dumb. I go there because the articles are frequently written by people who have no clue what they're talking about, and often come from this strange place of corporate-loving faux-geekiness that tells you that you need to own the new Samsung Pixel S98 Gaming Edition because even though nearly every phone on the market can do the same thing, this one is sexier. The comments are full of some really bad takes which are somehow very popular, and of course it wouldn't be a technology forum without rabidly angry Apple haters.
If there's one thing I miss from Reddit since deleting my account many years ago, it's r/linux_gaming
That place was a treasure trove of info about upcoming games that run on Linux OS', or just tips and tricks how to get things running.
Basically many desktop environment and distribution related subreddits were nice too, however I think the discussion about those is better suited on their respective forums.
Edit: Oh, also, a place for gamedevs.
yeah r/linux_gaming is great. ProtonDB is pretty good for getting info on specific games these days though, some people leave pretty detailed comments about the tweaks they make to get games to run/run better.
I do honestly think there are probably enough linux gamers here that we could have good discussion on that on tildes though, so there's hope for the discussion side for sure!
Wouldn't mind having something like ~tech.linux maybe :)
yeah I think that'd be a really useful subgroup
There's a couple gamedev-focused Mastodon instances that are a pretty nice place to hang out, if you're interested. Off the top of my head, People Making Games and gamemaking.social are the two bigger ones, but there's also indiepocalypse.social and gamedev.lgbt which both have a bit more of a niche.
Ah yeah, I don't feel like creating another fediverse account however. :')
Besides I think for nice discussions and help around gamedev, microblogging style discussions can be a bit too hectic.
I spent a lot of time on my local community’s subreddit. I found that experience missing in other places/forums, including Tildes.
Maybe try NextDoor? I haven't used it but it seems to fulfill that role.
For your own sake, please don't.
One thing I miss is national or regional "sub forums" where you can discuss local news and events.
r/bpd and r/bpdmemes are a genuine loss.
Even though I am very sad to see Apollo go, closing communities for people suffering genuine mental health issues is not okay. So many people went to these subs to seek help so I really can't support closing those places for this protest. It's gonna be a total flame war when they open up again.
i have to agree, it feels kind of tone-deaf to close communities dedicated to helping people
Mental illness / addiction support groups.
this is one i'd highly recommend you mention when the next round of groups is created. tbh it's important enough that i'd reach out sooner.
I wish there was a place for us to discuss the war in ukraine. what is so great about the r/ukraine community is that it's populated with a lot of native ukrainians, of course. yes, there are a lot of westerners spouting nonsense, but you often get real insights into the ukrainian experience during the war and i think i will miss that more than anything as i leave reddit.
r/nfl and r/fantasyfootball are ones I've used constantly during the season and occasionally during the off-season. I realize now that I haven't gone to any other site (aside from linked posts) for NFL-related news in many many years and that's very interesting to me.
If they stay dark into the start of the season, will I get "withdrawls"? Or maybe I'm not as much into the NFL as I thought and more into reddit's version of NFL news/events? I don't know, but this time has been an interesting period of self-reflection for me in a number of ways.
I agree with r/fantasyfootball. I know there’s alternatives like forums or sleeper but I feel like r/fantasyfootball threads moved a just the right pace for in season discussion.
I have a wide range of disparate interests, from cello to linguistics to programming.
Mostly I'm missing a curated list of specific interests to browse whenever I have a spare minute. Tildes doesn't really fulfill this requirement since the groups are more general
While I do appreciate the more in depth discussion on tildes I do miss the near constant stream of news/pictures/art released every minute on popular subs. Maybe it was an addiction that needed curing though. Will see how I feel taking a break from all that for awhile.
Not reddit-related, but for several years I've struggled to find a community that manages to give me an overview or recommendations on new tv releases.
There's just so much tv, and I always feel like I'm missing out on stuff because I first can't manage to get an overview of stuff that's being released, and secondly can't manage to find the good stuff among the uninteresting things.
The communities I used for this sadly closed down several years ago. Stuff like IMDB and Rottentomatoes, or reddit communities obviously haven't been replacements.
News, trying to catch up on the web is just a spammy ,ugly mess.
I didn't realize how much click bait had grown, being spoiled by posts from people who curated.
As well, in the comments someone would post the meat of the article so I didn't have to visit the big mess that are the news sites.
Even AP news page is just a mess!
I use Google news well enough but still feel I'm not hearing a lot of relevant news.
I also liked that usually ,locals to whom the news was close, would comment and add context.
Still not going back to reddit though.
They've burned to the ground and I don't have faith in anything they'll say now.
The most major loss for me will be /r/indieheads.
For most everything else I can find other avenues of being informed about my hobbies and interests, but indieheads was the only place I knew of that curated all of that content into one place and was big enough to get ama's from pretty much every band major to the scene.
The alternatives now are to follow bands on Twitter and Instagram, but I have neither and don't want either. So I guess I'll have to go back to checking up on individual bands and hopping around multiple music sites in order to find new bands and hear about tours.
I had a lot of issues with r/indieheads but there's really not any alternatives for music discussions online honestly.
What issues, if I may ask? I never contributed much on there, expect in album discussions, mostly just used it to keep up on news.
I think mostly my music taste changed over time and the way certain artists were talked about and pushed on there (Phoebe Bridgers/BCNR discourse) was rly annoying me because of how uninteresting I find these artists.
Also some conflicts with the mods over time that I don't really wanna get into lol
I think we're going to do alright on that front. There are an awful lot of people here from the music subreddits already. Just give it time. :)
Glad to hear it! I've only been here for maybe about a week, so I haven't had enough time to get a feel for the musical vibe yet. I will say, day 1 there was a post on ~music that highlighted a band I really am interested in called Squid, which in my experience only people into that scene are going to be aware of.
Still, Tilde won't be getting major band AMA's I'd bet, since it's walled garden approach naturally inhibits visibility and AMA's are pretty much advertising and PR.
Reddit made its bones on the AMAs, I think it's very likely we'll start seeing some of that here before the year is up. Not the PR type, more like when Victoria was running things on reddit pre-2015. I have this idea for 'guest threads' where certain topics like amas allow users to have a one-time account to interact with just that thread - about halfway in between a full user and an anonymous coward. Then we let the regular Tildes users moderate all of the guests with an iron fist and perhaps there's a mechanic to promote someone into a full time user there. This would solve the issue of people showing up to an AMA and not being able to participate without an account, at least. It's also a novel way to handle invites.
For me it's /r/Frugal and some of the more specific food subs like /r/CookingForBeginners, /r/dehydrating and /r/noscrapleftbehind
You should definitely make use of the ~food group and just tag well.
I'm sure if you explore the tags you'll find your people!
I thought I didn’t miss anything much from Reddit, but yesterdays NYT crossword theme was pretty great and I wished I could go and see the discussion around it! The comments on the NYT website just aren’t the same
As a casual NYT crossword player for about 8 years now, I cannot believe I never thought to seek out a crossword subreddit. I'd look at the comments in the Wordplay column occasionally if I felt strongly about a puzzle, but you're right that it leaves much to be desired.
If you’re still on Reddit have a look! It’s r/crossword (note, no S on the end - with the S it’s a sub for cryptic crosswords). There’s a daily thread for the NYT crossword which allows spoilers so it’s great to take a peek if you get really stuck. It’s also a great place to get an explanation if you don’t get why an answer is what it is.
I’m trying not to go back to Reddit now I’ve had this break, and I think I’m going to miss it there, but for me it’s not worth it
Thanks for sharing! Yeah, I am also looking to avoid the urge to log back in at this point, something about it feels... ick. I might have a scroll over there, though, instead of the Wordplay comments next time I'm looking for a little insight from other solvers!
I’ll probably do the same, just search for it via google and read it logged out. If you ever want to discuss a particular day I’d definitely contribute here! I debated started a thread yesterday but wasn’t sure there would be much interest
Ugh, I know! I have gone on reddit only a few times since all this started, mostly to go to r/crossword and look at the discussion.
I've mentioned it before on a other thread, but r/BestofRedditorUpdates and r/Oddlysatisfying. I've been using oddlysatisfying to find videos that fall into certain rhythms so my brain can calm down and let me sleep. That niche is pretty easy to fill though.
Harder to fill is BORU. One of my favorite parts of reddit is reading about real people's drama, and I realized long ago what I crave most from that is closure. I like seeing how situations are resolved, for better or worse. Heck just yesterday, I used safereddit.com to search for "title:update self:yes" on a couple subs (and reddit itself) to try to fill the void.
BORU didn't just collect reddit posts but stories from all over the internet. The most common external source was Ask A Manager, but there would also be stories from more niche sites and forums. Like the aquarium owner who found a giant worm-thing in a newly purchased rock, or the guy who needed to get rid of like 100 pounds of cheese ASAP. There was even one from the super old days of the internet where someone's dogs experienced heaven when they got a giant deer carcass on their property.
There's just not really a good alternative for that subreddit.
My biggest losses will be /r/cassetteculture and /r/edanonymemes. It's hard to find these niche communities anywhere else.
In addition to cars and auto repair, I miss the wealth of knowledge and experience of accomplished strength trainers and strong(wo)men. I’m very into strength training, and there were so many resources available on Reddit.
Emphasis on the "accomplished" part. It's hard to find online lifting communities that aren't mostly beginners / early intermediates.
I mean, I still consider myself in beginner/early intermediate status, and probably will forever. But I've learned tons from people with much more experience. And chatting with strong people is really motivating to me.
Mycology
I miss the various gaming subreddits, mainly /r/Dota2 and /r/PathOfExile
Where are game sub users going now? Not every game has an official forum.
This is the main thing I've felt lost about.
I haven't found a replacement but admittedly I wasn't looking too hard. Still, i doubt there is a reddit equivalent for the more niche games, even for something a bit more popular like /r/Dota2 you'd have to be willing to put up with Facebook groups and/or Discord. Some games have communities on lemmy but the ones I've seen weren't very active
r/Android, r/Apple, r/Cars, r/Formula1, r/wec, and a bunch more of the mobile tech ones like r/iOSBeta, r/iPhone, r/AndroidApps, etc. The reddit alternatives that have popped up have their own versions of these subs but they're so small that barely anyone posts :(
r/germany for news that affects me as an immigrant in Germany is gonna be hard to replace without actually subscribing to local English-language news. I've already had several occasions where I googled something and clicked a link to a relevant post only to realize that sub was still blacked out lol. But the culture there could get kinda toxic so I'm not missing how much stuff from there I used to see.
I also would love to see some conlanging content here, I think the dominance of memes and image posts tended to really hurt high-quality content on r/conlangs (I used to mod there) and the style here would be really suited to that. But I don't know how many conlangers there actually are here, so I don't feel super comfortable putting in the time and effort to make a post about my work here in case people won't like it, and it's hard to recruit friends from that space when there's no clear place to put that content here yet. I'm hopeful as things grow that might change though, and I think the text-focused nature of tildes would really benefit a hypothetical conlangs group compared to the subreddit.
I particularly enjoyed the "Just Used 5 Minutes of Your Day" daily thread where a new interesting sentence for people to translate into their conlangs was posted every day, but not sure that type of thread would work well here since new activity bumps the thread each time. Would probably have to be organized differently to have something similar here.
I am a 28 year old that recently got a Nintendo Switch and a Pokèmon game... and I just fell inlove: with the TCG, games, Go, manga. Wish there was a community of people sharing their achievements in the Pokèmon universe.
Other than this, I miss ShortScaryStories, dev subreddits like ReactNative, Laravel, specific tv show subreddits: Community, Parks and Rec, B99, The Leftovers, etc. Most of the shows have ended, but every once in a while someone posts their impressions and I get reminded how awesome it felt watching them.
Solutions to very obscure tech issues. That's the biggest loss for me.
I hope technical people can build up such back catalog of knowledge on Lemmy and here.
Honestly, I don’t think I’m experiencing any gaps. I was already feeling close to done with Reddit, and beyond mindlessly scrolling through r/all because it’s addictive, my most visited subs as of late were r/frugalmalefashion and r/buildapcsales which both just persuaded me to spend money. With the API changes removing NSFW content, I decided to make my own NSFW scroller with self-hosted Jellyfin and that’s working out great. Reddit just made me waste time and I hope that without it I can be a little more productive.
The thing I miss is reliable, unpaid recommendations from actual people. Google is useless for any kind of product research. Specific example: a friend of mine asked for my help in finding a tie for him - try googling for tie recommendations without any restrictions, it's all SEO crap and paid product placement.
The next time there's a call for groups, I'm going to ask for a dedicated recommendations group. Real recommendations have value, and tildes being invite only means it can't be ruined by bots.
I miss the NBA community, and then hiking/backpacking/kayaking/biking outdoor sports type stuff, and then snowboarding/skiing.
Local news, game deals, updates on new movies and games coming out. And especially focused coffee subreddits. It's really hard to replicate any of that. I've put together a decent list of RSS feeds but the news just trickles in it's not the same veracity and there is no discussion
r/litrpg, r/progressionfantasy
Those 2 fueled like 60% of my book purchases for the last 2 months, because the amazon/goodreads recommendation tool is crap.
I know that this site wants to avoid slapfights about it but I'd really like a political discussion section. There isn't actually a good place for that as far as I can tell.