I agree! I've been wasting time on reddit since 2008 or so, to the point that now and then I'd block it on my router to avoid going there from habit. Not all bad of course, but it's been increasingly futile and counterproductive in the past few years.

I've never used third party apps, but I stopped going there when it became clear the management has zero respect for the userbase.

While Lemmy is significantly less engaging, it is a lot better at that. I'm glad, especially knowing the algorithm isn't run by some money hungry people.

Reddit saved my life through making the service literally unusable. I was finally able to break an over decade long addiction to the service. Doc said if I had continued, the cancer would spread through the computer into me.

Curing instagram addiction is easy. Just unfollow everyone you don’t know in person. Cut my instagram time from ~2h/day to 5 minutes every other day

Same here! Since I quit Reddit, I've lost 120 lbs, gotten promoted, and learned to play the piano!

I started reading books much more. I'm glad about that.

There’s Pixelfed, something of a fediverse Instagram. In many ways it’s actually better, even. But it’s pretty mature at this point and has a bunch of QoL stuff going on, such as mastodon signup/login thing.

Unfortunately I think ig crowd is much less likely to move on to fediverse alternatives than Twitter or reddit folks.

Hard to just quit ig for me too, when I have brand accounts to keep up and active, and it’s also actually the last social media I have family members and relatives on, and only thing allowing me to move would be for them to join fediverse somewhere, not necessarily pixelfed, but thats unlikely to happen very soon.

For real. I miss the old Reddit. I recently took a digital walk down memory lane and found my first reddit link from 2007!

Good times. I miss Aaron Swartz too. Knowledge is power and he sacrificed himself for freeing knowledge.

Reddit to me is the digital Kowloon Walled City. Crazy place where you can find anything but also needs to be demolished.

Don't worry. As this site grows more and more contents are coming you will be back to normal. You will be watching yourself scrolling for hours.

The people here seem much nicer...for the moment.

Cheers Steve!

Same here, I've found myself being more productive and having more time. It's also a refreshing experience to be part of an early platform again and seeing it progress.

Agreed. I also downloaded a rss reader and am doing better about actually reading articles instead of going to comments to get the synopsis.

only good thing to come out of this tbh

It bothers me when people think of social network use as addiction. If you went to a bar, restaurant, work or school you wouldn't see it as an addiction. I think that seeing social media as addictive is especially harmful when Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok use it to do immoral things. They hide behind the "but they're addicts anyway, so what does it matter?" Social networks are not addictive. They're compelling.
Does this mean that married people are addicts, to each other? Think the absurdity of calling social media addictive. It devalues our online communities to use such words.