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.
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.
I've kept mine from 2012 alive just to check if some comments reappeared (which did on a few occasions) but aside from checking on it once or twice a month I haven't used reddit since the the blackout.
I did alter my profile to say "Went to lemmy" though. I should delete it soon however, I doubt any more comments will pop back up after all this time.
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 )
Stealth is nice. It's all I need, since I'm just a lurker with no use for account now. Like it for the same reason as newpipe with being able to have a feed with no account. Loving the account free lifestyle these apps allow for a personal feed.
Thanks. But I don't care anymore. I did all I could to get rid of my contents, but those will somewhere be on the internet (at least on wayback machine) - nothing on the internet is lost forever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 Directors Fuckers you report to) - where the decision making powers lie really truly at an individual level.
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 don't even click reddit links on mobile anymore. If it's something I might need (relevant tech support questions occasionally) I'll wait until I'm on my pc for old.
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.