The Time To Leave Reddit Was Two Years Ago

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Two years ago, Reddit decided to follow in the footsteps of Twitter (and Elon Musk), and restricted access to its API, allowing usage mostly only to those who paid for it (aside from small personal-use projects). This is what ended up spawning the ActivityPub alternative to Reddit, Lemmy. But, this was only the beginning of the wider and rapid enshitification of all corporate-controlled social media.

What we have today, is much worse.

Twitter has become a bull-horn of fascism and oligarchy, Threads has altered its ToS in order to encourage bullying marginalized people, and Bluesky is owned by crypto-bros.

Before we go any further, there has never been a better time than now to get over your fear of choosing a server on Mastodon, or any other associated ActivityPub software.

But now, as recently as today, Reddit has begun nuking its communities that are critical of Elon Musk, communities it deems “un-moderated”, such as NSFW communities, and specifically trans related communities. This is really no surprise, because it’s just Reddit being Reddit. Taking ideas from larger social media platforms that it thinks’ll win it points with investors, and then following through entirely regardless of whether these decisions are actually beneficial to maintaining a website and healthy communities. As if corporate-controlled social media owners give any shits about community.

Hours after doing so, though, an admin stepped-in to declare all of this a glitch. But, with everything going on in this country, especially related to the trans community, I don’t believe him.

See the post for yourself, and you can decide what you think of the situation.

But, in the notion of being critical of colossal assholes, as Elon Musk stages a coup against the federal government, with a bunch of literal children, no-less, there has never been a better time to be critical of the world’s most unintelligent billionaire. Just like there has never been a better time to finally concede that you are not safe on corporate social media.

I realize that this may not even be a good idea to post, while my website is being pushed through Github (which is owned by Microsoft) to Neocities, but I’m not worried. I have contingencies in place for this sort of thing, if bad situations should arise.

The fact of the matter is, though, is that even if Reddit isn’t beginning a years-long purge of marginalized communities, and especially those that are critical of billionaires, from its website, you should still leave. Just like you should have left Twitter 4 years ago. I am absolutely flabbergasted when I log onto Akkoma / Mastodon, and see people continuing to make their first posts on the Fediverse like, “I finally left Twitter.”

You just left? Today? Have you been living under a ROCK?

Unless your online presence is that of a bland influencer who has no original ideas, who only logs on to ask an inane question to an audience of none, you should leave any piece of media that is in the hands of someone with enough money to buy a planet.

The internet began as a collection of disjointed websites where nobody had the ability to wield money and power over others, and it is there that it will return.