I'm now mostly past the muscle memory of instantly opening Reddit any time I'm not actively busy.
Lemmy isn't ready to fill the hole that has left. But honestly as it stands I'm not sure that I want to fill that hole. It would probably be better for my mental health, concentration, social life and many other things if I could successfully leverage this moment to become a whole lot less of an online person.
I feel like Reddit had improved me a lot in other ways. It taught me a lot about the experiences of demographics that I don't deal with frequently, learned a lot of guitar, apps, shows, science, cooking, lawncare, etc, etc.
I used it to consume jokes and entertainment and stuff sure, but it also was my entry point into a lot of topics and really jump-started my ingestion of that information in a way that would be hard to replicate on any platform without a similar scale of adoption.
All the negative aspects of using electronics still applied, but I was getting a lot of positive results that I'll miss now.
Yeah that's a perspective I understand and I will miss some of that. However for myself at least the removal of Reddit appears to be beneficial to me to such a degree as to out weigh the loss.
But I already have had the benefit of 13 years of reddit opening my eyes andt 13 years of growth and experience from teenager to a responsible adult at the same time so don't feel the mind broadening the same extent any more.
Yeah, that was my immediate next thought as well. I've gotten so much benefit, developed so many interests from large scale community postings. I don't know where such a thing will exist in the future for my kids, if at all. I hope time proves this to be a foolish concern and I'll look dumb for posting such a question on the platform that answers the question.
I already read a fair amount. 2022 I averaged something like 118 pages per day averaged out of the year. So far in 2023 I've averaged a more sustainable 50 pages per day.
So not being on reddit isn't likely to influence my reading that much.
I think reddit changed a lot in the last 10 years. It went from lots of small unique communities where there was really good discussion to everywhere kind of just being an echo chamber where if you disagreed you were just down voted out of the discussion rather than being able to just talk about your different points of view.