I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
Another Lemming (I just made that up, what’s the correct term?) mentioned how they blocked all the news communities and how it improved their experience. Until then I’d just been blocking individual accounts. I took their advice and blocked news, but also politics, communities about certain countries, and anything else where the default seemed to be activism/rage/hopelessness related. I actually agreed with the sentiments or causes of a lot of the communities I blocked, but I found that those actually hit me the hardest as I would get invested in them. All this blocking has helped a lot. Lemmy is a lot less heavy now. There’s more humor and animals and less horrors. It’s not that I don’t care abotu bad things happening in the world, it’s that I start to care too much while being powerless to do anything about it, and then I was no good to anyone, not even myself.