Come to Lemmy. We have kitties and cookies and stuff.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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Privacy
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Here I am, not enough hands for all the cookies and kitties. Haven't used Reddit in months and perfectly happy without it. Still sharing my sadness about seeing "the old internet" slip further and further down that slope.
Funny. I always regarded Reddit and the other centralized platforms as the new internet, and lemmy rather as the old internet. I'm from the BBS days, and although that was not federated, to me the fediverse looks more like it than any commercial platform.
Agreed. Lemmy, while being very new, mimics features of ye olden times. Newsgroup era and all... But Reddit kinda started that way and then, as all good things, slowly enshittified. It seemed to resist enshittification longer than most sites. At least that was my impression. But good things can't last. There's no such thing as a free lunch, after all, I guess.
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Lemmy will likely be affected too: https://hachyderm.io/@ell1e/116844253291555343 At least for the large enough instances or something, I'm not 100% sure about how it works but I read about some micro service exception that may or may not apply to some.
Or, instances can just choose to ignore it. Just host your instance outside the EU. Congrats. You win. Like yeah feddit.org and other imperial core™ instances will likely just shut down but most of lemmy will be absolutely fine.
Worst case scenario host it outside the EU and VPN to a neutral country and you'll be fine.
bingo.
there have always been countries willing to host content outside the prying eyes of the West. There shouldn't really be any expectation of that changing.
Hell, if things get really desperate, we can all pitch in for a boat and host via satellite out of international waters. I think PirateBay did something similar for years.
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We have kitties and cookies and stuff.
Yah. We do. For now. Mostly b/c it's flying under the radar.
Long run, I think Lemmy cannot escape enshittification. Bots, politicians, lots of drivers.
Not having outrage amplifying algos helps Lemmy. But that's like 1 driver of enshittitification. There are many other sources that will try to shit on the cookies.
I believe Lemmy is more resistant than reddit or w/e. But it won't be enough. Esp if it becomes very popular.
Lemmy development being principally led by explicit communists should help a lot too. I do imagine that instances more aligned with the western spy states will have issues eventually, but hopefully their users will migrate to less censored places over time.
Now if the full western firewall gets created that's gonna be rough for users. I don't envy VPNs who are actually privacy-focused trying to breach that.
Something I never see anyone talk about, is how, with all the 'fingerprinting' and data collection/analysis these companies do, they already know whether you're 18 or not. I know this isn't actually about "protecting the children", but I'd still like to hear more discussion from the angle of: they already surveil us enough for this purpose.
Me -> NAL. So I'm only guessing.
One prob might be that fingerprinting IDs a device. There could be a 70 yo and a 7 yo using the same dev in the same house. It prob wouldn't stand up in court when Little Billy, 7, became a victim because Grandpa Wilson, 70, used the same device. Or the old dev fingerprint gets used with a new account. They let the account in b/c they know the fingerprint. But they never knew the dev was sold to a new owner who is 15.
Fingerprinting is way more powerful than most ppl realize. But it does have limits. If the EU, or the US, comes at them, they need something straighforward and easy to explain to a jury. If Little Billy forged a photo ID, that's a solid defense for the co. But if they screw up with hard to explain statistical methods, they have more legal risk.
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Just received the e-mail myself... now I am here! Hopefully more users with migrate soon.
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It’ll be like Facebook. The inertia and the sense of everyone doing it will keep Reddit alive. Even though it’s estimated that 50-60% is bot activity.
everybody needs to be on their best behavior for the next few weeks ok
I just dropped reddit some time ago... Time consuming + annoying tracking from their side.
Be prepared for rapid growth on lemmy. It will lead to growing pains. This has happened several times before and regularly happens on mastodon etc
why are people blaming reddit instead of EU ? (i dont like reddit either )
I live in the EU, this his honestly the first I've seen age verification on any platform.
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Oh, I absolutely am blaming the politicians behind this (and the lobby groups behind them). The only strictly wrong thing Reddit does is how it implements that law, i.e., using third-party age verification that happens to also use your data to profile you and that has been shown to be insecure (Further Reading links in my post).
There are many who think there's no sufficiently secure, risk-free way to do that verification.
See this write-up about the EU wallet: https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/eudi-wallet/wallet-development-documentation-public/-/work_items/13
Or Cory Doctorow on Age Verification of any kind: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/
oh yeah i agree , the eu governments can implement a service where they do the age verification themselves but i think they do this on purpose because they work for US and the whole thing is for surveilling and spying on people
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The thing that pisses me off is that, on paper I’m not against it. It’s the way they do it and collectively fuck over everyone else that irritates me. I’m not giving my ID out. Fuck off.
And PSA: Getting access to a VPN is ridiculously easy nowadays. I got around my Dads router restrictions when I was a teenager. VPNs are easier than that. You’re not doing anything to protect children. They’ll find a way.
on paper I’m not against it
Perhaps you should be, since there doesn't seem to be a non-dystopian way to do age checks on the internet at a large scale (as in, for more than e.g. sites dedicated for porn, and other very narrow examples). See Cory Doctorow write about Age Verification of any kind: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/ Or look at this EU wallet writeup: https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/eudi-wallet/wallet-development-documentation-public/-/work_items/13
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fuck giving your GOVERNMENT ID to a private fucking company. Holy shit, is this 1984 or what?
Although I didn't use it often, I would use facebook, mostly to look at my special interests. Not really to chat with people or whatever. Anyway, when my country brought in ID for social media, I just haven't been back. I'm not giving my FUCKING GOVERNMENT ID TO A FUCKING PRIVATE SPYWARE COMPANY. Fucking hell.
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Reddit blocks me if it detects a vpn
It often shadowbans for that, so you can still log in and read, but if you post, only YOU can see your post. Nobody else can see your post. It gives you the illusion that you posted.
One of the ways ppl knew if they were shadowbanned, was to open the post in a private window. But that will be harder now. The priate window won't be logged in, so you won't be able to look. And ofc if you log in, you'll see it, b/c that's what shadowban does. The only way will be to use an alt account to look.
The enshittification continues.
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tl;dr: screw reddit. Good bye forever (again).
I had to go back to reddit about a year ago to promote local mutual aid organizations and protest groups. I had turned my "since 2008" account into nothing but over the top abuse aimed at u/spez and vulture capitalism during the RiF debacle. I made a new account and engaged a little bit. I commented now and then, because you have to have minimal amounts of activity to post on some of the local subreddits.
Two days ago, I got flagged by automoderator for mocking a conservative on r/politics. I apparently had like 8 hours to tell the mods I was sorry, but I had no idea I'd been flagged, because I hardly go on reddit so I didn't know. They gave me a three month ban and when I messaged them to be like "why was I banned?" because it didn't make sense to me... I hadn't done anything that objectionable, a mod very condescendingly told me "You had 8 hours to respond to the complaint, but didn't avail yourself of the opportunity. You may protest the ban in 3 months." I seriously messaged them back with "enjoy your enshittification train to corporate town."
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Reddit wants me to reset my password or my account is locked.
So. I’m locked.
But I don’t use it any more so not really bothered.
I already deleted my 15 year old account, all of my posts, and all of my comments. Fuck Reddit and their shitty policies.
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I wonder how that’ll work with RSS and old Reddit. That’s all I use when reading Reddit
I read somewhere recently that old reddit will require you to be signed in. 🫤
Edit: found it.
The website includes a quote from a Reddit employee:
Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform. It’s also an important interface for many long-time mods and Redditors. To strike the right balance between preserving your access to Old Reddit while preventing abusive scraping and automated traffic, over the next month we will start requiring everyone to log in.
I didn’t realize casually browsing a website is “abusive scraping”. Isn’t that the equivalent of claiming that reading a news article online is “abusive scraping”?
That quote doesn't say that casually browsing is abusive scraping. I really hate that you're making me defend Reddit here, but two things can be true at the same time: you use it for casual browsing, and it is a significant source of abusive scraping for them.
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Read-only use of old reddit was the only way I use it. There are actualyl some good resources for niche topics. You can search, like how do I disassemble my electric toothbrush to replace the battery the mfg sealed into the unit. Somebody prob posted about it. Or weird game trivia. W/e.
Read only searching was the best remaining use for reddit. Which will now die.
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No mail yet, but I'll delete my account before i participate in that bs
Fuc reddit.. I just got banned for favoring Ukraine over Russia. Seriously. Some Russian dude posted a video saying that Russians should take pictures of all their air defense to show Ukraine it's still there and very strong. I said, "Ukraine would love for you to do that.". BANNED. So yeah, fuck reddit.
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It's amazing you think you're immune to this 🤣 or think the admins are going to go to jail protecting identites.
The second any instance hits enough users to draw attention they'll crumble faster than a quarter miles top fuel dragster.
Yes, but at least here I can choose an instance in a privacy friendly jurisdiction or one that is small enough, including a self-hosted one. It's not a perfect shield, but federation helps a lot with digital independence (which is why it's prominent in pre-internet theories of how to make anarchy work without collapsing into warlordism).
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God fuck this
A day may come when I upload my ID, and verify my identity online, but it is not this day.
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Indeed and to "celebrate" this I deleted the 5 accounts I had (was project related) still.
I already deleted my main years ago but those ones were just unused for 10 years. Good time to signal (if anybody cares checking through usage data) that I'm not supporting this.
Wow can't wait for the influx of 12-17 year olds on Lemmy.
Some really valuable perspective... They can tell us when it's curtains for Zoosha
So “13 year olds, immutable secure setting because you are a child and we cant get as much wealth from you anyway.” But “16-17 year olds, you’re still a child, but if you wanna do some more stuff we’re not gonna stop you.”
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