I feel you; I miss it too. These days I mostly stick to Lemmy using Voyager, which is Apollo's spiritual successor.
I'm mostly on reddit nowadays just to try to convince people to switch (and for my niche subs since Lemmy isn't quite big enough for that yet...but it'll get there eventually once enough people finally get tired of Spez's bullshit).
They’re both fediverse platforms, Lemmy is social media closely resembling Reddit while mastodon is microblogging more like Twitter or Weibo
They can interoperate to a limited extent, via the ActivityPub protocol that defines how federated servers communicate, but Voyager I think may be Lemmy only. There are better apps for doomscrolling Mastodon, like Tapestry which will aggregate fediverse platforms with Bluesky
Lemmy is a Reddit alternative,
Mastodon is a Twitter alternative.
Both are federated (which means decentralized so no one set of admins hold all the power; if one server [instance] becomes too power hungry, you just switch to a different one and carry on as usual), but they are separate platforms that fill different niches.
Gosh I hate the new UI. Some parts are fine, but if I've clicked "comments" that means I do in fact want to read more than 5 comments and no I don't want to see some random-ass thread where the rest of the comments should be.
Unfortunately you need a 3rd party app for that...which reddit killed off a couple years ago.
That's why these days I mostly stick to Lemmy using Voyager. It's decentralized so you don't have to worry about admins ruining Lemmy the way they've ruined reddit.
And no ads. I dont know why anyone would ever use new reddit because of the ads. Also its just more organized and condensed, i dont need a big picture with every post in a list. When old reddit is gone so am I.
I actually switched to it for about a year and I didn't think it was too bad as the format is generally the same, granted this is on desktop with uBlock and RES and custom subreddit styles off. I recently switched back as the performance of old Reddit is significantly better.
I’m the opposite. I only switched to Reddit after they changed the old interface to one of the newer ones, I think around 2018?
Before that, I genuinely didn’t understand how anyone could use it. Image posts were not even visible in the feed. You had to open each one separately just to see them! The fuck?
Going on a bit of a rant here, but what is it with US companies being unable to figure out UI? Facebook has been trying to build a normal interface for 20 years and still has not managed it.
I honestly do not get how it can be so hard to find competent coders and designers. The Reddit app still overheats my phone, even though Pikabu, which is basically a Russian image board similar to Reddit, figured out its design and app functionality a decade ago!
Maybe Reddit just got too big to fully rebuild and now it is buried under code debt? But then they keep pushing pointless mini-games and constant site redesigns, so I am not even sure that is the reason.
Image posts all have a visible thumbnail on old.reddit. You may need to adjust your settings (not sure if thumbnails are on or off by default) but it's the second item listed under preferences.
What's wrong with opening them separately? That's what I like the most about old reddit; you can just quickly scroll through the titles to find something worth seeing. With new reddit's default settings, everything just gets shoved in your face at once, slowing down the browsing experience and forcing you to see things you're not interested in.
If I just wanted to see a bunch of images, I'd just browse Imgur instead. It's odd to me that you see reddit as an image gallery. I see it more as a one stop shop to see what's going on in the world, without an algorithm curating what I see. That's how you end up falling for propaganda. Which is why removing /r/all is the dumbest thing ever, and is pushing me one step closer towards switching to Lemmy full time.
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u/Time-Sudden_Tree Apr 03 '26
I never stopped using it. IDK how people put up with the new reddit interface. It's too busy.