I see a lot of posts on fediverse trashing reddit, Twitter, spez, musk and so on, and rightfully so. But like it or not, the mass majority of users on the internet still use these sites, and some of us still want to interact with the friends and communities we are a part of on those sites. And there’s nothing wrong with that either.
Personally, I want fediverse to grow, and I post on kbin and mastodon constantly, and try to grow the communities on them. But I still pop over to reddit for r/splatoon, r/casualconveration, and my hometown sub, because either the communities haven’t grown enough here yet for constant fresh content, or the content is different enough between both to justify me checking in.
I get many are here as a protest against reddit, Twitter, or where ever else you came from, and that’s valid. But there are many of us who are simply casual users who want to include fediverse into their drives of other social media, and that’s totally fine too.
I have put in place a number of restrictions for my “rudimentary” use of Reddit. Most of these restrictions have to do with using Reddit to promote its alternatives, deleting/rewriting old posts/comments, decreasing my usage of Reddit overall and increasing my use of Kbin, and countering and deplatforming bigotry on Reddit. Some people can argue that even “rudimentary” use of Reddit is too much use, and maybe it is, but it’s still a pretty good improvement compared to the alternative of not being on the fediverse at all. I think that’s what matters in our current landscape.
Regarding ad blockers, which I’ve seen mentioned a few times in this thread: Ad blocking doesn’t really “stick it to the man” like a lot of people seem to think it does. The people who block ads are those who’d never click an ad, anyways, and if ad blocking is what it takes for them to use a website and build its value, then that’s what it takes. So ad-blocking doesn’t really decrease the click-through rate — I’ve actually heard that ad-blocking can sometimes increase the click-through rate, since ads are only shown to those most likely to click them.