It is a totally different reality. The nature of social media bubbles means that you are experiencing an entirely alien experience just by dint of being here. The problems of Reddit look huge when everyone around you keeps talking about them, you subscribe to communities that hate Reddit, and it sounds like everyone is on board with the exodus from Reddit because, well, they’re here.

But Reddit has ten? a hundred? times more users than the Fediverse has, even fully federated. All the people who stay are going to be people who didn’t deem the problem serious enough - this means complaints about Reddit won’t be upvoted, and there is a high chance that the only way that users feel affected by what Reddit has done at all are the blackouts that affected their performance. Everytime someone posts there about what is wrong with Reddit, it simply results in ten replies about how the problem can’t be that big, and Reddit still enjoys the engagement.

The nature of human intuition and social media means that it’s very easy to fall into the trap of believing your universe is the real one, and it’s just as true for us as it is for them. In my case I’ve chosen not to go back to Reddit entirely and provide the one objective metric I can of my unhappiness: -1 user on their site.