I was originally introduce to reddit by my dad about 12 years ago. He has been using it for about 16 years now.
It seemed when all the talk about the blackout started, he was completely in agreement with me. We both thought the blackout was a good idea, were cracking jokes about how we were gunna find something to do with all our free time.
I started looking around and found the buzz about lemmy and kbin. Started trying to figure out how federated sites work. It felt like information overload, but I didn't have anything else to entertain me so I made an account and started finding groups, and now I am enjoying my time browsing here a lot.
My dad had a different experience. He continued to check reddit through the first day of the blackout and by the second he was browsing it as often as ever. He seemed to have stopped caring about all the subs that were gone and protesting and just wanted some stuff to read and look at. When I tried to joke with him about it he seemed apathetic to it all.
I tried to get him to browse lemmy, to see how he likes it. He wasn't interested. I tried sending him links to specific posts, and he didn't really care or look at them. We used to share reddit posts with each other and talk about them, and I was kinda surprised he didn't care to do that at all if it wasn't on reddit.
Eventually I sat down with him in his office and got him to make an account on lemmy.world, but he browsed for less than a minute then just switched back to reddit. I just awkwardly left the room after that.
Today I shared another lemmy post with him, just still in the habit of sharing interesting stuff I see. When I asked him later if he looked at it, he told me to stop bugging him about this lemmy stuff.
It feels pretty bad to lose this routine that is an excuse to regularly talk to my dad. I feel like if I want it back I'm going to have to use reddit, because he seems to have a pretty negative perspective of lemmy.
Idk what it is I want from posting this. Maybe I want advice, maybe I want people to talk to because I feel kinda sad now, maybe I want to give people on here perspective on why some people aren't leaving reddit. Thanks for reading if you got this far.
You should share these thoughts with your dad. Tell him you feel like you lost something special with him. It's sad that Reddit can interfere with family routines... I also had a slightly but much milder experience with my spouse. But they eventually joined the lemmy train! Lol Maybe persistence will work for you too.
I'll try talking to him about it like that later today... I'm worried about giving lemmy a negative connotation in his head. I don't want it to be the website that he gets nagged about, then he'll never want to use it.
But making the conversation just about me and him talking and sharing links sounds better. Thanks