We will see what happens. Reddit is hard to let go especially for people in othe r/Blind community that fills a very real need. Plus they have been making a lot of cosmetic changes that may help appease some people and bring them back into the fold. Between that very real need we were filling and those cosmetic changes some of us are very likely to be drawn back in.

As for me, a short visit there yesterday proved to me that I cannot allow myself to go back. The r/Blind subreddit was what brought me to that site in the first place and was the one community I was a part of there that was largely resistant to the toxicity so prevalent through the rest of the site. Yesterday’s visit was heartbreaking, showing me how much the toxicity of the rest of the site had infiltrated r/Blind…and even so, the urge to dive back in was very strong. I felt like a recovering gambling addict walking into a casino for the first time since giving it up. I just cannot afford to go back to that.

While I hope that we will all continue to be a part of building something new, and hopefully better, we will have to see how may of us resist reddit’s siren call.

The need in the fediverse is at least as strong as the need r/Blind on reddit. I cannot imagine that building up this community will take any less time and effort than building up r/Blind on reddit originally did bit it should prove well worth it in the end.

A note to the admins and mods of rBlind.com and its communities:

Thank you for getting this started and providing a community for those of us with no place at reddit can support one another in our blindness and our visual impairments.