My journey with Lemmy started in 2022 out of interest in the fediverse and paranoia around how much control social media companies have, and how little choice common people are left with over the Internet.
Lemmy was much smaller back then. I really wanted it go get bigger, and tried to contribute to it. But it was small enough to be unsatisfying, so I would go back and forth between lemmy and Reddit.
After the Reddit fiasco, I shifted more and more towards lemmy and less towards Reddit. I finally abandoned Reddit when third party apps broke. I only go there for specific questions in communities that aren’t active on lemmy.
What about you?
Came here when the Reddit 3rd party app threat started looming, loved it and never went back.
Sure, Lemmy doesn’t have the same variety and amount of content that’s on Reddit but that’s because it’s a smaller and newer platform along with the fact that not all instances federate with each other (which is great).
I still get my scrolling urge fulfilled and presented with random memes and news that I’m interested in without the data harvesting factor which is perfect for me.
Reddit was slowly but surely becoming a terrible host for our @RimWorldPorn@rimworld.gallery community (direct link.) Then came the final straw, while we went black we held a vote and a majority voted for the community to move elsewhere. We chose for Mbin, which has turned out a to be a great platform, with the advantage of being part of the fediverse.
I’d personally only used mastodon up to that point, I now hardly ever browse reddit
Came here last year during the exodus from Reddit and never looked back.
I only use reddit to troubleshoot tech issues now or occasionally to look up info on some topic I’m researching.
I really enjoy Lemmy, it’s the part of the fediverse I use the most. I think federation is the best model for decentralized networks and I like how it feels a little like the old internet, when things weren’t totally corpo-controlled and hyper-monetized.
Like many people with the reddit exodus.
But i also got quite annoyed with the main German communities shifting more and more to the right and the moderators of the largest german subreddit to tolerate and enable transphobic and racist discussions, e.g. when there was some tabloid “news” on either topic shared.
I dont know how much of it was because the communities were more and more targeted by organized far right propaganda and how much was the moderators of the /r/de subreddit sharing such viewpoints.
Those trends already happened for some years, getting particularly worse with covid.
Joined last year when Apollo was forced to shut down like many of us. I’d been a huge fan of federated social media and decided this was the time to finally kick my Reddit addiction. So far Lemmy has completely scratched the itch and I rarely check Reddit anymore. That in itself has been a huge win and every month it’s just more and more upside as the communities get stronger.
I ended up starting a dedicated Magic: the Gathering instance at https://mtgzone.com for anyone interested. We’re small but growing!
I’d been grasping for literally any alternative to Reddit for months and heard about this place when they shut down third party apps. Haven’t thought about going back even once…
I moved over after the Reddit API with third party apps thing. Needed to voice my opinion with action
Lemmy is great, I spend way less time with it, it’s a nicer and generally more respectful community, and I’ve learnt a lot more about computers/OSS.
I realised that all my time with Reddit wasn’t actually teaching me anything valuable. I’m now more conscious of my internet usage
This happened to me too. I’m more conscious, I feel like I have more free time and am more creative. It’s a life upgrade somehow.
/r/chapotraphouse was the best socialist subreddit and it got banned over saying “death to slave masters”. The intense censorship campaign, at one point consisting of being site banned if you upvoted a comment in the subreddit, was so disgusting that I wanted to take the Reddit out of reddit. Chapo.chat-turned-hexbear was its direct continuation.
When they killed off third-party app support, and Apollo developer exposed Reddit CEO.
I left Reddit when they messed with the API stuff, then settled on kbin, using fedia and lemmy a bunch in addition
Definitely a different, nicer vibe in the fediverse - Actually can use the front page instead of hiding in what I’m subbed to, and there is a lot more thoughtful, varied content overall
I used Sync for Reddit since 2011 or so, that’s how I accessed Reddit 99% of the time. Then they just announced sorry, no more app. For me leaving Sync was akin to leaving Reddit anyway, and someone posted about Lemmy, I learned about the Fediverse, and I came over.
Now when I need to google something and Reddit pops up it feels… overencumbered . Heavy, too much going on with it. Lemmy feels clean, simple, what Reddit used to be. I won’t be leaving any time soon.
My journey on Lemmy is a part of my journey to be on every site. I have the world record for the most sites having signed up for. Even had I not signed up for genuine interest, I probably wasn’t going to not sign up for Lemmy. I gotta be the best like no one ever was.
I was aware of the fediverse but I’d never gotten round to engaging with it. Came here for something to do during the 3 day Reddit protest blackout and just… never went back to Reddit because it’s better here.
I already had a mastodon but I made accounts all over the fediverse (and other alternatives) ended up settling in my first pick - this account at kbin.social. I really love the features and I believe the dev has a lot of vision.
It’s exciting being part of something cool.
Lemmy started for me in December 2022. By that point, I’d been on the fediverse for 6 months or so. The Twitter implosion had just happened the month before, and I finally realised how sick of centralised social media I was. Reddit was the only one I was using, though I barely touched it because of the moderation, and so I went looking for alternatives.
I found lemmy.ml, and saw the potential of the concept. A month later, in January 2023 my partner and I were running an instance (we already ran a regular fediverse instance). The lemmy instance was basically just a single person instance. Sign ups were open, but lemmy was quiet back then, so the few people that joined left again. My partner barely used lemmy, so it was basically a single person instance.
And then the reddit implosion happened, and suddenly we found ourselves running a fully fledged lemmy instance, with more users than our “main” instance. And that was really the moment that I got more serious about lemmy too. The increase in community size and engagement transformed the experience.
I’ve never been back to reddit since I left in December 2022, but I didn’t delete my account until 2023 during the reddit exodus.
Vivaldi web browser opening their Mastodon instance brought me to the Fediverse. I started from Mastodon, but became curious of other fedi softwares - /kbin is one of them. I am on kbin.social as my Threadiverse instance in English since April '23, before Reddit API affair.
