What made you join Lemmy?

Where my Sync peeps at??

When they nuked third party apps. For a long time I used the official app, then I switched to 3rd party, nd I couldn't go back

the API fiasco.

I used Apollo to browse Reddit. It was really a great app, and it made browsing Reddit enjoyable. The dev, Christian, listened to his users, frequently updated and improved the app, was active in the subreddit, and seemed to care about making it a positive experience. It really was like being a part of a club.

It wasn’t just that Reddit shut down the API, but the way they boldfaced lied about Christian and their interactions with him. He was feverishly in talks with them to save the app, but Reddit not only wasn’t negotiating in good faith, but even worse, lying about the interactions to try to smear Christian and make him look like the villain. It was then that I knew that Reddit would never be the same, and I started looking for alternatives.

I tried several, but Lemmy seemed to be the closest to Reddit and scratched the itch. Not only that, an amazing dev created Voyager, which is heavily inspired by Apollo, (pretty much a direct copy), and makes me feel at home. There’s not as many communities here as subreddits over there, but I have curated a great Home feed, which includes most of my interests and that I enjoy browsing. I can honestly say the comments here are much better and more authentic. On the whole I get real replies and have better conversations instead of trolls and confrontations like I frequently did at Reddit. I do stop in over there sometimes out of boredom and browse, but it’s really not the same as before. (And maybe it is, and I was just fooling myself and not seeing it.) I don’t think I’ve posted or commented on Reddit since Apollo died except on live sports game feeds, which I do miss over here. I found a regional instance that I like, and, on the whole, I really enjoy it here.

TLDR: API killed Apollo.

I came over with everyone else in the big exodus wave from Reddit when they killed third party apps.

I didn't even use a third party app so it didn't affect me, but as an old-school Internet user I believe in federated networks over centralized services and it seemed like the one opportunity to finally get critical mass.

Well, I was originally here to promote a movie...

Reddits CEO.

Reddit just isn't fun without Reddit is fun.

I got banned from reddit for saying the genocide in Gaza was bad.

Reddit killed RIF. I'd already been looking into Lemmy, leading up to the day, but once my app stopped working, I switched to Jerboa and made a Lemmy account.

...didn't stay on Jerboa long

Got kicked off reddit. But also fuck Reddit for the api change. I just wish the communities had more traffic like reddit

API debacle. Went from Apollo for Reddit to Voyager for Lemmy

Fuck u/spez

• Most of the content is reposts and bots
• Moderators remove anything they dont like(Creating an echo chamber)
• Comments are mostly low-effort jokes or bots, not valuable discussion

I saw it as an open source Reddit alternative a few years ago and signed up, then left and went back to Reddit because nobody was using it. Then the API stuff happened, some Reddit users switched to Lemmy so I've been browsing it now, switched between a few instances and am now back here.

(I do wish it had more communities for specific topics and locations like Reddit has, and ironically a lot of FOSS discussion is still on Reddit also.)

I was already on Mastodon when the API price increase thing happened on reddit and my favourite client (infinity) became useless. I wasn't going to use the bloat-fest that is the reddit app, so I switched to Lemmy in "protest". Now I'm using eternity (a fork of infinity) and I have found a place in this community where I'm incredibly happy. I'm never going back to that shithole and I don't miss anything from there. There's a lot of karma-farming and every single person there reads exactly the same. There's no real discourse. The only times I use it (and through a web browser) is when I'm looking for solutions to some tech-related issue, and that is, if I haven't found the solution here already.

Bias for FOSS

I like open protocols and free software, and during the API exodus there was finally enough content that I wanted to jump ship.

of course I had annoyances with reddit, but I have annoyances with Lemmy too.

it's still preferable imho

My Reddit app stopped working…

I always wanted more decentralized alternatives. But none of them ever had any real users, then June 12, 2023 happened and I found out about this, that everyone is going to. And actually not a dead platform.

Also, booty: [email protected] (blocked by lemmy.world instance)

Started on Digg moved to reddit when Digg shot itself in the foot moved to lemmy when reddit shot itself in the foot. I will say I post and comment way more on here. Than I ever did on digg and reddit combined. This place feels more like old school forms than social media. Where people come out of the woodwork to be jerks. Ether because your views don't match theirs or you get some spelling or grammar that's not 100% perfect vs just engaging with your ideas for a constructive discussion. I can't tell how many times I have come back to a reply and gone " you make a good point." on lemmy.

I was one of the leaders of the big fuck spez on r/place, would have been a bit hypocritical if I'd stuck around after the that.

Edit: probably should add a photo

Had my account permabanned on Reddit by mods on a power trip.

Then they cut third party support so my app stopped working.

Centralised Social media is a disaster waiting to happen. You just can't trust corporates. They will be corrupted eventually.

Spez

The self-destruction of Reddit and the much greater toxicity. Leftist communities here are far more chill than Reddit as well.

I used Boost for Reddit but well, we know how that went. I really loved Boost. The dev pivoted to Lemmy, so I did as well. So far the experience has been pretty solid.

In no particular order as to why I left Reddit to join Lemmy:

• Reddit became a chore just to see good content. (This is even after the fact of filtering out unrelated or unwanted subreddits in my feed.)
• The comment sections on Reddit became worse and worse with more joke/meme comments than actually related comments, low effort comments, bot spam, and the burial of your comment for no one to see, (or care to reply to,) if you were to comment on a post or comment more than 24 hours after it's original posting. (Most of the time it felt like you had maybe 8 hours before it seemed to be a waste to comment.) Why would anyone stick around to comment or reply if nearly no one is going to engage?
• (Like many others have mentioned in the comments,) if you mentioned or talked about anything that wasn't considered good, you were often blasted with downvotes and/or comments.
• How often you saw rinse and repeat content, questions, and sometimes comments. (I'll admit. I took part in the rinse and repeat content 'sharing' and I wish I hadn't done it for so long. The karma whoring was real for me.)
• Concerns (then later the reality check,) about how much Reddit is an echo chamber.
• /u/Spez showing us who he really is.
• Not liking the direction Reddit was heading. Writing on the wall when they fired Victoria Taylor
• The API fiasco.
• Movement towards IPO.

Lemmy doesn't have any of these problems that I've experienced. Lemmy feels very much like a grass roots movement and I like that. I wish the communities that I am a part of had more active users, but that will more likely come with time.

Reddit is becoming WAY too nazi like. Say something that goes against they ideas and views? banned. fuck those fat fucks.

Reddits idiotic moderation

I'd quit stop using Reddit quite some tine ago, mostly a philosophical thing. Saw on Mastodon mention about a Reddit (aka Usenet 2.0) like replacement on Lemmy so, here I am.

I had been using Boost on Reddit, so I grabbed that as well as play with other apps like Jerboa, Raccoon.

Reddit is heavily American-centric.

At least on Lemmy, there can be multiple communities with the same name with different rules, focus, region, and culture.

I moved to Korea and started posting on r/Korea. I recorded a video of a big fire in Seoul, and because I couldn't find any news about it I uploaded it to my peertube instance and linked it on r/Korea.

The mods banned me for promoting my own website and said I should have uploaded it to YouTube.

So that resource was gone which was a bummer for me who just moved across the world and didn't speak Korean. That was my main reason to use reddit.

I already hosted mastodon and when the 3rd party amargeddon happened I heard about Lemmy. I was hoping that there would be a vibrant Korea community which never happened.

But somehow the UX is much better than on mastodon so I stayed. Later I switched the software from Lemmy to PieFed though.

I wanted to keep using Sync for Reddit and or Boost for Reddit, both clients were built for Lemmy now (as of this message Sync is quite broken though).

Even when I can keep using Sync for Reddit patched with Revanced I truly enjoy using clients such as Voyager (I missed Apollo a lot when I went from iOS to Android) and Summit, Eternity is a good alternative too.

IMHO Summit stands the best because it is the smoothest and behaves almost as good as Sync for Reddit did in its prime.

I was paid a large sum of money

I used other Fediverse platforms since about 2022 and was keen to find one that replicated a more reddit-like style.

Not to go too deep into politics but I’ve been banned from every social media platform (including Reddit!) for being vehemently anti fascist and anti capitalist.

I have some uh… opinions… about how to initiate change and they don’t involve peaceful marching with signs in circles and going home. Because we’ve done that for decades now and things are only getting worse and the capitalists are only solidifying their power especially with how fast technology is moving. We’re running out of time to overthrow these bastards before they make it impossible…

But anyways, those opinions aren’t allowed anywhere else and barely tolerated here (got banned from world after expressing my thoughts about Luigi). Too subversive and threatening I guess.

Being an anarchist is tough, it feels like online everyone hates you and accuses you of playing for the other team at least in American politics. As an anarchist I hate both teams who have the same fucking owners.

Their official phone app was, and still is, garbage. So I used a 3rd party app.

When Reddit killed API access, they did it in such a way that it killed that entire ecosystem abruptly. I'd have happily paid a small fee for API access to continue using the site, but no such option existed. Even at this point I'd still do it but that option still isn't there in a way that's useful.

After that, I found out that the 3rd party app i liked the most, Sync (on Android), had a Lemmy version. So I downloaded it to try it out. And here I am.

I got temp banned for saying antizionist things, while I was banned I began to look for an open source alternative which lead me here. Early on I used .world but after finding out about Blahaj Lemmy I switched :3

I quit Reddit many years ago, because I noticed the toxic culture was fucking with my mental health. Then I was on Mastodon for a few years. Lemmy started to exist in that timeframe and the premise sounded good, so I joined pretty early on, when there were only a handful of posts every week or so. But yeah, these days Mastodon is what I check only occasionally and this place has taken over, as I do like the format a lot more.

Joined about a year or two before the reddit API fiasco.

• I really don't like ads+tracking and didn't want my posts supporting a company like reddit
• I'm an advocate of FOSS
• reddit has inherent pressures to censor content based on mass media pressure and profit, and to permit anti-social far right trolls
• reddit punishes proxy users, where many instances here allow me to protect myself while posting here
• didn't like the new reddit layout - even before I came here, I was lurking for a year or two on alternate frontends
• I believed federation was a good strategy at building a better reddit alternative

But also, it actually had some communities at the time. If it were more dead, or unfederated, I'm not sure if I would have put as much effort in building communities.

I found out about Lemmy when the api thing happened but since Infinity was still working, I stayed. But because I like open source stuff and I wanna be part of the fediverse and support it, I joined Lemmy.

I already quit many corporate social media platforms in the years before, switching to decentralized alternatives for some of them (Mastodon mainly), but was still active on Reddit somehow. Then during the Reddit blackout protest, it was as good a time as any to check out and switch to Lemmy. Its downsides for me are also part of the upside: there is no endless scrolling to be done.

Reddit being ass

I got banned for inciting violence for saying Monty Williams should invest all the money he stole from Detroit back into the city and then promptly be killed with hammers as a sort of ritual sacrifice to cleanse Little Caesars Arena of his bad juju. It was just a joke and had lots of upvotes but guess it hurt a mods feelings.

I installed it alongside mastadon, and Lemmy was mode usable than mastadon

I guessed Reddit's trajectory would only go (mostly) downhill. I say mostly, because a few new features are useful, like comment searching. Awards are also back. Stayed in Lemmy because the community is more focused

Left reddit for /kbin.

/kbin slowly decomposed.

Landed on Voyager as it was similar to RiF.

I finally lost patience with almost every interaction on Reddit becoming a knife fight. No other platform I use(d) is like that. I'd post something, reply to something, or whatever and invariably someone would be needlessly aggressive and hostile. Any attempts to engage on anything beyond a surface level were either mocked or misunderstood ("it's not that deep bro" - get out of here with that attitude). In general it was socially exhausting and I was tired of it.

I've not found that's the case here, so this is what I use instead.

First came over with the API Reddit thing but realized Reddit is way better and Lemmy had zero content so I just went back as many did.

Then I got super into selfhosting and read a comment or post on that sub that asked why is the selfhosting sub not self hosted but thedonald is? That made me realize I thought Reddit was dumb and lemmy was my future. Now I try to invest in all selfhosted things

Early last year I decided I wanted to join social media so I'd periodically look up lists of different social media websites and I joined the ones I vibed with. Lemmy was on one of those lists. I've been having such a great time so far! 😃

Happy new year and welcome to Lemmy!

TL:DR; Reddit sucked, I got bored when it was offline. Lemmy has similar moderation BUT a transparent modlog. Post grouping, more niche communities I'd like to see.

I had first heard about Mastodon in early 2022, but since I wasn't into Twitter-style posting I kind of forgot about it and moved on.

The quality of discussions I was having on Reddit had noticeably declined over the years, and top posts were bots posting reposts, and the top comments under those posts started to become straight up copied from past top comments.

Compact mode got turned off, and later the apps had an outage in March 2023, so it was actually out of boredom when I had stumbled across Lemmy for the first time. It was a tiny thing of around a few hundred active users across all sites then.

API pricing scandal happened a few months later, my distaste for Reddit increased and simultaneously Lemmy's popularity exploded. So for June I made it my transition period to convince others to join, and in July I made my farewell post, swearing never to post or comment on Reddit ever again. I peek into Reddit on occasion but Lemmy had fully replaced my Reddit habit by September.

Conversations here have been far more lively, nuanced, mature. It doesn't always happen, as there are immature clowns and trolls here like anywhere, but we have reasonable people who are able to have a productive conversation while having positions at odds with each other. This virtually never happened on Reddit.

Tip for you, there are some types of comments allowed on some communities but banned or frowned upon on others. If you get a comment removed, check the modlog, filtering for your username as to why it may be. It may feel like censorship or power tripping, but at least it is more open and transparent. You can make an account on another server or post on different communities, if it's simply a matter of differing philosophies with the controlling admins.

I'd want to see grouping features of communities, and also there are a number of bounties on features that would be great to see. Development isn't fast so I just have to be patient. More niche topics would be cool to have.

Reddit.

Banned for a stupid reason from Reddit. I made a joke that a mod from r/entertainment didn’t like and got banned. I kept accidentally commenting on the subreddit because I often comment on posts without checking subreddit. Even though I had muted and blocked r/entertainment it kept popping up on my feed because it’s a general subreddit. Got banned from Reddit for trying to circumvent the ban.

When reddit started it's dive down the enshitification hole. As for things I wish it had, a lemmy version of multireddits would be nice, especially since we can end up with multiple communities for the exact same thing here.

I assume you mean the federation in general or at least the reddit alternatives like mbin or lemmy. this is asked every so often and there are sorta multiple waves and I came in response to the reddit api thing were it was really apparent how things were gonna be.

Tired of 14 YO "experts" and trolls.

Got a new phone and decided to use the opportunity to change up alot about how I do things, including using new social media platforms

Not sure which wave in the toilet bowl I rode in on, but I do know I will one day be flushed.

Don't hang on to tightly.

The reddit exodus during the API policy changes and 3rd party app shutdowns

I think I did try out Lemmy even before that. I remember making an account in Mander to try it out. Didn't use it much and forgot about it, even the username.
I didn't know about the Fediverse or Lemmy then. Didn't know about the progressive political background of Lemmy and the development too.

Then made this account. It's nice.
I still use reddit with Infinity for Reddit, since communities on my state, country and mother tongue are more active there(I'm from Kerala/India).

1. Multi-communities would be very good to have.
2. A feature to save draft comments/posts on the Jerboa app would be cool too. Not directly related to Lemmy tho

I think both have been brought to attention of the developers and they have plans to add that. Cool people.

Not reddit but the same

Apollo for Reddit died. Came here as it was supposedly a better experience. Used to be super active and use Reddit for hours a day for nearly a decade, now I barely use this platform at all as it’s insufferable and tiny tbh. The Linux Cultism here is off the charts and cringe as fuck, the communities are tiny and spammy and bloat the All page, so I block users and communities every day, and it’s been a pretty mediocre experience here for the year I’ve used it. Reddit is ofc a crapshoot now so it’s not worth going back, so I just use this platform for maybe 5-10m a day and that’s all my social media browsing for the day. So Reddit dying and not being replaced with a decent alternative actually cracked my addiction for endless scrolling which is super nice.