I found out about it because of a hacker news comment discussing the Reddit drama. I'm pretty upset that I didn't discover it on Reddit. I assume any mention of Lemmy was marked as spam or was I just not browsing the right communities?
Interesting. Up until a few days ago, there was a subreddit devoted to Reddit alternatives. It's how I learned about kbin and other options.
Some of the posts were, let's say, suspiciously negative. Lemmy/kbin were supposedly impossible to sign up for unless you had at least 2 degrees in CS. (I managed, somehow) Oh, and lemmy is run by tankies. (Wouldn't care if it were). And it looks like hot garbage. (I like it well enough. It's easier on the eyes than new or old reddit imo)
It seemed like there were too many alternatives to make a rational choice, but ALSO "they all suck so don't bother." It sounded overwhelming, but I just said fuckit and picked one.
I wasn't expecting a fully formed set of communities and content or a perfectly polished interface. And I wasn't expecting the interface to be filled with tons of features or to have no learning curve. This is actually a lot nicer that what I expected, which was a very new/basic site that will need to do a lot of growing.
I wouldn't sign up on an instance ran by nazis, I wouldn't sign up on instance ran by tankies. I don't think I'm being unreasonable connecting those two.