I've been doing the Internet social thing since #hottub and alt.religion.kibology. My services were thus federated before it was cool.
I came to Reddit from Digg after migrating from Slashdot. Made a lot of comments and answered a lot of questions about a lot of different shit; posted a lot of pictures of foodporn. Some of it was pretty handy to a lot of people over time, if the upvotes were any indication.
About 2 weeks ago, I Power Delete Suite-ed the whole of it, editing everything to 'null' ahead of time. Since then, I've been waiting for straggler subs to re-appear (and there've been quite a few!), so I could give my comments within the same treatment.
Today I finally deleted my account.
Looking back, I feel like it's a another chapter of my life closed. My relationship with the collective Reddit userbase has been more significant to me than have been several of those with people with whom I've had sexual intercourse, and certainly more so than with most of my past Internet relationships (never forgot you, though, lara (@umn); PM me if you see this ;)). I now feel vaguely adrift, hoping that Lemmy "makes it," as it seems to satisfy the majority - if not the entirety - of my immediate technical and entitative specifications, but also acutely aware that I'm really after the interaction with the high points of the Reddit userbase.
That's really the thing: Reddit did a really good job of making the Internet social thing doable, both for us net-native, "socially awkward" folks for whom Lemmy is a snap, and for everyone else at the same time. Through occasionally-careful regulation and monolithicism, Reddit did much both to establish the modern incarnation of the venerable BBS and to make it accessible to more everyday, less weathered/jaded folks than I, while still providing a relatively no-nonsense interface for those of us with a more directly functional bent.
I hope that on this, my round 2 (or is it 3 now?) of the federated/monolithic cycle, the good guys win, i.e. open Internet culture gains enough momentum from the Reddit implosion to make something in the Fediverse the new crowd favorite long enough to keep it safe from corporate compromise in the long run.
While I only had my account for 6 years, I feel similar.
I made a promise to myself: when boost for reddit stops working, I will not only uninstall it, I will permanently leave reddit.
So that's what I did and I will never look back
Close to 13 years, if not just over. Started as a lurker. Then saw something that I felt that I really needed to share my thoughts on. Of course it was just a mumble in a crowd, but it obviously meant enough to me to go through the effort of making an account.
I can't even remember what it was.
Over 100k karma and 3000 comments.
Reddit was by no means small in 2010, I don't claim to be a pioneer, but it was a different feeling place. Even back then RES was a must for desktop browsing. And 3rd party apps were the only option for mobile browsing. BaconReader was my choice. I think it was actually the first app I ever paid for.
Over time I tried different apps that were being developed and tried to bring a new thing to the table, such as card view (couldn't ever get away with that) or recently the ability to see deleted/removed comments (until Reddit started blocking certain API stuff that allowed that). Rather poetically found myself back on Baconreader just in time for the shutdown.
I don't think Lemmy necessarily feels the same as Reddit back then, but I wonder if that is more due to me changing and the communities that I follow, but it is scratching the itch of something to browse and occupy my mind, discover new information and feel like I'm among similar people when I'm procrastinating, shitting or something else.
Never used the 3rd party apps, but I can understand why people were upset.
I wasn't on reddit for long. Maybe a 5 years at most. But my biggest concern with it all were just the people themselves and I don't necessarily think there's anything that can be done about that. There's always going to be just enough shitty people to make a bad time. The only difference with reddit is the people that would make a bad time had the authority to ban you. And adding that Big reddit gives no fucks about the end user, well, it was just time to go