Ask Lemmy

Yeah API shit was the final straw, but it was a long time coming. Honestly I'd switch way sooner had there been any alternative. I and a lot of other people tried, but nothing ever really took off even though the systems were there.

It's about adoption, but mainstream adoption is also what kills a site like this.

I liked my third-party app, so when it moved to Lemmy, I moved with it.

I also didn't like the reaction to losing it from many on the subs I used. Most had the opinion of "fuck them, I want to use my sub again", so I left Reddit and haven't gone back.

Reddit banned me for reporting bots lol.

The death of RiF helped it along too

Some guy named Spez fucking up his website

APIpocalypse as others said brought me here. The smaller, more personal community feel kept me here.

Reddit API bullshit. But mostly I wanted to support the dev for reddit sync.

The apipocalypse same as everyone else. I do miss my niche communities, and my 4000+ internet points, but as an open source enthusiast (I use arch btw) I'm very much at home here 😁

I had almost exclusively used reddit through the Relay app since 2012 or something like that. Relay is still available actually, and I'd even be willing to pay for its subscription if most of the money went to the dev. I didn't like the idea of reddit making money off of a negative change they forced on me, it was bad enough that they trampled on the goodwill and efforts of the community.

Also I had used reddit since 2010, when it was much smaller. Most of reddit had grown too large, leaving only niche communities at a size where I felt it was worth interacting. I still miss some of the cooler small communities (and occasionally check on them through the API bypassing apps Geddit or Stealth), but Lemmy is generally at a size that I'm much happier to interact with.

I created my first account on sopuli.xyz on the 28th of April 2022, some days after leaving Twitter to join Mastodon, because I wanted to bring content to the fediverse (my ADHD brain wanted me to hyperfocus on the fediverse at that time).

Same reason why I left Digg years ago...

I do not want my information filtered through an opaque algorithm. My worldview is much too important to surrender to some corporation. I want to understand and have some control over any feed I use. My media diet includes Lemmy, AP news, PubMed/science journals, and conversations with friends and coworkers.

I am very happy with Lemmy so far. Some have pointed out there is less content on Lemmy, but that is a bonus in my book. It is not healthy to spend hours scrolling.

During reddits API fiasco. Specifically the app I was using (boost) recommend everybody move to Lemmy and I obliged. Used jerboa but as soon as Boost for Lemmy was launched I immediately hopped on board. I hope the rest of reddit users comes to their senses. The protest was so utterly pathetic and cowardly.

I was already on my way out of reddit before the API pricing changes, but not being able to use my choice of app was the final nail in the coffin. I had noticed just how much time I was spending looking at my phone doing nothing but scrolling through stuff, reading things I didn't care for. I spend so much time looking at screens as part of work, recreation, and socialising that I knew I needed to drop my usage. Return to monke.

Using federated services after going cold turkey for about 2 months, I now have a much healthier relationship with it. I like how its smaller and I don't get the feeling of missing out on something if I wasn't constantly checking. I started feeling calmer and generally happier.

Realistically, I just thought it would be slightly better, just because it was a little bit lesser known as a website, and I am consistently longing for older styles of internet engagement. The de-federated nature is nice, sure, but I really don't tend to care about that shit too much. Reddit had their whole api debacle, I'm sure old-reddit getting canned is on the table if not for apparently necessary moderation stuff that's still locked behind it. But I dunno, I still have browser extensions on mobile firefox that send me to a perfect libreddit redirect that works almost every time, so functionally it's sort of identical to what I was already doing, if not more convenient, because I don't have to deal with a reddit app substitute's search engine when I want to find stuff, I can just look it up, click on the link, blam, redirect. Not a big issue. The biggest problem for me with the API shit is that everyone decided to throw a bitch fit and completely delete their posts, so like a quarter of the things saved to this useful compilation of internet knowledge is kinda just gone. Except for unddit, but that shit's probably going to die at some point now that it doesn't serve a non-archival purpose.

With that said, I think I've found lemmy to be basically the exact same as reddit, give or take. It is just as relentlessly annoying as reddit is, and it has less diversity in terms of subject matter, as a whole. There's basically politics, i.e. inevitable "both-sides"-ism and vote shaming, technology stuff, i.e. stuff that is just linux, and like, assorted general posts, which are going to be comprised of either of the former two categories of thing, and gen-x pop culture references. Any other topic that comes up is a complete toss up, and will probably get commented on by a bunch of brainlets who think they know more than they do, but are actually just parroting the super standard talking points, or whatever they learned in high school.

You also get reddit posting habits, where people tend to mostly respond to the lowest effort meme posts, or horrible headlined news articles, rather than well-written posts or longer writeups. You also get that annoying thing where people just reply with sarcastic remarks that only serve their own self-satisfaction, instead of being critical of their own engagement for a half-second. I guess those are mostly just modern internet phenomenon in general, but it doesn't make it any less annoying, for sure.

The problem you will inevitably find with any forum organized around topics is that there's really just not that much to talk about, for most subject matters, so you either prevent communities from forming wholesale, or, more realistically, you just get insular garbage communities where people end up repeating almost the same exact conversations over and over. I think probably the unsung reasons that most old forums died isn't because of centralization, you know, digg and reddit, but it's because they all talked about everything already. Have a post? Oops, someone already asked that question in 2009, here's the thread, should've looked in the catalogue, you should go there, looks like it also never got answered and it's inactive, fuck you have a nice day. Reddit's only addition to that is the ability for people to post le relevant xkcd link, and we kinda already had/have somethingawful for that, for when you want to just talk, more than you wanna actually talk about something specific.

More seriously, I think my biggest problem is just that reddit, and by extension lemmy, kinda breaks the conventional format of the forum, in favor of something that kinda works less well but is more low-rent to engage with. Used to be that you would just browse a bunch of post titles, click on one, and get greeted with likely a huge customized post, maybe a compilation of all the past posts on a topic, maybe a couple links and natively hosted images thrown in there for good measure. Most reddit posts are just like, a single article, or a single video of something stupid happening. That's a major downgrade, imo.

Went to Mastodon when Musk took over at Twitter and so knew about Lemmy by the time Spez decided Musk had some great ideas about how to run a social media platform.

Years ago I was looking for alternatives. I was pissed at Reddit not banning my moderator account, even if they went out of the way to ban all my other accounts. That delivered a clear "we don't want you here... unless you're working for us, for free, you sucker" message that I was not willing to accept.

Being banned from Reddit

RiF reaching senility.

Came to /kbin first, and still here sometimes but Voyager wins on my phone after Neurospicy Artemis disappeared.

Another API leaver here. I'm curious what their non-bot population was pre and post dumbassery.

Curiosity

Seeing the racists on Reddit cheer genocide.

The Reddit API nonsense. Truth be told though, I used to go back for a few very specific subs but the site had gotten so bad that I cannot bring myself to use it any more

Privacy, ethics and morals .

Apps simulating reddit when it was good. Using Thunder atm

I always like to jump ship to open source projects, I ditched Facebook back in like 2010 for Disaspora and Frendica. Once I found out about Lemmy it was just a matter of time before I jumped ship, because that's just how I roll.

I liked the fact that it was smaller and filled with like-minded individuals

Cookies, I am still waiting

Saw a working link aggregator with good comments on a lot of topics. Thought it'd be fun to follow. Seems to work pretty well.

Got banned from spezbook

pro-nazi moderator bias on reddit - failure to remove hate speech, and retaliation against users who report it

Regreddit made me do it (the API bullshit).

I freely admit that I got banned because I replied to some cringe ruzzian moskal vatnik psyop on r/ABoringDystopia with actual facts.

Went looking for a news aggregator that wasn't trying to cater to propagandists.