I'm an old reddit user, going back to '08. Like many of you I'm sure, I've seen the site rise and fall. Killing 3p apps was a major blow, along with the purge of so many subreddits, and now you have to log in to even view it...it's getting real bad.
I had heard of the fediverse back when Mastadon was first announced. Briefly checked it out, but didn't give it much mind. This morning I was browsing reddit and read a thread about the continual degradation of the site. Someone mentioned Lemmy (new to me), but I thought "hey! I'll check it out, why not''. A brief google search gave me some iOS apps, and I wound up using Voyager (10/10 btw, Voyager reminds me a lot of Apollo in it's hayday). I applied/logged in....and just...wow. Wow y'all. Lemmy reminds me so much of reddit circa late 00's. Sure, there is a smaller user base, but so was reddit at the time. I remember the subreddit you were supposed to go to when you made an acccount and introduce yourself :D
And here on Lemmy, nothing looks like obvious bot posts. Content seems real. In correlation with that, the post titles seem pretty reasonable and not based around rage bait / click bait.
After setting it up on my phone, I found the desktop site (I'm on a laptop some times) and I adore a.lemmy.zip. To me its the perfect layout. The other incredible thing about Lemmy is just how seamless it was to set up, on both mobile and desktop. It feels super accessible to non-technical users, which is something I don't think is true for a lot of fediverse things.
But seriously, I used to adore reddit so much. Watching it fall apart has made me sadder and sadder over time. There was seemingly nothing in its place. I really felt like that era of internet over entirely. Just my first few hours on Lemmy has made me realize I was wrong, in the best way possible. It gave me chills. I'm looking forward to this platform growing. So anyway, thanks for any/all of you who developed/are developing Lemmy. It really, truly feels like a return to the golden age of social.
So we probably need to define exactly what the "what happened to Reddit" is, but in general whatever that thing is, it absolutely will happen to Lemmy.
The trick is that we can just run to the next instance.
On Reddit you can really like video games. So you subscribe to /r/gaming. But then that becomes garbage so you subscribe to /r/Games. But then that becomes garbage so you subscribe to /r/TrueGaming, or /r/TrueGames or whatever and the list goes on and on. Maybe you always have to keep jumping ship. Now you're subscribed to /r/NoSeriouslyTheBestGaming.
But what do you do when Reddit becomes garbage?
When the core is rotten what do you do?
On Reddit you're fucked.
On Lemmy, you go elsewhere. Lemmy.world sucks? Go to piefed.world. That sucks? Go to the next thing.
The core of Lemmy can't be rotten, because the core of Lemmy can just be tossed aside.
Yes, it's all probably going to take a bit more work, but a small jump or a small shift isn't much at all when you really look at it.