Ask Lemmy

I'd been flirting on and off with Lemmy for a year or so, not using it seriously (different username) but then u/spez deciding to sell user data to LLM's coupled with the general air of permanent aggro in just about every sub led me to finally ditch it. I've had to go back a couple of times and every time I did I regretted it. It's become Twitter level users intertwined with bot armies all flinging shit at each other.

1. RIP Apollo
2. I almost didn't join lemmy because the first time you sign up in the fediverse it feels like a big deal. What got me to actually follow through was to impulsively join a silly instance (RIP iusearchlinux.fyi)

Losing Apollo and what reddit did to the dev Also when Spez publicly said he admired Elon Musk

Kept getting banned for no reason. Last straw was when I was getting constsntly harrased and threatened by this massive dipshit who had been following me around for months. So I reported it to admins and I was the one who got banned for "inciting violence".

It took years for me to really disconnect.

• They introduced, with much fanfare, a mysterious new way of counting votes, and back-propagated it. Suddenly, all upvotes of past and present posts and comments got boosted by a factor of 8-9 or so. Felt hollow, manufactured, disingenuous.
• The founders admitted that in the early days, they made up lots of sock puppet accounts which talked to each other. That eerie, self-congratulatory sentiment never really left the site.
• Proven to tamper with comments.
• That derailed AMA with Julian Assange. It felt 99.9% inorganic.

And so much more.

My Discord registration was denied several times without explanation, so as soon as I discovered Lemmy, I came over and never looked back.

I prefer to support free, open, and decentralized solutions to things and I want to help the Fediverse grow.

I loved the Apollo app which Reddit destroy by changing the terms of their agreement with.

But more than that, the day after the apocalypse— I forget what they called it, but basically every smart person from Reddit left and the site became dog shite.

When israel started their Genocide the entire frontpage was filled with Zionist bots and any criticism of israel would lead to a ban.

All while IDF propaganda of beheadedbabies was spammed all over the place.

The new API rules in advance of the IPO rubbed me the wrong way. The multiple monetization schemes were already pretty creepy as it was.

And the Fediverse feels better all around.

1. My favourite 3rd party app stopped working
2. Reddit is filled with bots nowadays
3. Many of my favourite places on Reddit have been flooded by right-wing reactionaries

I got banned lol. Not even a "Okay maybe I shouldn't have said that" ban, near as I understand it I was just one of the last mod protest holdouts so they were like, "aite fuck this guy"

Not one particular reason in general, just the site's atmosphere in general was getting tiresome. Everyone trying to be the funniest person in the room to get the most upvotes. There's a place for that, and I still use Reddit from time to time, but for learning about current affairs Lemmy is much preferable.

Boost stopped working. The Reddit app is ass. It was pretty great at first, and I still prefer to Reddit. I have noticed a lot more negativity lately.

They made things worse and invalidated everyone else's hard work before demanding to be paid for that while they live on the content we produce. Yeah get fucked. It don't work that way.

They banned me but I was still able to see the subreddits on Reddit is Fun. When that died I came here. Reddit is gross and other than search results I haven't used it since.

It wasn't just the API thing, but also how all the mods handled it. So many Reddit mods are pathetic losers that will throw us all under the bus to hold on to their petty power.

The official app was obnoxious, so I used a better 3rd party one. Then, they borked it. And then when I tried to just use the website it was obnoxious too. And then when I tried to use the old.website, It sucked specifically for my phone.

I don't want to deal with that, so I hopped aboard the bandwagon that was going on at the time, and its all been... pretty okay, actually.

I think my profile pic says it all