I got temp banned for saying antizionist things, while I was banned I began to look for an open source alternative which lead me here. Early on I used .world but after finding out about Blahaj Lemmy I switched :3

I got banned for inciting violence for saying Monty Williams should invest all the money he stole from Detroit back into the city and then promptly be killed with hammers as a sort of ritual sacrifice to cleanse Little Caesars Arena of his bad juju. It was just a joke and had lots of upvotes but guess it hurt a mods feelings.

I guessed Reddit's trajectory would only go (mostly) downhill. I say mostly, because a few new features are useful, like comment searching. Awards are also back. Stayed in Lemmy because the community is more focused

I wanted to keep using Sync for Reddit and or Boost for Reddit, both clients were built for Lemmy now (as of this message Sync is quite broken though).

Even when I can keep using Sync for Reddit patched with Revanced I truly enjoy using clients such as Voyager (I missed Apollo a lot when I went from iOS to Android) and Summit, Eternity is a good alternative too.

IMHO Summit stands the best because it is the smoothest and behaves almost as good as Sync for Reddit did in its prime.

First came over with the API Reddit thing but realized Reddit is way better and Lemmy had zero content so I just went back as many did.

Then I got super into selfhosting and read a comment or post on that sub that asked why is the selfhosting sub not self hosted but thedonald is? That made me realize I thought Reddit was dumb and lemmy was my future. Now I try to invest in all selfhosted things

I finally lost patience with almost every interaction on Reddit becoming a knife fight. No other platform I use(d) is like that. I'd post something, reply to something, or whatever and invariably someone would be needlessly aggressive and hostile. Any attempts to engage on anything beyond a surface level were either mocked or misunderstood ("it's not that deep bro" - get out of here with that attitude). In general it was socially exhausting and I was tired of it.

I've not found that's the case here, so this is what I use instead.

Joined about a year or two before the reddit API fiasco.

• I really don't like ads+tracking and didn't want my posts supporting a company like reddit
• I'm an advocate of FOSS
• reddit has inherent pressures to censor content based on mass media pressure and profit, and to permit anti-social far right trolls
• reddit punishes proxy users, where many instances here allow me to protect myself while posting here
• didn't like the new reddit layout - even before I came here, I was lurking for a year or two on alternate frontends
• I believed federation was a good strategy at building a better reddit alternative

But also, it actually had some communities at the time. If it were more dead, or unfederated, I'm not sure if I would have put as much effort in building communities.

It was a new technology that had released and I was keeping up with its progress. I didn’t use it super religiously until Reddit banned a bunch of leftist subreddits around 2020 though because the user base was still pretty small.

I installed it alongside mastadon, and Lemmy was mode usable than mastadon

Left reddit for /kbin.

/kbin slowly decomposed.

Landed on Voyager as it was similar to RiF.

Happy new year and welcome to Lemmy!

TL:DR; Reddit sucked, I got bored when it was offline. Lemmy has similar moderation BUT a transparent modlog. Post grouping, more niche communities I'd like to see.

I had first heard about Mastodon in early 2022, but since I wasn't into Twitter-style posting I kind of forgot about it and moved on.

The quality of discussions I was having on Reddit had noticeably declined over the years, and top posts were bots posting reposts, and the top comments under those posts started to become straight up copied from past top comments.

Compact mode got turned off, and later the apps had an outage in March 2023, so it was actually out of boredom when I had stumbled across Lemmy for the first time. It was a tiny thing of around a few hundred active users across all sites then.

API pricing scandal happened a few months later, my distaste for Reddit increased and simultaneously Lemmy's popularity exploded. So for June I made it my transition period to convince others to join, and in July I made my farewell post, swearing never to post or comment on Reddit ever again. I peek into Reddit on occasion but Lemmy had fully replaced my Reddit habit by September.

Conversations here have been far more lively, nuanced, mature. It doesn't always happen, as there are immature clowns and trolls here like anywhere, but we have reasonable people who are able to have a productive conversation while having positions at odds with each other. This virtually never happened on Reddit.

Tip for you, there are some types of comments allowed on some communities but banned or frowned upon on others. If you get a comment removed, check the modlog, filtering for your username as to why it may be. It may feel like censorship or power tripping, but at least it is more open and transparent. You can make an account on another server or post on different communities, if it's simply a matter of differing philosophies with the controlling admins.

I'd want to see grouping features of communities, and also there are a number of bounties on features that would be great to see. Development isn't fast so I just have to be patient. More niche topics would be cool to have.

Reddit.

Early last year I decided I wanted to join social media so I'd periodically look up lists of different social media websites and I joined the ones I vibed with. Lemmy was on one of those lists. I've been having such a great time so far! 😃

Reddit is heavily American-centric.

At least on Lemmy, there can be multiple communities with the same name with different rules, focus, region, and culture.

Not sure which wave in the toilet bowl I rode in on, but I do know I will one day be flushed.

Don't hang on to tightly.

Reddit being ass

Tired of 14 YO "experts" and trolls.

I was part of the reddit exodus over the 3rd party app bullshit. I saw a post from one of the bigger servers bitching about how you shouldn't join lemmygrad or Hexbear because they are full of tankies so I made a Lemmygrad account. After Hexbear refederated I added a few of their comms and realized I jive more with their community than with Lemmygrad so I made a HB account and added a bunch of my old Lemmygrad comms to that.

I wish the hobby comms were more active. That's really the only reason I still have my reddit account.

In no particular order as to why I left Reddit to join Lemmy:

• Reddit became a chore just to see good content. (This is even after the fact of filtering out unrelated or unwanted subreddits in my feed.)
• The comment sections on Reddit became worse and worse with more joke/meme comments than actually related comments, low effort comments, bot spam, and the burial of your comment for no one to see, (or care to reply to,) if you were to comment on a post or comment more than 24 hours after it's original posting. (Most of the time it felt like you had maybe 8 hours before it seemed to be a waste to comment.) Why would anyone stick around to comment or reply if nearly no one is going to engage?
• (Like many others have mentioned in the comments,) if you mentioned or talked about anything that wasn't considered good, you were often blasted with downvotes and/or comments.
• How often you saw rinse and repeat content, questions, and sometimes comments. (I'll admit. I took part in the rinse and repeat content 'sharing' and I wish I hadn't done it for so long. The karma whoring was real for me.)
• Concerns (then later the reality check,) about how much Reddit is an echo chamber.
• /u/Spez showing us who he really is.
• Not liking the direction Reddit was heading. Writing on the wall when they fired Victoria Taylor
• The API fiasco.
• Movement towards IPO.

Lemmy doesn't have any of these problems that I've experienced. Lemmy feels very much like a grass roots movement and I like that. I wish the communities that I am a part of had more active users, but that will more likely come with time.

I was one of the leaders of the big fuck spez on r/place, would have been a bit hypocritical if I'd stuck around after the that.

Edit: probably should add a photo

• Most of the content is reposts and bots
• Moderators remove anything they dont like(Creating an echo chamber)
• Comments are mostly low-effort jokes or bots, not valuable discussion

Got a new phone and decided to use the opportunity to change up alot about how I do things, including using new social media platforms