What brought you to Lemmy?

The reason for the Reddit protests could have been justified, but the CEO's response couldn't.

He messed up, doubled down, and then continued to mess up. I don't know why the rest of the team let him keep talking

It was lying about the Apollo developer for me. He lied, he got caught, and then said (paraphrasing), "wow, he's a terrible person for recording our conversation without my knowledge! I don't want to work with him anymore anyway!"
- The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer.
That's what sold it for me.
I don't mind if reddit wants to make some money on their API, but giving app developers barely a month to respond, having insanely high prices, throwing away the relationships they built with app devs, and not responding to community feedback around the issue at all was all too much.
It was the AMA that was the last straw for me, on top of everything before. It had been going downhill, but that was where I lost all hope it would improve.
That is capitalism man 🤷🏽‍♂️. The CEO is emperor.
- Truth. Lemmy by design resists the influence of capital by being federated.

Reddit was killed, no, murdered.

What do you mean? 😂
- Probably that all the things that made reddit "good" were killed for the sake of profit.

Reddit killing 3rd party apps

A link on Reddit.

It was immediately after spez's fatuous AMA. I wasn't specifically planning to leave Reddit, but I had never really been satisfied there, so I was open to the idea. And I ran across a link to join-lemmy.org, so I followed it, just to see what it was about. I had no idea then that following that link would end up being the last thing I did on Reddit, but that's the way it worked out.

+1 for the third party Reddit app ban.

Reddit threatening to ban /r/piracy made me setup a failover in raddle. Raddle restricting sign-ups for months made me switch the failover to lemmy.ml. Reddit protests made me setup lemmy.dbzer0.com and make it the primary location for /c/piracy

I was kinda curious why Raddle wasn't your first go-to. This explains it.

Reddit forcing me to use their shitty app

Dude, it's so bad. The hordes of people defending reddit, saying, "the official app isn't even bad! Stop complaining! You're just too autistic to learn something new!" we're either liars or have no idea what a good app looks like. The official reddit app has tons of ads that are designed to look like regular posts. It's so stuttery. It constantly loses your place. You can't change the home page sort. Read posts get demoted, so after it refreshes on its own without your permission, you can't find your read posts again.
It's by far one of the worst apps I have ever used. How it has even been released is beyond me.
- Bots. Many pro-reddit pro-official-app comments were proven to be bots during the height of the protests.
  Reddit literally has a long, long history of using bots to make the site seem like it has more engagement, even from the early days of the site.
- I used the official for about idk most of my Reddit time (which was only 2 or 3 years) and Apollo for 11 months and would’ve been a year but yeah :(
  Anyways I didn’t realize how much I disliked the layout of the official app until I switched to Apollo
Which app do you use for Lemmy?
- I’m personally using Voyager and so happy with it so far
- Right now I'm on Jerboa. I tried Liftoff for a while but it had some weird bugs, and development on it seems to have slowed down a bit in the last few months. Thought it was very promising however, might try it again in the future.
- memmy, voyager didnt stick with me that much
- Mostly Jerboa nowadays and Sync nowadays. I used to use Voyager and Connect and Liftoff, which are all good also in their own ways, but Jerboa and Sync seemed to have the best functionality for me in terms of interacting with different communities and instances across the fediverse. I also need to look into Thunder one of these days.

Many things, but ultimately Spez

Yup. I didn't even use third party apps, I paid for Reddit premium, etc. I was exactly what they wanted as a customer. However, the way they treated the community beyond the actual decisions they made was unacceptable.
I'd been wanting a mastodon like Reddit for a while anyways, so when lemmy reached a critical mass, I signed up.
- What's your instance like? I've never seen that one before.

They killed BaconReader

Same, but Apollo. I’m still grumpy about it.
I came from relay, which is one of the few apps that still work. But it had to become reddits bitch to do so.
No nsfw subs, and soon there will be a monthly subscription fee, with multiple tiers depending on what API call limit you need.
And reddit still doesn't provide an API for new features like reddit chat, nor the rest, but those I never cared about.
Relay is on life support, I hope the dev realises that this is a stopgap. Reddit hasn't maintained feature parity between the 3rd party API and their internal one for years, which was fine when it was free, but paid services usually come with support. The reddit API isn't going to have that. This is just a way for reddit to seem like they want 3rd party apps to still be a thing, while still in reality killing them.
i used tje official Reddit app then switched to fatbird (fatbird still works) also i tried using spyke because the name was similar to Skype but i could sign up

Came from reddit like many others. I had been unhappy with the artificial and corporate-sterile feel of reddit for a while. And second to that, the way subreddits were set up made it rife with powermod agendas and no good alternatives to escape them.

I much prefer the "interconnected islands" of lemmy that reduces the ability of anyone to advertise, astroturf, or have ownership of the whole system. It feels looser and puts more control back in the hands of users, which is refreshing.

Same here. A lot of people (including myself until a week ago) are either oblivious or fooling themselves about what is happening to Reddit. Changes are being made with the sole purpose of boosting revenue ahead of their IPO. Reddit is no longer focused on improving the user experience, but has switched to full monetization mode. That will only get worse now. It is a slow-moving train wreck.
And, yeah, some Reddit subs are over-moderated and arbitrary. Looking at you /r/boardgames.
It was not easy to figure out Lemmy at first, and the sign up process a few months ago was difficult (for me). But now that I'm on board with a good app, Lemmy is just great. It feels like early-days Reddit before enshittification set in.

I had been flip-flopping for a while, but I figured that it was finally time to get off of Digg.

I prefer FOSS stuff.

I mean, technically, the code to reddit is open source.
- Can you elaborate on this?

When Reddit killed Apollo I deleted my ten year old account and never went back.

Deleting mine now...
Edit: done

General interest in noncommercial social media. My Lemmy account is two years old, and I've been on Mastodon for longer than that. I did start spending a lot more time here once reddit axed 3rd party apps.

Reddit killing off 3rd party apps. Also Lemmy feels more free as I don't need a set amount of karma to be able to submit a post or comment. I had a lurker account on Reddit that was verified and everything, but there were times when I wanted to post and when I did only I could see my comment.

RiF stopped working on Reddit

A desire for a fresh start most of all.
To be more open and friendly with others and to have some interaction. Not to be like the lurker I used to be :)
The whole reddit exodus was a good reason to follow through on it.

Also, lemmy has the potential to be the better platform, period. Federation is a fresh start for the entire concept of social media services
Federation comes with some drawbacks, but the upsides mean that the type of bullshit that mainstream social media has started doing can be fought back for real.
That's the horse I want to bet on, even if it's not in a competitive position right now.

Reddit killing off third party apps. I'll blow a leper before I use the official one. Lemmy was a good enough replacement at the time, and nowadays I only visit reddit when I need super specific information that might've been asked in the past 10 years.

Same. Since ApolloApp was disabled, I decided to call it quits.
Using the app Voyager for Lemmy. And it's almost like being back on reddit.
- Same with Boost. Got Jerboa, then Connect, and now back on Boost.
Yeah, I'll still check out Reddit when it pops up in search results, but I'm not on there passing the time like I used to be.

Because spez killed Apollo.

Who is Spez?
- Reddit ceo username (on Reddit)

Reddit banned r/chapotraphouse and this site was made.

are people still on the chapo discord? that was my life raft while chapo.chat was getting stood up.
well, first it was r/moretankiechapo until that also got banned
- then genzedong, quarantined
  at this point all that's left is true anon and some dead theory subs

My web browser then Android apps.

Ah the ol' "I'm gonna take this question strictly literally" response.
- And thus, we can determine that he came from Reddit

I've been waiting for Lemmy to take off since 2019. Reddit's API change made me jump at the opportunity to stop using it.

It all started when someone's reddit AMA got canceled due to the protests...

Sync stopped working on reddit.

The Reddit fiasco.

What made me stay was the concept of federation, and how similar to Reddit Lemmy actually is. I do find that my "home" feed gets stale compared to the refreshing of content Reddit would always have every time I checked, but I find there's a different style of discussion on Lemmy compared to Reddit, allowing for a more broad perspective than what one platform can provide to me.

As that sentence implies, I still use Reddit, but I divide my time now between there and here, with more niche communities being found on Reddit, focusing on FOSS and technology via Lemmy, and larger events (politics, world news, etc) being spread between both.

fuck u/spez

Apollo shutting down and the original Reddit app being 💩💩💩 Plus the way everything was handled by Reddit. So gross!

That is capitalism 🤷🏽‍♂️. The CEOs are emperors.
- Yap, Now slowly withdrawing, one person at a time.
Another Apollo refugee.

Just when you thought you were out?

Honestly started using Mastodon right at the start of the Twitter announcements, although I had never used Twitter. I was getting worried about where most things online were trendeing and tended to use reddit for a big chunk of my online browsing. I wasn't really expecting reddit to implode so quickly after Twitter, but as I was already using mastodon another federated platform seemed good to join

Reddit's recent API changes making it difficult to moderate the communities I was in charge of was the final straw for me. Tbh I'm surprised the racism, transphobia, and rampant sinophobia didn't scare me away sooner.

I'm digging hexbear and the lemmyverse, y'all are cool as fuck... mostly.

I could handle the occasional racist or belligerent troll when I had proper modtools on mobile. I can't sit down at a computer three times for it, though. Not for free.
I wish talklittle had released a version of RIF where users could input their own, free-tier OAuth key, but...

EMPRESS. Funny enough that she got banned on this server a few days after I registered.

That's hilarious. Good on the admins for banning her transphobic ass.

Ads, ads, and more ads. Especially once my feed got flooded with that “He Gets Us” bullshit every other post. I finally found out about Apollo only about a month before the APIcalypse happened, and the thought of going back was draining. I participated in r/place as a last hoorah before deleting Reddit, and that’s where I saw the Lemmy ad… Haven’t looked back since

I'll second the He Gets Us ads. They were extra obnoxious after learning more about the background of that campaign.
Peeking back into Reddit now is jarring. I've gotten accustomed to no ads here. Ads are endemic over there, to the point of being a major distraction from the actual site content.
- The idea of religious ads as a whole is just abhorrent and disgusting
uBlock Origin + Raspberry Pi with Pi-Hole and a strict block list with regex.
I haven't seen an ad on the internet in years. Even on reddit.
Reddit's crimes were worse than just it's ads.
- Never had the energy to muster to figure out that whole process… also I’m on apartment-wide wifi
  Yeah, Reddit did a lot of shitty things, but the constant religious ads shoved in my face was just the final push that made the entire user experience itself annoying for me
- Most of the front-page posts on reddit were sponsored content, so you still saw plenty unless you have a good way of blocking those out. On Lemmy I have a blocklist a mile long so I’m not constantly inundated with crap I really don’t care about.

Infinity broke, so now I have something new to scroll through while on the toilet.

The API pricing change and the closing of r/ProgrammerHumor.

It is still active
- The original plan was to close indefinitely. It became active again after Reddit's threats to change the moderators of big protesting subreddits.

Reddit has been in decline for over 10 years. It has been slowly getting worse and worse. I have been seeking a replacement for a long time.

About three and a half years ago I heard about Lemmy and made an account to check it out. Promptly forgot about it for a few years until reddit pissed me off again.

Wasn’t Reddit openly okay with racism, homophobia and sexism until like 3 years ago?
- Pretty sure they're still openly okay with them. Not the reason I was looking to leave, though. Unlike a lot of people, I wasn't scared of the Lemmy developers politics.
- They're still okay with all of those things. They just got better are pretending they are not. For example, if you say something obviously sexist, you will be called out and downvoted. But if you say something sexist against someone that the hivemind already decided they don't like, then it's A-OK to be sexist.
- From the outset (2008 account, lurking a few months before that) they had a policy of "so long as it's not illegal." I found this admirable at the time. After T_D, yeah, not so much.

spez

Fuck spez

Ultimately the killing of sync brought me. But reddit just isn't what it used to be. Every gaming sub is just a bunch of cry babies complaining about the game that used to be good but isn't. Every post is just someone else reposting the same popular phrase or meme. It just over all sucks. I've actually tried using the app and the site it just doesn't work well. It doesn't even show content from all of my subs like sync used to. Now I'm using sync on lemmy and its passable. I actually kind of like the smaller user base. Less hive mind bull shit.

The front page of reddit is so bad now. It's like 1/4 feel good memes, 1/4 variations of rate my pic subs, 1/4 ask reddit questions with the same answers I've seen a ton of times before, and 1/4 news and reviews. It's somehow bland pop culture nonsense mixed with whining and anger.
I can get the first and last 1/4 from Lemmy now and the other stuff I don't care about, so I get through the Reddit first few pages way faster than I used to now (when I'm browsing bored at work).

The Free Software

Did you have to pay for Reddit?
- The free software this guy is refering to is a matter of liberty, not price.
- when people say free software, they usually mean free as in free speech, rather than free as in free beer, as the saying goes. it's not about money, it's about if you have a piece of software, having the freedom to use, modify and share it how you'd like.

Participated in the blackout protest and simultaneously spun up my own Lemmy instance for a play. Decided I liked it so much (and u/spez was being a pigheaded tool) so went back and deleted all my Reddit posts and comments, before deleting my account itself.

Haven't looked back. I've (re)discovered the joy of balancing my time with other hobbies and passions, rather than endlessly scrolling Reddit.

In roughly the same boat here except for creating an instance :)

I used to use RiF (Reddit is Fun). Then it died. I searched for an alternative to Reddit.

I'm so sad that RIF's creator decided to move over to tildes instead of lemmy. I would pay a lot of money for RIF on lemmy. Not that I dislike Voyager. It's great. It's just not what I used for the past 8 years.
- Tildes has been around way longer than Lemmy and somehow still sucks more. I know Deimos was the creator of Automoderator, and has penned whole screeds on how to grow and manage communities, but all he has done is create a boring echo chamber.

Was sick of reddit and how happy they were to coddle nazis.

Went to the first place big enough to sustain conversation.

The phenomenal mod of @letterboxed@lemmy.world made a post on the subreddit letting us know that they were making a community on here because of the reddit insanity. Came over and joined same day and really haven't looked back since. Lemmy is amazing, and all the best parts of what reddit great, without the bull.

Permanent Reddit ban

Why?
- I was brutally honest on a political thread and got a suspension. Made another account and got the lifetime ban for subverting a suspension

The excuse was the 3rd party API shenanigans on Reddit. The real reason occured, as I expanded my stay here, and realised that without Federated Social Media and Open Source Software, humanity will turn into a neo-feudal barbaric age of cruelty sooner than later

After the start of the reddit API protests I stopped using reddit, except for occasionally checking r/savethirdpartyapps and similar subreddits.

On the subreddits I found that the creator of boost for reddit(the client I was using) was making boost for Lemmy. From there I searched for Lemmy on the google play store and then on google, where I found the join Lemmy website

Curiosity

Tbh for me the third party client thing was just the cherry on top of the constant barrage of corpo fuckery in general, plus the knowledge of reddit's IPO and inevitable decline with the way things were headed for a while.

I'm already balls deep in FOSS and started dipping my toes into the fediverse as a whole, so switching off Reddit for me didn't hurt in the slightest. It felt good. All spez did was give me the reason I was looking for to finally pull the trigger.

The great reddit exodus of 2023 brought me here

The catalyst was of course the API thing. First contact when r/mujico (a more casual and hornier r/mexico) shutdown due to many differences between them vs Reddit and moderators of other Mexican subreddits. mujico in Lemmy was born as a results of those conflicts

Were you guys able to get some of your community to switch over? Chaptraphouse was successful with hexbear but I don't see a lot of other communities having luck (such as !futurology@futurology.today).

I used reddit exclusively in the browser, but the admins declaring their empty box full of free labor would not tolerate the slightest backsass from that unpaid workforce was a sign to head for the exits.

Not aided by how many communities there (and here) think "be nice or else" is a sane policy. Appropriate behavior often involves telling someone they're being an asshole and they need to stop. If moderators want to be the only ones who get to do that... they better be on that shit immediately and always. Otherwise the rule just shields deliberate abuse from conversational rebuke.

A community about knitting can expect "friendly." Politics are different. If you expect political discussion to be both polite and constructive, sometimes you are mistaken. If assholes can keep repeating 'well I don't see the problem!' in the face of repeated explanation, and you don't let people speak like adults in the face of that childish trolling, those assholes are who the forum is for.

That dumb mother fucker u/spez

Not enough content that I’ve found on mastodon. Twitter signal to noise ratio is destroyed now. And of course Apollo ceasing to work.

Sync. I moved to kbin from reddit, but missed having a convenient app and was a longtime reddit sync user, so once the app released for lemmy I moved again.

I jumped ship when Joey for reddit was discontinued. I downloaded connect first and now I'm solidly in the Sync camp haha. Loving it so far but like anyone else O miss the community structure.

I was already entertaining the idea of a Lemmy switch after they announced the imminent death of my beloved RiF. Lemmy was mentioned many many times in the 3rd party app threads discussing the api changes.

They went ahead and hastened my transition by permabanning me (and two of my alts) for "report abuse" since I dared to regularly report all the obvious spam bots that filled so many subs. Meh. I could have made more alts but really just didn't give a fuck at that point. Sure hope Spez's pedo ass enjoys his already failing IPO.

I heard about Lemmy with the Reddit debacle but didn't think much of it. Then I got a Pixel 7 Pro to run GrapheneOS on and while searching droidify I found Voyager and thought I should check out Lemmy.

Its taken some effort figuring out how this shit works but I think I'll stick around for a bit

I have been perma banned twice on reddit and said fuck it. Also chapo got closed so i eventually saw hexbear and jumped ship

That is Capitalism. CEOs are emperors.

What is pixelfed?
- Federated FOSS photo-sharing social network. I have an account on it. I would like it more if it didn't try to copy Instagram's design that much.

Didn't like reddits official app and I was a RIF guy. Started using Liftoff and never looked back.

Hang on, you're not me, are you?
This is an exact description of my situation, fwiw.
- lol there are dozens of us I tell you! Dozens!

Being Perma-Banned from Reddit for having a different opinion…

Are you an alt-right individual?
- I've been banned from Reddit multiple times for being an outspoken communist

Everyone saying to go to Lemmy after the Reddit thing. I always browsed Reddit through their webpage so the third party app thing didn't really bother me but I thought the whole Fediverse concept sounded interesting and decided to see what it's like.

I was exploring fediverse services, found lemmy, gave it a try, used it for a while, then left until the protests because there wasnt much content

Freedom

🇺🇸🦅🫡

End of Infinity for Reddit and the whole Reddit fiasco.

When I killed Facebook (+ Messenger, etc.), I became interested into alternative social networks. I don't like microbloggging, as they are frequently used just to express hate and political opinion in one or two sentences. I like thoughtful discussions and cat memes. So I chose Reddit first. I tried Lemmy, but it wasn't good until this year. Now I'm on Lemmy.

I've abandoned platforms for less. Reddit was more of an addiction than anything else. For some reason Lemmy just doesn't feel like that (yet)

Reddit had definitely become a habit for me, one that I'm very pleased to have broken. Lemmy doesn't have the same amount of content yet which helps with that.

The 2021 Congressional testimony of the Facebook whistle blower drove me to try out Mastodon. Elon Musk buying and ruining Twitter convinced me to stay on Mastodon and to learn more about the Fediverse. Reddit API changes shuttered Bacon Reader; that was the only way I got on Reddit and that's how I found this place. Hadn't even heard of Lemmy or Kbin until Reddit started messing around with their modmins and API.

I still go to Reddit when Google results lead me there, but I haven't downloaded their app and have no plans to do so. Still cross posting between Facebook and Mastodon, but have completely left ~~Twitter~~ X and haven't looked back.

Wanted to join for years but it was mostly empty, then the reddit thing happened and it was finally worth joining

I left reddit a while ago for Instagram. There's a lot of art on Instagram, and I enjoy that I can interact with artists there. I also do some personal and professional networking there. But I always missed having a text first space for discussion. And I missed that old school forum feel. It's been a long time since reddit fulfilled those needs effectively, and Instagram isn't even trying. I heard about Lemmy when the API exodus happened and decided to give it a shot. So far it's kept my interest. It has a fun racous forum feel still, and could grow quite a bit yet without losing it.