I ended up here as a Reddit refugee. I said something mean about Elon and my accounts were banned.

I absolutely loved Reddit. Deleted my posts & left after the Spez api farce (Joey on Android you were a good soldier). I occasionally go back there anonymously to check niche subs (using Redlib).

Reddit is essentially shite now:

• Endless bots
• Same crap re-posted repeatedly (describe your cat I’ll draw it, 12 shitty manga characters - pick one to fight on your team, this is my cat the last thing you ate is its name etc etc etc
• The exact same jokes repeated endlessly
• Reply after reply quoting the next few words of a song lyric
• Topic replies tend to go way off the rails within 2 posts

Fediverse seems to be a more knowledgeable/mature crowd. Some great information disseminated. Ive seen some wonderful actual discussions between people with differing points of view asking for further clarification then discussing further. You never see that on Reddit.

Sure, we could do with a ton more posts & the niche communities continue to struggle but I’d much rather visit Lemmy 2 or 3 times a week than Reddit every day.

I didn’t so much pick Lemmy and the Fediverse over Reddit as I did decide to start participating in it in addition to Reddit.

As for why I chose to do that it is down to liking the general technical concepts around Lemmy and the Fediverse. I consider them more future proof than a single monolithic thing like Reddit. Lemmy and the Fediverse are not so bound to large financial interests that will prevent it from evolving and answered to the desires of its users.

But I have to say I do wish there was more diversity of subjects that got wide attention on Lemmy. From all of the servers I have browsed around it seems to be very slanted towards political topics which is not what I prefer to engage with much online if I can help it.

Not to say there are not communities on Lemmy for lots of technical topics, they are just not as “busy” as they are on Reddit. As a result to do spend more time on Reddit still because those type of communities are still larger there and current events on tech get talked about there more often or first.

I love open platforms, open standards, open source, and interoperability! I like that I can choose lemmy as my preferred way of posting to social media, but someone can read my content in their preferred format as lemmy supports federating to other platforms as well as distributing content via RSS.

I also love the lemmy culture. Anytime I ask questions here, I get some very thoughtful, educated and unique answers that I cannot seem to get anywhere else. The content I see on lemmy is the exact type I wish for. I only wish there was more of it.

I still use reddit for the same thing I’ve always used it for: finding answers written by humans to technical questions

Got banned from Reddit for saying mean things about Israel.

Got banned from reddit by AI for inciting violence (discussing bjj technicals) then my other account got nuked for ban avoidance. No appeals. No 2nd chances.

Personally I dislike reddit because of how toxic it is sometimes, immature folk too, and peeps who cannot think for em self and listens easily to whatever TikTok, youtubers etc tell em! Can you not think for yourself?! The problem with reddit its just that it keeps giving me stuff Im not interested in seeing etc! With fediverse I only see what content I wanna see!

I use reddit as well. Honestly, I still prefer reddit because there’s more people, it’s more diverse, and there’s more related to my specific interests. It’s also easier to avoid caustic political shit on reddit versus the fediverse. That’s not to say it doesn’t have downsides of course. There’s more bots and not-so-subtle advertising, and reddit as a company is dubious at best.

I left Reddit for the rightwing site-wide moderation policy changes. Well, technically I still have an active account, I just don’t bother using it. No point if nearly half my comments and posts get shadowbanned anyway.

reddit doesn’t let me use tor 😕

Lemmy is, in my belief, the next incarnation of the slowly moving train of society that at one point began on UBB boards.

Basically, community-built communiy.

I believe in that front and cause. Social media should be entirely owned by the users participating with it.

Well, for Lemmy, I jumped because of the r•dd•t 3rd party API fiasco. Haven’t looked back since.

As for the Fediverse in general, I never really used mainstream social media ( yt not included that list in my opinion) besides r•dd•t. So, I figured I’d try Mastodon and it’s pretty alright.

Also, don’t really know much about Matrix, so I don’t use it.

They took away my BaconReader and I refuse to use their horrible ad-laden web interface. So I switched during the Apicalype and never looked back

I jumped ship at the API debacle.

I wonder if ever Lemmy will “take off” a little though, it has rolled backwards IMO and is mostly anger inducing posts (“news”, trump, “AI!!1!”, gEnOcIdE, shoehorning the USA into every discussion, …) now, it’s way less fresh than two years ago. Way less crazy tankies though so that’s good at least.