My journey with Lemmy started in 2022 out of interest in the fediverse and paranoia around how much control social media companies have, and how little choice common people are left with over the Internet.
Lemmy was much smaller back then. I really wanted it go get bigger, and tried to contribute to it. But it was small enough to be unsatisfying, so I would go back and forth between lemmy and Reddit.
After the Reddit fiasco, I shifted more and more towards lemmy and less towards Reddit. I finally abandoned Reddit when third party apps broke. I only go there for specific questions in communities that aren’t active on lemmy.
What about you?
I never really liked Reddit. I avoided it for a long time, but finally relented and grudgingly signed up in 2011.
I was always on the lookout for a new home, and would follow links to any place that looked promising, but none of them ever panned out - they were always too dead or too narrowly focused or too shitty or behind a paywall or something. And I’d go back to Reddit.
Immediately after Spez’s petulant AMA, I happened on a link to join-lemmy.org. I was especially eager to find a different forum then, just because Reddit was set to get much worse much more quickly and the CEO is a twat, but I really didn’t expect anything of lemmy. I assumed that, just as with all the others over the years, I’d browse around a bit, be unimpressed, and leave.
Instead, I looked around and liked what I saw. And the more I looked, the more I liked it. And I just never went back, and have been here ever since.