One day, I was about to install RedReader through F-droid. For some reason I searched for “Reddit” in the search bar instead of “RedReader” and saw Voyager, Jerboa and some other Lemmy clients there.
I got curious and installed “Eternity for Lemmy”. I browsed around, then decided to created my first account on lemmy.ml. Instantly fell in love with how nice most people were, how quickly I got answers and replies and the closely-knit feeling of a small community where it’s not surprising to see the same user in many different places.
I found Lemmy and decentralized social media by sheer luck.
I know most of you came here after the reddit API changes to spite the corporate site, but I wonder if there are other stories.
P.S. I find it sort of weird how lemmy.ml censors the word for “female dog”. Cmon, that’s such a tame and common insult! Can’t even quote Jesse Pinkman properly.
I was a r/196 user during the API change
It was ether from one of the subreddit talking about alternative to Reddit which was around the time of Reddit did changes to API or from someone made post about Lemmy on Mastodon and wanted to try it out.
Several years ago I stumbled upon ActivityPub and the Fediverse. I created a few accounts across services, I think Friendica was the first. I quickly got bored with it because no one else from my real life was on it and the overall userbase was tiny. Move forward a couple of years and I left reddit when they took away third-party apps and mod tools. Lemmy had enough users at that point I’ve stuck around.
I created a Mastadon account when Musk bought Twitter but that’s gone idle. I was never that into Twitter, it’s not a format I prefer.
In the wake of the Reddit API changes, I decided to jump off that ship. Saw Lemmy mentioned but a lot of posts were painting it negatively, due to federation things and tankies. I was on Squabbles (lol) as my Reddit replacement platform for a few months before that disintegrated and then finally arrived at Lemmy.
same, Apollo was my favourite/most used app and that was it for me when they banned those apps. I found voyager/lemmy and never looked back. I bet Lemmy’s population exploded after all the reddit refugees showed up.
I was weening myself off the reddit news cycle and then Baconit got killed by the API and that had been my only venue for using reddit soooooo I started looking for alternatives and already had Fdroid installed…one thing led to another
I moved to Lemmy during the Reddit API stuff
Saw Lemmy mentioned but a lot of posts were painting it negatively, due to federation things and tankies.
The tankie stuff was what made me try lemmy out and stay.
Thought that it’d be an actually leftist community, if it was facing such terms.
And it was indeed one. And is quite good.I got know about the Dessalines audiobook channel too and that’s nice too.
I was on reddit when the api changes happened, after that (and the canvas) i deleted my account over there and went here.
im was banned in reddit because… i accidentally wrote lgor360 (first letter: L) instead of Igor360 (first letter: I) and reddit thought i was pretending to be a person with a nickname Igor360 and ban me…
It was indeed during the API exodus. I used the official app so I didn’t have strong feelings about it, but I really hated how they handed it all. Of course it was discussed everywhere and I was like “I hate it like everybody else, but there isn’t really an alternative” and someone was “uhm, how about Lemmy or kbin [or other stuff I don’t remember I think]?”.
I looked into it, got confused, asked the guy some questions and they were kind enough to explain. Looked into it more and made a slow transition. Really helped this was at the peak of the exodus so everything was firing up here.
Saw it mentioned on Reddit
Reddit API drama >> kbin.social >> lemmy.world
Yet another reddit exodus user here, started with Jerboa and settled on Eternity. Trying to learn rust so I can help out.
They took away apps that worked and apps that had accessibility features built in in favour of monetizing everything which sits very badly with me as a concept so I stopped being a part of how that company makes money and I joined here.
Now my stupid comments make nobody money. Win win.
Yep. This was me. I followed the android Sync app here. User-created content should not be monetized. Im not going to subscribe to something that’s mostly memes, attention-seeking behavior, and bullshit.
I had hated reddit for ages. Many trigger-happy omniscient mods who couldn’t admit to a mistake if it swam up their arse and blew a trumpet. I was eventually perma-banned for glorifying violence by making a Star Wars reference about Trump. I can only assume the mod wasn’t old enough to remember Star Wars movies.
I had been there from the bright and cheerful early days and watched it become 99.8% trash.
Lemmy has hit the rewind button for me. It kinda sucks that so many people are trying to emulate what modern reddit had become, but it still feels refreshing. With a bit of luck, Lemmy will go in a direction I prefer. It’s not that I don’t want people to do whatever they want, but i feel like some instances will cater to certain demographics.
The ChapoTrapHouse-Hexbear pipeline
The great Reddit migration when 3rd party devs realized how much Reddit would charge them to use Reddit’s API in order to serve information to their apps. RiF was my shit.
I love Lemmy now though. Its federated nature, while abnormal and at times not the easiest to explain, has me hopeful for the cyberspace future that isn’t fully dictated by corporations. Using Fdroid, getting over the hump from Chrome to Firefox, and now the prospects of switching entire OSs from Windows to Linux are within my visibility now, when before I was comfortable in my corporate bubble.
Think the next thing I need to start taking strides on after Linux is privacy. I still keep my passwords locked under OneDrive Vault and a password protected OneNote. Should probably dump that and move over to keypass or some other password manager. I just don’t want to have to pay for a service right now on a recurring basis unless I choose to to support the devs.
re: password managers, I can recommend BitWarden. Open source and free for personal use. Can donate for a couple enhanced features. Also have the option of self-hosting.
How’s Proton Pass? Seems like I can’t download BitWarden from Fdroid, although I imagine there’s an .apk somewhere online
Earlier this year, I decided to engage with social media, so I searched for lists of social media websites and signed up on the ones I could find. Lemmy was on one of the lists and also happens to be one of the websites I enjoy the most! 😃
When the Reddit API thing was going down I was looking for a place to jump ship before Apollo went down and Lemmy was one of the options. I found Voyager and later I joined other parts of the Fediverse
