What brought you to Lemmy?
Just wondering what brought everyone here.
Background: I was banned from Reddit for questioning the system and feel that true leftist ideologies on Reddit are severely censored (despite being considered one of the few last leftist social media platforms). I think the left needs more tech literacy and I hope the Fediverse is the future.
So, I am wondering what made folks curious about alternative options?
When Reddit killed Apollo.
Me too. API death of reddit.
They thought disabling RIF would force me to use the Reddit Mobile App, but it just got me to break up with reddit finally after 10+ years.
Who nose, maybe this was all part of their plan to get rid of Reddit's original users and make room for a younger culture who doesn't care about privacy or ads or whatever.
It was Boost for Reddit for me. Note: I hate the ads in Boost for Lemmy, but I still havent jumped ship or started to pay for ad-free. When I go on contract at work (I hope) it'll be more possible.
e: wait, it's $5, one time? Ok, I'm killing the ads now.
I want to support the platforms that look at people for their interactions, not their marketability. APIs were going to be dead at Reddit and I wasn't willing to stand over the body with a knife in hand.
My pihole blocks all ads in Boost.
Yeah I've been on Boost for years now, on reddit first and then Lemmy after the API stuff, and it's well worth the $5
You were replaced by 20 llm agent -> more ads revenue
Same, but because Boost got killed in the crossfire. Still loyal to Boost on Lemmy btw.
Pleasantly surprised to see so many Boost users in this thread. Great app
I took a meandering path to get here, but that’s the same reason for me.
Reddit app wouldn’t let me block those dumb He Gets Us ads. Even after blocking the account, I still saw them. I swapped to Apollo to avoid it, then Reddit dropped Apollo, so I dropped Reddit.
I switched and never looked back when they blocked third party clients and the mods started migrating to Lemmy.
I am brand spankin' new and didn't realize mods migrated too! That's great! Only thing I wish there was, was the database wealth of information that reddit has but that takes time and humans make that possible.
Oh yeah, it's impossible to mod effectively via reddit's official mobile app. And admin was becoming increasingly inconsistent in its demands and communication.
I am too! If mods are leaving too I think that shows there’s definitely an issue. Hopefully enough people will migrate to Lemmy
Left during the purge of 3rd party apps.
They killed my favorite app "rif", so I started using the web version. Then they made the web version almost unusable with the "open this in our app" banner on every page which was the last straw for me. Can't use third party apps, and the web version is constantly nagging you to not use it? Stupid. Now I just use Lemmy on Firefox and have had 0 issues.
I was already "over" Reddit and fully invested in Lemmy by the time RIF went down, but RIF actually going from 100% working to not working...I actually watched it happen. That was surreal. I think that's when it really hit me that I'm not considered economically viable anymore.
The death of third party Reddit apps.
What were the apps?
You know, I thought all but one became unusable but after just trying to figure out which app it was I discovered a lot of third party apps apparently became usable again at some point, including the one I used to use Sync.
I know for a fact that Sync stopped working because for a long time you'd open it and it'd just say it didn't work and he was working on making it work with Lemmy. Which is what I'm using now. I guess he made Sync for Reddit at some point after that.
Might be a moot point now, but it was not the only reason I haven't gone back. The leadership has proven they don't care about the users all that much. They are much more focused on money.
I used Reddit for a long time, since the extremely early days of the site, back when most of the content was posted by Reddit staff and there was really just one page.
While I wasn't enthralled with the move from old.reddit.com to the new reddit.com, the site was at least still accessible via the old interface, absent a minor quirk here and there in how Markdown was interpreted, and different ways of customizing subreddit appearance. That wasn't enough to cause me to leave.
What did it for me was that I expected that when they moved from their growth phase to monetization phase that they'd make some changes that I wouldn't like, but I didn't expect them to end access for third-party clients, which was not okay with me.
reddit killed 3rd party apps and i don't wanna use their shitty app or websites on my phone so i just ditched it for lemmy
I might have worded it differently, but this is my answer as well.
Same same.
This comment posted by sync for Lemmy...
Paywalling the API was the final straw for me. I saw they reduced the price to something "reasonable" for the top few 3rd party apps, but too little, too late. Leading up to that, I understood the ads, I was satisfied with using old.reddit, and I thought we were making progress with fighting management. Killing all the small time apps and turning Apollo et al into an income stream (or, really, stifling competition to their ad-infested 1st patty app) showed there was no way back to the reddit I knew
When they try to force me ads in official app killing third party apps.
Fuck marketing! Everything it touches it turns shit
The data they had even proved it was useless to us. Something like 50% of the content came from the 10% on third party apps. They just couldn't deal with only 90% of their users being served ads constantly though and had to kill off the third party apps.
From what I hear content got noticeably worse. Good
Much like what happened to Digg back at the dawn of time, Reddit's relentless series of unforced errors, undesirable policy changes and deliberate enshittification finally drove me to seek out an alternative.
Was looking for a good alternative to Reddit for a while, then the API debacle happened.
I left when it became clear they had no interest in dealing with nazi sympathisers, and when it became clear that transphobia was acceptable, as long as it was "civil". This was long before the Reddit API exodus
I found lemmy when looking for fediverse/federated Reddit like platforms, and spun up an instance to test it out. It was basically only me on the instance until the Reddit exodus happened, and then suddenly the instance and lemmy add a whole saw a huge growth in traffic.
And then we spun up a piefed instance when it became clear the lemmy devs also hold some shitty beliefs, so that users who wanted an alternative could have one.
I'm not going anywhere. Federated/decentralised social media is the future as far as I'm concerned. At the very least, it's the only future I'll consider.
❤️💛💚💙 Thank you for making a home for so many of us here.
Boost for lemmy being announced soon after the Reddit API pricing on a subreddit created for the protests
The loss of Reddit third party apps and the reasons they were giving for them doing it felt like it was going to be a slippery slope of shit. The Reddit app was also shit at the time and still is.
With Lemmy, I can just go looking for another app if there's something I don't like and even if I don't switch between them, they also seem to be way more configurable too.
I came when they took away 3rd party apps. Though to be truthful ive been leaning towards making a return because the communities here are just so small and mostly dead. Even popular topics have almost no presence here.
No ads and killing off third party Reddit apps.
Reddit is shit now. PCMR is just memes and weird Linux vs Windows rivalry, Piracy sub is just memes and moral grandstanding, most gaming subs are just bots posting "news" articles, AIO/AITAH are just karma farming for people selling accounts or fanfic quality fantasies, many Linux subs are either insufferably elitist, have a weird fetish for distro-hopping or are just circlejerks (looking at you r/linuxmint).
The only thing it's still good for is niche interests which I doubt will remain the case for long.
That's a bummer because the Linux communities here are super welcoming and helpful, and it seems like people expect the opposite. Probably because of reddit.
Yeah, totally different vibe here on Lemmy I'm happy to say. There are helpful people on Reddit too of course just few and far between depending on the sub.
AI/bots posting has become more "apparent" once they massively purged tons of actual users. it becomes lopsided now. if yuo ban someone using bots, it wont stop them, they will just fire up another 100+ after they figure how to evade your filters/moderation(carefully), and this not even propaganda bots. its the bots that reddit was targeting the most.
Age Verification is coming soon to reddit (and other major platforms)
And the mods are dicks that ban or delete content for no reason!
It's not just political opinions they will ban for all sorts of reasons or no reason at all!
spez also wants to get rid of r/popular and make the feed more "curated", i would assume mean more propaganda slop.
the reddit filters/admins seems to be more problematic than the mods now, because they are deleting comments and posts, banning people unilaterally and the mods are kinda annoyed that they are getting less engagement and more ai slop as a results. only the reddit bootlickers/brown nosers are ok with it.
I used the Android app Boost for Reddit. One day I opened it as usual, browsed as usual, but something felt a bit odd. Turns out it was updated into being a Lemmy app instead. Fair enough then, I continued my scrolling.
Access to the content we create not being controlled by any corporation or any person. That's about it for me, even though there were other things I did not like about reddit.
Banned for saying that I would murder Andrew Tate given the opportunity.
He literally abuses women and likely has murdered some. He is disgusting. The fact our government has used surveillance laws and things like The Smith Act to go after leftist causes / organization and never the KKK or proud boys... says a lot about how much these entities (including the wealthy) care about equity or human rights. Never are any of the right wing extremists labeled as terrorists but the black panthers were.
Because I love everything open source.
Quit reddit 5 years ago. Had a 12 year old account then.
Thread asked for early examples of racism against a certain group, by my country. I dug up such examples and translated them into English. The examples included slurs. Got permabanned for using slurs, no appeal.
Apparently I should have included a racism trigger warning in a thread asking for examples of racism, although the mod admitted that that wouldn't have saved me either.
This is a site which was notorious for indulging in gore with videos of people being killed by the way. Bunch of weirdos.
That's not why I deleted my account though. The last straw was when CIA thinktanks made a hostile takeover of all Middle East and geopolitics subs, forcing a Washington agenda to manufactor consent for war. The Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq subs were riddled with ex-military Americans and the mods were literally paid thinktank gooners. They were quite open about it too.
Wow, my account was 12ish years old too when I was banned the first time. Then I was able to access Reddit again because my partner has an old 11 yo account lol and then they banned that too, even with my VPN and a new device it was accessed from. They are shit ass. Both times I didnt do anything against the guidelines. They just didnt like my educational shit going viral because Americans arent majority fascist alt-right extremists despite popular belief. Most genuinely want basic human rights, healthcare and affordability. Duh. These rich people will eventually collapse because they are choosing to make a fake world instead of learning how to survive within the real one.
When RIF shit down, talklittle sent people over to lemmy.world as a replacement for reddit (even though he himself went to tildes). The signup page was laggy so I signed up for a different instance instead.
I suspect as with many here it was Reddit's API nonsense back in 2023. I joined another instance back in mid '23 but it took me until this year before I started using it regularly.
I read about the Fediverse years ago and opened a couple accounts across a couple platforms. As I expected at the time, too low volume of people to really keep me engaged.
I stayed on reddit until same as everyone else here; they killed 3rd party apps and mod tools. I was a mod on a small, friendly little niche hobby sub. It started getting overrun by bots and MAGA types who wanted to make every post about guns and women staying home to serve their husbands. Good members started leaving the sub and I turned from having fun to loathing it very quickly. I created some fresh Fediverse accounts and made the move for real.
I got banned from Reddit for making jokes about eating rich people. They warned me and temp banned me twice before the permaban. It was over like 6 months too, which means I don’t learn lessons and have a tendency to make those jokes often.
No regrets.
They also banned my wife and my downstairs roommate. I assume for being on the same wifi? Or ip address? Or something? Idk they were mad but I like to think I helped them in a way.
Makes sense since their shit hole servers only support IPv4. You were all probably NAT’d to the same IPv4 address.
I don’t know computers, but sure. I bet you’re right.
We moved away since then and my wife made a new account that hasn’t been banned. I considered trying it but I’ve been rebanned almost immediately when I tried before on the last one and I worry if I try again they’ll ban me and everyone on my wifi again.
The simple explanation is that on IPv4 it’s 99% probable that it’s the case that everyone on your home network appears as the same IP address on the internet. With IPv6 it’s possible but highly discouraged, each device would have its own IPv6 address (though it might still be obvious they’re related).
So yeah, it really does seem like they’re hating on your home network.
Good to know. How do I know what my IPv is?
I use this website quite a bit but there are tons (just search for “what’s my IP address”). This is another good one for testing IPv6 connectivity problems.
Oh yes nobody has mentioned this aspect yet! Reddit can and will ban all connected accounts because of a perceived breach of the rules on one account.
What a weird reason for them to ban you, sorry about that
The only reddit clone owned by individual people.
I kept getting banned, got tired of making accounts. this place has its issues, but reddit is worse
Reddit being reddit caused me to look around.
The nice beeple at beehaw drew me in.
Now I have a couple accounts (beehaw was the first) and I haven't really run into many rude people. I like it here.
Reddit told me I wasn't allowed to use a non-shitty application to read their content any more.
Fled Reddit when the Exodus happened.
I wasn't going to use Reddit at all, and neither would my producer. Since we won't be using mainstream social slop (except YouTube), we use the Fediverse or Nostr instead.
EMPRESS brought me into lemmy, she quit later because she got banned off .ml, i stuck around, and eventually started my own instance.
I got banned by reddit by saying it wouldn't be a shame if the idiots who ride motorbikes on pavements in towns and nearly hit people ended up being hit by a bus
the 3rd party shutdown
i think it was privacytools.io that got me here first, then reddit fucked up in 2023 and i actually got to use it more.
Lol. Reddit hasn't been leftist in a long time if it ever really was. There were some leftist spaces, and I guess a lot of users were left-of-center, but the platform certainly wasn't.
I came over here when they blocked third party apps. I didn't join earlier because I thought it'd be similar to Voat, which was apparently horrible and an alt-right cesspool. I was pleasantly surprised. I like that people can have actual discussions here without things being flooded by thousands of comments.
Also, since you're new, I'd recommend against Lemmy.world. They're a little aggressive with moderation. They're the largest instance, which is another reason to go somewhere else. The fediverse works best when no one instance controls it.
lemmy.world is the least aggresive with moderation i have seen. i've been banned from other instances, mostly for not agreeing with politics or linking to factual sources that don't agree with their narrative.
i have never been banned from anything on .world.
They aren't as bad as .ml or Hexbear, but some of the communities are apparently not great. I haven't been banned, but I've heard from other people who have for pretty minor things. They definitely aren't the least aggressive. There's a lot of instances out there.
Regardless, it's the largest instance. We should I courage people to spread out.
Can you please elaborate a bit about that "little aggressive work moderation" on lemmy.world? I am there so I am interested.
I came looking for the conversations with all the beautiful people here.
Okay fine, it was separation from difect corporate control.
But I stay to read the opinions of all you beautiful people
Accessibility options of different apps then reddit app.
I left Reddit because I didn't want AI scraping my lackluster comments.
I gravitated to lemmy vs Mastodon or Blsky because the community seemed more "based" instead of biased.
And it's great. When I'm wrong, the
lemmingsfolks here rip me a new one.AI has free reign to scrape Lemmy or any federated site. But at least the data being scraped isn't curated and moderated by a massive advertising platform.
The death of 3rd party apps sent me here. It's been great over in the fediverse but I do wish there was more content. I will sometimes go back to Reddit.
Overall it's been great though.
Since I am here for near 5 years, maybe I just like to replace greedy-shitholes with fediverse alternatives as soon as possible.
Banned for no reason I could figure out. Never got any response from mods when appealing. Pissed me off that an account that I had for 12+ years with no warnings of any kind was shadow banned.
you were probably banned by association. could have made a post 10 years ago in a community that was banned and thus you were banned.
That's one of the most infuriating things. Like, you get tons of posts on your frontpage that you did not choose. At some point you engage with some unhinged statement, trying to reason with the lonely wayward person that said something horrible or sad. You are now shadowbanned from multiple large communities, so no normal users will see your posts and you won't even get notified that this action has been taken against you.
When the 'fun' side of reddit became unrecognizeable, then gradually after using Lemmy all I really do on Reddit is post in more useful places where I can share advice on chronic illness, and its really unfortunate there's not much in comparison for communities here otherwise Reddit would be deleted already.
Political comments shouldn't turn into vaguely threatening DMs, so many people on there nowadays need their teeth knocked out like some airpods for that shit.
most of my fun subs got you insta banned from more serious subs becauase no joking or mockery of weirdos was allow. had to separate out my accounts. even then I'd have crazy reddit weirdos stalking me and reporting my comments on other subs trying to get me banned for one comment i said in their sub.
i was temp banned initially, thought i would use another account that was untouched avoiding the sub, then i was getting multiple emails, found out they banned all the accounts i even forgot about too. then the wierd shadowban came for final account, appealed for a few months with no luck, while already made an account on lemmy.
this happened to loads of other users too, im also in another forums where they tracked the shadowbans more clearly. had to navigate throught he tankie instances for a few months without knowing that i was participating in, then found out i could block them, plus having do deal .world politics users too.
Banned from Reddit for taking the piss out of the far right.
Deleted from ml for taking the piss out of the far left.
Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
When Reddit started charging for their API Key. Killed off Apollo, best Reddit app on iOS. Didn't want to try the Reddit App. After Apollo officially shutdown, I stuck around reddit through old.reddit and it wasn't the same. Deleted all my accounts and jumped over to Lemmy. Joined Lemm.ee then that shut down and moved over to lemdro.id
Paywalling subreddits was the last straw for me
Terrible Reddit experience; I still wanted to answer questions because of boredom just not on Reddit. Long story short, I experienced a romance scam/sextortion where a Reddit user manipulated me into sexting him by being my "friend" and he knew I was at a vulnerable place in my life because I told him that I was healing from a breakup since I genuinely thought he wanted to help and get to know me---he figured that I was lonely and hurt. Thankfully, I was quick enough to stop the convo before he threatened me to send him money or other things. Lesson learned.
I value freedom and love free / libre / open source software. After the US trade war against basically everyone I searched for non-US Reddit alternative. Lemmy is a great combination.
Looked at Reddit alternatives for many years due to increasing issues with Reddit. Found Lemmy to be the best project
I never used Reddit, but 9GAG and looked for alternatives because the lack of control over content I see and the obvious stearing of content that's pushed annoyed me to much.
I don't have a reddit account but heard of the enshittification and alternatives. I was looking for a place to have discussions since it feels like there are fewer decent places for that on the internet these days.
been on the fediverse a few years, but didn't really move over until my third reddit ban and how increasingly awful reddit is. i might already be unbanned againt but i just don't see a point in posting on reddit anymore where jokes about your cat killing rabbits is considered promoting violence and talking about your life experiences are considered sexist/racist.
i still miss my 'controversial' subreddits i used to be a part of. like bicyclingcirclejerk. i don't miss the insane people on my city subreddit who had insane political takes and massive victim complexes. but there are plenty of people on lemmy who make posts like that. but at least here they are mostly in their own communities i can block, rather than spouting there crazy nonsense in totally unrelated spaces.
i started getting fed up with reddit around 2020, but all the alts back then were awful. at least now they have a decent user base and some more moderate/open minded instances. 5 years ago it was all conspiracy crazy people and nazis. i used kbin until it died and then moved to .world
Banned from Reddit, like many here. The charge was bullying, for posting a video about Alligator Auschwitz. Funny part is I didn't. I commented often in politics threads and such but never posted any. I only posted in hobby subs. I already had an account here, but hadn't moved in because of lack of hobby communities. Well, here I am now.
I left Reddit because I realized that the people running it were complete assholes who believed money was more important than community.
What made me interested in Lemmy was the decentralized nature. What made me stay is how it reminded me of Reddit a decade ago and of course the community.
Typical angry reddit user. I didn't like that they allowed r/conservative to be a sub full of racist shit. Then they banned one of my favorite sub reddits. They're greedy and only allow you to use their shitty app.
Another vote for Rexodus.
Banned on Reddit for literally no reason ): used to love posting my NSFW content there but couldn’t make a new account and couldn’t even use my old SFW account anymore
i was attracted to the rust implementation as i have a general interest in rust usage
shame they turned out to be lunatic commies
So you joined a platform where everyone is a communist?