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.

73 points

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.

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29 points

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.

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8 points
*

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.

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4 points

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

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29 points

+1 for Reddit API exodus.

Lemmy was sold to me as a Reddit replacement. And it is, superficially. I knew it wasn’t going to be drop-in going in. But the longer I use it the more I think it’s not really quite like Reddit, and never will be. And that’s fine. Lemmy is its own character and I like it for what it is.

I still use Reddit. Lemmy doesn’t scratch all the itches for me. But only old.reddit on the desktop and on mobile with a UI de-shittifying extension. I’m amazed they still offer it at all. Once that’s cut off, something I’ve been bracing myself for for years, I’ll consider the UX enshittification to have fully completed and I’ll truly bail. I simply refuse to use their gentrified UI. And I’m tired as it is having to slap on compatibility layers just to keep their less terrible alternative on life support; I’m not going to do the same thing to make their mainstream UI somewhat more palatable.

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4 points

I’m just as critical of Lemmy as I was of Reddit.

Lemmy is a very left leaning echo chamber and a lot of people dont want to hear counterpoints to their soap-box rantings.

I do love Lemmy, but theres a decent percentage of fucking whackadoodles on here too. Also I’m not installing Linux, stop asking.

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2 points

The only thing we all have in common politically is that we don’t think social media should be controlled by a handful of gigantic manipulative corporations.

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1 point

Which extension?

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2 points

OldLander

It’s only available for Firefox.

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2 points

Thanks! It’s nice, just installed. The open old reddit button is super useful too, for search results landing on reddit.

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28 points

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.

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24 points
*

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 handled 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 like “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.

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20 points

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

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