this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
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I was a long time reddit user, and made a couple new accounts as throwaways last year from different emails but they kept getting shadowbanned everytime I tried to post, comment or send a message. Just last night, my 3 year old account I had no issues using it at all got shadowbanned as soon as I sent a message. It's just so frustrating how hard reddit is moderated and there's no explanations given either they just shadowban you and I don't even know where to ask anyone either I installed Lemmy, hoping it'll be a good alternative and it is great and a lot of things I like about reddit, but there's a significant lack of the type of communities that I browsed in reddit. Hopefully I'll find them here or more people will join and it'll be better. So what made you install Lemmy and what did you wish Lemmy had?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Their official phone app was, and still is, garbage. So I used a 3rd party app.

When Reddit killed API access, they did it in such a way that it killed that entire ecosystem abruptly. I'd have happily paid a small fee for API access to continue using the site, but no such option existed. Even at this point I'd still do it but that option still isn't there in a way that's useful.

After that, I found out that the 3rd party app i liked the most, Sync (on Android), had a Lemmy version. So I downloaded it to try it out. And here I am.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I came over with everyone else in the big exodus wave from Reddit when they killed third party apps.

I didn't even use a third party app so it didn't affect me, but as an old-school Internet user I believe in federated networks over centralized services and it seemed like the one opportunity to finally get critical mass.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I have a very similar experience, I only left because I noticed just how awful the website has turned by the time the API fiasco happened, and I was definitely getting a bit addicted to the website so leaving essentially made me combat this addiction. I haven't logged into Lemmy for over a month. Yeah, it has definitely helped me cut down on social media usage.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Same here, both the X and the Reddit things came at a time when I was trying to cut down on social media usage as it was definitely having an effect on me. Having social media that runs out and doesn't just go on for infinity is so much healthier.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Fun fact: I deleted Twitter exactly 23 days before it was renamed to X. I was just tired of scrolling through drama.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

I’m the same but I used Apollo, and the ads + principle of what they did drove me away permanently And I scrambled all my comments

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The reddit exodus during the API policy changes and 3rd party app shutdowns

I think I did try out Lemmy even before that. I remember making an account in Mander to try it out. Didn't use it much and forgot about it, even the username.
I didn't know about the Fediverse or Lemmy then. Didn't know about the progressive political background of Lemmy and the development too.

Then made this account. It's nice.
I still use reddit with Infinity for Reddit, since communities on my state, country and mother tongue are more active there(I'm from Kerala/India).

  1. Multi-communities would be very good to have.
  2. A feature to save draft comments/posts on the Jerboa app would be cool too. Not directly related to Lemmy tho

I think both have been brought to attention of the developers and they have plans to add that. Cool people.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (7 children)

I moved to Korea and started posting on r/Korea. I recorded a video of a big fire in Seoul, and because I couldn't find any news about it I uploaded it to my peertube instance and linked it on r/Korea.

The mods banned me for promoting my own website and said I should have uploaded it to YouTube.

So that resource was gone which was a bummer for me who just moved across the world and didn't speak Korean. That was my main reason to use reddit.

I already hosted mastodon and when the 3rd party amargeddon happened I heard about Lemmy. I was hoping that there would be a vibrant Korea community which never happened.

But somehow the UX is much better than on mastodon so I stayed. Later I switched the software from Lemmy to PieFed though.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

I'd quit stop using Reddit quite some tine ago, mostly a philosophical thing. Saw on Mastodon mention about a Reddit (aka Usenet 2.0) like replacement on Lemmy so, here I am.

I had been using Boost on Reddit, so I grabbed that as well as play with other apps like Jerboa, Raccoon.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

I found out about Lemmy when the api thing happened but since Infinity was still working, I stayed. But because I like open source stuff and I wanna be part of the fediverse and support it, I joined Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

I quit Reddit many years ago, because I noticed the toxic culture was fucking with my mental health. Then I was on Mastodon for a few years. Lemmy started to exist in that timeframe and the premise sounded good, so I joined pretty early on, when there were only a handful of posts every week or so. But yeah, these days Mastodon is what I check only occasionally and this place has taken over, as I do like the format a lot more.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

I installed Lemmy, hoping it'll be a good alternative

So what made you install Lemmy

If you interact with a website through an app, you are ceding both functionality and power. Angry Birds is an app, Signal is an app, Reddit and Lemmy are websites with URLs and you are duplicating the function of a browser if you use anything else.

I'd heard of Lemmy (and Raddle) since the late 2010s, and put them in the "things I'd like to pivot to at some point" category. The main subreddit that I posted on (a transgressive mix of edgy, caring, partisan, and weird) was quarantined and then finally banned in 2020. As a result I quit using reddit altogether, but after a few months I poked around and realized people from that sub had started a forked instance of Lemmy as a refuge.

The one thing that's lackluster is the search function. Everything else is superior.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I was paid a large sum of money

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Damn and I did it for free?? Where can I redeem my 20 bucks for becoming a lemming too?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Wait, you guys are getting paid!?

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Reddits CEO.

Reddit just isn't fun without Reddit is fun.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

I already quit many corporate social media platforms in the years before, switching to decentralized alternatives for some of them (Mastodon mainly), but was still active on Reddit somehow. Then during the Reddit blackout protest, it was as good a time as any to check out and switch to Lemmy. Its downsides for me are also part of the upside: there is no endless scrolling to be done.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago

I always wanted more decentralized alternatives. But none of them ever had any real users, then June 12, 2023 happened and I found out about this, that everyone is going to. And actually not a dead platform.

Also, booty: [email protected] (blocked by lemmy.world instance)

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I was already on Mastodon when the API price increase thing happened on reddit and my favourite client (infinity) became useless. I wasn't going to use the bloat-fest that is the reddit app, so I switched to Lemmy in "protest". Now I'm using eternity (a fork of infinity) and I have found a place in this community where I'm incredibly happy. I'm never going back to that shithole and I don't miss anything from there. There's a lot of karma-farming and every single person there reads exactly the same. There's no real discourse. The only times I use it (and through a web browser) is when I'm looking for solutions to some tech-related issue, and that is, if I haven't found the solution here already.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

I used other Fediverse platforms since about 2022 and was keen to find one that replicated a more reddit-like style.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 week ago

Apollo for Reddit died. Came here as it was supposedly a better experience. Used to be super active and use Reddit for hours a day for nearly a decade, now I barely use this platform at all as it’s insufferable and tiny tbh. The Linux Cultism here is off the charts and cringe as fuck, the communities are tiny and spammy and bloat the All page, so I block users and communities every day, and it’s been a pretty mediocre experience here for the year I’ve used it. Reddit is ofc a crapshoot now so it’s not worth going back, so I just use this platform for maybe 5-10m a day and that’s all my social media browsing for the day. So Reddit dying and not being replaced with a decent alternative actually cracked my addiction for endless scrolling which is super nice.

[–] [email protected] 99 points 1 week ago (1 children)

When they nuked third party apps. For a long time I used the official app, then I switched to 3rd party, nd I couldn't go back

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (3 children)

It seems like most people joined Lemmy for the 3rd party apps. I admit I am not familiar with reddit 3rd party apps and what they do in terms of functionality, I'd love if someone explained them to me

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

The Official client was mid at best and hundred of thousands of people where on various third party apps.

Then Spez wanted to sell API access to train AI so it became prohibitively expensive for most third party reddit clients to continue.

So I didn't want to use their app and on top of that it was to sell my data to AI businesses.

I actually wanted to nuke all my comments to be sure they couldn't use them but didn't manage to do it reliably.

But yeah the fact that they completely killed the reddit client I used just to sell my data for AI training was the last straw for me.

Also reddit was getting quite toxic especially in some subreddits IMO.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

They literally acquired the Alien Blue client, which at the time was the best Reddit client according to many people, and used it as the base for their official client. How on earth did they fuck it up this badly??

I never used Apollo since I was stuck on Android. But I still wish I had the chance to use it while it was available.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago

They're just apps not made by Reddit, but made by Reddit users, some of which were paid. And many which were significantly better and more reliable than Reddit's.

A quick example on Lemmy just with the web, these are all lemmy.world but different UIs:

And that one too: https://tesseract.dubvee.org/

And that's just the web browser ones, there's a bunch for iOS and Android too. Reddit had even more.

A good app that matches your style of scrolling really makes a difference.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I used Boost for Reddit but well, we know how that went. I really loved Boost. The dev pivoted to Lemmy, so I did as well. So far the experience has been pretty solid.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm not sure I'm aware of reddit boosts or 3rd party apps, could you please explain to me how those work and how it was a deal breaker to so many people here on Lemmy?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Reddit changed the API which meant that any popular third party apps were going to have the pay thousands or even millions to Reddit just to access it.

Third party apps like Boost, Apollo etc all left the platform but some devs created apps for Lemmy instead which gave people the experience they were used to. Reddit official app is full of ads and you can’t download half the stuff you want.

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