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?
Got kicked off reddit. But also fuck Reddit for the api change. I just wish the communities had more traffic like reddit
- Most of the content is reposts and bots
- Moderators remove anything they dont like(Creating an echo chamber)
- Comments are mostly low-effort jokes or bots, not valuable discussion
I was one of the leaders of the big fuck spez on r/place, would have been a bit hypocritical if I’d stuck around after the that.
Edit: probably should add a photo
the API fiasco.
This was the same reason for me.
Well, I was originally here to promote a movie…
I had a crush on you as a teenager when I saw you in suicide squad
In no particular order as to why I left Reddit to join Lemmy:
- Reddit became a chore just to see good content. (This is even after the fact of filtering out unrelated or unwanted subreddits in my feed.)
- The comment sections on Reddit became worse and worse with more joke/meme comments than actually related comments, low effort comments, bot spam, and the burial of your comment for no one to see, (or care to reply to,) if you were to comment on a post or comment more than 24 hours after it’s original posting. (Most of the time it felt like you had maybe 8 hours before it seemed to be a waste to comment.) Why would anyone stick around to comment or reply if nearly no one is going to engage?
- (Like many others have mentioned in the comments,) if you mentioned or talked about anything that wasn’t considered good, you were often blasted with downvotes and/or comments.
- How often you saw rinse and repeat content, questions, and sometimes comments. (I’ll admit. I took part in the rinse and repeat content ‘sharing’ and I wish I hadn’t done it for so long. The karma whoring was real for me.)
- Concerns (then later the reality check,) about how much Reddit is an echo chamber.
- /u/Spez showing us who he really is.
- Not liking the direction Reddit was heading. Writing on the wall when they fired Victoria Taylor
- The API fiasco.
- Movement towards IPO.
Lemmy doesn’t have any of these problems that I’ve experienced. Lemmy feels very much like a grass roots movement and I like that. I wish the communities that I am a part of had more active users, but that will more likely come with time.
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
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
The goal of 3rd party apps is to do what’s best for the user so they continue to use their app
The goal of Reddit’s official app is to do what’s best for Reddit
It’s possible to expand on the functionality but that’s the fundamental misalignment on priorities regarding users
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:
- https://a.lemmy.world/ - Alexandrite UI
- https://photon.lemmy.world/ - Photon UI
- https://m.lemmy.world/ - Voyager mobile UI
- https://old.lemmy.world/ - A familiar UI
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.
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.
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.
There’s nothing left of AlienBlue with their redesign, it’s basically a glorified web wrapper like many other apps at this point.
What a shame. It’s almost like the biggest companies make the worst crap or something.
Had my account permabanned on Reddit by mods on a power trip.
Then they cut third party support so my app stopped working.
Centralised Social media is a disaster waiting to happen. You just can’t trust corporates. They will be corrupted eventually.
I got banned from reddit for saying the genocide in Gaza was bad.
I got banned for saying Israel was a fascist state and this was years before the current genocide started. Zionists have infiltrated that platform good and proper.
Most of us kinda didn’t realize that Israel is a disgusting abomination until Oct 7th
These parasites really crossed some lines
Never again 🤡
I believe the politically correct term to appease the only “acceptable” narrative is war not genocide to describe a very clear targeting of Palestinian children Tsk Tsk for you not knowing it’s common knowledge at this point /s
I saw it as an open source Reddit alternative a few years ago and signed up, then left and went back to Reddit because nobody was using it. Then the API stuff happened, some Reddit users switched to Lemmy so I’ve been browsing it now, switched between a few instances and am now back here.
(I do wish it had more communities for specific topics and locations like Reddit has, and ironically a lot of FOSS discussion is still on Reddit also.)
ironically a lot of FOSS discussion is still on Reddit also.)
Bromies love their chains
I joined Hexbear for the hentai.
I don’t know why this feels so genuine
It shouldn’t, Hexbear has a strict no-porn rule, Hentai included.
I used Apollo to browse Reddit. It was really a great app, and it made browsing Reddit enjoyable. The dev, Christian, listened to his users, frequently updated and improved the app, was active in the subreddit, and seemed to care about making it a positive experience. It really was like being a part of a club.
It wasn’t just that Reddit shut down the API, but the way they boldfaced lied about Christian and their interactions with him. He was feverishly in talks with them to save the app, but Reddit not only wasn’t negotiating in good faith, but even worse, lying about the interactions to try to smear Christian and make him look like the villain. It was then that I knew that Reddit would never be the same, and I started looking for alternatives.
I tried several, but Lemmy seemed to be the closest to Reddit and scratched the itch. Not only that, an amazing dev created Voyager, which is heavily inspired by Apollo, (pretty much a direct copy), and makes me feel at home. There’s not as many communities here as subreddits over there, but I have curated a great Home feed, which includes most of my interests and that I enjoy browsing. I can honestly say the comments here are much better and more authentic. On the whole I get real replies and have better conversations instead of trolls and confrontations like I frequently did at Reddit. I do stop in over there sometimes out of boredom and browse, but it’s really not the same as before. (And maybe it is, and I was just fooling myself and not seeing it.) I don’t think I’ve posted or commented on Reddit since Apollo died except on live sports game feeds, which I do miss over here. I found a regional instance that I like, and, on the whole, I really enjoy it here.
TLDR: API killed Apollo.
Same journey for me. Digg > Reddit > Lemmy. I do need leave .world though.
I was on .world too, but I’m from Georgia, so I like being on yall.theatl.social much better. It’s a smaller, more tight knit community, and it’s in Atlanta, so it’s more-or-less local for me.
Same journey here.
My story’s pretty much this.
Bias for FOSS
I might sound illeterate but what is Foss?
Free and open source software
Free & Open Source Software
(Free as in freedom, not as in “costs nothing”)
Invented by GNU together with the GPL (GNU general public license)
Supposed to make both making and using software accessible to all, and protect the software from being stolen from the public
Free open source software
User can audit the code 🤡User relies on some tech bro to audit the code but hey at least there is some transparency
Reddit killed RIF. I’d already been looking into Lemmy, leading up to the day, but once my app stopped working, I switched to Jerboa and made a Lemmy account.
…didn’t stay on Jerboa long
What client do you use?
I switched to Connect, and have liked it well enough that I haven’t tried any others
Same story, except I have used Connect from day one.
Yup. RIF stopped working. Reddit’s official app was a turd sandwich.
I want to say I left Reddit in solidarity with the users and mods at the time, but in reality the Reddit app was just so very, very inconvenient that I tried Lemmy.
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.
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
I came over with everyone else in the big exodus wave from Reddit when they killed third party apps.
Heh, and they say the exodus/protest were pointless 🤣
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.
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.
Fun fact: I deleted Twitter exactly 23 days before it was renamed to X. I was just tired of scrolling through drama.
