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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
No ads and killing off third party Reddit apps.
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
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.
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.
