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.
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.
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.
Moved to Lemmy during the Reddit API stuff too
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.
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
+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.
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.
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.
Which extension?
It’s only available for Firefox.
Thanks! It’s nice, just installed. The open old reddit button is super useful too, for search results landing on reddit.
In that case, you may get some mileage as well out of Old Reddit Redirect. It will automatically force all Reddit links to open in old Reddit for you.
Oh, I didn’t know it is on firefox android. I use it on desktop firefox though.
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.
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.
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
I didn’t come here directly after reddit. Stopped off at mastodon first, but it was too twitter-like for my taste. Saw Lemmy on a list of alternatives, and this place scratches the itch pretty well.
deleted by creator
Saw it mentioned on Reddit
When the chapotraphouse subreddit was banned I learned about lemmy and hexbear. I lost the password to lemmy.ml u/HamidPayaamAbbasi now I have my own instance.
Why was the Chapotraphouse sub banned?
Who knows, they said because of glorifying violence when people were praising John Brown, but really I think Reddit is anti leftist and used quarantining The_Donald as an excuse for “fairness”
Reddit is a captured propaganda tool of the US state department and heavily botted by their political parties.
Wouldn’t stop promoting killing slaveowners after Spez said he would probably own slaves in a post apocalypse scenario.
A better more exhaustive answer here: https://hexbear.net/post/56333
Same, minus the u/HamidPayaamAbbasi part
I remember seeing lemmy maybe 4+ years ago on some open-source subreddit. It had practically non-existent user base, so I’ve ignored it. After that, I remember a first wave of people making mastodon accounts (even before elon). There I’ve first heard of concept of “fediverse”. I liked the idea but I honestly thought it had zero chances to compete with mainstream social media.
And then everything turned to shit, making a gap between something like lemmy and reddit a lot smaller. So I’ve jumped the ship with everyone after the API shitstorm.
It must have been somewhere around early 2020 when I was casually browsing Mastodon. I found about a federated Reddit alternative and got immediately interested. I registered to Lemmy.ml and in 2021 founded Sopuli when federation got implemented properly. And here I am!
I was on reddit when the api changes happened, after that (and the canvas) i deleted my account over there and went here.
The great Reddit migration when 3rd party devs realized how much Reddit would charge them to use Reddit’s API in order to serve information to their apps. RiF was my shit.
I love Lemmy now though. Its federated nature, while abnormal and at times not the easiest to explain, has me hopeful for the cyberspace future that isn’t fully dictated by corporations. Using Fdroid, getting over the hump from Chrome to Firefox, and now the prospects of switching entire OSs from Windows to Linux are within my visibility now, when before I was comfortable in my corporate bubble.
Think the next thing I need to start taking strides on after Linux is privacy. I still keep my passwords locked under OneDrive Vault and a password protected OneNote. Should probably dump that and move over to keypass or some other password manager. I just don’t want to have to pay for a service right now on a recurring basis unless I choose to to support the devs.
re: password managers, I can recommend BitWarden. Open source and free for personal use. Can donate for a couple enhanced features. Also have the option of self-hosting.
How’s Proton Pass? Seems like I can’t download BitWarden from Fdroid, although I imagine there’s an .apk somewhere online
Haven’t tried Proton Pass, so can’t speak to it. As for BW, you can get it from FDroid, but have to add their repository. It’s on their Download page.
The ChapoTrapHouse-Hexbear pipeline
Yet another reddit exodus user here, started with Jerboa and settled on Eternity. Trying to learn rust so I can help out.
Several years ago I stumbled upon ActivityPub and the Fediverse. I created a few accounts across services, I think Friendica was the first. I quickly got bored with it because no one else from my real life was on it and the overall userbase was tiny. Move forward a couple of years and I left reddit when they took away third-party apps and mod tools. Lemmy had enough users at that point I’ve stuck around.
I created a Mastadon account when Musk bought Twitter but that’s gone idle. I was never that into Twitter, it’s not a format I prefer.
