I joined Mastodon when Musk took over Twitter. That didn’t really work out. So I stuck to Reddit. Then spez started up with the API nonsense, and I kept seeing stuff about Lemmy. Checked it out, and here I am.

Last November, Seattle Bike Blog posted about a “mostly Seattle-based transit-loving” Mastodon server (social.ridetrans.it), and it sounded great to me (and still is!). But coming to Lemmy around the Reddit blackout (I was a RIF user for probably 10+ years) was what really got me interested in the fediverse as a whole.

I joined after the shitstorm that Reddit made the community go trough. It’s a worse website now because of the changes to the API where they now take money for using it. They now have to charge the user for using their apps. Basically making it easy for me to stop using reddit entirely.

Tip for you guys that still want to use an app but don’t know about it: geddit is a free app that scrape RSS to let you browse reddit. I’ve used it more and more to get used to it. It’s pretty good but since it doesn’t use rhe API you can’t comment or bookmark stuff. You can however watch NSFW stuff but it doesn’t work that well compared to how Relay for instance did it back when apps where allowed to show NSFW content…

I nuked my Reddit when spez decided to be a clown and moved to Lemmy.

Technically 3 years ago when hexbear was launched.

Late June of this year, when RIF was shut down.

I joined Lemmy when Boost for reddit got paywalled.

06/16/2023 on sh.itjust.works and 06/17/2023 here on SDF. Since I didn’t yet know what Lemmy was, I used same username I have on sdf.org UNIX system. And now I am stuck with it.

I was a reddit refugee from the whole spez thing. Lemmy being a potentially viable alternative kept me around through the growing pains.

I like writing long, informative comments on occasion, and rather than let reddit own them, I’d rather we all own them. That’s all.

Only like a week ago when we finally federated, it’s been kinda wild ngl

Lemmy on June 9th. The day before reddit died. There were 1.21k users on this instance back then. All of Lemmy looked like it was less than around 5-6k users total, and most were not active. There were less than a dozen communities I would call active, on all major instances combined. Beehaw and .ml were the biggest, but that is not saying much at the time. Kbin was totally defederated from everyone back then.

I tried out Mastodon once, never really got into it. Fast forward to Twitter’s acquisition, shit hit the fan, you know the story, but I wasn’t really convinced until some of the decisions lately. Tried out Mastodon again, and whilst it was nice, it wasn’t really for me. I figured I’d try looking for another instance, and I ended up landing myself on Kbin as it has Lemmy support for topical discussions, as well as microblogging capabilities for who I keep track of on Mastodon. I don’t post that actively, but it’s been great so far!

I created my account in Status.net (now GNU Social) around 2009 and later it was switched to pump.io: https://identi.ca/chuso
And Diaspora* in 2010: https://joindiaspora.com/people/4d0aa88b2c174330380001db
Like others, with not a lot success with those early projects until I joined Mastodon in 2017: @chuso

I technically started with Lemmy pretty early, long before any of the Reddit exit stuff, but it was hyper focused on politics still and I feel like spending that much time talking politics online is extremely unhealthy. I was really only interested in a hobby forum with the Reddit format that didn’t have the suffocating debate bro culture.

I started lurking since the Reddit exit stuff to see if it would grow enough to support other topics. It has, but I’m not certain if I’ll stay. Unsurprisingly an influx in Redditors has made this place culturally a lot more like Reddit, for the worse.

I also dabbled in Mastodon years ago but I’ve never particularly liked the Twitter format so a federated clone didn’t really gel with me.

I found it via lurking Reddit during the API protests.