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.

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.

My lemmy.ml account is now over 3 years old.

I had forgotten about it when all this reddit stuff started, and thought it wasn’t letting me sign up (there’s a bug that existing usernames just make it sit and spin instead of letting you know it’s taken)

… I just checked and my Mastodon account is nearly 5 years old. I’d guess my Matrix is around there also.

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 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.

Like some of us, a few weeks before the end of Apollo on Reddit. Been enjoying the ride so far, with its ups and downs.