I'm an old reddit user, going back to '08. Like many of you I'm sure, I've seen the site rise and fall. Killing 3p apps was a major blow, along with the purge of so many subreddits, and now you have to log in to even view it...it's getting real bad.
I had heard of the fediverse back when Mastadon was first announced. Briefly checked it out, but didn't give it much mind. This morning I was browsing reddit and read a thread about the continual degradation of the site. Someone mentioned Lemmy (new to me), but I thought "hey! I'll check it out, why not''. A brief google search gave me some iOS apps, and I wound up using Voyager (10/10 btw, Voyager reminds me a lot of Apollo in it's hayday). I applied/logged in....and just...wow. Wow y'all. Lemmy reminds me so much of reddit circa late 00's. Sure, there is a smaller user base, but so was reddit at the time. I remember the subreddit you were supposed to go to when you made an acccount and introduce yourself :D
And here on Lemmy, nothing looks like obvious bot posts. Content seems real. In correlation with that, the post titles seem pretty reasonable and not based around rage bait / click bait.
After setting it up on my phone, I found the desktop site (I'm on a laptop some times) and I adore a.lemmy.zip. To me its the perfect layout. The other incredible thing about Lemmy is just how seamless it was to set up, on both mobile and desktop. It feels super accessible to non-technical users, which is something I don't think is true for a lot of fediverse things.
But seriously, I used to adore reddit so much. Watching it fall apart has made me sadder and sadder over time. There was seemingly nothing in its place. I really felt like that era of internet over entirely. Just my first few hours on Lemmy has made me realize I was wrong, in the best way possible. It gave me chills. I'm looking forward to this platform growing. So anyway, thanks for any/all of you who developed/are developing Lemmy. It really, truly feels like a return to the golden age of social.
No you're absolutely correct. I vividly remember reddit 18 years ago. Pretty much every post on every subreddit was intentional. Early on, even the concept of comments on posts was disputed as a good feature or not. Now its entirely different. The big reddits now are ones like poursTea, sipsTea, different variations of infuriating, and WhitePeopleTwitter, etc. They're all basically rage bait holes, designed to get an emotional reaction out of you, and the comments are people arguing with bots, or bots arguing with bots. And with the scale on reddit now, you can effectively doomscroll /r/all, as more and more posts flood in. It's not far off from Instagram and TikTok.
Lemmy has less posts, less upvotes, but they are all [presumably, hell I'm sure there's an exception] real.
It's feels like trading in a giant box of cheese balls for a small, but very nicely cooked steak. Smaller but actually filling.
whitepeopletwitter went kinda boring after they came back from being banned temporarily. i suspect thats why reddit is doing the login popups, too little users less and more than 60+% bots on the site. too many got purged , AI banned(with no recourse to appeal). with forcing log in, they are trying to claw back some actual user data. i saw on some of the subs that were discussing the popup, they were temp banned, or banned they ended up just browsing reddit logging out to avoid potential future bans altogether(aka lurkers).
and also google limiting thier number of accounts per phone, and yes they likely are working withr eddit.