I want to see more FOSS/FLOSS projects succeed. One of Lemmy’s biggest obstacles is its lack of users so I joined to be a part of the solution instead of the problem.
Hopefully Reddit’s changes provides similar benefits for Lemmy that Elon’s Twitter changes did for Mastodon. I’m not sure if Lemmy will ever reach the size of Reddit (or even Mastodon), but it honestly doesn’t need to if the community is engaged enough.
As you say, size isn’t end-all-be-all. It’s the engagement. There’s plenty of old-school forums online that thrive with around 100-200 members. Lemmy probably has double that in active monthly users spread across the 4-5 big instances. It already feels bigger than VOAT ever got. And, at least this instance (beehaw.org), seem to be way better modded and ran.
I agree that beehaw is rad, but the last few months were very quiet on lemmy. Too quiet for my taste. Since the recent reddit thing there was a big influx of new users and also new ideas and whatnot.
A bit of both.
In short: Came for the Reddit, stayed for the Fediverse.
Reddit was down for several hours a month or so ago, then the new site was back up much faster than old.reddit.com and apps. That clued me in to the fact they appear ready to shut down the API even before any announcement, so I made a Lemmy account then and there. So right now is the transition period for me between the announcement and when free Reddit JSON API access gets cut off.
Before I joined Lemmy I heard about Mastodon, looked through Peertube a bit in passing.
Lemmy being an open source project has been the main reason for me, Fediverse support is a bonus. I think that social platforms fundamentally need to be open and publicly owned. I wrote about this in more detail here https://justiceinternationale.com/articles/2020-12-02-we-must-own-our-tools/
Sort of both, my brother runs a plemora instance so I knew about the fediverse, and Reddit’s recent move to try to cut out 3rd party apps prompted me to give lemmy a try. The only reason I used Reddit was because of how functional the 3rd party apps were.
I use it because I miss what reddit used to be. Now, all the moderators talk about subs as their “projects”.
I am already in fediverse, just discovered Lemmy after Reddit decided to charge for api access making my use of third party client difficult. I find this approach really annoying so here I am.
Gonna be honest I don’t really understand the Fediverse yet but I’m here cuz it feels cool and reddit kind of annoys me these days
Same here. I know Lemmy should, in some way, connect to Mastodon, which is getting bigger
mastodon, lemmy and a few other softwares can speak activityPub, a standard, just like e-mail is one. You can follow a user, read their posts etc. Lemmy uses this differently than mastodon, where on lemmy there is an emphasis on the groups feature (which is shown on lemmy through the reddit like communities), while mastodon focuses on users and their posts. It’s not yet 100% compatible in all ways, but it’s getting there. For example you can follow a lemmy community from a mastodon server and you’ll see that community as a groups that boosts all the posts and comments that are made. Something like that ^^
I don’t even understand it 100% anymore, it’s getting more complicate the more things are built. But I think in the future it will get easier and each software (lemmy, mastodon, etc) will focus on something and then have a set feature set of what they can do with other servers.
That’s what I’m feeling as a new user looking for a reddit alternative. This whole thing shows a lot of promise, but it feels very complicated and not especially intuitive. That’s ok, though, nothing wrong with complex, it just going to take some getting used to.
The fediverse is the future of the web. Reddit has been a massively important part of the modern web experience, but it looks like their pursuit of profits will begin to diminish It’s usefulness. Lemmy is slowly filling that void for me. Hopefully it continues to grow and fill that void for others too.
I came here because reddit community is really bad (upvoting bad stuff) and mods aren’t helping. Still reading posts there. Here I feel comfortable voicing my opinion and I love the FOSS part of it (and I love infernoJS too).
I can see some uses for reddit for professional related topic, I once publish a blog post that got me traction and clients. I never used reddit for small/personnal/political talks because of this too.
I have never been in social networks (no twitter/facebook/mastodon/etc), I don’t see yet the pros of the fediverse.
Because of Reddit, but I’m very excited to see the fediverse grow such that Reddit is the last network I have to leave
Both? I started using it because it’s on the fediverse, and I keep using it because it’s on the fediverse and it isn’t reddit
Mainly because of fedi. Had been using fedi for years, never had a Reddit account.
Both, I was interested in the Fediverse, made this account as a just in case. Then Reddit started to become like digg, pulling the API thing, forcing me to use the app and not the webpage when I was on my phone. The final straw was the realization that they might pull a twitter.
Currently, I’m checking if I can find similar lemmies (I hope that’s the correct word for a Subreddit equivalent) to what I was subscribed to.
You can always make them if you can’t find them!
