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.
Yeah, Reddit is deep in a downward spiral, as it arguably has been for years.
And Lemmy (along with the fediverse/threadverse in general) is pretty great. Of course, it's much smaller here for sure, but that has its ups and downs. As much as I would love to see the fediverse grow, I'm happy right now that it isn't suffering many of the same problems that the big legacy corporate social media platforms are (bots, scraping, corporate shilling, endless slop mills, addictive and manipulative algorithms, power-tripping mods and admins, dark patterns, etc.). This place feels like a real community, or rather, a bunch of real communities all tied up together. It undoubtedly takes a little more effort and participation on the part of the individual user to get the most out of Lemmy, but I think it's in many ways more rewarding in the end.
I'm now permabanned from Reddit for some stupid reason, and so the new requirement to be logged in to even read the site has made it pretty much useless for me under any circumstance. After more than a decade on the paltform my relationship with Reddit is all but over now, and that's probably for the better, frankly.
Hopefully we can continue to find a way to grow the platform without inheriting many of the problems that Reddit has today.
appears them purging so many users last year, resulted in this. google is the main recipient of scraping reddit data, and they are likely complaining that they are running into more and more AI content(AI scraiping AI) because so many users left the site due to it.