My journey with Lemmy started in 2022 out of interest in the fediverse and paranoia around how much control social media companies have, and how little choice common people are left with over the Internet.
Lemmy was much smaller back then. I really wanted it go get bigger, and tried to contribute to it. But it was small enough to be unsatisfying, so I would go back and forth between lemmy and Reddit.
After the Reddit fiasco, I shifted more and more towards lemmy and less towards Reddit. I finally abandoned Reddit when third party apps broke. I only go there for specific questions in communities that aren’t active on lemmy.
What about you?
Lemmy started for me in December 2022. By that point, I’d been on the fediverse for 6 months or so. The Twitter implosion had just happened the month before, and I finally realised how sick of centralised social media I was. Reddit was the only one I was using, though I barely touched it because of the moderation, and so I went looking for alternatives.
I found lemmy.ml, and saw the potential of the concept. A month later, in January 2023 my partner and I were running an instance (we already ran a regular fediverse instance). The lemmy instance was basically just a single person instance. Sign ups were open, but lemmy was quiet back then, so the few people that joined left again. My partner barely used lemmy, so it was basically a single person instance.
And then the reddit implosion happened, and suddenly we found ourselves running a fully fledged lemmy instance, with more users than our “main” instance. And that was really the moment that I got more serious about lemmy too. The increase in community size and engagement transformed the experience.
I’ve never been back to reddit since I left in December 2022, but I didn’t delete my account until 2023 during the reddit exodus.