I discovered Lemmy as a reddit alternative once they introduced the api changes, and from what I understand, so did most of the current users. So I was wondering what was Lemmy like before that? Did any notable things or inside jokes happened? If you are one of the old users are you happy with this growth? Is there anything you’ll miss?
I’m very happy with this growth! Lemmy before the refugee influx was nice enough, but the conversation topics were more or less based on politics and open source software. With new users coming here posts have become much more varied.
As far as notable things are concerned, there is one incident that I thought was funny. About two years ago, the content on Lemmy was sparse. So sparse that even if a post only got a few upvotes, it would get on the front page. And so it came to pass that one user’s posts were regularly featured on the front page. The user will stay unnamed, but the posts were about flat earth.
The posts were downvoted, many into negative numbers no less, and ignored at first, but they just kept coming. And the user was so adamant that the earth was flat, he would go off in the comments calling people “simpletons” for believing the “lies” we were fed. So then a few users, myself included, went to the user’s community and just started shitposting flat earth memes. The user tried arguing at first, but then went quiet. And after that, no more flat earth posts.
It was very small and slow, every post had max 50 upvotes and like 10 comments (maybe more on the more political ones, where trolls reigned) There was a new post once in a blue moon, you could scroll at 10,and find the same content that you would find at 22.
I joined a year ago btw, it was like this until the mass migration 1 week ago or so
Yeah that sounds about right. I joined a few months ago and it was just to small to keep me interested. I think it popped up in a post about mastadon after Musk took a shot all over Twitter. Its been fun to see all the new communities pop up over there last fun days. It’s like watching a newly planted garden pop up in spring. But with memes instead of snap peas.
You could come to lemmy once a month, and see just about nothing change.
It was not nearly as fun as it is now
https://lemmy.ml/u/Communist from a 4 year old account.
And I thought my 2.5 year old account was pretty old
I’ve been here for 2 years. Didn’t post anything or comment until the migration.
This influx of users has been great, and I really hope the momentum continues!
It’s been the same for me. 2 years ago, when I discovered Lemmy, the platform felt a bit dead. I looked around and there wasn’t much content.
Now with the huge influx of people, Lemmy has seen an unprecedented grow. It’s undoubtedly caused it’s fair share of problems for the communities that were already in existance, although I don’t see that as somerhing bad, just a step in it’s growing process.
Way before the meltdown of Reddit, Lemmy was used mainly by it’s creators and likeminded people. Now it’s become way easier to find interesting content and diverse opinions.
I hope this wave of reddit refugees has given Lemmy the exposure needed to become a useful platform. I just hope that “the bad” of reddit doesn’t come here.
It was… sleepy. One guy provided half the content. Particular topics had like max 30 people interested enough to click the arrows, usually way less. Hell, even the few trolls we had were usually recycled.
As a refugee myself, I’m glad to hear the old ones seem to perceive the influx as mostly exciting and positive. I had some worries some people might not like how the new ones change and overwhelm what’s old and dear.
Ah well, maybe it’s too early to judge. Maybe you hate us next week? :)
Slow, mostly tech- and politics- focused (for me, as I follow plenty lemmygrad communities), and to be honest kind of boring. I’d open it up once in a blue moon, check if there was some content, “nope”, and then move on.
Now though? I’m probably a few hours straight here, drinking my yerba and using it.
The good: we didn’t have people constantly asking the same basic questions instead of opening the support/chat community and seeing that 4 other people had made the same post the same day.
The bad: we didn’t have people.
It was a small friendly community where we could shoot the shit. I’m generally lurking much much more than posting on all the platforms I’ve used, but on lemmy sometimes if I had a silly thought I would just find some community adjacent to my silly thought and throw it out to the world, without feeling like I might be judged for a bad post or wrong place to share.
Absolutely everyone knows it’s dumb to get invested in upvotes or downvotes, but I’m an irrational person and sometimes I like to see that someone appreciated my contribution to discussion. When you’re in a smaller community, those somehow feel more personal, you feel like someone actually read what you wrote. The flip side to that mentality would be feeling insecure about downvotes, but I think I only ever got one downvote before the migration a couple weeks ago. The community felt welcoming to me.
I will admit, there is a tiny part of me that feels like my special place is turning into another reddit, which I’ll have to get used to. I feel like I’m not supposed to say that out loud, but it is there. The big concern I have is getting big enough to have product placement and PR stuff. Reddit was popular enough to get astroturfed to hell, and as a dumb person sometimes I can’t distinguish which opinions are genuine. That makes me feel more detached from discussion.
Overall though, I’m really happy to see this place succeed, it’s come so far since I joined a few years ago. I’ve commented a bunch in the past few days, I do really like having more people to chat with. My experiences with the devs have been great over the years and I’m happy for them to have their project gain steam, they really deserve it.
I wasnt here for long (lemmy wise, i mostly use calckey, interface like twitteri) idk if its me but lemmygrad.ml had alot of out posts then lemmy.ml Anither note i might selfhost my own lemmy instance, to help with keeping lemmy decentralized
For new users: Welcome to the fediverse! it takes a bit to adapt but you end up understanding it more esp with the graphics I see it as a social media community, built and made by the community, its what social media should be, whenever big corps behind social media fail, everyone is guided and flocks to fedi Graphics https://fedi.omada.cafe/files/f62eb02f-e9ac-4c64-8bc8-1c5d54079dbd https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_view_into_the_Fediverse.png (same as above) Another one below by @axbom@axbom.me https://fedi.omada.cafe/files/c1203ad1-7010-4030-aeaf-4dcd37cc546a https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fediverse_branches_1.2.png
(Had to self promo my instance)
peaceful
You’d recognize almost every user that posted or commented. I guess it did feel peaceful, as others have mentioned. I’d add to that that it also felt a bit limiting.
At the same time, most people were interested in the same topics as I am, so it was great to find like-minded people! Libre software, classical economics, the wellbeing of most people on Earth, environmentalism, programming…
I quite liked it. You could recognize users, everyone was generally nice, you could leave for a month without feeling like you missed out, conflict wasn’t worth it most of the time so you’d see it to a lesser degree than compared to the conflict generated in just the past week, and the vegan community thrived. I actually started having conversations with some Lemmy users outside of Lemmy!
I remember how exciting it was when federation was enabled and the handful of instances could finally hang out together.
It was quiet and peaceful, but drama would happen once every couple of months that was both entertaining and annoying.
