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.
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. But those generally aren’t my kind of social networking style.
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.
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/
Just for the fediverse
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
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.
I use it because it’s the best shot we have to build a real alternative to Reddit. It feels a bit like Reddit at 2008 or so.
But I have the feeling that I might just stay for the community.
What is this thing called Reddit?
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.
