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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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? :)
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.
