Before the whole Reddit migration I was passively aware of the Fediverse, I thought I somewhat grasped the concept, and had created a Mastodon account, but never really used it.
But once the migration started, I decided to try out Kbin, and really liked it, and even started to use Mastodon more often.
During my master’s degree we had a course where we had to make a small app or data collection thingy using the Mastodon api (or something, can’t fully remember). So I was aware it existed, and contemplated joining at a few points. Ultimately though, I just don’t really vibe with Twitter-like social media. After Reddit did the thing, I saw Lemmy, which suits me way better. I like it so far. I’m donating a small amount of money to help with keeping the instance running, and I hope this remains a cool place to be for many years to come.