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?
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.
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.
It was a niche network for few passionate people. Content was more political than generic. It always felt like it would succeed though. Only thing I’m missing is that the website was blazing fast back then. It’s struggling now with all the new users but I’m sure that will be fixed sooner or later.
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.
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
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.
