Everyone cheered when the jannies got booted for "abusing their power" only to be replaced by someone less capable but more willing to toe the line for the company
I didn't care too much about API changes at first - I used on open source app on my phone but mostly browsed desktop. Would have been fine going back to desktop only. As long as they keep the old site design around, I'd be fine to stay.
What killed it for me was the absolutely un-caring, not-budging response from leadership. I don't feel good continuing to feed the site my attention at that point.
I like quirky Foss stuff anyway, so I was already curious about Mastodon and Lemmy. But I'd always figured they'd be ghost towns. Twitter and Reddit deliberately being proudly, blatantly awful was enough to push me out to here, along with enough other folks.
It was a result of the 3rd party app collapse that triggered the migration of reasonable people out of reddit. I was the mod of r/mapporncirclejerk and saw my mod queue explode with the most hateful shit that went unchecked by other commenters.
Then my friend told me about where everyone went, glad to see all of you!
While the "recent troubles" put energy to my leaving, I have always been uncomfortable with Reddit, Twitter, Discord, Stack Overflow, Quora and Fandom, as corporate-owned repositories who work by, in one way or other, profiting off of freely contributed work.
It used to be that if someone wanted to help people with freely-given information, they'd offer it in a forum, on Usenet, or on a website they started and hosted themselves, or if it fit in there, put it on Wikipedia. Now, people add it to a freaking pile that corporations monetize. Don't just hand them value! Put it somewhere that won't beg you to install an app, or beg you to "upgrade" to "Nitro," or force you to watch intrusive ads, or force people to create an account to see it, or track you! Your volunteer labor should not be a profit center!
Forums and websites have always used content to market things (think DAU or visitors to sell more expensive banner ads at the top of a post).
I agree that forum hosts were (mostly) random people that wanted to do something for their community, but monetization didn't kill the friendly Internet, consolidation did.
The killing of Apollo (and all others) really rubbed me the wrong way, and I refuse to support companies moving in the direction of forcing ads in front of people.
I got permabanned for telling someone to crawl back in their hole and apparently that's a euphemism for telling someone to kill themselves?
Meanwhile the person I was replying to was talking about how she saw female genital mutilation as abhorrent but all her sons were circumcised for "visual reasons" (she thought uncut penises looked gross).
So yeah, I noped tf outta there and have been here ever since.
It's an upgrade in most ways but lemmy seems pretty 50/50 on how they treat poor people and technology.
I got permabanned for talking about piracy in /r/movie and then accidently commenting there later on a separate account. This was just months before they killed 3rd party apps so it was very easy to leave.
API changes, I use to use Infinity for Reddit and it was good. Then they killed it effectively.
So I moved to Eternity for Lemmy until support dropped. Now I'm on Voyager.
Good apps design keeps me using a platform and I like the slower pace of Lemmy. I still use reddit for time to time especially for smaller communities. But do my part here.
They virtually blocked me from posting because I deleted my main account. Not out of protest but only because karma is meant to make you 'feel' like you're important and keep you enagaged. I would just rather not let reddit have access to all my thoughts for years and years in a easy to access public account. So I purge accounts all the time, easy come, easy go.
It usually is fine but the next account I made would get a lot of harassment for being new and typical commentary I had no problem posting on my high Karma account would get me banned from certain communities. Which is fine but it wouldn't stop me from purging that account too. They eventually flagged me for "ban evasion" and my posts were blocked the second I'd make an account.
The third party switch. Plus I have found lemmy to be quite refreshing. On Reddit all I did was lurk. But now I actually comment and participate. Because it feels like I'm talking to real people.