Ask Lemmy

Surprisingly not hard at all. I helped build tools for moderators on Reddit that were used by millions. When the API changes hit, it completely destroyed all of my work. I have no interest in dedicating my time casually or seriously to a site that treats me that way.

I’m a habitual person but switching to the fediverse was like trading cigarettes for a vape. Same addiction, different delivery, more flavor 😛

Not difficult at all.

Left Facebook in 2016, Left Instagram in 2017, Left Snapchat in 2018, Left twitch in 2021, Left Twitter in 2022, Left Reddit in 2023.

I could walk away from tiktok at any moment.

Honestly I thought it would be tougher than it really was. The first couple days I did miss it, it was my go to for over 12 years.

I'm thankful RIF suggested this place, it's a much nicer environment.

I still haven't fully abandoned reddit. Reason: There are a number of niche communities I'm part of that just have zero or near-zero population here. Fediverse just doesn't yet have the minimum critical mass of users necessary to be a viable alternative for anything but the most common and basic topics.

As far as making the switch for the common/popular stuff, there were difficulties that I ran into but I've mostly adapted. My first big mistake was trying to use Jerboa (I thought it was the 'official' app, but quickly discovered that it loves to shit itself if the app version is out of sync with the server version by even a sub-sub-dot version number. It also crashed a lot. Another early mistake was joining a small instance and not realizing that their view of "all" communities was not the same as the view of "all" communities from a bigger instance...and so my earliest view of the fediverse was pretty crippled until I started creating accounts on other instances. My next problem was the learning curve: I didn't see a lot of the communities I wanted while on that small instances and so I started creating them, only to later discover that many of those communities already existed on other instances and were well established. Fediverse has a MASSIVE community discoverability problem that needs to be solved before more of the masses will be attracted to it.

Now that I've got a good working client that I like, have local accounts on the main instances where most of the communities I participate in are located, have re-found replacement communities for the ones I lost access to when beehaw de-federated, I estimate that after about 2 more years at current growth, fediverse might also be a viable alternate to those niche communities I'm still going to reddit for. I'd estimate that I'm 70% fediverse + 30% reddit at this point.

Not at all. Honestly getting rid of Twitter and Reddit has given me more free time that I didn't realize I was wasting constantly scrolling. There's less to see on Mastodon and Lemmy so I usually just run through it in the morning on my way to work and a bit at night if I'm bored (like right now.) I've gotten back into reading books a lot more and getting off the computer for a lot longer.

Honestly getting rid of Twitter and Reddit has improved my life if anything.

Surprisingly not that hard. Thanks every one!

I've left better things over lesser issues.

Switching from Reddit to Lemmy was easy because most of the major reddit communities exist here (albeit smaller) and have generally better post quality.

Really easy. I assume when you say “social media” website you mean Reddit. Reddit was a website I’d browse to kill time when I was bored to find amusing content. Thanks to their recent policy change and their crappy treatment of their users, I torched my 10+ year old accounts and moved over basically overnight. Plenty of like minded individuals have done the same in the past couple months it seems. The fediverse has reached critical mass.

The core of Reddit were their users and the mods who volunteer their free time to look after the site, and they shat all over them. Killed the golden goose as it were. I’m a little surprised as to how many people (especially mods) are still hanging around over there.

It was easy to start, but difficult to keep to. There were communities that had a special place to me, and while I've found the Lemmy analogues and they're amazing, I still sometimes miss seeing certain familiar names I grew to associate with my time over at Reddit.

I realize we were nothing more than ships passing in the ocean of comments, but sometimes, seeing a familiar name drop some good advice or just a cheery reply on a rough day was nice.

Way easier than expected. I used to spend hours mindlessly scrolling on reddit, occasionally learning something useful but that was the exception. I suffer from anxiety so I genuinely had concerns about quitting reddit, but also recognised it was an unhealthy way to spend so much free time. I left on the first day of the protests and haven't been back since. Was honestly surprised and impressed at myself for managing it so easily (rediscovered my love of crosswords and my kindle). Joined Lemmy 2 days ago, so still finding my feet but so far it scratches that itch of keeping a little bit in-the-loop with pop culture. (But with time limits firmly on this time!)

For me, it depends on the website.

Twitter to Mastodon is easy. I've never understood short form text social media. I never made a Twitter account but I have a Mastodon account so I guess that says something. But I still don't use it.

Instagram to Pixelfed has been a hard sell. I enjoy photography but have hated Meta. I hated Instagram and ended up making one just because it's the only real active community, even though it's compression, resolution, and aspect ratio garbage are all awful for actual photography. I've tried 500px, Flickr, Vero, and a bunch of others and they all have problems. Pixelfeds UI and community just both aren't great so I can't buy in yet. And I'm not even using Instagram much these days anyway.

Does YouTube count? I don't comment/post much, but I have very little faith in PeerTube or any of the others ever gaining reasonable traction. So many other attempts at this have failed and the content is too important.

Reddit to Lemmy has been a mix. I completely axed Reddit apps and don't check it daily and instead use Lemmy. Been having a hard time filling the content void. And when I want hive mind type feedback on obscure things / recommendations / tech problems, you just can't beat reddits 15 year history of content and opinions. But I am actively posting/browsing on Lemmy instead.

Reddit made it very easy. If I was going to have to deal with switching apps anyway and a lot of the best moderators were gone this likely destroying those communities' ability to resist bots and other spam attacks, then may as well move somewhere that has more likelihood of being around in a few years with content rather than just ads and spam.

For me I dropped my main account cold turkey the day before the protests started. Never logged back in and never felt a strong enough desire to. There were a couple of time I was curious but held out.

My porn account on the other hand I used until Boost stopped working.

I would love to say the switch was seamless but it was clear from day one there was going to be pain points with the exponential growth lemmy experienced.

All in all I feel better with the slow pace, the friendly genuine people. No more endless doom scrolling.

Reddit is the only social media I no longer contribute to. I have a private LibReddit instance I use to read from the smaller niche communities that I can't find elsewhere, and some I even have feeding into my RSS reader. I haven't had a Facebook in quite some time and I never signed up for Twitter/Insta/etc.

The Fediverse has actually encouraged me to take part more. Not having to worry about corporate interests, or me being used as a product was always my main gripe.

Not hard once a leading contender for an alternative became obvious. Reddit helped by perma banning me for God alone knows what reason!

Facebook: “we’re now no letting you hide your profile and it must be public for sea—“

Cancelled as of 10 years now.

Steve Huffman: “I want to be like Elon M—“

And cancelled as well.

Thank goodness I don’t have addictive tendencies

A bit hard. That's very dependent on the alternative though.

Lemmy: I tried it a few days after the Reddit debacle and I never looked back. I really want this to work but the main thing is that I can still doom scroll anyway so I got that going for me, which is nice.

Mastodon: I didn't use Twitter anymore but then I wanted to again. So I looked into mastodon. It's been chaotic af. Couldn't find ppl I wanted to follow because no recommendations and you kinda have to know who you're looking for. Also there's no likes, so you don't even know which tweets were more interesting and that didn't help (I know this is controversial, but imo these are things that will always make it hard for the average social media person). I kinda just gave up and until this gets easier I won't try again. Don't have the motivation nor the patience for that. Not worth it.

I ~~am~~ was an Apollo user, and decided that Reddit killing it was too much. I switched to Lemmy, and while it has been an adjustment, I am reminded of the days of forums past. I dig it. Using Voyager (formally Wefwef) has helped preserve most of the UI of Apollo, which is nice. I had never heard of Progressive Web Apps before, and am super interested in the topic now. This makes me want to pick up programming again, in hopes of eventually being able to contribute to open source projects.

Once I was able to find the volume of content I needed to be able to find something relatively new to interact with any time I had 5 minutes to kill at work, that was it for Reddit and FB. It turns out that all I want is to hit the button and get the pellet, just like Skinner's rats.

Leaving was easy.

Using the alternatives is hard.

Pretty easy. Here's my two experiences so far:

• Twitter: I've only ever used it for memes, to follow a literal couple of content creators I liked and to promote my Twitch channel (which, at that point, was inactive). After the Musk acquisition and the first few bullshit decisions, I've promptly deleted my account and never looked back. I've since heard of Mastodon and decided to give it a shot - Twitter wasn't one of my favorite socials to begin with so I'm not particularly active on Mastodon either, but it's hands down a much better experience compared to it.
• Lemmy: I haven't outright deleted my Reddit account and I don't think I will, not because I want to keep using the site but rather due to some contributions that can be considered important to some communities (mainly 3DS hacking & homebrew) which could be lost if I do. However, I've been enjoying Lemmy a lot and the more time passes, the more I find myself using this social compared to Reddit.

So easy. Social websites are about the community, not the platform. If the people move, so will the discussion follow. Reddit now has no one that's worth talking to. Everyone worthy of having a meaningful discussion with has already left.

Now youtube... that's different... I don't think its possible for them to get replaced. Youtube is about the content created by content creators and I don't see any big youtubers moving to another platform, especially a fediverse one, since there's not gonna be adequete compensation to be worthwhile. I mean, maybe they can crosspost, but I'm not sure if the TOS allows that if you have like a special partnership agreement with youtube. Also, storage is going to be a big problem for a competing platform. Videos are much bigger than text. A text-based platform like Lemmy is going to be much easier to maintain than Peertube with videos taking up potentially terabytes of storage per day when the platform starts growing.

Quitting Reddit and switching to lemmy - easy. Quitting FB - not possible. I have no other way to keep in touch with remote friends and relatives and there are local FB groups that are useful for me. Dropping Whatsapp also is sadly impossible. With my nerdy friends I use telegram/signal but 99.99% of ppl are available only on WhatsApp.

I thought I'd miss Twitter, but nope. Mastodon's great. The only difference is you have to put in a little effort and engage with people, since you don't have an algorithm trying to feed you content.

I hope in time I'll enjoy Lemmy just as much.

For me it was easy because Reddit was really my only outlet. Never been a big social media user, but I've been using forums as long as I've been on the internet (a long enough time not to admit). So yeah it was a pretty easy transition other than a little bit of a learning curve in understanding how Lemmy and the Fediverse works.

Honestly, making the basic effort to try it was the hardest part…but I found pretty much all my main communities have slowly started gaining momentum here to the point where I maybe check Reddit once a week now?

Like Lemmy works great, and seems to just being gaining more and more steam.

Once I figured out that it does not matter what instance you join, it was simple. I initially kept trying to join lemmy.world but it timed out for a couple weeks. Tried signing up with a smaller instance and they had to manually approve my account which never happened. Finally found lemm.ee which let me sign up.

The Lemmy site could do a better job in making it clear that the instance you join does not matter that much. Currently the site tells you to join one that matches your interest which is a bit silly considering there are a myriad of subs on each of them.

I hardly ever used Twitter so when I started a mastodon account it really wasn't that big of a deal. Going to find out I don't really love Mastodon, I think I just don't like the format.

I left Reddit to come to Lemmy things were a little light not going to lie I'm missing some of my old support sites. The conversationally this place is the bomb. Less trolls less jerk wads more helpful nice pleasant people. When you get downvoted for something you can kind of tell why, but it's not like Reddit where they would downvote you and then make it through in personal vendetta to heckle you. Here just means you are being disagreed with or maybe have an unpopular opinion, or on occasion maybe you took something too far.

I saw the spaz "ama" and started looking.

Twenty minutes later, I had an account and was using it

Pretty damn easy

Easy. Deleted my FB 2016, never had a Twitter, Snapchat, vine, or anything else besides reddit. Didn't become a frequent on reddit until 2017. I think the longest thing I was on was myspace. That place I was always on and posting or using to communicate with friends. Was happy with squabbles but deleted account as well due to the knee jerk policy being thrown left and right. Will wait a while to see if they get their stuff together. Lemmy is ok. Still small so eh. Always hated people knowing about me or searching me up.

Pretty easy really, but the only "social media" I really used for at least the last 6 years was reddit

Super easy, barely an inconvenience

What’s been hard was that I left before the great migration. The issues were more technical and the fact that apps were just all at early alpha phases with many functionalities missing. Now it’s pretty much navy to normal. I actually even welcome the lower amount of content. Easier to keep track of instead of drinking from a Firehouse.

I haven't, really. Someone has to surf Reddit and Twitter to repost content to Lemmy, and right now I'm one of those someones.