Zero! Zero familiarity! When I heard about Lemmy during the Great Reddit Migration of 2023 I was like “What a stupid name. I should code my own Reddit and get rich. The time is now!”. But then I realized I don’t want to code Reddit after writing code for 6-10 hours a day at work, and I checked Lemmy out. Then I learned about the Fediverse. Then I was highly impressed and gave many oohs and aaahs. Now I’m off Reddit completely (except for CenturyClub from my desktop like twice a week for 10 minutes) and this is my home. Yay!

I knew and used Mastodon on occasion but, definitely appreciate it more now

I setup a Mastodon instance at leftist.network back in 2020, when I was worried that the COVID/Trump situation was going to quickly transition into something more serious. Besides Jan 6th that didn’t happen, but hey, it was a cool domain for people to join when Twitter started tanking!

But the thing is, I never really used Twitter. My social media was Facebook and reddit. Both of them for the discussion groups (Facebook isn’t boring if all your friends are gay communists). Mastodon didn’t quite scratch the itch, mostly because there’s nothing like Facebook groups or subreddits. I had looked at Lemmy before, but there wasn’t a big enough user base to really move over.

I looked up kbin and lemmy with the reddit diaspora, and they fit both social media fixes. Most communities are on Lemmy, but I like kbin’s interface more. I just want kbin to add the feature to hide upvoted posts.

I’m a little dismayed that more and more stuff is moving to Discord though. I was an IRC regular back in the day, but I could never quite deal with Discord’s 24/7 conversation to try to keep up with.

I was vaugly aware of Mastadon and the federation idea. Thought it was a cool idea but I just hate the Twitter format so never thought more of it.

Had a Mastodon account years ago (whenever the radical.town instance was a thing). But I never used it because I never used Twitter. Made an account on an instance for music and that I’ll actually use here recently with the Twitter stuff. Then joined kbin and Lemmy to check them out shortly after with everyone else during all the commotion.

I had a general idea of the Fediverse, how it worked, and some of the platforms on it (Friendica, etc), but never really got into it til earlier this year.

i’d used mastodon.social briefly after the tumblr porn ban but then switched back when it turned out to be not that big a deal. not to mention i really didn’t understand the concept of different servers or how federating/defederating worked. i floundered for a couple of days before i came across my current setup. calckey account which i look at rarely and an account on a small lemmy server for stability purposes.

I had gotten so ‘meh’ with Twitter that by the time Mastodon came around, I just wasn’t interested and would rather just quit Twitter altogether.

Then, a couple weeks ago some buddies on a Discord were talking about Lemmy, so I decided to look into it. And so here I am.

I hadn’t even heard of it!

Already used Mastodon before and understood the concept of decentralization. I used Lemmy years ago, but the front page was getting like 12 upvotes so not much was going on lol.

To be honest, I thought it was stupid. I misunderstood how it works and I thought it was overcomplicating the idea of decentralised instances

Doubleposted fyi.

Personally I was vaguely aware of Mastodon when it first started being talked about as a Twitter competitor. But I didn’t really “get it”, I thought it was Twitter with added email functionality or something.

Wasn’t until spez shattered reddits remaining anti-troll defenses that I started actually doing some research, and finding out Mastodon actually does not have email functionality. Something completely different from that, actually.

Pretty similar to you: Had heard about Mastodon when Twitter started imploding and made an account over there. But didn’t really get it and I never really used Twitter anyways so I wasn’t too interested in figuring it out.

Then when the APIpocalylse kicked off I came and checked out Lemmy and learned more about the Fediverse. When I found the Memmy app and more people started coming here it really felt like this was taking off, and I’m excited to see that momentum continuing. I haven’t opened Reddit since Apollo died, and this is now filling that void in my online diet.

I’ve been a regular on mastodon for a couple years, having fully quit twitter for it.

i was vaguely aware of lemmy but wasn’t interested enough to switch to it until basically now

Same here except that I created a lemmy.ml account. I had an account on a mastodon server which doesnt exist anymore but I never really used it. But now I still dont use mastodon but Instead of being reddit addicted I am now Lemmy addicted.

Generally its impossible to be reddit addicted because I always use Open Source apps for Social Media which now will cost me 2 million dollars I heard.

Been aware of it for the past year since twitter fucked up API access and I knew that reddit was going public someday.

I even selfhosted a matrix server for a while to try to use discord less but that fizzled out. Its complicated and kind of resource intensive to host your own instances especially with federation. But I am glad that is an option and will do it when I can upgrade my homelab. Now that reddit has fallen I am committing to the fediverse using mastodon and lemmy.