Title basically. I was here at the very start of it all and really enjoyed it. However I felt it lost its uniqueness within a few months of mass migration and started turning a bit like reddit again so I deleted my old account. However Reddit has only gotten much much worse since, and Lemmy has stayed about the same. So here again.
I haven’t read all the comments in here, and probably won’t. But based on what I’ve seen so far, I’ll be the contrarian.
I first started actively participating on Lemmy maybe a few months before the API debacle, but I’d also been checking the place out a bit for a few months before even signing up.
This place was A LOT kinder then. Users were more apt to stand up for each other and call out bad behavior. Someone called another person a “fucking idiot” over an inconsequential difference of opinion and multiple people would be on top of that.
The API debacle itself meant a lot more users arriving at a faster pace, and they were mostly a good mix of all the different Reddit archetypes – the good and the bad. To me, it seems like it’s the in between Lemmy picks up the, shall I say, less appealing Rexitors. The ones that were permabanned for no reason at all they simply said they LOVE KITTENS – and then you see their toxicity here and that internal conflict strikes where you’re like “permabans shouldn’t be a thing, but in this case, I can kind of understand why it might’ve happened”.
Anyway, all this to say, back in the before times, the Fediverse felt a bit more distinct, like it had truly had its own generally amicable vibe and culture. Now, it feels like this is probably “Reddit-vibes” but from six months ago.
Not that I’m hating on Lemmy, obviously I’m still here, and it’s still currently the lesser of two evils.
Yes, it’s fair to day Lemmy used to be more friendly, but it also was more homogeneous. I think, for the quantity of people found, it’s still pretty civilized. I just admit, once, they author of some kind of “fuck you” message was me, and, while I still stand by that message, the moderators, probably the same person I replied to, banned me of that community. Fair, I guess.
Our bans are… less effective than Reddits. So it’s not just that we hand them out less.