I feel like the way the question is phrased is going to select for people who were banned. Personally I wasn’t but saw the upcoming IPO and wanted to dip before the platform was totally enshittified.

Ii was banned for saying old people call people who go to therapy “f_____”, i am not homophobic, matter of fact it wasn’t even in english, i used a word with much lighter connotation in my own language.

Some weeks before the fact i said that certain presidents of a certain country would end like Saddam Hussein if UN was serious.

I don’t use it as much but most of the engagement posts are run by bots. I stick to discord a little more. Feels more transparent and you need an invite.

I use this site because the community is genuinely better and reminds of me reddit from the early days. Reddit bans are easy to get around

My 20 year account got banned for using Apollo sideloaded. I still go there but let’s be honest, lemmy has far better memes

Why are new lemmy users thinking this is a refuge for the reddit banned? To my knowledge my account is still usable, but I just don’t want to log in since the API cash grab. What bullshit is reddit doing these days?

I deleted my reddit account during the API debacle and didn’t participate since, but kept lurking there. Then, a couple days ago they started requiring an account to access the site, and now I’m here, oh well.

Nah, i left when they killed whatever mobile app i was using to not have to deal with their shitty website

I got shadow banned (seemingly site-wide) after pointing out that the Biden and the Democrats’ messaging shifted from “Trump is a fascist” to “we have to think about unity!” after Trump got shot in the ear, which proved to me Biden et al. were either allied with fascists by protecting them from harm or never believed Trump was a fascist to begin with, which pointed to Biden (and his team and the whole democratic news media) being more closely aligned with Trump than they wanted people to know.

The tipping point for me was probably the line “if Biden actually thought Trump was a fascist and had an actual problem with that, he would’ve shot him on stage”

I was never banned but a few things led up to it

• I received a warning from their AI moderation because I wrote I wanted to shoot annoying children (who were playing reddead redemption online). I was in the red dead subreddit too when I wrote this. Any level of context literacy would not have let that go through. This also happened after I made a very contentious post about being sexually harassed in a video game which made the nerds very mad and I guess mass reported my history
• the punishment of mods protesting the API shit. I’ve moderated a community for 12 years, for those years it was implied it’s my community and I make the rules so I’m invested in it, but then suddenly you can have it taken from you if you set it to private? I now just sit on my subreddits and ignore them. I will remake them here.
• a beloved subreddit of mine (I didn’t own it just visited it daily) was attacked by a spam network for 2 weeks. Mod was inactive. I spent hours mass reporting every account but reddit did absolutely nothing and just shut the subreddit down instead of blocking suspicious accounts trying to post the same keywords there, like 3 seconds in automod would have saved it. I could have taken it over, but I’m done doing free labor for Spez after the API fiasco showed we have no control over our own subreddits
• people getting banned just for upvoting comments reddit doesn’t like
• everyone on reddit has become a lot more hostile and toxic, only wanting to shoot ‘hot takes’ and insults instead of having a discussion. It feels a lot more like Facebook now than Reddit
• final straw was the hiding of post history. There is no point in interacting with anyone on reddit if I don’t know they’re a real person or not

Pre 2021 I had none if these issues and it was a great place that I learned a lot from, but corporate enshittification is going to enshittify everything it touches so I’m only going to donate my passion to open source things now.

Neither, but I’m fed up with Reddit regardless. Open Source and self hosted is something I prefer.

And if everybody praises the alternatives, but nobody is using it, we’ll never get shit done.

I created an account here after the API nonsense. Stayed on reddit for a couple years, but the bot problem there got worse, and worse. I was very vocal about why reddit chose to turn a blind eye to the bot problem. My account of 12 years kept catching bans for the mildest of takes. Feels like they were trying to get rid of me. Finally caught a perm ban for ridiculous reasons in 2024, made an alt account that got caught for ban evasion a year later. Gave up because they’re very hawkish about keeping humans off the platform, but they welcome bots and alt right shitheads with open arms.

When they closed down the API for third party apps I packed my things, I thought reddit would be different, but to me, at that moment they proved they were not different.

Lemmy is not perfect and the whole dev team has some pretty insane views. But you know, it’s FOSS, so it’s not about the devs as much. Perfect is the enemy of great, and Lemmy is a healthier choice then Reddit imo.

The ones with their cake day around may and a bit later in 2023 are most likely here because of the API changes. After that its mostly alt accounts on a new instance, privacy reasons and bans