Late to the party, but I just slowly used Lemmy more. Almost kinda made myself. It slowly kinda became a habit and after a week, I signed out of Reddit. I use browser, and for me when I scroll down for more than 10 seconds it stops me and tells me to get the app, effectively making it impossible to use. I have then naturally gravitated towards Lemmy and haven’t used Reddit in like two weeks besides random threads I actually needed to do something.

I kept using Reddit to browse for a while years back, and decided I’d just stop using it when the API no longer let me read stories. Evenrually… It stopped working. The end.

Lemmy is much smaller but it also has more engaged community discussions imo (but yea, it is another echo chamber - its hard to avoid that with such a niche tech/privacy/anti-corporate network).

It reminds me of old school forums where you’d know most of the regulars, and I don’t mind that.

After getting banned for saying it’s ok to punch nazis in the face. 12 year account I just stopped cold turkey. I refuse to even click reddit links.

Actually it’s been quite good for me. I realize I had an addiction to the site. My social media time has went down dramatically

I started when the API thing went down… exploring other sites with Lemmy among them. After continued enshitification I slowly started manually deleting 13 years of posts. Some here, some there. When I ran out of posts to delete I killed my account and just would occasionally browse old reddit. Now after they killed old reddit without logging in. (Which I will not do again). That was it. You get way better conversations here with mostly real people … Honestly feels like the old days of reddit. I’ve had to find other places for niche forums and stuff for my hobbies but I’d rather do that then to go back to that shit pile.

There are still niche communities there that don’t exist here.

Now that old.reddit is account-walled, its become reeeeaal easy to not go there at all

I don’t use reddit anymore, I still have an account but I stay logged out unless I need to see info in a thread that is some fix that I need because they won’t let you see that now without being logged in.

Lemmy does have way less content and way less people but you can find them if you look. I suggest changing your default sort to either “active” or “new comments”. I use “New comments” this sort will show all threads that have any new comments on them so I can find the active conversations right away. I have been very chatty on Lemmy this way.

Lemmy has its own set of trolls and extremists, they aren’t conservative trolls like you see on reddit, they are extreme left all the way around back to Fascism, but I see you are on db0 so, you won’t see the more troublesome instances.

EDIT to add: My main in on Db0, and I still use that on mobile, but I ended up making an account on lemmy.world just to use this Lemmy skin https://old.lemmy.world/ Old Lemmy was what got me out of reddit forever, there is something very comfortable about this skin and it made my transition very smooth.

Outside of one community I use to track sales for a niche hobby, my main use of reddit is looking up old threads. There’s nothing new on there that’s helpful anymore. I like looking up old episode discussion threads for TV shows that I’m watching for the first time, for instance.

I wish Lemmy was a good alternative. But without enough people using it, it can’t really come close to a replacement. All my interests are more niche too, and I hate Discord, so it leaves me out here touching grass.

Reddit’s always been toxic, it’s just worse the more MAGA and AI came to prominence (also a lot of what appears to be Russian astrotufing, but that might just be the subs I used).

Unfortunately, Lemmy’s not always better. I’ve been trying to figure out which instances to avoid, because I am really tired of certain people harping on about certain things.

Put your Lemmy app in the spot of wherever your Reddit app is. Make the Reddit app take much more effort to get to. I used to have mine on my home screen so it is one click to get to it after unlocking. Now that’s where my Lemmy app is and RedReader is in a folder off to the side. (I suppose I could go one step further and just remove the Reddit app from the home screen folder.) I end up checking Lemmy first now.

The nice part is that Lemmy is getting big enough that I end up seeing a lot of the same news when I run out of content on Lemmy (start getting into more obscure posts) as when I switch to Reddit. So I find myself thinking “I’ve already seen that” so it makes the Reddit app feel more “stale” and easier to leave.

Step one is to never log in to Reddit again. Just lurk. You still get access, but your community is here.

I still look at reddit sometimes on my computer. But I just never installed their app on my phone.

Reddit… really sucks now. Idk if it has gotten way more reactionary or if I’m just more aware of it. Tons of chuds, recycled posts, tons of astroturfing, bad comment sections. I don’t miss it in its current state.

No content is better than crap content, and I can spend that time doing something else and not just wasting the same amount of time on lemmy.

I still have a throwaway account for one off comments/posts for some really niche stuff where I’m looking for info, otherwise the major subs I used to hang around in were either lobotomized or cracked apart with new mods or spam bots.

It was easy for me to switch when my app stopped working.

I will say I personally see having less content on lemmy as a feature. I sort by top - 12 hours, and once I’ve browsed deep enough to hit what I call “the porn layer”, I consider lemmy exhausted and find something else to do for a while. It’s lowered how much time I spend scrolling.

I have been opening Lemmy for about two months now, browsing the communities and reading users’ comments, and yesterday I decided to create an account.

Honestly, as someone who has only been on Reddit since 2018, I am curious to know what Reddit looked like in its early years, and Lemmy is a really good opportunity for that.

The content is limited? One day Reddit’s content was limited too and then it grew! + Platforms and communities don’t grow on their own. they grow because of the people in them.

So I used to used both Reddit and Lemmy and now I have completely switched over to Lemmy, which has turned out to be a much better experience anyway. (Less trolls, less intentionally divisive content, etc)

Here’s what I did:

1. Got a permanent ban from Reddit (easy to do, plenty of guides online)
2. Started a lemmy community (!westchesterny@lemmy.ml)
3. Engage with others on lemmy
4. Post content to c/westchesterny and other communities I am interested in (typically NYC metro area communities)

What it was for me is Lemmy has a lot of tech and political discussions, but I don’t really care about that so I started a community and contribute to communities that are regional to me because engaged hyper local and regional communities are a huge gap in the lemmy federation right now.