I recently discovered I've been shadowbanned, with zero idea why. Appeals vanish into the void without an answer... So I can read, but not participate. Feels pretty hostile towards users. Maybe they're doing me a favor?

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

I still also browse Reddit some but I've been using it a lot less since they banned me and cut off old.reddit

I keep my feeds on the app very curated which helps a lot. There are some niche subs that I like to visit still that don't have a presence on here.

By replacing reddit shortcut with Lemmy shortcut on my front page/screen. Muscle memory is helluva drug

Lemmy is not a replacement for Reddit imo.

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 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.

Yeah, I get you. When I first came here exclusively I was looking for the same dopamine as I was getting from reddit. After, I'm not looking this up, the whistleblower from Facebook talked about anxiety being a better algorithm driver to keep people engaged longer, (?) I don't wonder how many other platforms like reddit, use algorithms to cause addiction. Maybe the answer is breaking the addiction and then coming back at it, on your own terms. I feel like I've broken the addiction. I am able to put Lemmy down. I don't feel like I'm stuck. I did struggle at first because my brain was in the habit of drawing that dopamine in that way, I redirected it to a specialised interest. And leaned into some psychology tricks for manual reset hacking the body, to reduce my anxiety. I like this side where I don't feel that addiction any more. I feel more present in my life now. I read lemmy for half an hour a day with my coffee in the morning or in a doctors office if I'm waiting for a while and such. That dopamine is out there in different ways.

I just.... left.

I came here during the API change drama. Started to get acquainted with the platform before Apollo stopped working. And when it did, I never came back. Didn't even bother deleting my few hundred comments or give them the chance to ban me for not being a nazi propagandist cunt.

I only use Reddit on rare occasions and I add friction to remind myself not to use it. I have a Lemmy app on my phone. I do not have a reddit app on my phone. The mobile site is pretty unusable, so I end up using old Reddit on desktop. I have leechblock installed so it asks me "Do you want to compromise your principles and ethics?" every time I navigate to something in the reddit domain.

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.

Lemmy definately has less content, but it feels like the old internet. People are just friendlier here. My biggest recommendation is to post/comment a lot; I think things like that really help the platform grow. I can honestly say I've never received any negative feedback here, so its a pretty safe space.

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

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

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.

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.

I don't still use Reddit. I bailed back when they took ownership of all of my content. I did go through some withdrawals. Would constantly open my phone to open Reddit and remember that I had uninstalled and closed my account. Now a few years later I don't have anything like parity in Lemmy compared to my Reddit experience. Ultimately, I decided to not try and chase that. Lemmy is not Reddit, And the Reddit that I loved back in the day, is completely gone anyway, replaced by some corporate bullshit, bolstered by bad actors and robots.

What I love about Lemmy, in contrast, is smaller communities and more genuine engagement. There are still bots and bad actors. Regardless of its flaws though, I'm about as likely to go back to Reddit as I am to creating a Facebook account. I'm on my phone less and more engaged with the actual people in my life now. Maybe we all need less social media, not better social media.

All I did was delete my Reddit app.

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 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.

Try mentioning the genocide in Gaza and they'll force your hand into leaving.

My experience with reddit is similar to other folks here. I got permbanned in 2024 and then again in 2025, started going on Lemmy but lurked on reddit via third party app Infinity until earlier this year when reddit killed my API key. Since I refuse to use reddits hot garbage ad-riddled app, I uninstalled infinity and never went back.

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.

Just walk away from reddit it’s easy.

I just use a redlib instance to lurk on reddit.

https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/instances.md

Can subscribe and filter users and subreddits, and is an accountless experience.

I don't find reddit anymore aggravating than lemmy, since I stick to subreddits I'm interested in which tends to be more mellow stuff like games and tech compared to if I was looking at news type subs.

I just do more actual commenting here due to having easy access to third party apps which reddit no longer provides. And I don't feel like going through effort of getting stuff like reddit is fun working. I'm fine lurking reddit now and not bothering logging in.

I mostly used both on mobile. I refuse to use the official app, my Sync app stopped working (can't use Apollo). I have RedReader but it isn't as comfortable, no NSFW, and the UI is awkward.

When my custom API token stopped working in Sync, I just didn't care enough about reddit to jump through new hoops to fix it. It annoyed me each time I loaded the app out of habit, but not enough to fix it.

I think lemmy having less content is a good thing for me. Everything in moderation: I'm sleeping better, reading more, etc since reddit became unpleasant to use on mobile. I'm okay with that.

I don't know how much I actually enjoyed reddit vs how much my brain was just addicted to the IV drip of pseudo-information.

I go to Lemmy first.

Lemmy takes priority. Some days there's enough action on Lemmy I never get around to Reddit. The more days you don't go to Reddit, the closer you get to not caring about it at all anymore. Reddit also helps by being awful and doing things like banning me enough times that I stopped carrying my subs from account to account and without my subs Reddit is almost entirely useless except for when I'm completely full of Lemmy for the day. And that's becoming less frequent as I've seen more Lemmy activity in the last 2 years I've been here.

The key is that there can be no "slowly leaving." I went absolute cold turkey. I maintain that there is no other way. Not only do most people not have the self control to be able to moderate themselves, but reddit's structure and algorithm are specifically designed to try to suck you back in, keep you enraged, and keep you scrolling. Because Enragement is Engagement™.

But reddit and its various decision makers went out of their way to piss me off multiple times, as well as tons of other people, so I left. I consider myself a pretty rational and level headed bird, and I made plenty of contributions. But the message there was clear: They don't want people like us there. They want vacant eyeballs they can market at with bots. That's what the new shareholders demand.

I have not found that my life has been significantly less enriched without reddit being present in it. Rather, much the opposite. All the inevitable bickering, the arguing with idiots, the whole thing about having to walk on eggshells or appear to espouse a particular approved dumbass point of view or else you'll be brigaded with downvotes or randomly banned; it turns out none of that is productive. It's not even, if we're honest, really engagement.

I find I have more hours in my day to do something else instead. I'd rather do something tangible, and here I can share it without having to be concerned about whether or not my contribution will be approved by the hivemind.

Block everything except for the niche content you can't get here: stuff for your town, your make of car, plants for your specific area, etc. You should be able to get most of the mainstream stuff here. Yes there's less posts, but you can help with that. And besides, you probably want to be scrolling less anyway, right?

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.

Reddit is full of bots who's mission is to keep you outraged and angry, there by keeping you engaged and locked on. Of course you're going to feel agitated. I left cold turkey and replaced my addiction with Lemmy, people here are nicer and fewer bots.