I just wanted to tell you how great you all are.
I moved to Lemmy shortly before the mass exodus from Reddit in 2023. I eventually created an instance of my own and to begin with, leaving Reddit felt like a mistake.
I could browse Lemmy’s equivalent of /r/all top-last-24-hours in about 15 minutes, so my doom-scroll time plummeted. I was better for it. However, I still yearned for the meme laughs and thought provoking comment threads of Reddit. Lemmy had them, but they were much fewer.
Fast forward to today. My instance is hosting a popular up and coming community, of which I’m honoured, even if I’m not welcome. The top-24-hour of all posts is now more than enough to satisfy my needs. I laugh at memes, I get to share posts I found on Lemmy with friends and family, I’m exposed to more cultures than just American which is a real refreshing change.
It isn’t mainstream, and I think its better for it. It has its own culture, and we are beginning to get all meta with Lemmy in-jokes which I think is both annoying and awesome at the same time (ie. Hussain memes).
Overall, I am just really happy for Lemmy and am glad to be sharing it with all of you. May the good times continue.
Which is a fundamentally unenforceable rule unless you rely on posters to go out of their way and be polite enough to say ‘hey I’m not a woman but I appreciate many topics of discussion here.’
Before I realized that ‘girls only’ was an actual rule, I made several comments there that were generally popular, and only the ones where I added a ‘I am a guy, but here is how I would approach this woman’s fashion’ type comments… those ones, I got asked to leave, with other commenters saying ‘no, let them stay!’, and the ones where I didn’t mention I am a guy, they just got upvoted and spawned other silly convos.
Oh well, I guess?