Posting this from my Lemmy.ml account so you can see the account age - it’s from 2020. When taking the survey, I noticed the phrasing/answers on some of the questions could maybe be improved if you want to find out what Lemmy was like before Reddit came over.

I am a long-time user of Reddit. My Reddit account is well over a decade old at this point, and I’ve disliked the admin team since about 2013-2014 or so. I continued to use Reddit because of its scale and the ability to have niche discussions on it, but I have always taken any alternatives seriously. Over the last 10 years, my trust in the Reddit admins has continually shrunk; bear in mind that I am also a moderator of a medium-large subreddit (600k subscribers).

I discovered Lemmy from this post on Reddit. At the time that post was made, Lemmy didn’t really have any federation yet. Lemmy.ml was the only real place with any activity (although Lemmygrad was founded and beginning to grow).

I used Lemmy for a while, but left for a couple reasons:

1. Conversations were slow, with 1-2 weeks between a post and a reply

2. People on there had unsavory politics that I disagree with, including the creators of Lemmy itself (who ran Lemmy.ml, which was - again - the only instance with any notable activity)

I also was frustrated with the lack of an Android app; I was recommended one at the time but it has since stopped development and is now abandoned.

These factors drove me to Reddit again, although Lemmy stayed in the back of my mind. But I checked in every 6 months or so, just to keep an eye on things. Which brings me to my real point here:

It’s really hard to talk about “Lemmy” as a whole. It’s not quite like Mastodon, where there is very much a culture that’s shared across instances. Pre-migration, there were politics between Lemmy instances and these politics have always been dividing lines.

People federated with Lemmy.ml because there was no alternative. That’s the “stock” place people go to sign up. It was the only place with activity, and thus if you didn’t federate with it you didn’t have anything in your feeds. (Not that there was much going on anyway… there were maybe a couple dozen active accounts per month.)

Despite this, you still had places like Beehaw which had a very strict moderation policy (basically a safe space for people who disliked Reddit and Lemmy.ml), but Beehaw still federated with Lemmy.ml. You had Hexbear, which technically turned off federation altogether and used Lemmy as a traditional forum after their subreddit got closed (like Truth Social is to Mastodon). Etc.

The way the survey speaks about all these places as a monolith sort of ignores a lot about what Lemmy was like before the migration from Reddit. Each instance was very different from the others; now they’ve sort of run into one another but prior to that you had very specific “look and feel” for individual instances.

Because of this, questions like “How do you feel was the response from the existing Lemmy community towards the migration?” will get very different answers based on what instance you joined. Asking how Beehaw reacted is very different from how Lemmy.ml reacted, and Lemmy.world didn’t exist at all before Reddit came over.

Another confusing question: “Which platform’s user interface do you find more user-friendly?”

This can give you very different answers based on whether people are coming from New Reddit or Old Reddit. I very much dislike New Reddit (and have since it was launched). Old Reddit is much more functional, but I have no way of indicating what I’m comparing Lemmy to.