I don’t know if it’s still this way, but at the time I felt as though I had joined an empty cell on reddit and had to go through pages upon pages of potential subs/interests, many of which were vastly under-populated or duplicates from various other instances. It felt a bit like using a radio dial to find stations out in the static, and most of them weren’t interesting. I was using Jerboa and didn’t care much for it, but after Sync arrived my experience became nearly indistinguishable from reddit… except I’m not always stressed out and constantly dealing with inflammatory assholes and social confrontation.

Lemmy has definitely grown a lot since I arrived, though. I do miss niche communities, especially for old PC games that are no longer mainstream… But I haven’t been back to reddit since before the blackouts. It wasn’t good for my mental health.