i’d used mastodon.social briefly after the tumblr porn ban but then switched back when it turned out to be not that big a deal. not to mention i really didn’t understand the concept of different servers or how federating/defederating worked. i floundered for a couple of days before i came across my current setup. calckey account which i look at rarely and an account on a small lemmy server for stability purposes.

Knew nothing, still don’t know a lot and had a hell of a time signing up but it seems to be getting better and growing. I’m trying to be more active to help out with growth but I’m not that guy.

To be honest, I thought it was stupid. I misunderstood how it works and I thought it was overcomplicating the idea of decentralised instances

For the last year or so I’ve been using a private PeerTube instance I run to host videos my kids like to make and share with their friends/family. It isn’t federated for privacy reasons.

Zero! Zero familiarity! When I heard about Lemmy during the Great Reddit Migration of 2023 I was like “What a stupid name. I should code my own Reddit and get rich. The time is now!”. But then I realized I don’t want to code Reddit after writing code for 6-10 hours a day at work, and I checked Lemmy out. Then I learned about the Fediverse. Then I was highly impressed and gave many oohs and aaahs. Now I’m off Reddit completely (except for CenturyClub from my desktop like twice a week for 10 minutes) and this is my home. Yay!

I found Peertube and thought it’s much better than YouTube but I just couldn’t find any content.

I once created an account for Mastodon because I thought it was something else, I didn’t expect a Twitter clone and I have no interest in Twitter.

I joined the metaverse via mastodon four years ago and lemmy 2 years. Guess that makes me a fucking hipster, lol. Though i’ll admit since the reddit fiasco i dumped reddit completely and made /kbin my home and been using the fediverse quite a lot more.

I knew and used Mastodon on occasion but, definitely appreciate it more now

I didn’t know anything about it, and I still pretty much don’t know anything about it. In my super hazy interpretation, it sounds like it pretty much means there are a bunch of spaces that work standalone but it’s possible to access one from another without having to sign up or anything to the other. Or something. I’ll probably look into it someday but for now I’m just happy to have it.

I was on Mastodon because Musk is an absolute shit head. Didn’t miss it one bit and it actually is a lot nicer. Same seems to be true here.

I had gotten so ‘meh’ with Twitter that by the time Mastodon came around, I just wasn’t interested and would rather just quit Twitter altogether.

Then, a couple weeks ago some buddies on a Discord were talking about Lemmy, so I decided to look into it. And so here I am.

I hadn’t even heard of it!

I started from scratch

Pretty similar to you: Had heard about Mastodon when Twitter started imploding and made an account over there. But didn’t really get it and I never really used Twitter anyways so I wasn’t too interested in figuring it out.

Then when the APIpocalylse kicked off I came and checked out Lemmy and learned more about the Fediverse. When I found the Memmy app and more people started coming here it really felt like this was taking off, and I’m excited to see that momentum continuing. I haven’t opened Reddit since Apollo died, and this is now filling that void in my online diet.

Doubleposted fyi.

Personally I was vaguely aware of Mastodon when it first started being talked about as a Twitter competitor. But I didn’t really “get it”, I thought it was Twitter with added email functionality or something.

Wasn’t until spez shattered reddits remaining anti-troll defenses that I started actually doing some research, and finding out Mastodon actually does not have email functionality. Something completely different from that, actually.