I liked the positivity of the community for the most part. Reddit, to my mind, was the only largely non toxic form of social media and that will be hard to replace though I’m liking Lemmy so far.

I always liked getting into micro communities and hearing how they talked about their worlds. That might include life in obscure (relative to me) places around the world, getting into the weeds of various occupations I’ll never work in or learning about the fine details of hobbies I’ll never have. Real people having good faith conversations about highly specific things relevant to them.

Recommendations and reviews about everything under the sun from actual users and not sponsored ad reviews.

definitely the niche and obscur advices. The parenting communities !

Tons of niche/hobby communities are my main interest

On one hand Reddit is a really negative and 'hivemind' kind of culture. On the other, it was really the best one stop shop for news (general and breaking), gaming, hobbies, information, etc. aggregation. I am hoping that it can fill that void without becoming a hivemind culture. Cheers to the future.

Niche stuff. I mostly came to reddit for discovering interesting/weird/rare plants and the best way to care for them. Googling has become absolute dogshit with obviously generated articles that are just parroting the same information (which for niche plants, can be false, speculation, and even harmful).

I'm in a couple of Discord communities (which have jumped up in activity in the last couple of days), but those communities are a bit harder to find that four year old post about "what does this type of growth mean", or something similar.

I also used reddit for tracking technology issues in much the same way - very specific, hard to locate issues that only a few people might be experiencing and talking about in a searchable way. Everything from video games, to work related technologies.

I primarily used Reddit to get involved in niche hobbies/interests and learn more about them. After seeing a lot of my favourite communities jumping ship, I thought I’d jump too!

I loved the writing subs. Reading short stories and encouraging eachother to grow.

Pretty much all sort of info, news or otherwise, and often backed with sources and references. For practical issues, people would often share tips or refer to helpful videos and step-by-step instructions.

I use Reddit for 2 main purposes. As a distraction with a diverse home page curated to my interests: It was nice to scroll through and have a mixture of memes, art, text posts and news all in one place mixed together. Secondly if you want advice for a hobby/interest there is usually a subreddit for it where you can have a decent discussion.

I've spent a small amount of time on here an kbin so far and both look pretty promising (especially since they should have the same content once the federation on kbin is sorted), if they're active enough I can see one of them mostly replacing Reddit for me even if I'm not sure the main userbase will ever switch. The main thing I'm waiting for now is a decent iOS app, I'll probably use whichever platform gets one first!

After college, my reddit was mostly used to keep up with product reviews (especially in terms of durability), tech news, and biomed research, and a lot of times I got guidance on hyperspecific issues from a lot of the professionals in those communities.

Also have to give a huge shoutout to r/resumes and the other large jobhunting subreddits-- I don't think I'd have found a job at all if it weren't for their megathreads and resources

Rebbit was great for troubleshooting tech issues. Subreddits like r/thinkpad r/linux r/homelab etc were very useful it figuring out weird tech issues when google finds nothing useful.

Excellent shitposting memes, I hope that community proliferates here

Primarily authentic opinions on things that I want some input for, like products, experiences etc. Also gaming communities for seperate games.

The comments from knowledgeable individuals - frequently involved in the post itself. How often did I read of an astronomical paper, only to have one of the authors comment. Or read about some random fact about plumbing or medicine or whatever, and an academic or professional from the field would offer further insight

Not to mention the spectacular recommendations in various areas: whenever I'm in the market to buy literally anything, I'll search for the best of it on Reddit. The amount of high-quality information available on Reddit is not easily replaced. For that reason, I'll probably continue making such enquiries there, even if I do give up on Reddit in every other way

I'd say these three

• Sharing memes and clip highlights with the streamer communities I care about
• Learning new things from tech specific communities
• Troubleshooting to figure out if there's a solution someone already derived or share my own for those who end up with the same problem

This is how I've used Reddit

Help was there when you needed it, even for niche software or usecases there was more often than not someone who had already asked the question or who could help. This has been invaluable every time I've tried something new (eg. Making a static website, learning Spanish, switching to Linux.)

1. Tech support that isn't an advert (Reddit was a goldmine for more interesting hardware)

2. Cool stats/maths things to share with my students

3. Snek and Fox pictures to get me through my marking sane(ish)

I went from the rough equivalent of graduating with a 1.5gpa in high school and suicidal to making a grand total of 1 application and getting into a top 10 CS university in the States, literally giving me a second shot at life.

firstly: actual information that isn't a slurry of AI-generated buzzword SEO designed to get you to click an ad; real experiences from other people, real answers to questions.

secondly: participating in specific hobby communities.

thirdly: a place to go when my brain turns off and my fingers just type an address into the URL bar and hit enter.

1. Same point on burning time
2. Specific in-depth discussion on hobbies and interests
3. Humor (the kind I like)

A lot of learning and reading. I spent most of my time on Reddit just lurking and reading things, but I can't help but notice the overall higher quality of conversation here. I'm pretty happy.

Instead of escaping out a tunnel in my cell wall, I knocked out a guard. I put on the uniform. I work here now

Creative posts and some "historical" lessons, like how being a hivemind isn't exactly too good of an idea for communities in Reddit...

In general, responses and knowledge from actual humans with experience on the topic I'm looking for, in this age of generated SEO results and AI, that information is more valuable to me.

My need that I want to fill is a bit unrealistic and unfair to expect but... everything.

What made Reddit slowly morph from just another interesting webpage for amusement to a place where I spend a lot of my time and rely upon for so many things was how it slowly came to intersect with everything.

It became a kind of a separate google when you didn't get much joy from traditional web searching. It was a place to feel one belonged but at the same time a place for anonymity when I wanted it (at least to other Redditors anyway), a place for serious discussion and pointless shitposting seeing news as it unfolded but also stupid cat videos.

It was a placeholder for every niche you could think of so if you were trying out a new hobby, or watching a new show, or starting a new career, or trying new software there was always a sub for it.

Lemmy and other alternatives theoretically could do that, but, it'd be hard. Reddit couldn't really do that because of a great design, it just naturally progressed that way when it had more and more people in one place. That centralisation was it's flaw and it's strength so it's a difficult line for any would be successor to straddle. Ultimately though I think, if nothing ever does pull that off, Reddit ultimately created the need for Reddit and we were all fine before it and should be fine after.

I'm looking forward to Lemmy becoming a useful DIY or reference tool. I always used to finish Google searches with 'reddit' because someone somewhere will have asked that specific question already.

On top of that I'm going to miss those really supportive subreddits like r/dadforaminute and r/momforaminute. Though, it does seem like a lot of the people who made up subs like that have migrated here, so I'm hopeful!

For me, reddit killed hobby forums. I'm hoping lemmy can take it's place. I'm partular I'm looking for computer networking and infrastucture, and Judo/BJJ

I'm old enough to remember the earlier parts of the internet. I'm talking Prodigy and AOL keywords–the era of "You've Got Mail!" and 14.4k modem speeds. The era of if someone picked up the phone inside the house (the one that was tethered to the wall with a wire) you'd get disconnected and have to go through the logon process again.

At the time, just being able to access anything was a marvel. Then the internet exploded, and in just a couple of years modem speeds were 56k and it was wholly impossible to see it all. Then we saw the rise of one of the first iterations of a link aggregator in a browser tool called StumbleUpon.

I absolutely time-traveled with SU. One click and I was brought to the next quasi-random site that was generally within my predefined interests. This was about 2004-2009.

Then SU stumbled (I can't remember why) and I made my way to reddit. It had done a lot of what SU did, but condensed onto effectively one single page, and the community could vote on whether or not it was "good" and discuss nearly any aspect of the content.

It was that juncture I liked. It was part BBS, part StumbleUpon, and the entirety of the internet conveniently laid out. It didn't try to do too much. At the time, it didn't try to link us together, harvest our data, generate avatars or any of that other goofy shit. It just served all of the internet quickly, and simply.

My oldest reddit account is 11 years old and as reddit grew, I grew with it. I was there for the Chuck Testa memes. I was there for poop knife. I was there for the Coconut. I was there for /u/Hornswaggle rise to fame with 1985 Sweet 1985. That was big deal reddit news at the time.

And I was there for the rise and fall of Alien Blue, from whose ashes rose Apollo. I grew into a heavy mobile user that only third-party apps could keep up with.

I found reddit through the the fall of Digg because I was wandering from the demise of SU. Now it seems I'm cast into the Fediverse.

I literally just want to shitpost without a phd in Web 3.0, maybe it'll get easier in time though.

Mostly killing time in various situations. I do have a set of subreddits that I gravitate to for some news type situations, but honestly it's a pretty large time sink that I've really had my eyes opened to since yesterday. Hoping to find a happy medium between that and quitting this type of content entirely.