You could come to lemmy once a month, and see just about nothing change.

It was not nearly as fun as it is now

https://lemmy.ml/u/Communist from a 4 year old account.

It was very small and slow, every post had max 50 upvotes and like 10 comments (maybe more on the more political ones, where trolls reigned) There was a new post once in a blue moon, you could scroll at 10,and find the same content that you would find at 22.

I joined a year ago btw, it was like this until the mass migration 1 week ago or so

Slow, mostly tech- and politics- focused (for me, as I follow plenty lemmygrad communities), and to be honest kind of boring. I’d open it up once in a blue moon, check if there was some content, “nope”, and then move on.

Now though? I’m probably a few hours straight here, drinking my yerba and using it.

It was a small friendly community where we could shoot the shit. I’m generally lurking much much more than posting on all the platforms I’ve used, but on lemmy sometimes if I had a silly thought I would just find some community adjacent to my silly thought and throw it out to the world, without feeling like I might be judged for a bad post or wrong place to share.

Absolutely everyone knows it’s dumb to get invested in upvotes or downvotes, but I’m an irrational person and sometimes I like to see that someone appreciated my contribution to discussion. When you’re in a smaller community, those somehow feel more personal, you feel like someone actually read what you wrote. The flip side to that mentality would be feeling insecure about downvotes, but I think I only ever got one downvote before the migration a couple weeks ago. The community felt welcoming to me.

I will admit, there is a tiny part of me that feels like my special place is turning into another reddit, which I’ll have to get used to. I feel like I’m not supposed to say that out loud, but it is there. The big concern I have is getting big enough to have product placement and PR stuff. Reddit was popular enough to get astroturfed to hell, and as a dumb person sometimes I can’t distinguish which opinions are genuine. That makes me feel more detached from discussion.

Overall though, I’m really happy to see this place succeed, it’s come so far since I joined a few years ago. I’ve commented a bunch in the past few days, I do really like having more people to chat with. My experiences with the devs have been great over the years and I’m happy for them to have their project gain steam, they really deserve it.

As a refugee myself, I’m glad to hear the old ones seem to perceive the influx as mostly exciting and positive. I had some worries some people might not like how the new ones change and overwhelm what’s old and dear.

Ah well, maybe it’s too early to judge. Maybe you hate us next week? :)

It was… sleepy. One guy provided half the content. Particular topics had like max 30 people interested enough to click the arrows, usually way less. Hell, even the few trolls we had were usually recycled.

It was a niche network for few passionate people. Content was more political than generic. It always felt like it would succeed though. Only thing I’m missing is that the website was blazing fast back then. It’s struggling now with all the new users but I’m sure that will be fixed sooner or later.

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peaceful

I quite liked it. You could recognize users, everyone was generally nice, you could leave for a month without feeling like you missed out, conflict wasn’t worth it most of the time so you’d see it to a lesser degree than compared to the conflict generated in just the past week, and the vegan community thrived. I actually started having conversations with some Lemmy users outside of Lemmy!

I remember how exciting it was when federation was enabled and the handful of instances could finally hang out together.

It was quiet and peaceful, but drama would happen once every couple of months that was both entertaining and annoying.

You’d recognize almost every user that posted or commented. I guess it did feel peaceful, as others have mentioned. I’d add to that that it also felt a bit limiting.

At the same time, most people were interested in the same topics as I am, so it was great to find like-minded people! Libre software, classical economics, the wellbeing of most people on Earth, environmentalism, programming…

I’m very happy with this growth! Lemmy before the refugee influx was nice enough, but the conversation topics were more or less based on politics and open source software. With new users coming here posts have become much more varied.

As far as notable things are concerned, there is one incident that I thought was funny. About two years ago, the content on Lemmy was sparse. So sparse that even if a post only got a few upvotes, it would get on the front page. And so it came to pass that one user’s posts were regularly featured on the front page. The user will stay unnamed, but the posts were about flat earth.

The posts were downvoted, many into negative numbers no less, and ignored at first, but they just kept coming. And the user was so adamant that the earth was flat, he would go off in the comments calling people “simpletons” for believing the “lies” we were fed. So then a few users, myself included, went to the user’s community and just started shitposting flat earth memes. The user tried arguing at first, but then went quiet. And after that, no more flat earth posts.