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.