Basically what I mean is, did you also come here from reddit?
I came here after I got my Reddit account banned permanently. And the thing is, I don’t exactly know why I got banned. Nor what I did wrong. I always tried to follow the rules, post and comment appropriately and nicely, but on New Year’s Day last week, I got a message simply saying "Your account have been permanently banned for violating the rules.
But when I replied asking what rule or rules I unknowingly broke, they just messaged me back saying “you got banned because you violated the community guidelines”. So now I’m here.
What about you? Are you also a Reddit Refugee?
I think the majority of Lemmy users are Reddit refugees, not because they got banned, but because of the Reddit API changes that forced 99% of the third party apps to shut down.
+1 RIP Apollo
Long live Voyager!
Practically a decade of Riddit is Fun…
What is API?
Like ELI5 please
It’s a way for apps to interact with reddit. Reddit shut down the API for third party clients so that you’re forced to use their crappy official app instead of much nicer alternatives.
I used a different app to access Reddit and hence couldn’t use it anymore. The official app was a huge downgrade to what I was using before and full of ads. So I - like many others - just left Reddit for good.
to be precise: not exactly shut down, but made it really expensive
That’s like saying you can hack SSH/HTTPS just by calculating out the prime number, it just takes really long time (billion years).
the official app is more data mining, and intrusive too. thats probably one of the reason why reddit doesnt want it, because they cant sell your info to GOOGLE, or OPENAI and palintir.
Interface third party software uses to connect
If I have valuable info and I want to share it in a controlled way, I can use an API. If i am an airline, I could spit out a feed that tells you a list of flights and how delayed they are. If im Reddit, I can share posts, comments, etc.
Anyone (in the case of a free API) can take the data the API spits out and make their own app with it. But if you charge for API access, then someone would have to pay to make an app with your information.
The API change wasn’t it, it’s when it became clear to me they were selling all my data to Google. I frequented mental health subs, and I started getting Google ads for scams TARGETING people with mental health issues. Just sick.
the recent surges of refugees are from the multi-wave purges last year.
Woah there boi, we prefer the name “Reddit Expats”, we no simple refugees or immigrants
Unless this is your job and you’re planning to go back to reddit, we’re not expats.
Or is this a dog whistle?
not because they got banned
Nah, that’s always been a sizable chunk. Fediverse will always have the worst of the worst, because it’s the easiest to evade bans. And yet there’s still multiple people who constantly get accounts banned for ban evasion.
Naw the worst go to bsky or threads, that’s where the evil shit is acceptable.
deleted by creator
Since the API exodus, yes.
I made a very conscious choice to leave reddit at that time, due to that particular bullshit, and I don’t regret it.
Doesn’t mean I don’t miss reddit though, because I do. Reddit has a lot more traffic which obviously means a lot more content in the sort of niche communities I really love.
But I made the right choice. I don’t want to be part of that any longer. And the more of us make this choice, the better things will be for us all.
Pretty much the exact same for me
there are niche subs i miss, like drama of ytuber i used to follow(obscure ytubers, not the current grifters).
I still follow my niche interests via the lurk-only app Stealth. It allows you to kinda follow subreddits you want like multireddits you could create with RES but you can’t login so you can’t post. Feels like an okay-ish third party reddit app.
Redreader does that too! It’s amazing.
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/
The maintainer of RR had to basically shame reddit into not killing RR access (because RR is one of the only apps that blind folks can use to access Reddit) and they still keep trying to cripple it.
Good to know that app is still being worked on. I used it in the past until around 2024 but stopped because it haven’t had any update.
Good to see there’s a couple from 2023 in 2025 :p
I left during the api bullshit, fuck spez
… Every single person on Lemmy is a Reddit refugee. You’re not going to find a single person here who has not used Reddit before.
Yeah, same here
Fuck spez.
I agree with you on this
Me too!
The vast majority of folk here are ex Reddit users. I predate the great Reddit exodus, but even so, I came to lemmy after leaving Reddit, because I wanted something to scratch that itch.
reddit forced alot of people off the site, after the election to change the narrative and introduce more astroturfing, plus the use of AI also drastically increased on reddit as well.
Yes, a lot of us left during the API exodus. Reddit was already going downhill anyway with all the bot spam and shills, that’s probably even worse there nowadays.
Once in a while I do bring up old.reddit to read through some communities that haven’t caught on here (yet), or maybe something that comes up in a google search, but that hasn’t been enough to make me want to log back in there let alone post/comment on anything.
its funny now its AI spamming ,botting now.
I left with the disabling of API.
Today, I went back in to my account to delete every single comment I have ever made, one by one, then deleted the entire account. Should have done it ages ago, but better now than never.
I was reading about bans and stuff and all sorts that I didn’t care to understand, so instead of using a third party apps to change/delete/etc my comments, I did it manually. It felt pretty satisfying.
My last “fuck you, r/jailbait Spez”. I’m not letting them use my comments or account for anything. Hopefully, I’ve done it right.
They see that happening and just restore all of the deleted comments anyway.
Damn… Thought I had it right. 😔
You’ve gotta replace the comments so that the new comment is what’s backed up. When it’s restored by Reddit it’ll be the Gibberish you left behind in your edit.
Take note, those who haven’t deleted their Reddit accounts yet. Don’t do what I did - do this instead!
I would probably even say: Who wasnt?
You either came from Twitter, Reddit or some other major social media as a primary user.
I don’t believe someone just was old enough to join the internet world and decided to just join lemmy/fediverse at first sight.I am here from reddit but I wouldn’t call myself a refugee. More like an immigrant. I wasn’t banned. I just tried this, liked it better, and since I disagreed with the API changes I settled here. I still browse reddit when I can’t find specific stuff on Lemmy, and very, very occasionally (like once or twice a year) I post there in subs that aren’t as developed here.
This but I would die before posting on reddit, you can check my history there and confirm I speak the truth. Spez can tongue my anus.
Same here.
My first account was banned for (IMO bogus reasons)
My now second but primary account is still active sometimes but I only lurk 99% of the time and almost never vote
I only use Lemmy as of now primarily.
They killed 3rd party apps, I didn’t wanna use their app, so I switched to something else and that something else happened to be Lemmy. Turns out, Lemmy is even better than Reddit in many ways.
Exactly the same for me. As soon as RIF was done, I was done.
They killed 3rd party apps. I left when my app stopped working and lemmy conveniently worked with some of the same clients that reddit was breaking.
I think the better question is to ask who isn’t a Reddit refugee. As in, who here never had a Reddit account and just showed up on Lemmy one day?
Same here. Permanently banned from all of Reddit, and I was never told why. I suspect it was my criticism of the Orange One. I appeal every day, just to give them a little more paperwork.
Yeah, I’m banned from Reddit too
Originally I came with the API changes, I had only been using reddit for two months though. If I had known about Lemmy I don’t think I would have had the desire to use reddit in the first place.
Same story got hooked on Reddit because I could access content without an account. Turns out: you can do the same with Lemmy, the results just aren’t that high on a web browser.
