Me! I'm new to social media in general, decided to engage with it earlier this year by looking up lists of social media sites and then joined the ones I could find that I vibed with!
i didnt come across lemmy, specifically. i wanted to build a public reddit clone, and found 'kbin', which federated both microblog (mastodon/universodeon/threads) and threaded forums (lemmy).. so i built that. kbin has since died, but was resurrected in a fork named mbin.
so im not technically on lemmy, but our instance fully federates with it.
ive been actively recruiting users from reddit who dont like swimming in bot farms talkin to eachother.
Kinda sorta. This specific account I opened after the reddit API thing.
I have other Lemmy and broader Fediverse accounts I opened separate from any reddit issues. This is just my active one that is basically my replacement for reddit.
Looking at my password vault history, it looks like my first Fediverse account was probably Friendica. I remember I was looking for an alternative to Facebook. I didn't think Google+ was going to last, nor did I really want to use another Google platform. I used Ello more at the time, which isn't based on ActivityPub protocol. Ello never did gain critical momentum and fully closed down within the last year or two. I kept up some interaction with it all the way to the end.
I've been following Lemmy development for years since I think decentralized software is cool. I always thought it was a cool idea, but there was never enough content for me. It always seemed like a prototype of an idea. When the API catastrophe struck, I committed to Let full time and deleted my account.
I created my account a couple years before any of the recent reddit migrations. I am always interested in alternatives to the status quo and simply searched in DDG "reddit alternatives" one day and bam, Lemmy came up.
I signed up, but honestly I barely used it back then as the traffic was miniscule.
I kind of just hung onto this account and it ended up being my main social media outlet now that there's more people here. I'm simply hoping Lemmy thrives and attracts more users. It is objectively better than Reddit, it just needs more users and cm unities imho.
While I previously had a Reddit account (which I don't really used in a frequent basis), I found about Lemmy through Mastodon, which in turn I found about through my search for social network alternative platforms. Turns out I've been participating at Lemmy more often through the entire 3 months I've been here than I participated at Reddit throughout more than a decade (I joined Reddit in 2012 IIRC).
Same. 12 year mostly reddit lurker. I have x10 the posts and comments hear using Lemmy for a year :| once I'm working again I really need to set up a monthly donation for my server admin
I've used reddit.com before but I never made many posts or comments and I haven't used it in years. I'm pretty sure there was a period where I visited it regularly though.
I don't think I've ever posted anything with facebook.com or twitter.com either. I never browsed them for fun, and if I want to coordinate with someone in my family I just contact them directly. I do use youtube.com a lot though.
I tried using pleroma but I haven't used that in a while either. I prefer lemmy much more (probably because posts being different from comments provides more structure).
I came from EMPRESS's suggestion to migrate here (she got banned from lemmy.ml and didnt bother to change instance), stuck with here after the whole Reddit API thing.
Maybe I dont count, but I was a reddit mild lurker, I would check something like r/memes every week, and also r/linux with similar frequency, and learnt about lemmy close to reddit API stuff, and made a lemmy account sometime after
exactly me, I tried to get into Twitter a few times in the late 2000s and 2010s, but never could really see the use of it; nowadays I am a regular reader of Mastodon
Reddit meanwhile I have been active on (sometimes more, sometimes less, on different accounts) since 2014, so I can't post a top-level answer here. I still enjoy forum-style communities like on Lemmy more than I enjoy microblogs, so post a lot more here than on Mastodon, but I read both regularly.