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!

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.

Excellent shitposting memes, I hope that community proliferates here

I just like a 'digital public square' aspect. I want to see what people are interested in today. I want to catch up on the latest news. Maybe I want to learn something new in a hobby community.

Reddit was okay at that at first, but it did start to feel 'gamed' over a decade ago now. People were starting to notice common reposters, 'super users', and its only devolved from there with sponsored posts, awards, and advertisements. That takes away from the public square aspect and instead makes it feel like you are consuming a product.

Loved being able to find niche interests having a supportive group around the niche.

I loved being able to find a collection of knowledge in a single space.

And really, just being able to have decent conversations with randos over things I would have a hard time finding people to talk to in person about. I like to explore controversial topics and opinions (the ones not based in stupid at least) and I either don't know the right kind of people in my day to day life, or I want to be able to talk without worrying about it impacting my job and day to day life. I try not to be an asshole or anything like that, but sometimes I have and unpopular opinion and need to be able to discuss it with people more knowledgeable on the topic before I change my opinions or sometimes fully understand what my opinion is. I like that discourse.

music discovery/discussion. I found so much cool music on reddit communities for bands or genres I like

resources for learning about & discussing some of my hobbies and interests like FOSS software, Linux, gaming, guitar etc

communities for people local to the city/state I live in

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.

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

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

Quick responses to oddly specific questions in niche communities.

Users aggregating links on a specific topic like buildapcsales and gundeals from reddit.

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

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

Niche communities are what made Reddit fun/useful to me. It was really nice to have discourse with a community that liked the same video game, movie, hobby, political ideals, etc, that you did.

Guides and tutorials were the other big thing. I utilized and contributed guides on Reddit regularly. It was really nice to engage with a community to solve an issue rather than use some AI generated or ad ridden article.

I hope to see Lemmy fill these gaps and it seems it has the potential to do so.

So many things. All the baking and cooking subs for inspiration and advice, my country's sub for daily banter (made plenty of IRL friends through that) and all the subs dealing with people and relationships (relationship_advice) to see what people from all walks of life are struggling with.

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.

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

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

I was mostly a lurker on reddit for a long time but got into some of the hobby subreddits and support groups over covid and started talking more. I stopped doomscrooling so much and focused more on the communities in the individual subs. So now I am here and looking to do the same. Support and community are what I am looking for I guess. And to share my interests with others.

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.

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.

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!

I learned how to fix so much stuff around the house and picked up ideas for my home automation hobby. And the photos of swimming pools were nice :)

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 used reddit for news, socializing, and discussion/debate. along with niche hobbies/interests. I'm not sure how much the fediverse stuff can replace that lol. we'll see.

I mostly used it for extremely specific obscure tech issues that were solved 10 years ago in random threads 🙃

I highly valued the discovery of niche communities. Like solo ttrpgs as my current hyper fixation. I always lurked on reddit so I hope to be more involved here. And of course memes.

Most Google search involves the "Reddit" keyword, it's really getting in my way now that most subs are private! One of the reasons why I don't like the "delete all your own comments" thing people seem to be doing

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.

The random really cool people that show up in the comments

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

I guess I'll be the piece of shit who says porn lol

I'm hoping some good ole fashioned porn gifs make it over here in some capacity.