Title basically. I was here at the very start of it all and really enjoyed it. However I felt it lost its uniqueness within a few months of mass migration and started turning a bit like reddit again so I deleted my old account. However Reddit has only gotten much much worse since, and Lemmy has stayed about the same. So here again.
My account is 3 years and 5 months old. I joined Lemmy before it was cool, because I like open source things. In fact, when I joined, Lemmy.ml was the main/recommended instance. Now you all hate it.
Lemmy used to be a barren wasteland of content. Now it is not. I’ve noticed no further changes. The tankies, the in-fighting, the debates about whether to de-federate with instances, the arguing over whether it’s becoming too much like reddit - it’s all been here as long as I can remember.
I also have an old account on Lemmy.ml that I signed up for back when the average front page post had 3 upvotes. It was a ghost town, for sure. I was open to using it, but the chicken and egg problem of needing content to get users and needing users to post content was the main issue. The Reddit api debacle injected just enough life into Lemmy to get things moving. I do hope it gets some more users though.
Hated for good reason, as you point out in your second paragraph partly for tankies and China/Russo propaganda bots.
Though it raises a question for cases like yours: is account migration to another instance possible?
i make the mistake of commenting in a .ml thread yesterday and I got like 30 replies telling me what an idiot I am for not thinking the USA is the great Satan and how it is a ‘puppet regime’ that will soon fall apart before the MIGHT of Iran, Russia, and China.
it was insane.
haha yeah, been there. They’re swarming with either human or computer Pro-Russian/China bots and venture out oftentimes to spread more propaganda.
My understanding is you can’t migrate posts and comments, but you can migrate subscriptions and blocks. I’ve done it to both Lemmy and Piefed instances.
Don’t know, don’t care. This honestly isn’t my main account anymore, but I switched to it to reply to this post to prove I’m not lying about how long I’ve been here.
Do you think it’s fair to ask someone to migrate their account just because you hate pro-China and/or pro-Russia bots, assuming they exist?
Yes. It’s the same reason I migrated my party banner from Republicans to Democrats over the decades. No longer wanted to be associated with the prevailing winds of those coalescing beneath it.
But also, I didn’t ask them to move; rather, I posited the question of whether or not they could.
Well, good luck asking for it.