I'd been flirting on and off with Lemmy for a year or so, not using it seriously (different username) but then u/spez deciding to sell user data to LLM's coupled with the general air of permanent aggro in just about every sub led me to finally ditch it. I've had to go back a couple of times and every time I did I regretted it. It's become Twitter level users intertwined with bot armies all flinging shit at each other.

Not one particular reason in general, just the site's atmosphere in general was getting tiresome. Everyone trying to be the funniest person in the room to get the most upvotes. There's a place for that, and I still use Reddit from time to time, but for learning about current affairs Lemmy is much preferable.

Losing Apollo and what reddit did to the dev Also when Spez publicly said he admired Elon Musk

I'm an open source freak heard of Lemmy sounded cool switxhed

The new API rules in advance of the IPO rubbed me the wrong way. The multiple monetization schemes were already pretty creepy as it was.

And the Fediverse feels better all around.

Kept getting banned for no reason. Last straw was when I was getting constsntly harrased and threatened by this massive dipshit who had been following me around for months. So I reported it to admins and I was the one who got banned for "inciting violence".

I prefer to support free, open, and decentralized solutions to things and I want to help the Fediverse grow.

I used the API to see what mods were censoring. The lack of mod transparency is gross.

API changes. Now I only use it for some niche communities, all the big ones are overrun by bots anyway.

Boost stopped working

Boost stopped working. The Reddit app is ass. It was pretty great at first, and I still prefer to Reddit. I have noticed a lot more negativity lately.

The official app was obnoxious, so I used a better 3rd party one. Then, they borked it. And then when I tried to just use the website it was obnoxious too. And then when I tried to use the old.website, It sucked specifically for my phone.

I don't want to deal with that, so I hopped aboard the bandwagon that was going on at the time, and its all been... pretty okay, actually.

Mostly? The new horrible interface reddit pushes harder and harder on me.

To be honest I got initially repelled by significant number of hardcore socialists here, but the community is much more diverse now

The API got me interested. Now I use both. Lemmy has no ads, better news, and better apps (currently on Arctic.) Reddit has a better desktop experience (well, new.reddit, I hate old.reddit and new new reddit) and better niche subs. I’d love it if Lemmy grew enough so that the niche experience reddit offers became viable.

I was bored, again

They made things worse and invalidated everyone else's hard work before demanding to be paid for that while they live on the content we produce. Yeah get fucked. It don't work that way.

Going to preface by saying I still use Reddit occasionally alongside Lemmy AND Tildes sometimes as well. I just like talking to people with similar interests.

Most of us came over to Lemmy (in my case, originally kbin) because of the 3rd party app shutdown and API apocalypse. I still use Reddit since it has a lot more communities I'm interested in so I wouldn't be an ex-redditor per say. I'm not nearly as active as I used to before 3rd party apps got shut down.

I was always indifferent towards Reddit as a platform since I mostly just felt connected to the communities there. I only use more niche subreddits related to my interests and was never active on any with over 400k besides from askreddit, so I avoided most of the stereotypical bad things about Reddit's community and the whole "Reddit is becoming like Facebook" stuff. If Lemmy gained these communities I love, I'd stop using Reddit completely.

The community and content matters to me a lot more with link aggregator type platforms, the software less so than it does with microblogging platforms like Twitter and such. Spez sucks for what he did but I really don't care enough to criticize the dude one year after the Reddit migration and the failure of the blackout. I like Reddit's sheer amount of content available and don't care for the software/anything paid on there, and I like the technology behind Lemmy but the community offerings less so.

TL;DR I halfway switched.

Not banning one of my accounts. "Incidentally", the one that I used for moderation. That screams "we don't want you here unless you're working for us, for free" from a distance.

As a secondary reason: the ban message about "multiple, repeated violations of the content policy". It was one violation dammit. (I told a Nazi to kill himself.)

That was years ago. In the meantime I hopped from alternative to alternative. While still using Reddit mostly for trolling. Eventually the APIcalypse happened and there was enough content in Lemmy to make me forget about Reddit, instead of lurking once a week (like I typically did years ago).