I am looking for curation and durable content here.

For me, Reddit was a curated source of information. You have these communities full of knowledgeable people. If you went into that community you’d either find the info you need, already asked and answered, or you could ask and get a good answer. Discord is just real-time chat. It has virtually no search engine find-ability, no categorising, tagging, or reasonable way to go back and find something someone asked a year ago that was answered perfectly. Many of the social media are really personal and ‘now’ oriented. I’m eating a donut. This person pissed me off. I’m getting married, etc. Video streaming platforms have individual creators, who often have a theme, but they don’t have communities or top-down categorisation. And video sucks as a searchable archive. It’s really hard to know that 17 minutes into this video with a clickbait title, there’s a really useful nugget of information. But Reddit (and now its federated clones) is user-curated and categorised. If I jump into a Windows-oriented community, I won’t find a bunch of Linux stuff. If I want to look at a sport or a hobby or politics, there’s a place to go. But it’s not one creator/curator. It’s organic.

Reddit was my biggest source of news. Not just because it was usually pretty up to date, but I greatly appreciated being able to check the comments as a bullshit detector. That and the article being in the comments instead of news sites’ paywalls.

Hobbies, learning and hopefully a place I can share things I make with people without being called a spammer… At least for a few years.

Cats and news

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 love the communities for my hobbies. I hope they will be just as active as on reddit.

Advice on choosing between two things that are only marginally different.

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

Diversity and exposure to new ideas.

Whether I agree with the idea or not, breing exposed to so many different points of view changes how I look at various topics. Sometimes it reinforces and strengthens my position and sometimes I change my stance.

I feel like Reddit (and now Lemmy) allow me to engage / listen to discussions on an issue. Discussions that involve a wide assortment of different viewpoints. It’s hard to find that in most places on the internet.

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.

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.

“A way to burn time that doesn’t feel like a digital sugar rush” - well said, that was definitely one of the main reasons I used it habitually. In my experience, reddit had a fairly unique balance of being able to facilitate both serious and silly content.

Excellent shitposting memes, I hope that community proliferates here

The simplicity of the comments is why Reddit has been king. The separation lines between comments are too old school blog on here and I really don’t it. The waterfall style of Reddit comments is an infinitely better mechanic

I’ll co-sign all of that! Niche stuff is why I was on Reddit.

Fitness for FTM guys, my city’s local page, subs for my dogs’ specific breeds, Jewish cooking. The communities that grew organically in n niche spots brought me a lot of joy.

Also hey! Kayaking! If you know of a Lemmy community for it, I’m game! Always nice to run into other paddlers.