Sorry if not.
I was on Reddit for a lot of years and enjoyed most of them, I really did. Almost all of that was through the Reddit is Fun app, it was one of the few apps I liked enough to pay for it.
I stopped opening RiF the day the API incident happened and I switched to here (using Connect, after some experimentation, because the UX was most similar to RiF). I wasn’t confident we would gain enough users to make it worthwhile to switch, but I wanted to try and I didn’t want to support spez. Just this morning I told my wife that we probably had several thousand users, then a few hours later I saw a post saying we had almost 1.5 million. That’s amazing!
I struggled a bit with Lemmy when I started using it, but either Lemmy or I evolved - probably both - and now it’s a wonderful experience to open every day. Y’all are great and I appreciate your presence.
edit: Probably should have said it in the original message, but in case it wasn’t explicit: thank you all.
I feel the need to point out (like others in the original post) that the absolute user count isn’t very helpful. At one point there were millions of users on single instances because of bots and unprotected signup pages on some instances.
More important is the number of active users. There are about 45k users who have posted, commented, or voted in the past month. Still pretty good!
I’m cool with that.
The reality of the situation for me is, without people talking here, it wouldn’t matter how good or awful Lemmy itself is. Fortunately there are enough quality people here that the conversation is engaging and that’s all I need.
I’m very happy here.
I’ve seen lots of posts about how “I barely miss Reddit” or “I only use Reddit a little” or “I only go back to Reddit for the niche communities.” All are valid points and I don’t begrudge anyone that decision. However, the only times I’ve been on Reddit since the API debacle have been when I clicked a link in a search result. I legitimately don’t miss the behemoth that they are. More people are welcome here in my eyes, but 45k active users - as you referenced in the last line of your comment - is plenty because they are comprised of the most interesting and largely pleasant subset of the millions or whatever Reddit has.
Like you said. Pretty good.