I wasn’t just a lurker, I was extremely active, with over 900K in karma. I was going to try to break 1 million this year. Not only that, I was a fairly radical activist, and was rabidly anti-MAGA. Reddit has capitulated to MAGA, so now Im a political enemy.

I repeated an opinion that I’d made made times in the past without even a warning. The first time after the Inauguration, and I was permabanned, despite being a 12 year member with over 900K in karma.

I came to Lemmy, and discovered a lot of recently exiled Reddit vets with high volume posting accounts that were 10+ years old. We were the people that built Reddit over the last decade, with thousands of posts without getting banned, and suddenly ALL of us managed to say something bad enough in the same month to get permabanned.

It turned out February was a bloodbath, and an unknowm number of people were ejected, probably in the thousands. Recently we found out that Musk had been pressuring Spez, and obviously Spez capitulated, like so many other cowardly CEOs, abandoning their core Free Speech mission (which was becoming increasingly compromised anyway).

I’m still lurking over there, but the problems they were habing with puns, bots, TROLLS, Russian propaganda farmers, etc. have only gotten worse.

So now I’m at Lemmy, with a lot of other active ex-Redditors. It looks a lot like Reddit looked 12 years ago, when I started over there. I’ve seen many of the original posts that have become Reddit lore, and I’ll miss what we built, but it’s best days are definitely behind it. Now, we’ll help energize Lemmy, and grow it into its own cultural powerhouse.

For me, that includes building an active, enthusiastic, supportive, POSITIVE guitar community here.

I can’t, I’m permabanned. I tried getting around it several times, with new account names, but each one lasted a shorter and shorter time, as the algorithm honed in on me. My first alt lasted a few weeks, my last one was caught within an hour.

I do like the idea of building the Guitar community here at Lemmy, I’m just not familiar enough with the system to know how to do that. Do we start a new forum, or take over an existing one? Do we have just one and put EVERYTHING in there, or do we split it up between various subjects - general, lessons, performances, gear, amps, etc.?

I was forced to go to Lemmy after the post-inauguration bloodbath, but Ive liked it a lot, more than Reddit in many ways. I was getting really tired of the bots, puns, Russian Propganda, novelty accounts, TROLLS, etc.

OTOH, I feel like I can speak much more freely on Lemmy. Even before I got permabanned, Reddits Free Speech mission had become non-existent.

The downside of Lemmy is that some of my favorite subs don’t have an equivalent on Lemmy. For instance, the Reddit guitar subs are very active, but the few Lemmy guitar forums are nearly empty, with posts that are days, weeks, months, and even years, apart. I tried Googling “Lemmy Guitar” for ideas, and literally every link was about Motorhead.

So I welcome more quality Reddit immigrants, as long as all the Trolls stay over there.

Supposedly Lincoln said something like “We are as happy as we make up our minds to be,” and whether he said it or not, I’ve adopted that philosophy. I’m not always happy, but even when times are tough, like they are right now, it allows me to still remain optimistic, and not surrender to despair, and give up.

Children, this was the Internet prior to 1995.

12 years, and almost a million karma, and I was permabanned soon after the election for repeating an anti-HitlerPig post that I had repeated many times BEFORE the electuon.

I was bummed at the smaller crowds on Lemmy at first, then I realized I didn’t have to scroll through dozens of puns, bots, trolls, idiots, etc. on EVERY post.

Try out Mongolian Metal. They combine metal and throat singing.