Honestly I am surprised.

I didn't expect much, but I expected more than this quite frankly.

I think the best moment for me was probably

Provided that person is aware of Lemmy, that is

Sorry that that wasn't obvious, but the desktop bit was mostly a joke!

But yeah; on desktop extra applications you have to download are definitely a hard sell.

I would assume a good amount of the reason has less to do with tracking [though I'm not denying it's a factor], and more with other stuff such as it being an icon on your phone etc, apps just have a different "feel" than websites ultimately imho

I don't really agree on the whole tbh. Specifically, the one thing that's still keeping my Reddit account alive is that there's a bunch of communities that don't exist on any other platform because they'd need enough of a "critical mass" of users for it to make sense; and they're too niche otherwise.
A huge influx of users certainly comes with.... Challenges, I do not deny that. But I'd also love to not have to use Reddit anymore solely because of its active user count. And new Lemmy users are unlikely to come from Twitter or something; as it's a different kind of format.

Also, I think the sentiment of "the Lemmy community rn is also formed of at least mildly tech-savvy people [...]" is kind of exclusionary for no real reason, I don't think you have to be tech-savvy to have a good perspective on things, make a good joke or all in all be a positive person to interact with.

I used to distro hop A LOT, but by now I'm mostly on Arch [my laptop still runs Nix but I'm thinking of going back to Arch on that one too - Nix is nice but I feel like the difficulties for non-pre-packaged stuff aren't worth it for me personally], just because it's simple enough that I know where to look to fix things, plus the wiki is great.

If someone says "comms" I'm going to think "communications"

but I guess that also technically works ^^

There's some communities on Reddit that don't yet exist in other places; so I'm going to continue browsing those rarely; but once they move somewhere else I'm moving with them.

Users can block those on desktop without issue. On mobile it's a bit harder so most people I know don't even if they use ublock or something on their PCs/laptops (though that is of course only anecdotal).

So if anything if that was the issue they should've shut off support for the desktop version LOL

Honestly, I don't see this issue with that - having preprepared answers to make sure they're accurate (though that doesn't appear to have been the reason in this case...) etc is a reasonable thing for an AMA like that

I think the substance (or often honestly lack thereof) of those responses is much more the problem, together with not actually addressing most of the questions that were responded to properly (and I'm honestly just confused by the decision process by Reddit's leadership in general tbh as it was rather foreseeable not to end well. Kinda wish Reddit will die from this hoping a lot of the communities I care about migrate to something like Lemmy instead; but I'm not holding my breath)

Also my timing was so perfect that just as I tried to log in after getting the confirmation email, it went down. Needless to say I was kinda scared that I did something for a second before realizing that was rather unlikely

I've been looking at different Lemmy communities the second pushshift was down (and let's just say finding things on Reddit suddenly became a lot harder because the built-in search function is kinda limited in a bunch of ways), and just made my account today out of random chance essentially LOL

I don't mourn it, but I do already miss it. Because as terrible of a place as it can be, it has the huge advantage of being, well, huge.

So even more niche stuff has some level of engagement enabling you (together with the format) to find things you enjoy or are interested in.

Based on my experiences on Reddit, I've honestly found that voting is not just incredibly easy¹, but also something that at least I found myself engaging with when I didn't want to write a comment myself LOL

¹ due to the very local results of votes in this kind of format, it doesn't have the same feel as, say, a thumbs up on YouTube (and I very rarely engage with thumbs up etc as a result there), if that makes sense? Like, it's limited to that particular level of the conversation