Partly it was the API fiasco on Reddit, and partly it was Lemmy that drew me in, honestly.

I've left discussion/chat forums before over the years when technology moved on, or the quality of discourse declined, like FidoNet, Usenet, ISCA BBS, or Slashdot. I lived my life just fine without them. Reddit was a good COVID19 distraction for me, a way to stay connected to people using a low-data phone plan. I hadn't heard about 3rd party apps until the appocalypse. I knew that the Android app ran up the count in DuckDuckGo's App Tracking Protection, and the iPad app drained the hell out of my battery. (Seriously, I could watch a 2-hour movie on Netflix, and the battery would be at 96%. An hour of the Reddit app drained it to about 60%. Was it, like, live-streaming the view from my camera back to Reddit servers?) I tried Apollo less than two weeks before the shutdown, and it was marvelous. The quality of the discourse had become, just, bad, so I figured I'd just leave Reddit behind when it ceased to function.

But, I checked out Lemmy after reading about it. It was small and quaint. But, I checked it out again. And again. And again. Then, about a month after API Day, I signed up for an account and never looked back. (The big draw, I think, was users who view comments as a discussion, not as a form of verbal combat that you "win".)