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.

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

Reddit and it's users are good at hyperfixating on a topic and building a community around said topic, with different skill levels. Therefore if you want to also participate, you can simply look up a subreddit for that topic and nearly instantly get answers to your questions and tips on how to start.

A massive search engine registered database containing years of knowledge from millions of people. Its going to be hard to replicate that.

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.

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'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

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.

The comments from knowledgeable individuals - frequently involved in the post itself. How often did I read of an astronomical paper, only to have one of the authors comment. Or read about some random fact about plumbing or medicine or whatever, and an academic or professional from the field would offer further insight

Not to mention the spectacular recommendations in various areas: whenever I'm in the market to buy literally anything, I'll search for the best of it on Reddit. The amount of high-quality information available on Reddit is not easily replaced. For that reason, I'll probably continue making such enquiries there, even if I do give up on Reddit in every other way

Access to some really great knowledge combined with a friendly community .. I think of subreddits like Picopresso and Selfhosting among many others

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.

I liked the positivity of the community for the most part. Reddit, to my mind, was the only largely non toxic form of social media and that will be hard to replace though I’m liking Lemmy so far.

I always liked getting into micro communities and hearing how they talked about their worlds. That might include life in obscure (relative to me) places around the world, getting into the weeds of various occupations I’ll never work in or learning about the fine details of hobbies I’ll never have. Real people having good faith conversations about highly specific things relevant to them.

Definitely number 3. I completely agree that Reddit was great for the niche stuff.

I mean, if not for Reddit, I wouldn't have organised multiple hiking and backpacking trips, sticking up propaganda posters about kayaking.

Plenty of camaraderie, suggestions and wild discussions on /r/HPFanfiction

I really hope the educational subs like learn programming, personal finance, and so on can be successful here.

I just like a 'digital public square' aspect. I want to see what people are interested in today. I want to catch up on the latest news. Maybe I want to learn something new in a hobby community.

Reddit was okay at that at first, but it did start to feel 'gamed' over a decade ago now. People were starting to notice common reposters, 'super users', and its only devolved from there with sponsored posts, awards, and advertisements. That takes away from the public square aspect and instead makes it feel like you are consuming a product.

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.

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.

music discovery/discussion. I found so much cool music on reddit communities for bands or genres I like

resources for learning about & discussing some of my hobbies and interests like FOSS software, Linux, gaming, guitar etc

communities for people local to the city/state I live in

Ironically Reddit mostly became a “filter google bullshit response” site. I miss the community stuff from Reddit of 5 years ago, I think Lemmy is heading in a good direction.

A false sense of not being alone.

Rebbit was great for troubleshooting tech issues. Subreddits like r/thinkpad r/linux r/homelab etc were very useful it figuring out weird tech issues when google finds nothing useful.

Product reviews, restaurant recommendations (regional searches on Reddit for Vacationing/etc was awesome), tourist recommendations - this was the truly useful part of Reddit that will take Lemmy a very long time to catch up to.

It's the niche stuff that made Reddit useful. For example, Amazon reviews are no longer trustworthy, but there were really good recommendations in reddit threads about which devices or products worked. The DIY subreddits were incredibly helpful. I got good recommendations for motorcycle tires and ultralight backpacking gear and Android apps and hotels in particular destinations from reddit. I got walkthroughs on how to set up a Plex server or do a particular project with a Raspberry Pi on reddit. With so many subs, there was almost always a thread for what I was looking for. That was the value. I expect it will take a while to rebuild that elsewhere, but I'm sure it will be recreated.

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.

Excellent shitposting memes, I hope that community proliferates here

Pretty much all sort of info, news or otherwise, and often backed with sources and references. For practical issues, people would often share tips or refer to helpful videos and step-by-step instructions.

I went from the rough equivalent of graduating with a 1.5gpa in high school and suicidal to making a grand total of 1 application and getting into a top 10 CS university in the States, literally giving me a second shot at life.

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