We just made it past 1000 signups this morning. Nearly everyone joining had very thoughtful and meaningful explanations of why they want to try using this instance. It is an amazing time for the internet and we truly appreciate SDF being a part of this.

SDF in 2004

Hello, everyone!

I am a software engineer and consultant. I started out working in Assembly and Fortran, which will give you some idea of how long I’ve been around… These days I work for a company that provides internet solutions to non-profits. I love working with people who are trying to make the world a better place.

I have always been a gadget geek and have unreasonably large collections of multitools, knives, flashlights, pens, and similar things. I also know more about things like metallurgy, LED technologies, and ink chemistry than I have any need for, but it all keeps me entertained.

Ultimately, I like people. I’m something of an introvert, which makes it harder for me to make contacts, but I really enjoy talking with people. The extreme polarization of views we have at the moment is deeply disturbing to me, but I am trying hard not to hate the extremists as people, even while working to repair all the damage they are doing. I still believe that we have more in common than we do differences.

reddit was my primary online community for well over a decade. Now that I no longer want to be there I’m grateful that SDF is helping to provide a better venue. And I appreciate the rest of you for providing a friendly community.

Hi SDF! I write programming books, teach programming, and have fun hacking on stuff.

So proud to welcome the Super Dimension Fortress into this bold new era of cyberspace.

Hey, folks! I’m yet another Reddit leaver looking for a new home on the Internet. I initially wasn’t aware of SDF until I was browsing possible Lemmy instances to join and saw that this one had lots of tech-related communities. I thought it was a good vibe since that’s what I’m interested in as a photographer and gamer, but I had to know what SDF was, so down the rabbit hole I went.

I’m not a programmer or coder and don’t think I could have the patience for it, but this whole thing is fascinating and makes me want to SSH in to SDF! I’ve already ditched Windows for Linux on my home machine, so luckily I won’t be starting from scratch with a terminal. If anyone wants to provide tips or a resource, I’m all ears.

Three cheers for the fediverse!

Well the recent SDF Lemmy email requested an introduction and comment about what we think re: the reddit to Lemmy exodus.

I’m hobbsc (aka cmhobbs, notcmhobbs, nilmethod, rev. dok. granggggg, etc). Been an SDF user for a minimum of 20 years. Love the place. More info plus fedi links etc: hobbsc.sdf-us.org

My thoughts on the reddit exodus? I’m indifferent. I’m just a passive consumer of reddit content. I don’t currently have an account. I just hope that the communities that leave go somewhere public and searchable instead of places like discord where the info will be locked away. Much like the stack exchange sites, reddit holds a wealth of useful information.

Glad to see SDF running more federated services, too. It fits well with the general theme of the fortress.

Hello SDF Lemmy! This is peron!

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Hello. I’m someone who’s previously/currently had accounts with 2 other nonprofit Unix shell account providers similar to SDF since approximately 1996/1997, and first found out about SDF maybe 10 years later while looking for other email-account-provider options. Then, last year, I saw SDF’s Mastodon instance listed on joinmastodon.org, and decided to sign up for an account there… which eventually (thanks to the email announcement that was sent to users registered there) led me to this Lemmy instance.

I suppose the main reason why I decided to sign up here is out of hope that ActivityPub/Fediverse will become similar to, but better than, the various types of discussion forum systems (Usenet/NNTP, mailing lists, mailing list archivers like Pipermail & MHonArc, phpBB/vBulletin-style web forums) that were popular in the '90s and '00s. Personal blogging/microblogging systems (Mastodon, etc.) aren’t an adequate replacement for newsgroups/forums, as far as I’m concerned; to paraphrase something I read elsewhere, too much of so-called social media is mostly about “look at me”, as opposed to “look at this” (i.e. organized by topic).

(By the way: Lemmy currently seems to have some sort of incompatibility problem with QtWebEngine and/or the Falkon web browser. I initially tried to post this from Falkon, but the “Preview” and “Post” buttons were disabled even after typing some text, so I ended up posting this from Firefox instead.)

Hello world! I’m one of the many reddit refugees who found out about lemmy after the blackouts. The ray of light in the whole twitter debacle was finding out about mastodon, and the greater fediverse, so when I saw reddit going the same direction, I was already primed to look for a federated platform to jump ship to.

Lately I couldn’t help shake the feeling that the current state of the internet was just wrong, and I longed for the early days when it felt like a giant collection of unique and interesting communities, all linking to each other. I truly feel like this is the next step in the evolution of the world wide web, and that massive corporate-controlled social media websites were just a brief distraction from actual progress.

It’s good to be home.

Hey! I’m another reddit refugee, was so excited to find about things like Lemmy and Kbin (already a very light user of Mastadon when… things… happened to the bird site). I am ashamed to say that I wasn’t familiar with SDF until I looked at smaller instances that had great uptime. Saw this one, did me a Google, and… what an awesome community! The fact that you guys have been doing the public access thing since before my family even owned a PC is incredible.

Anyway, instant fan of all you do.

Hey, everyone! I’m Doug Anger / daanger. I’ve been on SDF for awhile. I’ll likely be a bit quiet here for awhile as I’m working on a master’s thesis, but I’m excited to get better acquainted with more of the community.

Here’s the required introduction blurb. I’m just glad to have another usable social media site that isn’t trying to IPO or turn a huge profit I guess. I’ve been part of SDF for over 20 years.

Thoughts on the reddit exodus, if any? Most of these forums only last a few years. How long were you on Slashdot? Kuro5hin? Plastic? HuSi? BinRev? SA? Or any of the multitudes of phpBBs that are(were) out there? Reddit ain’t gonna disappear instantly, but it might be at its apex and start going downhill. These things(forums/boards/etc) don’t last forever, and are rarely profitable, thus don’t last long, and those that do become pretty boring, attract to many trolls/riffraff, or scare away all the interesting people.

It’s nice that things are kind of decentralizing, hopefully for the better.

Hi @SDF, I’m peron, a SDF user from #Argentina.

I’m an individual interested in historical operating systems, synthesizers, anonymity-respecting communities and cooperative electronic communication environments.

I certainly enjoy login into public machines, and meeting new friendly people. SDF provides a nice suite of free-access federated services, including its Mastodon instances, PixelFed and now Lemmy. Greetings to all my friends and kind people on the Telematic Fortress.

If anyone is interested in knowing a bit more about me, you can check this pseudoanonymous bio webpage. http://peron.sdf.org/whoami/

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     ConducTor / IndoctrinaTor / Ubuntu Peronista EdiTor / Hacker

Another Reddit leaver here. I figured I’d go back after the original two-day blackout, but I’ve pretty much abandoned it; I haven’t seen that many tone-deaf responses in a row since I tried out for “Name That Tune”.

I had been vaguely aware of the SDF project before this, so I figured “okay, this is an instance that’s probably likely to survive, and perhaps a little less politically loaded than some other choices.”

My first Unix-flavoured setup was throwing Minix 2.0 on a 16MHz 286 clone in like 1998. Still have a bit of affinity for the vintage kit, but I traded away too many of the interesting Unix boxes I had back in the days when the local university would sell them as scrap for pennies, (HP 712/60, Sun Ultra 10), so now I have to just run FVWM with too many CDE-inspired visual features for the same effect.

I tend to find the Fediverse concept interesting because it decouples presentation from content. Right now, we’re obviously still very much following the prototype Digg and Reddit gave us, but maybe there’s an entirely new universe of ways to consume cat pictures we’re on the cusp of discovering.