I’m one of the new ones, but I’ve been aware of and interacted with Lemmy and Mastodon for at least a couple of years.
For me, I liked what I saw but felt like they lacked enough of the network effect to convince my nontechnical friends to make the jump with me. That made me concerned that they would shrivel up and die. I’d recently been interacting a bit more though, Mastodon especially, since I’d say its gained a good amount of traction given Twitter’s…cancerous CEO. Every couple months I found myself downloading Tusky and Jerboa to mess around, but hadn’t made it a habit.
Reddit’s API changes were a line in the sand for me though. I decided I didn’t care about my friends following anymore, and I was ready for a smaller community again, with less rage bait and predatory capitalism.
Does that make me the wrong sort of refugee?
In our case the mud was because the largest patch we grew on was mostly bare due to how poorly our grass had handled the previous summer and how trafficked it was. I haven’t noticed any issues since the clover grew in, except for areas where it was still immature or had been killed before reaching maturity by the kids and dogs, which I just reseeded a week or so ago.