I joined because Reddit has become a cesspool of bots and toxic behaviour. Lemmy is still completely open-sourced, while Reddit isn’t at all now. Also, when you first sign up on Reddit currently, you get completely ignored now and can’t post or comment on regular subs.
When these threads come up, it’s always interesting to see how many of the “I was banned for no reason at all, I only said puppies are cute” users have a post history here on Lemmy that makes me think “I don’t agree with full-on bans, but in this case, I can kind of see why they might’ve done it.”
Also, I always wonder with these how many people are saying “I was banned from Reddit” when actually they were only banned from a specific sub. It’s super easy to get banned from the average sub on Reddit (at least it used to be). Much higher bar, generally speaking with caveats, to get banned from the site itself.
Having said all that, I did get a temporary site-wide suspension from Reddit, the REAL DEAL, for using the word “retard” in the accurate non-abusive way when discussing methods to slow the growth of mold. So, there’s that.
As for what made me join this place? I was already ready to be done with Reddit. I was aware of Mastodon, checked it out, definitely not for me, but by looking into that I found out that there was a news aggregator style alternative of similar principle called Lemmy.