Hi everyone! I’m excited to say that this is my first post on Lemmy! This reminds me of “the old days” when I was first learning the internet (in a good way!) I’m a Computer Science grad student focusing on AI, and have an interest in a ton of different areas. Anyway, it’s great to be here!
Hello! Welcome!
Me too! Discovering niche online forums about reptiles and science was very important to me during my teenage years. Finding close-knitted communities with a specific interest made it a lot of fun to explore those interest as well, because to me it felt very personal. Maybe others do see reddit the way I used to see online forums back then, and I was simply too old by the time reddit became big, but I spent 11 years on reddit and I honestly can’t tell you 5 usernames I would recognize.
I feel like the concept of Lemmy might be able to replicate the niche community feeling at an instance level, but at the same time it can provide the more generalized content in the way that reddit does through federation.