maybe they tried the fediverse when it was bad or didn’t have apps, I think before lemmy my experience was mastodon many years ago and I was confused because I thought it was supposed to be like discord the way ppl talked about instances not twitter, and even when I joined I didnt realize they interconnected til I joined lemmy years later lol, thought it was so weird having mini worse twitter that doesnt connect.

And in lemmy’s case I weirdly associated it with voat and lag, then I joined and was suprised at the left leaning (significantly lol) userbase that actually provided helpful suggestions instead of telling me to google and actually getting replies for most posts/comments instead of them being lost in to the void.