I began chatting with people on IRC (mIRC up in here, pIRCh losers get lost), and some html chat rooms, ICQ and IM (a/s/l?) then waaay later found myself on some less desireable forums and Digg for a while, and I remmeber when it went south, and remember seeing reddit. I stayed away until the pandemic when google searches started showing reddit thread results and I got sucked in.

What I mean to say, through all of those incarnations of talking to strangers on the internet, I never felt any of them had distinct personalities from any others, other than the slang that people used.

for reddit, it was "username checks out", " this", "TIL" etc etc. I left when every conversation felt the same. Anyway, I dont think I have a point, other than Lemmy is a fedirated reddit clone, and I'm not sure any online community has had an identifiable identity, except from some of the places that everyone just tries to say the shittiest thing they can think of