Sorry for the unwelcoming people. They're actually all Reddit refugees from a month ago and you know what some Redditors be like.
Find a good app, there's quite a few now. I like Thunder, but try out a few since preferences seem to be based on what users were most familiar with on Reddit. They're all solid.
There's a few things around explaining how it all works if it's confusing at first. But basically, start searching for and following communities to build up your feed. Until then, viewing Hot and Top Today for All instances will get you by.
Don't be surprised if it's slow sometimes as traffic uptick is big. Also, there's a lot of NSFW that pops up and I'd recommend not browsing at work even with it filtered.
Wdym? The community here is already much better than on Reddit. Same post there was met with little notice, and all of that was like "stop shilling, loser".
I believe I'm quite settled here already, using Jerboa on my phone.
One thing that could help get more people here in my opinion is promotion of the "lemmy" "brand". Now when I try to lookup the lemmy keyword on my search engine, I have to scroll waay below the first results (which is not a behavior of most users). Why isn't e.g. the "official" app called simply Lemmy, but instead "Jerboa"? I assure you this is confusing for many people.
Anyways, thank you for welcoming me! I see great potential in Lemmy (compared to e.g. Mastodon, which is dependent on specific people and not communities).
TLDR: Met with awesome community already, but the app is a little bit confusing.
Ah, a fellow rat appreciator. Welcome! (Also, I don't think there is an official Lemmy app, or indeed official Lemmy anything. The whole point is decentralisation)
If I had to guess, LiftOff, Thunder, Connect, and Sync are the front-runner apps, so try them out. I bounced between 5 when I got here before landing on a favourite. Jerboa has reportedly gone a bit downhill, or other apps have surpassed it. As a former RIF user, I personally didn't like it.
My friend switched to the default Reddit app after they killed RiF, he just told me today he's sick of it and made an account on world so there's definitely still people trickling over
X's influence - they are doing some stupid $hit (like removing ability to block people). So I guess my brain decided it is fed up with corpo apps.
degradation of content quality - I feel like Reddit has served it's purpouse, and I struggle to find something funny and/or informative. When I opened Lemmy for the first time, at least 4 interesting articles came on my feed.
One reason why reddit could die slowly. It won't be a process of dumb leader quotes/decisions like the twitter to mastodon waves. It will be slow and continuously.
It's kind of hard to generalise based on one point of data, but I'm surprised at you saying that the content quality went down. I did expect it to happen, but not so quickly. (Also, welcome to Lemmy!)