I've been looking for the next thing for more than a year, because the things that made Reddit a (relatively) healthier form of social media were being eroded. I tried out tildes, and the community was much more friendly, but almost too friendly. It was like they were overcompensating out of fear of the community becoming toxic... It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't comfortable - it felt like meeting strangers who you really want to impress. They're also somewhat anti-growth, which isn't a bad idea, but they were well below the sweet spot
Plus, I never loved the old school Reddit visuals, and it's design principle is html only and had no app or dark mode... All in all it's a great place for a specific group of redditors that didn't include me
Then I made up my resolution to leave Reddit when my apps go down and started looking at making a custom app to collate RSS feeds, and I started hearing about Lemmy.
I liked it enough that I've dropped everything and started building a better app. There's a lot missing, but there's so much good energy.
And the design principles of the fediverse address many of the fundimental problems with social media and the Internet as a whole. This might really be something important