I’m new to Lemmy. I came across join-lemmy.org and browsed the servers by “most active.” Blåhaj stood out to me because of its cute logo. I’m a straight cis girl, but I love the LGBT community, and being an escort I’ve met many trans girls (and some gay guys) through my work, so I’ll always stand in full solidarity with them. I also noticed that the instance has downvotes disabled, which made it feel like the right place for me, lol. Curious how it went for you all.
The SDF started back in the late 80’s as a anime dial up BBS. SDF is a reference to the anime Robotech, A show released in the 80’s but that I grew up watching as a kid in the 90’s.
In the early 2000’s, I was trying to figure out this thing called Linux, I found a site that would give me access to a unix machine for free and it had a name and logo that reminded me of the anime I loved as a kid. While poking around I found that they had a fairly active message board, were willing to give me an email address, usenet access (albeit, limited), and would host small personal web site for me if I wanted. They were my primary email address through most of the 00’s before I, regrettably now, switched to gmail like everyone else.
Fast forward to 2022, and I find out that there is this thing called Lemmy and it’s supposed to be like Reddit but better. So I put up my own server… and it crashed and burned. Mainly due to my own stupidity. I failed to make backups and borked an update.
While I was playing with my own server, I found something interesting. Not only was the SDF still kicking, but they had decided to host Lemmy and Mastodon servers as well. So I signed up for both and started donating to the SDF again. Been here ever since. Good place, decent folks. I don’t see myself going anywhere else for a while.
I had to dig a bit on that page just to find what SDF stood for. This whole time I assumed it was “Software Development Fund”