Similar thing happened to me. It was a near 20 year old account. Somehow it got hacked and banned. for my history I felt a sense of loss because I realized I wanted to be able to look back and see my old posts and comments. I appealed with no answer, it’s like appealing into the void.

I still had the addiction to seeing content and reading comments, seeing something always new. But I slowly started coming around to fediverse. Not all at once, I created a new reddit account just to see the content. It pissed me off they gated the content to people logged in, pissed me off they keep trying to push you to use the app, but I eventually gave in because of my content addiction to seeing that new dopamine drip feed.

The final straw was when I started noticing a more hostile commenting environment. I would comment something innocuous, but then I would get people arguing with me on fairly un controversial comments. I would notice they would be accounts with private histories less than a year old. Some would have only fans like ads in their profile.

I also noticed a vast uptick in rightwing trolling and right leaning comments. These accounts all seemed suspect. Reddit had always been a left wing space. I really think a lot of the money being funneled into these midterms is being used for troll farms and bot farms to astroturf narratives on social media platforms. That was the last straw. I was arguing with people who were probably bots on reddit, giving reddit the engagement they want and I had enough.

It really is an addiction, I had to cut it off but I still try to pull up reddit sometimes when i’m bored. But I think fediverse is really going to be the future and we have to keep getting people to gradually come here.