I was looking for a Reddit alternative for years. I would have been cool with anything non-corporate, but figured it would take ages to build.
It’s incredible what Lemmy has turned into so quickly. A Reddit alternative went from being impossible to actually existing within a matter of weeks.
As much as that makes a great story… The groundwork for lemmy goes back years. It’s true that lots of issues were addressed and client apps were ported after Reddit started going down hill, but a ton of work was done beforehand to make that all possible.
client apps were ported after Reddit started going down hill
For me, this can’t be overstated. I don’t work in an office/at a stationary computer and 99.9% of my Reddit time was mobile. I checked out the “mobile apps” for Lemmy, and hated them. I probably wouldn’t be active here at all if it wasn’t for good dedicated apps like Sync.
I haven’t used Reddit since the blackout. Thankfully Sync for Lemmy was out within a few weeks. Sort by TopDay and there’s enough content on here to scratch my itch.
Boost for Lemmy as well
Damn straight. I tried out Jerboa and was so disappointed that until Lemmy Sync was announced I just assumed I would no longer have a Reddit style app for a while.
Lurks in sync
Voyager for Lemmy is really good and open source. You should try it, might get a better mobile experience.
Will do, thanks!
You can also have a look at https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/
There should be one that you’ll like
Well said
Work started on lemmy way back before lemmy could be a good alternative to Reddit
I agree with you on the technology part of it, but I’m wondering if OP meant “existing” as in how relevant of a social media platform it becomes.
Plus building it is kind of the easy part – the hard part is getting people to migrate over and having enough active posts / users that people feel it’s worth their time to stay and post as well. Migration will inevitably splinter communities as well, especially small ones, where not enough people move over (or don’t move quickly enough). I’ve seen so many alternatives where the userbase was too small or not posting enough or just right wing trolls or the site was unusably buggy. lemmy managed to be good enough in all those categories at the perfect time - when reddit spat in the face of their users.
It’s the niche topics that need more activity. I love science - mostly space/physics - and it’s mostly a ghost town. Once the unique corners grow their activity, it’s going to be great.
I would have assumed spacey topics would sell like hot buns.
I guess Physics are more of a niche and you would probably find more armchair physicists here than actual physicists.If things need more activity try posting, it works great
except no one comment and no one posts
Regarding the content problem, I see the repost bots are still active, I wish they could be either turned off or have their rates severeöy limited.
At first glance they make Lemmy seem active and vibrant, but since they are just bots few people vote on the posts and fewer comment on them, they post so much the any original Lemmy content in those communities gets drowned out by the bots reposting Reddit threads.
During the influx of users after the apikalypse these bots where probably needed to not scare people that there was zero content from different subreddits, but now they just seem to be holding those communities hostage.
Easiest is yo block them, so they won’t show up in your feed.
Yeah, I know, but they make Lemmy look like a place full of fake content
Plus building it is kind of the easy part
I mean… not entirely. I’ve been on quite a few reddit alternatives over the years. Most of them passion projects by indie devs, and start struggling the moment they hit 4 digit users. Ruqqus was nicknamed “dumpster fire” because it would go down every time a new wave from reddit came over.
The software existed for years, but yes the instances that popped up and the dev work to make it actually sorta stable at scale did happen quite quick.
It’s incredible what Lemmy has turned into so quickly.
This couldn’t have been possible without the help of Spez and all the board responsible for the APIcalypse, thank you very much!
What if he was secretly a good guy?
Spez being wholesome? The plot twist of the year.
Directed by M. Night Shamalyan
It’s what makes me want to donate to keep my home server alive. It’s the first open source thing that I’ve ever donated to, and I now have a monthly donation to help try to keep this alive since Lemmy is the alternative we all deserve.
Impossible? The only moat with Reddit was the userbase, the site is just a link sharing site with nested comments…
It’s worth stepping back a moment to appreciate that it’s actually worked. Whether it will continue is another story, but Lemmy became a successful and viable alternative to Reddit. That’s worthy of praise and celebration, and it couldn’t be done without the admins and mods of .world who’ve made this place into what it is.
After seeing other potential alternatives, then seeing how LW and a few other instances took off, credit really goes to protocol devs, fediverse devs/admins, and LW is a standout for the praise you just mentioned as well. It’s a culmination of so many things going right to make such a diverse and expansive community. We’re already seeing the tech question help phenomena that Reddit has right here on LW, where some search engine queries can be magically made better by appending lemmy.
Let the migration continue! I haven’t missed Reddit since coming here.
Yeah, Lemmy isn’t anywhere near its final form, but it’s already a success my eyes. This place is a lot of fun because it’s full of nerdy shit I like.
If it keeps growing and becomes the new Reddit but free and open, then good for Lemmy and all the new users, even if the average post/comment quality goes down.
Lemmy is like 1/2 of what reddit was able to do for me. I haven’t gone back to reddit since the exodus, I deleted all my posts and my account and never went back. But even now when I need information on anything from a community it’s always reddit that pops up with the information that I need. I understand this is because of userbase and interacting with it but lemmy has not been able to do that effectively yet.
Granted I did post about a fish for my fishtank here and it was answered actually pretty quickly.
I think I’m just not understanding what instances and the feddiverse is. Most posts I’m interested in have like 1 or 2 comments, and half the time they’re not useful interactions. It just feels kind of dead here. And again I understand it’s because of the lack of interaction and userbase. But to say it’s better than reddit or the best alternative is being a little frivolous.
Feels kind of dead
The frustrating aspect is that it isn’t dead here. I’ve been on dead forums where you make a post and nothing happens. On Lemmy I’ve posted on seemingly dead or near dead communities, and received a flurry of response in the form of votes and comments. There are definitely people subscribed, and willing to comment, but very few people posting threads. It is a bottleneck to have users all waiting for somebody else to post something.
I hope anybody reading this comment understands that in a smaller ecosystem they can’t just passively wait for content to fill the feed. There needs to be more contribution in the form of posts, and hopefully posts that go beyond just memes (memes are great and fun, but Lemmy desperately needs posts that go beyond just that) or arguing about politics (politics are important, but exhausting). More activity on interest, and hobby communities, especially with original content adds uniqueness here.
The one thing I’ve noticed, at least on the lemmy.world instance, is that posts I make in whatever dinkum communities I’m in show up on the front page right there as bold as brass, which never happened on reddit. I think that’s where some of these comments and upvotes are coming from. After I started noticing this I looked to see what communities the other random stuff I’m seeing on the front page is coming from and in quite a few cases they’re also from tiny communities.
So that’s pretty cool. Making a post in your niche subcommunity of choice is not necessarily just shouting into the void, and some people might actually see it even if they weren’t looking for it.
Some of it absolutely is from the frontpage, but I consider that a reason communities need more posts. Posts from a niche community actually have a chance at wider visibility. People who interact with the posts are more likely to be the kind of people who would like the community I figure.
My new year’s resolution is to post more threads in “dead” communities I care about. Thanks for the perspective.
I’ve taken one and tried to post something into it daily. Its kind of a fun project.
Yeah same, what lemmy needs is more of the niche stuff because that was what made reddit “reddit”
Rather than trying to find a specific community to ask a question. Ask it in a general community. Specific subreddits were only born when generic ones became too big. But as the generic ones are much smaller it makes more sense to ask your questions and make posts there.
That’s helpful thank you. If I had a question for example for a specific video game you’d recommend going to the gaming community over the game specific one?
As of January 2024 that is still the recommended way of doing it (mostly because of the overall network size).
Yes absolutely. Ask in the general game community.
For example I wanted to know about HaikuOS. It’s an open source OS. There’s no community for it but I know Linux users are the most likely to know about it and the Linux community is huge.
So I asked in c/Linux and found users of the OS.
If I didn’t get a response I’d ask in c/AskLemmy
I’ve done the same with anime and games.
That would work for asking, but it wouldn’t help if you wanted to discuss community specific things. For instance if I wanted to discuss the new Heroic lineup after Stabby imploded the previous core I can’t just post this into gaming. People are going to look at it, think “what the fuck did I just read?” and ignore it. That post requires a CS2 community and that community doesn’t exist yet. There have been attempts but it’s never taken off.
I think such communities are important for growth because those are the communities of you stick around for. I probably wouldn’t be on Lemmy if the Formula 1 community wasn’t active here. General communities are great for a general news feed, but the “niche” communities are the glue that keep people together.
You think the gaming community doesn’t have CS gamers?
See my other comment where I do just what you say you can’t:
For example I wanted to know about HaikuOS. It’s an open source OS. There’s no community for it but I know Linux users are the most likely to know about it and the Linux community is huge.
So I asked in c/Linux and found users of the OS.
If I didn’t get a response I’d ask in c/AskLemmy
I’ve done the same with anime and games.
This is insightful. Also some of the niche communities that came over have probably found it hard to recreate the experience with less participants - whereas when they were historically established on Reddit only when was enough traffic to justify splitting off from a more general topic.
Perhaps over time the members of smaller niche Lemmy communities will drift into more general topics. For example if there’s not enough participants to maintain a vibrant ‘wearing feathers in your hair’ community, those members would probably be welcome, and valuable participants, in the larger ‘head ornaments’ community. Since I’m slightly invested in the success of Lemmy, I certainly hope that’s what happens rather than people going back to ‘/r/featherhairwearing’.
My Reddit account is 16 years old but I have abandoned it. Lemmy is what Reddit was like 10 - 12 years ago. People were nicer for the most part and there was light discussion on random topics.
Yeah my account was about 15 years old. Reddit definitely decayed into worse and worse and I have no regrets leaving. But it did leave a little bit of a hole that’s yet to be properly filled. And lemmy is definitely doing a good job, just hasn’t filled it yet.
Yep. Need a bit more engagement, but not as much as Reddit/FB/etc.
But even now when I need information on anything from a community it’s always reddit that pops up with the information that I need.
Lemmy devs should prioritize SEO optimizations to make the platform more visible on search engines. This will boost traffic and leads to a positive userbase growth.
punching you punching you punching you
Yeah, I think it’s just the critical mass that makes a space feel lively. The discussions I participated in felt great (actually felt like pre-digg reddit). It’s a trade-off. I similarly minimized my own reddit usage, but I still browse it on my desktop (much less than before). And that’s fine. I also stopped using Twitter, and Mastodon is a similar story: fewer, but better interactions. I don’t mind it, and it also might be by design. It’s not a for profit service and it does not need to make the engagement line go up all the time. I have more time to do what I actually want.
Half of what reddit was able to do for me is being overly generous, but my experience is the same.
Did you try to use alternative search engines like tailsx or searx?
Encourage more niche reddit subs to move to Lemmy.
To the people who want Lemmy to be more active, if you want that, you have to be part of it.
The internet adage is that on any forum 10% of users comment, and 1% post. Lemmy needs to break out of that paradigm, and users should be disproportionately active compared to user/activity on Reddit.
People like posting in places where other people are already posting. It’s a snowball effect. That’s why meme communities have managed to take off; the 1% of users can pump out a huge amount of memes in a short time and make the place feel more lively than it actually is, which in turn kickstarts it and makes it lively for memes.
I make posts mostly in non-meme communities because I think Lemmy should have that too. Some posts are just links but a lot of them are original content. I think it adds value but I simply cannot, as one person, post the kind of volume that memeposters can. These more niche communities need people to post.
If you are subscribed to an interest community, I strongly encourage posting new threads there.
TLDR:
As a fairly longtime lurker on Reddit now bought into Lemmy, I’m making it a resolution to break that habit and post/comment more. Thanks for the PSA!
What should I post? Like legitimately, I’m mostly into sports, but short of copying what’s getting posted in /r/NFL and /r/hockey, what should I do? Or maybe it’s just that? Pick some of the best posts from those subs and bring them here organically (none of that dumb mirror/bot shit that discourages people from commenting)?
Just whatever strikes your fancy. Worse case it gets no attention, but usually you’ll get at least some feedback
I posted (from an alt account) five articles (not just tweets, but legit stories) between my comment and yours. I’ll try to do that daily. I read enough articles via rss, no reason I can’t post them here for everyone else.
I don’t know what discussions sports people are into honestly. You know better than me. I assume aside from game news (which if nobody else is posting games, that is a no brainer), there is talk about players, training, trades, strategies, and I don’t know if like stories about the fandom are a thing. What are the kinds of discussions you liked on Reddit? Bring the best of that.
the 1% of users can pump out a huge amount of memes in a short time and make the place feel more lively than it actually is, which in turn kickstarts it and makes it lively for memes.
Just like the stock market!
Stocks only go right.
💎👐
Absolutely right, engagement is key!
Yes! In the spirit of posting, some of the things I’d like to see more engagement in (and I’ll do my part) are television, movie, and book communities. On reddit I loved discussing the latest episodes of my favorite shows or hearing about theories in the books I’m reading.
It isn’t about “winning”. Lemmy can coexist with any Fediverse application, and that’s the beauty of it. Everyone on the Fediverse wins.
Not every “Reddit alternative” is on the Fediverse.
Honestly in the current landscape, any alternative to an already popular platform that isn’t federated in some way is doomed from the start.
True even for megacorps for Facebook; hence why Threads is federating.
Some of the people in that reddit thread are unreasonably angry that some people moved to Lemmy.
I’ll never understand loving a company so much that anyone who doesn’t like it is automatically deemed a bad person. Why is a stranger’s choice of social media so personal to some of these people? Why are they so livid?
I’m not even going to quote the specific comments I’m referring to just in case I get banned. One of them was comparing the entire lemmyverse to the subreddits that were banned over explicitly only having content about hating strangers for existing.
I’m happy I left if that what I’m “missing out” on.
I find it weird that they’re not more mad that reddit got ruined by a fuckhead CEO and horrible management.
They are in denial, it was an amazing place and still is in some ways. I went from loving it to realizing it was basically a walmart that helped drown out the mainstreet web. Small forums and irc chats may be too much to moderate now that so much of humanity is online, and it is truly suprising people are willing to mod sites for free that prioritize monetization over community and sustainability. Sure mods power tripped 20 years ago, but in many ways it was easier to find an alternative run by sme’s or fans of whatever that just did it for community. So much so they donated their time and money… but now, Why spend money when you can create a sub / community. But then you are stuck with that platform as it evolves. It took me a while but i finally accept defederation is as critical as the knowlege base that we all helped create.
The really confusing part to me, is that, though I haven’t personally read the comments, I don’t doubt your experience… But the post is in /r/redditalternatives… Which should be filled with members who are actively encouraging and discussing openly alternatives to Reddit… Right?
It confuses me why there seem to be so many Reddit die-hards in a subreddit about finding other sites that bear some similarity to Reddit…
Then again, straight Christians who are anti-LGBTQ+ show up to gay pride regularly too… Which is equally confusing to me. I get it, you don’t like it. That’s fine. Just go home Sarah, nobody wants you here when you’re just going to complain the whole time. (I know there’s more depth to this example than I’ve touched on, it’s not the point of the example, so I’ll just stop there)
It’s reddit though. How can we know how many of those people are real?
Even before the Reddit app debacle, reddit made very questionable decisions and if you went to look at that discussion at a later date, the answers that were artificially boosted to the top (this depended on how you went to look at the site, it seemed a lot less in old reddit) seemed as fake as a fake Amazon review, as if reddit was astroturfing their own website.
The change that broke reddit for me was this: https://old.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/s71g03/announcing_blocking_updates/?limit=500 I have no way of looking at the thread without using old.reddit, so I don’t know if it still looks as astroturfed as it did back then.
Reedits motto was “fake it till you make it” and we know that disinformation campaigns are also rife on the platform so there is every reason to believe a single entity is behind these accounts, whether it be Reddit itself or a third party.
That said, there is kinda a sunk cost fallacy thing too in the sense that people have decided Reddit is “their platform” of choice and people will defend it like a diehard sports fan does for right or wrong. Just like in politics which is just as weird too.
Reddit’s bigger communities are a kind of double-speak: r/funny is anything but, for instance.
I don’t think it’s rooted in love for reddit, I think they hate lemmy because it isn’t what they wanted - while ignoring the fact that they have the opportunity to help make it into what they want.
I guess it’s not loyalty to Reddit and Spez, but rather to a place they deem their home.
For some of them, it may seem we caused stir in the community out of nowhere, a stir that ended up with a lot of damage to Reddit.
While they may misunderstand the root cause of why we’re here, we need to understand this concept in order to communicate importance of this platform. Some people deleted their 10+ year accounts on Reddit. Some use Reddit in parallel with Lemmy. Some stick to Reddit and don’t plan to go anywhere, and are forced to witness their house crumble.
This “the alternatives are great” gaslighting stuff has got to stop. We’ve all tried it and we’re all still here, for good reason. Reddit sucks but the fediverse sucks even more.
Oh the irony in this comment… The only person being gaslit is yourself.
And secondly - a lot of people don’t know that you can now block instances individually and that defederation/blocking is not really that big of a deal anymore.
if you think fediverse is worse than reddit you have issue
There’s a certain demographic of people who crave a constant flow of outrage to fuel their social media addiction. I know because I’ve struggled with this myself.
Reddit has a slew of bots and artificially promoted posts to provide this to increase engagement.
I guess we have bots here too, but it’s trivial to block them, and obvious spam/ads tend to be removed on sight.
There’s far less outrage fuel here than on reddit, and also the comparatively slower flow of content encourages actual engagement and participation vs. merely consuming.
I can see why someone who’s balls deep in reddit might be disappointed here.
I may also be completely wrong about some of this, but that’s my observational take.
As someone who went from a daily user of reddit for a decade and now hasn’t used reddit basically since the app’s red wedding, I really don’t think this is it. As much as I hope the fediverse and Lemmy take off, currently I’m extremely pessimistic about that because if anything the problem is the reverse of what you describe. My current front page on Lemmy (all/active):
- an article whining about Elon
- an article about Fox News/trump
- a post complaining about charging for XBL/PSN
- an article about Tesla being banned from driving schools
- an article complaining about DoorDash
and so on. And to get to this great non-rage bait content, I had to go through the trouble of even figuring out how to use the fediverse and which instance to sign up for (and then still hop instances a few times) and spend my first week just blocking like I was getting paid for it because language settings on this site mean nothing, more or less, and there are a few “communities” that pop up here that provide all of the intellectual stimulation of jamming a q-tip too far in your ear.
And if those posts alone don’t paint a clear picture about who the user base is here, heading to the comments will. Most of the comments read like they’re posted by “lefty white linux bro” or “communist trans linux they/them” who have decided that those are their entire identity/personality. While none of those things are bad and I tick a lot of those boxes myself, it creates a real echo chamber that borders on hostile to anyone that isn’t in that category. The other side effect I’ve seen on this is that this place can offer up some real doozies of takes in a way that is likely to make anyone who actually knows anything just up and leave. I saw one the other day that was talking about greatest people in the FOSS space and uncritically lists RMS that was heavily upvoted. At least someone brought up why that’s problematic in the comments, but imagine hopping over to the mainstream sites and talking about best musicians and seeing R Kelly on the list…
Anyway, while I don’t mind an echo chamber now and then, if Lemmy in particular is to grow and be useful for anyone outside of this base, I’d suggest the community adopt something closer akin to “reddiquette” which is probably the main reason why reddit was able to get somewhat past this in the early days, and some of the “niche” communities were able to grow. I put niche in quotes here, because as it stands now Lemmy doesn’t have even very vibrant communities for fairly mainstream things (music and TV, movies, etc.)
So while I personally choose to spend my time here instead of on reddit, that’s mostly an ideological choice and I view as a sacrifice because I’m missing out on tons of other content that I enjoy. Even your post is a form of this – “reddit bad” (sure) “because of bots” (also sure) “and Lemmy has less outrage content and fuels engagement” (uh, no.) Lemmy has as much or more, and it’s only fueling engagement on those that don’t immediately bounce off, but since you posted “their team bad, our team good” you’re getting upvotes and probably will continue to.
That you accuse leftists and marginalized groups of “mAkInG iT ThEiR wHoLe IdEnTiTy” tells me everything I need to know about your privilege and worldview, and explains immediately why you’d prefer reddit, a notorious alt-right platform.
We’re generally not welcome on reddit, so the fact that bigots and transphobes or right-wingers get immediately dunked on here is actually a good feature, and makes this far less toxic overall.
FYI I’ve blocked you, so I won’t see any further hot takes from you and therefore won’t respond. My time and sanity are far too valuable to waste on someone like you.
Ah perfect. Sets up a strawman, completely misses the point of my post, says one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard (reddit being an alt-right website*) and then immediately moves to block in response to me saying this place is a hostile echo chamber. 10/10, no notes, illustrates the point I was trying to make better than I did.
Just to be clear for other readers, I was not saying that any of those things are bad I was saying that this place has a purity test that borders on stupidity which this post illustrates well.
* just how does one come to this conclusion? It’s less lefty than Lemmy, but not by much. It’s alt-right communities are usually either banned, quarantined, and regardless of the technicals of the website or how the admins run it, they’ve always been outcast and if you say “vote for trump” in any but the clearly right echo chambers, you’re going to get downvoted to hell.
It’s fine for actual bigots to get dunked on. But Lemmy users will dunk on you: literally for liking the “wrong” piece of software. The echo chamber is real.
I’ve not noticed. Can you provide an example? You mean Chrome?
Honestly, I wish more people would switch to Firefox, but I’d never dunk on someone for Chrome. I might try to talk them out of it though lol
You perfectly illustrated the point
The “point”
“But I like my corporate cage 😭😭😭”
Reading the comments in that thread made me realise how little I miss Reddit. The sub is RedditAlternatives and there’s a whole lot of people in there whinging that people are talking about alternatives to Reddit. Lemmy has it’s problems, but Reddit is toxic AF.
I guess you could say the people who actually moved away from Reddit aren’t on /r/RedditAlteratives anymore
I don’t know what current Reddit looks like but old reddit is still irreplaceable so far.
People on Reddit are simply too addicted to the content. That’s the only real reason I can see what could bind someone to the platform. It all boils down to that - content. (And you probably don’t need me to repeat the usual “for more content we need more users” lol)
The old reddit is purely a technical thing at this point. I believe in the popular opinion that it’s a matter of time before it gets shut down.
I’ve personally been a user of it on Apollo and Relay and to me it was the way to use it. Rarely have I interacted with the website. So I imagine it’s a similar thing with the old mode users.
a lot of people don’t know that you can now block instances individually and that defederation/blocking is not really that big of a deal anymore.
I’ll reshare my thoughts on this from a comment I left in a completely different context a few days ago:
My question about that option is: what effect does it have? My understanding is that if we defederate, they can see our content and reply to it, but only other users on their instance will see those replies.
Does an individual blocking them do the same thing? If so, perfect.
But if, as I suspect, it still allows them to see and reply to comments and everyone else in the fediverse can see it, I cannot support it as a solution to dealing with the kind of bad faith interactions which would make me want to block or defederate an instance. It allows them to continue peddling their rubbish without even enabling the person they’re cribbing off of to respond.
Yeah, I’m so weary of this argument but you’re dead right.
If I and all my neighbours close our curtains then we won’t see all the garbage, rats, dead bodies, and other refuse piling up in our street, and then congratulate ourselves at the lovely community we share.
It’s absurd. As though everyone expects that corporate encroachment into the fediverse is going to come with a big sign that says “threads” or some such.
Everyone in that thread has Stockholm syndrome. They’re so used to being force fed shit that they couldn’t possibly believe that an online platform could be run any differently than Reddit.
And, everyones total misunderstanding of the fediverse. Yea, no wonder it’s all tech people here, dumbass
Honestly, there’s a reason hype has died down. The site has all the same problems as other alternatives.
After the initial hype, it’s only as big as a reasonably large individual subreddit. In fact, here are the top weekly posts of lemmy’s federation partners and T_D’s exodus site. The latter edges out the former slightly in upvotes and much more substantially in comments, and it’s just a single community. Even in the fairly small category of “biggest extant reddit alternative”, lemmy doesn’t take first prize.
Same content problem as all the others: roughly half of the posts are politics of a uniform orientation, and the other half are reposted facebook memes.
Reddit’s killer app is the presence of a sizable community for every little niche thing, and that’s not there. Unless your only interests are politics (within roughly .3 standard deviations of the median Huffpo writer) or Facebook memes, it’s not a viable alternative.
Competition: Sure, it’s federated in theory, but the block-happy, drama-centric culture means that, if an alternative were to pop up with the userbase of 2012 Reddit (or even 2018 Reddit), it’d get defederated almost immediately. Open federation solves the “dozens of sites competing for the same thousand-or-so people” problem. Closed federation just pretends to do so.
This is basically all the same issue: not enough users. It’s so dumb. “Lemmy isn’t as good as Reddit because everyone isn’t there yet. But ya, Reddit sucks.” /face-palm Then come over and get users to come over instead of saying there’s not enough people.
Hey, it’s not all politics! Star Trek is doing great here! I just saw a post about how the Bell Riots are going to…wait…
Lemmy right now actually feels like it’s the same size as when I started using Reddit, before the Digg migration. It was so much better then.
well it doesnt necessarily need to be politics, the biggest subgroup for lemmy users are usually people into tech (a lot of tech and tech adjacent communities are fairly sized on lemmy) as they are the ones more likely to make the jump. Easiest way to tell is to go to the communities page, sort by all communities and count the number, or even just get an eyeballs search to know that a common thread between many communities is either memes or tech
Not only not enough users, but there are certain users on here that are generating constant spam and/or propaganda. That becomes half the feed if you don’t block them.
Fair enough. But thats also understandable since there’s no single entity moderating. I think we should accept to get wet when showering.
I‘m pretty sure we can use blocklists for instances that suck like mastodon. Its very easy although masto doesnt do a good job yet to promote blocklists.
Which means that when more people come in here, there will be more spam and more propaganda, reaching the feed more often. And you won’t really stop people like that, they’ll simply go to a different instance and do the exact same thing.
Well, the same as always. They evolve, we evolve. Its an arms race.
Its already way past that as well. Bans of the largest instances federate through to smaller instances. So if you manage to get banned on instances I federate with, I don’t see your stuff either.
Works pretty well already.
That’s Reddit, too. World News there is basically all Israeli propaganda right now. It becomes a lot more diluted with more users.
I always have to laugh when I see an ostensibly pro-lemmy comment that says:
“Reddit mods are out of control”
Do these people understand that basically the whole idea behind a Federated system is that community owners have significantly more moderation power than they do on commercial platforms? If someone’s main problem with Reddit was unchecked mod power, I have some bad news for them…
Eh, it’s not that the moderators are out of control on Reddit. It’s that they’re under control… by a single corporation.
A moderator here could potentially move their community to another instance if the owner of the instance tries the asshattery that Reddit Corp does.
Users choose the communities that have mods that are cool, the mods choose the instance that’s owned by someone that’s cool. The second half of that sentence isn’t true for reddit which turns it into a top down power dynamic.
Eh there are also power mods on the platform that have a lot of control over loads of large communities there who are an issue in Of themselves in the ways they can control or stifle narratives on the site.
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I think many of those people are conflating subreddit moderators with reddit site moderators/admins. On many platforms, “mods” refers to the top level people.
Yup. Mods here are forced to have public mod logs, and people can create the same community under a different instance. Even instance admins have less power than Reddit admins.
So yes, if you hate mod abuse, Lemmy is better
The mod log is public and transparent.
No, they don’t realize, because their sense of where the proverbial line should be drawn matches the mods. If you’re a moderate (or heaven forbid a conservative) then you likey won’t stay long or post these views often.
You hit the nail on the head. People can’t seem to see themselves, especially when they’re using the same language as their proclaimed enemies. They’ll oppose with all the same tactics while calling the other side fascist.
Edit: I think I’ll start referring to them as kettleblacks.
Except if I really have a problem with the mods here I can set up my own instance with blackjack and hoo…wait.
The problem with Reddit is the centralized corporate control. The company can, at will, make all the community apps useless, and they did.
I love it because the apps are much better… The regular reddit app has too many notifications, and red reader is too boring, and laggy. I’m using liftoff and it is so much better
Same. If they kept RIF I never would have known how crappy Reddit is and I left and never looked back.
Yeah, when RiF stopped working I just stopped using Reddit. I didn’t want their app with their random irrelevant notifications, nft shit and all the rest.
Can’t believe how many people went through the same steps. I miss reddit, but post RIF, it was unusable
I use it on occasion on mobile. Oh boy is the UX bad. UI is too cluttered as well but manageable.
The mobile UI before the exodus was fine imo.I use the full width/height card UI in Sync. The old style isnt my thing and I use(d) lemmy/reddit during lunch break.
Same. I was a dedicated user of Boost for Reddit (before the API Armageddon) and the only reason why I’m using Lemmy now is because they made an app for Lemmy (which I’m currently using).
Boost is such an amazing app and made Reddit tolerable
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But Liftoff doesn’t seem to be getting updates.
When this happened I went back to Eternity, a fork of Infinity, the app I used for reddit. That’s also the beauty of Lemmy, there are lots of third party apps unlike reddit that banned every single one
I mean the sentiment in the comments in that thread is not at all positive. The damage the tankies/hexbear/lemmygrad has done to the reputation of lemmy is not negligible.
imho It’s important to help people stear away from those places when they join lemmy except if that is their intention.
Lemmy went stronger when center-left people joined the platform. .ml and Lemmygrad will remain far-left. There are many server available to suit their needs. I was once on .ml until I joined the server set by people who were active on r/piracy before.
What about the spam and propaganda generated by users on lemmy.world? We have so much of it here lemmy becomes either empty or unusable depending on if you block them.
What kind of spam? I don’t see much of any of it.
In the same vein that Hexbear users don’t see their own posts as spam or propaganda. They fit your narrative more so you don’t notice it.
propaganda
This would be ”making you look at the shit Israel has been doing", right?
or “people don’t believe that communism would work”
The straight from highly biased often misinformation websites, yes it’s propaganda. The fact that lemmy is being flooded in it by a few select individuals makes it propaganda. The straight up lies being told around here makes it propaganda.
The Hamas defence here is inexcusable and I’m not surprised many people are turned off by this.
Generally I don’t like how lemmy.world is being hijacked by fringe politics. This has ended all other reddit alternatives (like Voat). We have a good thing here - let’s not let bad actors to hijack it.
Condemnation of Israel’s response is not “fringe politics” (nor indeed “Hamas defence”) and if you believe it to be so then whatever media bubble you’ve been placed in is working, other than this place. I’d be glad of that of I were you. America makes up a loud and influential portion of political opinion but it is 4% of the world and even there not a universal truth.
If you consider anyone with a different politics to you to be “fringe” or a “bad actor” then it is you who are not useful, not them.
Thats not what I said.
Why are you twisting my words with this strawman? There are literally comments defending Hamas.
If anyone did any twisting of words you did by making the connection that criticism of Israel is defense of Hamas. You can be anti-hamas and anti-Israel and you can even be pro-Palestine and anti-hamas.
I haven’t seen a lot of people defend Hamas (and the ones I’ve seen are quickly beaten down). However I have seen a lot of people argue anti-Israel takes are pro-hamas, which just isn’t right.
Ok, so your response to me was irrelevant twisting words? Because I didn’t mention Hamas, you did. I’m not the one trying to change the topic of conversation.
Leaving reddit was a good idea, joining Lemmy, I’m not so sure anymore.
The userbase here is not really diverse in itself, so the whole platform gets this large echo chamber vibe. And with “not diverse” I don’t mean hostile or anything, just very homogeneous. Overwhelmingly left and far left on the political spectrum, embracing all things LGBT+, high nerd & tech factor; and if you don’t belong to or identify with either of those factions, you get downvoted to oblivion, and worse yet, mod removed and banned for no factual reason.
What made reddit strong as a platform was that you had the right kind of diversity and a big enough userbase to not spiral out of control, unless the top management fucked up.
On Lemmy, instance admins are (or become) often the worst offenders, making any interactions with users on their instance tiresome, unless you regurgitate the same stuff that has been said there over and over and over again.
Well, in defense of Lemmy, it’s nice to feel like I’ve got a lower chance of encountering Nazi rhetoric when in one of the anime/manga related instances
Overwhelmingly left and far left on the political spectrum, embracing all things LGBT+
And that’s what makes it great. I don’t get this idea that it’d be better if that wasn’t part of the demographic. Like, what value does being anti-LGBT or neutral-but-whiny bring to the table, for example?
Bringing opposing points of view like that for the sake of it didn’t help Reddit, but only strained moderation and made the user experience worse when we had to deal with so many hateful bigots for no good reason. I saw one sub get overrun by these people and practically squeeze everyone out in a coordinated effort. One of those subs became unequivocally anti-trans in a matter of weeks. It was awful.
As a left-leaning (okay, outright communist), LGBT-supporting, Palestine-supporting (even pre-war), techy and nerdy person (i.e. Lemmy looks like it was made for me, lol), I still heavily agree we need some diversity here. Without it, Lemmy will never really be what Reddit has become. And we have all tools at our disposal - we are federated! So it becomes a little weird and phenomenal that we get such bubbles in here. But, I guess, this stems again from the small size of Lemmyverse - kind of a vicious circle.
Mastodon has more diversity, so maybe we just have to grow out of the current state? I don’t have the answers.
The good thing about Lemmy is you can create your own instance.
I think you’re confusing your current instance for the Fediverse. You can join Beehaw or another federation with different viewpoints. Granted the “main” instances are largely like the internet of old.
This place is more of an Echo chamber than Reddit at this point. By far.
I think you are right about the lack of diversity.
My own take on it is that lemmy is currently populated by early adopters. There might be a relation between beign open to try new things and being left-leaning, I don’t know.
But I do think that over time, if Lemmy survives it’s early day phase, more people joining should bring more doverse point of views.
This is my biggest issue with lemmy. The userbase is not particularly one I want to interact with or even read their comments most of the time. And it seems there is very little room for nuance or any real differing opinions. And worse, it seems most here are convinced they are correct (though that could be everywhere). There are a few niche communities devoid of that, but they are so small that there is either very little content or the same handful of people are doing all the posting.
Love the idea of lemmy as an alternative to reddit. In practice, it’s absolutely not a place I want to fully spend my time.
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Is…is that you Spez?
Reddit has been getting really far left too, lately. I find myself hitting the chans sometimes just to level it out. I swear I’m a moderate but all the damn propaganda I see is either ultra left or ultra right, loudest voices in a crowded room get heard or whatever.
I’ve always considered being mass downvoted on any platform a good thing.
Jesus. Look at those comments. Reddit has gotten considerably worse since the exodus.
I think they hired a troll farm to make it look like engagements are up
I think people are willing to do it for free because they think being contrarian gives them some sort of clout.
One comment was just “too long won’t read Reddit won lol”. It was seriously only four paragraphs, way to self own, Reddit guy.
I rarely see worthless contrarian posts like this here and it’s generally called out by at least a few people when it occurs.
It’s the same psychology that in meetings, people try to show intelligence with their abilities to deconstruct others’ ideas without suggesting anything better. It’s a cheap win at another person’s expense and it’s pathetic
I have a feeling that the sorts of people both still active on Reddit and also still subscribed to “RedditAlternatives” are probably not the sort of people who are likely to take charge over their own happiness.
Looks like a lot of people of the conservative end of the political spectrum who can’t handle the leftist nature of Lemmy generally.
There’s an interesting thesis in this somewhere; conservatives respecting authoritarian power structures. Seems like they enjoy the boot of reddit.
IMO as Lemmy continues to grow those people will eventually find their way here. Conservatives love it when something is established and no longer new and scary.
I think it’s more an international thing. There was a thread a while back saying post where you’re from. Way less American dominated here, hence less American conservatism and ‘leftism’ and more balanced global views rather than the excessive america centredness of reddit. Federation helps with that too. No American corporate entity shaping the culture.
Except when users complain that a channel called “Politics” at lemmy.world shouldn’t be exclusive to US politics. Then it’s American exceptionalism all the way down, baby.
You think we could start a World Politics community here without it quickly becoming r/anime_titties?
Didn’t follow r/anime_titties, but there’s definitely userbase that would be interested in a channel dedicated to the discussion of various global political topics. I don’t have the energy to moderate what that could become, though.
Yeah, me either. It sounds way too much, like an unpaid full-time job. Could only really work with a bunch of good moderators.
Ha wow, you weren’t kidding.
Some of those comment chains have real “drinking the verification can isn’t that bad” vibes.
Reading through some of the complaints, I suspect part of the problem some users are having is that they want to be toxic and argumentative, so jumped into the most toxic and argumentative parts of lemmy and then bounced off because their specific flavor toxicity was outnumbered.
Maximum toxicity.
>Reddit comments complaining about Lemmy on a post on Reddit with significantly less upvotes than the post on Lemmy about the post on Reddit about Lemmy.
I think these people are still in the denial stage of grief despite it being 6 months after the api apocalypse. They’ll come around eventually
Mate, that subreddit is dead because the few upvotes here are from people who came from there. So of course there aren’t a whole lot of people on that sub anymore - but that’s not indicative of the state of Reddit as a whole, especially compared to the fediverse.
While Lemmy is gradually growing and the whole federation is a pretty good concept too I have one question about lemmy and it’s future.
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Since it’s just two devs maintaining the whole project (I know there are many open source contributors but the project is on them right?) what if they get tired of the project or go MIA? Can a fork be made and that can be maintained as a replacement of lemmy?
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How are and will be the SEO of the lemmy’s instances? Reddit reached a wide audience due to that. It’s nice to have a niche set of audience at the start but that should not be the case forever right?
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