I am a reddit refugee. Keep seeing that this is supposed to be somehow better than Reddit. As far as I can tell, it follows a similar format, less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose. But It looks like people still get down vote brigaded on some communities. So I’m curious, how it’s better?
It’s not, but it’s old Reddit with more attributes that prevent a transition to corporate Reddit so I’ll take it.
Everyone’s talking about the tech, but I’ll talk about the user base. When you make a post or comment on Reddit, it often feels like you get lost in some black hole of other posts or comments. No one sees your comment because there are 1000 other comments on the same post.
At Lemmy, there are fewer users and fewer comments, but your comments actually get seen. People upvote. I weirdly get way more upvotes at Lemmy than I did at Reddit, in spite of the smaller user base here. Because of that, I’m way more active here than I was on Reddit.
it’s such a backward argument but the fewer comments means I don’t spend a lot of time on each post and just move on with my life. I like it for the most part.
Welcome to Lemmy! Enjoy your stay.
The functions are more or less supposed to be like how Reddit used to be (a link, comment, information and sometimes image aggregator). Here are some differences, though:
- Many varieties of apps to access the Lemmy API (the reason why many people had migrated from Reddit in 2023 to begin with). It’s even partially compatible with Mastodon apps/accounts (the Fediverse’s closest analogue to Twitter)
- Power tripping asshole mods and admins exist here just like anywhere else, but they alone can’t ruin all of Lemmy, unlike Reddit. Even the original creators, despite holding a couple of disagreeable and harmful views, has made something that’s larger than themselves.
- There’s isn’t a dedicated team tied to deepening the owner’s pockets by finding ways to make the experience worse. Development progress is slow but it is continually in the interest of the community.
- No ads! But please try to support your instance if you can!
- A public modlog makes a huge difference, even if the mod action originators are still anonymous. By being honest with which of your account(s) were unfairly banned/silenced, you can make a public appeal (just in the form of a post from another instance). If it is a case of the aforementioned power-trippers, extreme bias, or tyrannical rules (but some instances like Beehaw have strict rules for good reason), then it is easy for everyone to see that, and you can make your home on the new Lemmy instance and have a good time. If you’re just a piece of shit troll, that’s also clear as day and then none of the networks will want you and ban you independently or you will get such notoriety that you will be blocked/banned/defederated.
I was practically forced to move to other platforms, including Lemmy, because Reddit’s way of dealing with things is absolute garbage. Their app is garbage, their ethics are garbage, their admins and moderators are garbage.
In short I got permabanned on the entirety of Reddit after confronting a moderator in my favorite sub violating their own (and Reddit’s) rules and content policy. Which eventually led being banned on the sub by said moderator, and later Reddit got triggered as I was “avoiding a ban” with an alternative account (which happened accidentally).
Since then it’s been impossible to get in contact with admins, and they’ve been autobanning any new accounts I tried to set up. I’ve been trying to appeal my bans dozens of times in the past year, but never get an actual response from an actual admin, I doubt they even have humans working at Reddit at this point. That’s on my 8+ year old account…
Previously I also got permabanned on dozens of subs for commenting in a sub that was supposedly brigading, I didn’t even have any harmful intention or said anything worthwhile of a ban, yet all those completely unrelated subs banned me for “participating” in the brigade thing.
It just shows what absolute trash moderators and admins of Reddit are. They’re all only playing their own little agendas. They’re only destroying their own community with stuff like this. I miss my favorite communities, but I absolutely don’t miss the garbage surrounding it.
In terms of variety of communities it isn’t better, but the hope is over time people will continue to come over here as reddit decays and eventually it’ll catch up.
I left reddit when they killed the 3rd party app I used. I didn’t want to switch and I ended up here. in my opinion Lemmy still has a long way to go to be as good as what I left, but I don’t want to support reddit anymore and I find it to be good enough here to still be enjoyable. I can still look at memes, and there’s still some good discussion to be had.
The biggest thing Lemmy is missing is niche communities and a broader and less techy audience. I think both of those will happen overtime if the platform keeps growing. Crossing my fingers we get there.
Nice comment
It’s pretty pretty hard to have this achieved with how the platform is today. Content is one (communities and posts) but lack of WTF is going on even for tech savvy people is another thing. Try asking a non user to go to the main entrance place for Lemmy (like googling it). Then ask them to find something of interest. Then ask them to create an account so they can comment. Those pretty fundamental things are non-existent.
Pretending that they exist or are easy to use is like saying Arch Linux is easy or even driving is easy. It is not. You need tons of preparation. The above take 1 minute in all common social media. Unless those three things are clear for people 20 to 40 yo, Lemmy will never gain traction.
I think you’re spot on with those hurdles. I’m somewhat techy (not nearly as much as many on here), and even I found it to be a major turn off for a long time before I finally decided to figure it out.
The way I would approach this if I was trying to improve it would be to create a way for people to essentially skip the instance selection process. Perhaps instance owners could opt in to this pool of “open servers” let’s call them. The user would create an account on a neutral website created for this onboarding purpose, and by default there would be a checked box for “automatically select server”. It would sign them up for an instance based on their IP address and the size of the instance to try and spread out population a bit.
If you want more control, you uncheck the box and it gives you more things to select from like region, population size, and anything else relevant, and then gives you a list of servers fitting your criteria and you pick the one you want.
Lemmy’s barriers to entry are a problem, there’s no getting around that. Personally I don’t think they are that bad and requiring a bit of effort / research is, oddly, in some ways, kind of a good thing…? The people who want to be here have put in at least a little work. But you make a very valid point. It needs to be easier and more intuitive. I would also point out that reddit sucks for new users, too. People are constantly complaining on there about how hard it is to get a new account going because of prerequisite karma, wildly varying sub rules, etc.
I realize I’m a bit late to the conversation, just wanted to say i agree with your sentiments.
I kinda felt that the whole tech world was a little better when it had a certain gatekeeping element, in that you had to know how to operate a computer to at least some degree to do anything with the Internet. While that does reduce the amount of potential users dramatically in its own right, it also cuts down on the signal-to-noise ratio similarly. Giving everyone phones didn’t necessarily make the Internet a better place, imo. But it also has given a voice to many who never would have had one (for better or worse, as well)…
Not every place needs an enormous user base to make it worthwhile or enjoyable. Too many comments def leaves you feeling like you don’t have a voice, but i guess too few and you wonder if anyone’s listening…
I mostly agree. I don’t want a “highly exclusive, only for elites” type of vibe (and I’m not saying that you do). But yes, there’s probably a sweet spot of “obstacle course” to get here somewhere. Not that I claim to know what that is in precise terms.
It has good mobile apps (And multiple options, depending on what you like).
I haven’t been banned for suggesting child molesters don’t deserve to live. Can’t say that about Reddit.
Happy cake day!
Listen, I won’t dig into all the tech and philosophy of decentralization and anti-corporate ownershipa. There are other people here for that. But let me tell you why I am enjoying it: it’s small, it ends, and it feels like early internet.
I load up Lemmy, and see a series of disjointed memes, or a current ongoing meme (like pondering the orb) and absorb that for a short while. I see a couple world news articles, a couple about Trump and a couple about places that aren’t the US. I read an article about Ryzen’s new chips not performing well on Windows and see someone’s retro-gaming setup. Then, after about 10-15 minutes of scrolling, I go “oh hey, I remember this post from yesterday”, and then I close Lemmy because, and this is the important part, I’ve hit the end of new content in my feed.
I still get the news, I still take in a couple memes about the current state of politics, or a celebrity flying her plane altogether too much, but I am never stuck here. There’s no one trying to rage bait me for the sake of user engagement, and any argument I find myself in wraps up and moves on. I don’t feel disconnected, but I am also never completely absorbed, and my life is better for it. Sure, sometimes while I am waiting in a line I load Lemmy only to discover there’s nothing new for me in the hour since I’ve closed it. Sometimes I do the age old, “looking to busy myself”, close Lemmy because there’s nothing to see, immediately open Lemmy because I am looking for something to occupy my Internet poisoned brain. But being bored for a minute here and there is worth it, if it means a lot more free time because I am no longer absorbed in the rat race of infinite scrolling social media.
I think Lemmy is better in a series of ways, but the one that really matters is that it helps me put down my phone, and do things that I enjoy.
I prefer Lemmy, even tho it can be a little too reddit-like. But the mods do seem to be a bit less ban-happy, so that’s a good thing.
But since I vote for third parties, I get pretty much the same hateful comments I got when I was on Reddit. But hey, at least I’m not banned! :)
So as someone else said, more assholes here, but less hivemind.
You’re coming at this from the design and community aspect. I don’t think Lemmy makes significant improvements over Reddit on those fronts, it’s designed the same, has the same benefits and drawbacks. As of right now the small size of the community makes it lacking in diversity and impractical for niche interests (aside from tech-related ones).
My case for Lemmy being better is a business case: Reddit was a for-profit company backed by venture capital, and is now publicly traded. They are extremely susceptible to enshittification, and are in fact already deep in that process.
Meanwhile, Lemmy is an open source software that enables users to host their own social media. It’s not even a business at all, i’m not even sure if the developer (LemmyNet) is a business or a person or some other legal entity.
Fediverse social medias (Lemmy, Mastodon) are structurally resilient to the enshittification that we’re seeing from corporate social medias, and i like that a lot.
The small community aspect also has benefits. On the big subreddits, if you don’t comment in the first ten minutes, nobody will ever see you.
Yeah, i was way late to this thread and yet i still got seen a bunch, and this has happened in a lot of threads.
Though i think that might be because comments are sorted by Hot by default, and i assume the “Hot” algorithm is designed in a way to surface new comments
I found your comment just now, and it’s awesome! 😎👍
The biggest upside to my Lemmy experience, so far, has been that you can stay within you communities, and actually have a decent conversation about the topics being posted. On reddit, it’s consistently been the exact opposite of that.
I get that not everyone is this way, but there are a lot of really, really frustrated people. Every comment ends up being either ragebait, an argument, or is neither, but still gets downvoted into fuck all, because people cannot differentiate a different opinion, from an incorrect one
I am a new Lemmy user (and new to this fediverse, although I have more fediverse experience from other decentralized platforms such as Matrix). I’ve been liking Lemmy, for the pupose it’s thought for, a thread-focused platform (while Mastodon, for example, is post-focused, microblogging). For starters, no advertisements nor sponsorship nor tracking (yet my adblock is active everytime anyways). Possibility of integrating multiple kinds of platforms through ActivityPub (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc). Open and accessible API. Definitely, not only Lemmy is way better than Reddit, but the fediverse is way better than any mainstream social network.
Welcome!
Open mobile app support
Ad free (depending on the app and instance, but its pretty easy to get Lemmy without ads)
No CEO to make whacky, unpopular decisions without clear purpose or recourse
No shareholders whose priorities will always take precedence over the users
There’s also something to be said for being part of a smaller community
Of course any and all problems can occur in microcosm within a particular instance or community, but it’s trivial to just block that instance/community. As for brigading, bullying, and harassment, Lemmy offers no solutions to human nature, unfortunately.
Lemmy offers no solutions to human nature
This is an excellent way to phrase it lol
Federation, this makes it immune to large-scale disruptions because a single instance may go down or a couple of instances may go down at the same time, but the entire network cannot be taken offline all at once without taking the internet itself offline.
Lemmy, where the votes are made up and karma don’t matter
