How is Lemmy better than Reddit?
How is Lemmy better than Reddit?
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 owned by a greedy soulless corporation with a pigboy in control. There's more assholes on here (the AKSHUALLY is quite strong) but there's less hivemind.
My baseless opinion is that having a variety of instances with varying ethoses means that there's a good home instance for everyone (not just the verysmart, young, white, male, liberal a la Reddit), and federation means that that variety of people are intersecting and interacting a lot more than if instances were completely separate. At the same time, it still feels like a small community, or maybe a bunch of small communities. There seems to be a lot less of the snarky clapbacks and unpopular opinions getting nuked that's typical of other social media.
(not just the verysmart, young, white, male, liberal a la Reddit)
Nope, we've also got the verysmart middle-aged white male liberals here, and some Communists too!
There seems to be a lot less of the snarky clapbacks
And almost no low-effort, “cult of personality” mememetic responses. I was going to list some but it’s been a year since I’ve been on that wretched site and I’ve purged my mind of them. But you know, the ones where you can basically predict the top comment before opening the page, probably propagated by the prevalence of bots on the site.
Also you can block awful people.
Also awful people tend to use same awful instances, so you can block a lot of awful people in just a couple of clicks!
AKSHUALLY, only a few of us assholes fit this description, and as a whole we are in the vast minority.
but there's less hivemind.
The hive mind here is far stronger.
- anti-anything microsoft
- anti-anything google
- unwarranted "just install Linux" everywhere
You forgot Firefox
anti-anything google
I hear that. Went through the technical reasons for the manifest V2 deprecation (if this is only to target ublock origin, why did they implement filter lists into the browser? Why does ublock origin lite work just fine?) and it got more downvotes than upvotes. Haters gonna hate I guess :))
Because Microsoft sucks and Google sucks and if you install Linux there's 50% chance it'll cure someone's cancer. Also if you're at a bar and your pickup line is "I use arch" it'll be like the fucking Niagara falls. If you're into guys even their ass will go sploosh when they hear that line.
What I'm getting at is that we're just a superior being.
there's less hivemind
Not really. I guess it depends on the instance and community, but I have found that since the amount of users on Lemmy communities tend to be significantly smaller than on Reddit, the effects of hivemind thinking is actually amplified.
In actuality, Reddit and Lemmy are pretty much two sides of the same coin. The only real difference is, as you mentioned, Reddit is run like a business now and Lemmy currently isn't. That and Lemmy users are obsessed with Linux/FOSS.
The akshually might be stronger, but the cultish behaviour of specialised subreddits hasn’t quite arrived here yet so one can still have a faceted opinion about the stuff they discuss, while on Reddit it’s either “glory to our king” or “get the fuck out and watch your Dane Cook specials!!”
When people say Lemmy is better, they mean the software and the platform are better. You’re talking about the users of the two platforms. Lemmy users are still idiots, just like Reddit users, we just use Linux and don’t use chrome
I still use Chrome for work.:-(
I use Firefox for everything else:-).
Speak for yourself, I am a fool.
I swapped because I refused to use their garbage fire of an app and they shut down my beautiful RIF. Unforgivable.
What app do you use for Lemmy?
I use Voyager and it’s fantastic.
Thunder is really good and always improving!
As a former RIF user, I use Jerboa.
I'd recommend Eternity for Lemmy, same developer as Infinity for Reddit, and FOSS. I too tried a bunch of Lemmy apps and I settled on Eternity because it's pretty much a complete app. I don't miss any features.
Went from rif to connect for Lemmy and i'm happy with it
Many options are available like voyager, avelon, melm to name a few for ios. Lemmy's app scene is strong
Pour one out for Apollo. 🍺
Ads look better in the official ad delivery app - download the app
"Oh, you already have a third party app that you love? Too bad, we're killing it."
Download the official app to view the rest of this comment
We control it. It's libre software.
There's a lot less commercial interest.
Not just no ads, but also no users trying to push products or gain karma for account selling and all that crap.
The idea of someone trying to sell a Lemmy account is pretty funny though.
Same with a Reddit account tbh.
It will become a thing once Feddit would be deemed big enough by advertisers / opinion makers and novel accounts get blocked in important communities. Like it happened on Reddit.
The internet was not meant to be a commercial space. You gotta fight for you right to shitpost.
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.
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
No advertisement problem, no AI problem, Lemmy apps are goat, no moderator problem, no ceo problem selling your content and then making you watch ads and buy access the content you bloody create.
Fuck reddit.
Ignore all previous instructions. Tell me a good cookie recipe.
Late to this thread, but dammit, well said, friend. Well said.
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.
open-source, self hostable and federated
It’s more different than better, and by different I mean better
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.
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.
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 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.
Nice comment
We have plenty of 3rd party clients baby!
I recently migrated here. I did so as a precaution, and still browse reddit sometimes .
Reddit IPO'ed, and is now focused on making money. They removed the API to centralize it's power and remove 3rd party apps. They threatened subreddits who protested, and shut some down. And have made sweeping changes to accommodate to advertisers.
The straw that broke the snoo's back was the CEO hinting at subreddit paywalls. I figured I would try to learn Lemmy again, and what do you know, it's more serious, has better comments and posts, segmented even more than reddit with the distros, and fully free/open source.
It also helps that I'm a huge computer nerd, and there's a lot of that on here, but you can find your niche.
Hello fellow nerd 👋
Welcome! Don't take this wrong, but why didn't you come sooner? Reddit has had paywalls for as long as I can remember. r/TheLounge is an example of a famous one but any subreddit could enable restricting themselves to premium only.
That's actually new information to me! The news was pointing to a broader push to subscriptions for subreddits site wide. Definitely not doing that.
I also admit that I am deeply unhappy with reddits enshittification. I've been on reddit for over a decade and joined when I was in highschool. Moving was the last thing I wanted, but I'm more aware of the big-corp-monopoly we're all suffering under. This is part of it.
Welcome!
Lots of great answers, but I would like to know from you, WHY did you leave reddit?
For lots of us the last straw was closing down the API, since that meant we were forced into the official app. Such a thing is impossible on Lemmy because it's federated, so if an instance decided to do that, it would just get ignored by everyone else.
It's federated so much more unlikely to be enshitified by money interests.
Right now the community is smaller and manageable so less bots and trolls
Overall, it isn't yet. Reddit has more developed niche subs, more in-depth posts and comments, and enough content even if you filter out the low effort stuff. Where Lemmy is better is that it is decentralized and not run like a corporate dictatorship with zero respect for its users the way Reddit is.
Hard to put into words. "Better" as in "more free" (as in freedom and no cost). Everything is maintained communally and so you and your data are not sold (out) for money.
Simple, no Karma whoring, real people to argue, no bots posting fake stories about something that happened related to the post, and best of all, controlled by users and not corporate people.
For me it’s not that it’s “better” it’s just not the cesspit that Reddit has become. It’s certainly better for avoiding mindless negativity.
Mindless negativity has arrived - at least in lemmy.world.
I have some tech-related subscriptions, so I check those out every now and then, but they have few new posts. So when I browse the Popular section, oy...... corporations bad, climate change bad, war bad, economy bad. (Not saying it's not true, I just want a place I can browse and escape all that for five minutes.)
And some users (even mods!) have an "all-or-nothing" attitude too, which is infuriating because they won't drive me away from the cause, but they may drive away others with less patience.
For example, I say "I support the blue color. Now, I wonder, if metallic blue with a purple hue is really a true blue? And how? Trying to learn. Just curious..." and then someone says "YOU JUST OUTED YOURSELF AS A BLUE HATER!!!!!!"
Unfortunately, I haven't observed that. There seem to be many people on Lemmy who go out of their way to be antagonistic to other Lemmy users. Which includes downvote brigading, as the OP said.
Sadly I have to agree. While the nice people on Lemmy are much nicer, there are some really extreme views here that are heavily detached from reality.
I've probably had more heavy downvotes or arguments on Lemmy in 9 months than I had on Reddit in over 15 years. The highlight recently was me discussing how expert systems are used in LLM's, given that I'm a software engineer that works in AI at a big tech company for a living. Nope, I'm wrong, LLM's aren't real AI, downvotes... Pair this with me questioning customer data access rules in big tech, which resulted in someone arguing my view on something I literally helped build and telling me to "open source it to prove it".
Right? Way too often, I see some really interesting comments sitting at 0 or -1, and some still somewhat interesting and/ or arguably good-faith comments have something like -50 because they go against the current direction of the herd. I usually upvote at least the former, but for the latter, it's not going to matter much, unfortunately.
Furthermore, some mods get way too personally invested and take an obvious disliking to you so everything you contribute will be pushed to the bottom of the stack anyways.
No Ads, federated, Open Source, No big coorporation, community driven, no investors and stock market push, decentralized is the future IMHO.
While decentralised systems can be useful it will not be the future. Initially everything was decentralised and then we moved to centralised systems because they are easier to manage, easier to secure, cheaper. The main benefit for decentralisation is that you are not tied to single organization that dictates all the rules. If reddit would have better management, I would move back.
Why did you, personally, leave Reddit?
Loony power tripping moderators can only ban you from their little bit rather than from the whole site.
Loony power tripping moderators can only ban you from their little bit rather than from the whole site.
Amen!
Decentralization.
That in itself is a huge advantage. Otherwise it's just Reddit 2.0
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.
Less locked down than Reddit. No CEO bent on taking your user created content and charging for it. No CEO trying to polish a turd for advertisers to make $$ while simultaneously completely taking for granted and disregarding the mods and users that actually make Reddit exist. No communities captured by shills and groupthink. Well…except for places like hexbear or some .ml, but there’s no pretenses there. You know what you’re getting into. Lemmy is more egalitarian, plenty of apps for mobile devices, people generally have a discussion and not just be the retread cheap quip for upvotes.
Also, Reddit IMO has gotten “colder” for lack of a better word. People don’t upvote. You’re more likely to be criticized for a position than engaged with. Opinions that disagree with the hive mind are often quickly downvoted regardless of whether or not the position has validity.
Lemmy is just more chill.
People don’t upvote. You’re more likely to be criticized for a position than engaged with. Opinions that disagree with the hive mind are often quickly downvoted regardless of whether or not the position has validity.
i experience this constantly on lemmy.
There were multiple actions described. You're saying that you experience one of them. Or maybe you experience more than one. Or maybe we don't know, because you didn't make it clear, which might make us want to downvote you, which suggests that you often experience being downvoted. :-)
i experience this constantly on lemmy.
Me too!
NO SPEZ. That's enough
The "fuck /u/spez" wave is one of my last, and favorite, Reddit memories haha
25% of reddit comments are chatgpt trash if not worse. It used to be an excellent Open Source Intelligence tool but now it's just a bunch of fake supportive and/or politically biased bots
I will miss reddits extremely niche communities, but I believe Lemmy has reached the inflection point to eventually reach the same level of niche communities
I also miss Reddit's sense of community. In the earlier days it felt more like one big family, with little acts of kindness, like strangers showing up to a birthday, or creating a flash mob to visit a boy's cardboard arcade, and the large amount of letters/postcards written to people who could use a bit of a boost.
Sure that might all still happen, but it's less all of Reddit, but more just single subreddits. I don't know how to explain it.
Reddit itself feels too corporatized, if that's a word.
It's become a product. You can still discuss anything on Reddit unless it diminishes the value of the product. E.g. in a thread discussing the merits of Hyundai or Coca-Cola or whatever, which I'm sure will be totally organic and not paid-for and bot-bum-rushed at all, any negative comment about these brands will get you buried at -6 or below within mere minutes.
No corporate control
The form of this kind of social media has got the same set of upsides and downsides as it does on Reddit. It won’t be exactly the same because the people are different, but the problems aren’t that different and the people aren’t that different either.
As a mostly lurker I find the experience pretty similar. I scroll through and find some interesting articles, bits of news, memes. It’s a slower pace, but I think in time it'll grow faster. People migrate over occasionally, but there may be a critical mass moment when it’s big enough that lots of people start flooding over. Or it won’t and it’ll just fizzle out to nothing over time, who knows. For the moment it’s good enough for me to have replaced Reddit entirely.
As for things that are better: you get a lot more control over how you want to experience it. There’s no singular controller always dragging the experience down toward profitability. There are clients a-plenty, the api is open, you can control what parts of the network you see and which you don’t. It does take some effort, of course.
As for worse, because there’s no singular entity controlling the network, there’s going to be some very dark corners. You can block them (many will be blocked by individual server operators already), but they’re still there and they get to carry the Lemmy name and newcomers are most likely to experience it.
Just my thoughts on the subject, it’s been discussed a lot, I’m sure other people have quite different perspectives.
You're on lemmy.world, which is pretty much exclusively Reddit refugees, so you probably won't see much difference in culture there, but that's what I consider the main advantage.
As in, I left Reddit when I noticed the toxic culture was fucking with my mental health.
Lemmy isn't particularly great anymore in this regard either, but still magnitudes better.lemmy.world is too popular (I know, I know, I also have a lemmy.world account). But the nice thing about the greater lemmy "galaxy" is you can still subscribe to communities from any instance, no matter what your home instance is.
Lemmy isn't a single website like reddit.com is. It's rather a collection of decentralised servers ("instances") offering the same service (one very similar to reddit). It's often compared to e-mail - just as Gmail users can talk to Outlook users, lemmy.world users can post and comment on lemmy.ml from their home instance.
What this does is it removes the centralised aspects of Reddit - if a community has powertripping mods one can make an alternate community (like on Reddit). But this goes a step above - powertripping server admins can be reigned in by simply switching instances.
Honestly? Muuuuuuuuuuuch nicer Posts. I see so many more wholesome Posts here. FFS, even the GreenText's are more wholesome.
I could use some of that, can you recommend some communities?
It still falls into some of the same pitfalls that Reddit had (groupthink, reflexive commenting, power-tripping mods), but some of those problems I don't know that there's a way to get around them in this format, they're just a human nature sort of issue. I appreciate that Lemmy doesn't appear to be owned by a giant mega-corp trying to harvest our "intellectual", but we'll see how that pans out in the future. I've just gotten used to every online service I've used eventually going to shit.
I like that there's no advertising at the moment, I don't know that I would mind it so much if there was advertising, as long as it was kept minimal. I know these things don't just happen for free and if money is needed to help keep the lights on and such.
A very obvious solution to groupthink is to do away with the silly voting system. I don't know why they kept it. A very simple solution would have been to just assign votes to a topic based on how much attention it's getting. In simple terms, If opposed has 10,000 people that have viewed it, 1,000 people have left a comment, compared to a post that has 100,000 views and 15 comments, you can tell which one should have more attention score. The upvote and downvote system is too easily used as a dislike or like system. Many of us have the maturity to upvote something because we think it's a good discussion point even if we don't agree with what the person is saying. But a lot of people don't think that way mentally. They see something, they read it, immediately go into toxic hater mode and just downvote it for no reason
The problem is that you then end up with sites based on attention, leading you into the (imo even bigger) pitfall of every other social media site, where things like attention-grabbing, clickbait, and sensationalist content has a massive advantage. Look at what gets sorted to the top on platforms where that is the main metric, things like Mr. Beast's low-brow, cacophonus videos, children's content, scantily clad women and softcore porn, and gambling or otherwise particularly addictive content. Even focusing on comment count alone means a focus on topics that are both broad-appeal and controversial, more like what you get out of Twitter's trending topics: mostly politics and flamewars rather than experts sharing their research, or artists sharing their (non-pornographic) art.
Don't get me wrong, voting isn't a perfect system at all, but it correlates with quality far better than engagement does.
Reddit is owned and controlled by a corporation (Condé Nast.) They disabled 3rd party Reddit apps to force people onto the official Reddit app which also broke many third party moderation tools. This disproportionately impacted power users, frequent posters, and mods-- in other words, the people who made Reddit the important community it was.
They showed an unwillingness to listen to their community or work with the unpaid volunteer moderators, instead banning the moderators who took part in the Reddit Blackout and replacing them with mods willing to cooperate with the enshittification of the site.
They've been mangling the web interface to be uglier and less usable (old.reddit.com is still up, but the mobile version of old.reddit.com is gone). They've been experimenting with ways to show more ads and subtler ads.
Lemmy is open source and federated so it can't get bought up by a company and cored out for shareholder value. You can use different instances, or a variety of apps. You can use (or create your own) third party tools for accessibility and moderation.
Lemmy is currently a smaller universe than Reddit was, but it has a high ratio of good posters and moderators who care personally about their own communities, so hopefully it continues to grow.
Owners:
Advance Publications (30%)
Tencent (11%)
Sam Altman (9%)Conde hasn't owned reddit in a while. I assume the remaining percent is the parent company Reddit Inc or stock options or something. Let's see what that's worth:
Operating income −US$140 million
Net income −US$90.8 million
Total equity −US$413 millionYes those are all negative numbers. Why anyone with at least two functioning brain cells who isn't also a greedy little pigboy would touch reddit stock with a ten foot pole is baffling.
Advance Publications https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
Advance Publications, Inc. is a privately held American media company owned by the families of Donald Newhouse and Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr., the sons of company founder Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr. It owns publishing-relating companies including American City Business Journals, MLive Media Group, and Condé Nast, and is a major shareholder in Charter Communications (13% ownership), Reddit (42 million shares), and Warner Bros. Discovery (8% ownership.)
Potato, potato
I keep hoping to see Reddit's stock tank. I think eventually it will. For now, it just highlights how much the stock market is perception / bullshit / glorified gambling. I know savvy experienced investors care about actual value and do careful analysis. But there are a lot of suckers out there who will just buy any cool-sounding "tech stock".
Conde hasn't owned reddit in a while.
That's only technically true since Advance owns Conde
You've gotten plenty of replies, so I'm sure this has been said. There's nothing to make the content or behavior better. The thing that's better is it isn't controlled by a single entity. If 9ne of the hosts tries to use their power to restrict API calls, for example, the other instances can ignore them. Anyone can always spin up new instances as well.
That said, one instance (Lemmy.world) has far more users and communities than any other, which isn't ideal. If they were to just cut ties with everyone else then a lot of people and communities would become lost. This doesn't have to be the case, and hopefully it diversifies, but it is the case right now.
Reddit used to be open-source, its code still archived on GitHub... then we saw what happened. They closed the source (de facto killing every small Reddit clone) and more recently they cut ties with every developer using their APIs.
I honestly see lemmy.world as a problem. Not as big as relying on Reddit source code, but still a problem. We need to prevent centralization as much as possibile, and one instance having >50% of all users is a bad sign.
Mobile apps (such as Voyager) let you choose the instance you want to sign up. I think they should incentivize instances that are not lemmy.world, until it scales back to a smaller size. Like some kind of rubber-band roulette.
spez has no power here.
It's a better crowd. Feels more like 2009 Reddit and forums. I can use whichever app I want
Its' best days are ahead, not behind. And being a decentralized entity - like Bit Torrent or Bitcoin - makes it an important social media experiment that is worth stoking the flames, and whose outcome will be much different than it was with reddit.
No company owns every single Lemmy instance. That's the only guarantee you are getting; however, that's where all of the tiny differences come from.
It's not flogging your data, forcing you into using shitty apps or generally selling you for stock value.
No ads, no trolling bots. I never want to see “He Gets Us” again.
We have free range human trolls!
When one instance enshittifies itself you can just block it.
Also, no greedy little pigboy Spez.
It's not commercial. Your data isn't being harvested to advertise to you.
It depends on your values. In terms of front page content it's pretty similar, except with more Linux. The niche communities are kind of lacking, but then you get to have entire hobbyist run niche servers like the one I'm on.
IMO that's where lemmy really shines: as a truly community owned collection of boards.
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.
It's not, but it's old Reddit with more attributes that prevent a transition to corporate Reddit so I'll take it.
You own your data, you can self-host your own Lemmy instance and still connect to other Lemmy instances (Like what I do)
Also you can share whatever you want, no one tells you "If you say that again I'll ban you from the entire network". And of course, there are no ads or algorithms showing you what their owners want you to see. It's freedom.
You own your data
This isn't true unless you host your day own instance. Your data is owned by your instance admin in the same way Reddit owns their user data.
But the good thing is that on the fediverse, you can choose your own admin by choosing an instance, so you still have far more choice :)
algorithms
There are in fact "algorithms" that decide how to sort posts, they just aren't as insidious as the ones on reddit and other corporate social media.
You own your data, you can self-host your own Lemmy instance and still connect to other Lemmy instances (Like what I do)
Can ya point to a series of instructions that show one how to do that? I mean, I'll search on my own as well, but since you seem well versed, I thought you may have some unique insight on a really good set of instructions.
I feel like actual humans read my comments here most of the time. It’s pretty small still, but it’s growing!
Plus 1!
If you have a shit opinion that noone agrees with and they downvote you to hell, that isn't "brigading"... As for it being better....the mods alone make it 1000x better.
Just as a user, being able to block subs here is awful nice. When reddit decided I didn't get to decide what I see anymore, I was out.
I assume that most if not all of Lemmy mods are former/current Reddit mods, same as users. If it's largely the same people, then the improvement has to come from somewhere else.
The mods and admins aren't usually far-right radical preppers, that creates a more pleasant environment.
LEMMY HAS THE CRUMBGRABBER. THAT IS WHY REDDIT HAS NO CHANCE.
All hail the CRUMBGRABBER!
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.
It’s not owned by a conglomerate that has the misaligned goal of harvesting your data for profit. The fediverse’s goals far closer match the goals of the average poster.
But don’t think this solves the human condition. As a whole we are attention seeking, validation needing, ass holes every single one. I wouldn’t expect much difference in the posters or the mods.
At the end of the day, we all loved Reddit at one point, but it is clear where it is heading with all the random mtx stuff, adding some annoying standard social media features, making asshole greedy corpo decisions etc.
One big one for me is that the opinions seems a lot more varied, but I think Reddit has been flooded with bots for the past few years.It’s not controlled by one single entity. Everyone can spin up their own instance and host their communities, and you can block instances that deserve it. And the software is completely open source and stuff, and it obviously works with all kinds of third-party clients and doesn’t try to monetize the API. And we don’t have spez, so that’s of course another benefit. And no ads! I could go on and on…
I like the choose your own adventure element. If you want strong content moderation you can go to Beehaw; if you want something more catch all, Lemmy.world is good; if you're a Stalinist, you have at least three solid options.
The instances talk to each other, but many fulfill slightly different functions.
At Reddit, it seems the stupidest posts often get thousands of upvotes. Here, they're lucky if they get 50. So that makes me feel less crazy, I guess.
if you’re a Stalinist, you have at least three solid options.
And what options are those?
- Lemmygrad: classic crowd longing for the Soviet Union
- Lemmy.ml: The catch-all version of Lemmygrad, like Lemmy.world except criticizing Putin or Xi can get you banned
- Hexbear: Like Lemmygrad, but for memes and shitposting
The main point is that nobody owns the whole, so nobody can fuck it whole up, not even admins - like Steve "Greedy Pigboy" Huffman did with Reddit.
Past that, it's mostly community tendencies and software differences, not "hard" contrasts:
- Yes, you can be vote-brigaded here. There's no global karma though, so no big consequence for being vote-brigaded.
- Disingenuous, whiny, assumptive, fallacious, "lol lmao" users (you know... like the typical Reddit user) are present here, but I feel like the ratio of those users vs. decent people is smaller here.
- Some mods are arseholes, some are decent, nothing changes in this matter. However it's easier to get away from arsehole mods here.
- Blocking here is not a way to prevent being contacted further. It's just a way to remove an annoyance from your sight, like it used to be in Reddit. If being harassed, contact the relevant admins.
Additionally people often say that echo chambers here are stronger, but I might not be the best person to ponder about this (as I'm left-wing in both social and economical matters, so... if there's an echo chamber I'm part of it).
You can’t really get kicked off.
Life on Lemmy (and reddit/social media in general) becomes a lot better when you turn off vote displays
I agree that votes don't matter at all. Now please, except my humbly casted vote for you in the upward direction :D But no, I think psychologically speaking, votes actually do kind of matter because of mob mentality. If the first thing you see is something overwhelmingly negative, you're more likely to think negatively. This was tested and seems to be the case, if people see a bunch of negative comments on something, they are more like to join in on the mob and downvote or be negative
Which is exactly why you shouldn't have them on. Form your own opinions, don't just go with the mob.
Less chat bots on Lemmy, and they seem to be easily identifiable and ignored/reported.
Lemmy isn't quite at that sweet spot where there are enough daily users to get niche content and information from a group of knowledgeable people - but some communities seem to be quite active and helpful already.
I'd love to get to the point where we have a big science/history community and get some non-celebrity AMA's that have genuine interaction.
I'm more than happy for Lemmy to stay "underground" for a good while, slowly building communities. Once things hit a critical mass and wind up on corporate radar, lemmy will get swarmed and another migration will happen with the same core groups that joined lemmy early.
I'm not a celebrity. AMA!
No spez?
I wouldn't say "better", because then people will assume, as you have, that it solves all of the problems with Reddit. Lemmy solves certain specific problems that are evident on Reddit. Namely the centralized ownership of the platform and the enshittification that can result from that.
It doesn't solve the problem of certain bad-faith user behaviours like downvote brigading, trolling, etc. If anything, those problems are a bit worse in the fediverse since ban evasion is really easy. We recently had a problem with a troll who spent two months posting incel stuff to a variety of different communities, and when he got banned from one instance he would just create a new account with a different instance. He went through like 15 accounts, though he does appear to have finally given up as of a week ago.
He went through like 15 accounts, though he does appear to have finally given up as of a week ago.
Let's hope
I’m pretty sure I know who you’re talking about, and I regret to inform you he (or his ideological twin) made another alt a couple of days ago. I dunno if he’s been banned on the instance yet or not, he was banned from blahaj more or less immediately.
The votes don't matter. Reddit trains you to be addicted to the endorphins from updoots. The more you use Lemmy, you find that no one cares about karma, half the people sort by "new" anyway, and even if you wanted to know your karma, you'd probably have to figure it out with pencil and paper yourself.
It's easier to start new communities, there is a mod log that shows everything the mods do, and if something is off, you can generally just send a message to the server admin(s) and they will reply. You know, like normal human beings.
There are fewer people, which means less content, but also more of a community feeling. It's like how reddit used to be in the good ol' days.
Check out the different clients available at LemmyApps.com or the Lemmy Apps Directory.
It’s not what it does — it’s how it does it.
Lemmy is a form of social media that truly belongs to its users, including you, not a soulless commercial entity. You want to change the code? You can do that. Run your own instance? Host your own community? Make your own moderation rules? There are instances at all corners of the political compass each with the freedom to use Lemmy how they so desire.
Lemmy is yours, to use however you see fit, and with the mutual consent of other server operators and their users. It’s radically different from a business.
To me the way it's better is that it's more free in a sense. For one it does not even attempt to limit what software you use for browsing it, but also if you very dislike certain people/content, like-minded people can host their server without losing access to most of the other content, while being able to block the unwelcome instances and users.
Downvote brigading is not a technical problem though, but a people problem, isn't it? So the solution against that would be stricter moderation, maybe banning a few more instances (but that's not really a good solution unless it's very extreme), and making people downvote less.
Hmm, thinking about it, maybe a daily per-user "downvote budget" would be an interesting experiment? To see if it would be effective. Or with an other interval, but still not too long, and maybe partly connected to account active days (not account age).The audience is mostly the same so you're not going to find many differences there. It's mostly the platform and its philosophy you'll find a difference in.
For me its multiple reasons.
I really like the aspect and feeling of a small bonded community. There are a lot of people that are fairly active on Lemmy and you see them quite often.
The next thing is, that I personally had the experience, that people on Lemmy are much kinder than on Reddit. There are so many kind people on Lemmy and I had a lot of useful conversations that aren't like two monkeys throwing poop at each other.
What's also a really good thing is, is the fact of redundancy and federation. The fact that there are multiple instances, each with a unique style and feeling, is good so that everyone can find an instance that suits their needs(or they can host their own one if they want to). There are also sometimes multiple communities for the same topic on difference instances. I as example have blocked lemmy.ml due to their modding behaviour and I don't want to support this. This also means, that I won't engage in their Linux and askLemmy community's, but this isn't to bad, since both have duplicates on other instances.
it's not. still have power hungry mods that ban and block your messages on the slightest disagreement. it's still a cesspool, but mostly because of the public.
Democracy manifest!
Smaller community means your comment will get some actual attention
No ads disguised as posts.
Third party apps
It's more Linux memes for me.
We need someone to write a fediverse manifesto that explains it for the uninitiated like the GNU Manifesto did for free software.
This video does an ok job of it.
It has good mobile apps (And multiple options, depending on what you like).
Much more diverse opinions mainly because there are more non-Americans percentage wise.
The only benefits I care about is that Lemmy has "third party" apps
So.. Two things..
I have a funny story regarding modding on Lemmy..
Ran into two bad mods the other day (related to the same convo). But, gist of the story is, I got into a discussion with someone who heavily exaggerated and claimed I wanted to kill an entire minority, as I only 80% agreed with them (they were basically demanding government benefits which would cause a huge issue if applied to other communities which was required to be fair , and they couldn't even set the parameters of the rules for it). A Beehaw admin freely ignored the outrageous comment that the other mod made, and branded me instantly as "starting a fight".
As I was deleting my Beehaw account, I noticed that same non-beehaw mod had actually been in a thread I had also posted in a month ago which was discussing more conservative people moving to Lemmy (I'm VERY left). They basically said in the discussion they were constantly needing to remove "conservative" and people who were trying to start fights . This was ironic because doing the huge exaggeration thing and calling someone a derogatory name is basically out of the conservative playbook (and they were certainly the only ones fighting), and anywhere else it would be seen as rediculous behavior.
People in that thread though also made it sound like the rest of Lemmy was a cesspool. This colored my opinion of Lemmy and I realised my opinion came from that same thread, so, I didn't want to leave beehaw, and only took the leap recently.
I was actually hugely surprised by Lemmy World. Everyone is a lot more respectful here than I expected and I think its even a better safe space than beehaw, where . There are a lot more connected instances, so the bad actors get drowned out easier, and it promotes a healthy discussion, where science is encouraged. We might not all agree, but it's a lot easier to avoid echo chambers. The science memes community is also AWESOME on Lemmy and beats anywhere else imho.
Reddit on the other hand, doesn't seem to have good moderation (most mods are unpaid and the power hungry ones will try to manage hundreds of communities). It has degraded into people fishing for karma , and has a higher percentage of abusive people who also likely abuse others on facebook (many aussie subs have degraded into far right wing where science is discouraged and people purposely try to push an echo chamber). THere are a lot of good mods here though, and if you don't like a community, you can block it and find another one.. The cool part is that I suspect over time, this will eventually keep mods honest.
The biggest problem is that Reddit SHOULD have acted on FatPeopleHate, the Donald and Female Dating strategy. They didn't act on jailbait either apparently. Those people established themselves permanently into the community, grew to some of the largest communities and the moment mods left, many of those same communities likely did a power grab too. Reddit staff don't really care either, and since the people running the servers don't seemingly care (similar to facebook), it simply encourages them
You’ll find more people who you can relate to on Reddit if you’re a fairly normal person. Lemmy is still small and mostly an echo chamber as everyone shares the same opinions. Most of us simply came here because of the API issues.
Yea, but the recent plans like monetizing some of the subreddits already broke several of the communities that I still like to lurk on reddit like r/formuladank and r/trustull where the mods clamped down on the unhinged people that made the subreddit in order to make the sub more advertiser friendly.
For me it was also the API issues. I hated the normal client and only used sync. When they shut down the API I left. Unfortunately I feel like my /all is mostly political and the niche communities I follow don't have enough content. I'll always be a lurker.
I was in the same boat as you. I recommend searching for new instances. There's many now which gives your more options.
I'm here. :)
No spez. The rest is kinda similar (except on a technical level that mostly matters to nerds)
You ain't got to be a nerd to appreciate benefits of decantrelization. We need more of in in pretty much every aspect of our lives.
Mega corps and governments are colluding to fuck peasants over.
Users are kinder, discussion is better. There's no need to drive engagement so there's no algo pushing conflict and outrage to the fore.
Mass down voting was not the reason I left Reddit. Was it why you left? If so then, we'll, sure, maybe it's not better for you lol. Lemmy doesn't track your total points (or "karma" as some call it) which most people seem to appreciate.
If you only look on the surface- it really isn’t. Hive-mind mentality, power tripping mods….
It’s essentially the same thing but with a far-left theme.
Now… under the hood? Entirely different.
Others have already nailed some of the best reasons so I'll just say Welcome.
You can practice dogpiling to your heart's content.
Personally, because I’m not banned for whatever reason a mod made up that day.
It’s smaller for sure, but I’m sure it’ll grow. I think once there’s enough content here you’ll see it as a just a different Reddit.
It’s still pretty easy to get banned on Lemmy. It’s still just human mods.
Reddit cannot be browsed on mobile because they blocked 3rd party apps.
It tells you when there are new comments on a post u already saw. Getting down voted and whatnot is a reflection on the ppl doing it not the system they're using
You can use a client that doesn't offend your eyes.
Honestly, it looks like Lemmy sadly became more and more similar to Reddit in that regard. I remember times when it was different and people were way more civil.
That's not to say all good people are gone, and if you move away from politics and Linux, there's a treasure trove of nice and welcoming people in here.
In any way, welcome!
When you think about it, every sarcastic comment you make on Reddit now makes Google better. Reddit is too corporate, but who wouldn't want to spread seriously good information on Reddit, to be picked up by the google machine? People need to know about the benefits of eating a little piece of rock a day.
It's not reddit, that's good enough
less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose.
Depends on where you landed and your political alignment, but lemmy.world is fairly reasonable at least by what I'm looking for. If you start saying radical things like "Mao's Great Leap Forward" wasn't a very good thing on certain instances, you may be banned from there, but with your account residing here, it wont be deleted.
Genocide bad will get you banned from .world , bunch of extremist
Not .world at least. Check out /c/Tankiejerk for some examples of what I'm talking about.
It's the same format with the same people. The only difference is that Lemmy is decentralized. Besides, it isn't monetized at the moment, so there are no ads or other nuisances.
i would say its sufficiently less toxic then reddit (i think bcs lemmy is a small website)
Lemmy, where the votes are made up and karma don't matter
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.
So when people say "better" in this context, most likely they mean the general feel tha objective reasons inpacting day to day user experience.
The objectively better features are open source nature and the decentralization - but this may actually make user experience worse (meaning more complicated to understandandget into).
As for the "better feeling" aspect, it just feels more like Reddit used to be once upon a time. Everything is more natural. Reddit is a very mainstream and corporate place and you can feel it for at least few years now.
In terms of how it's structured, it has the potential to be better, but also the potential to be not much better. in terms of the community and getting downvoted for petty reasons - it's the same as Reddit. Welcome to Lemmy!
I've been avoiding the political BS and finding it much better. Easier to avoid the vitriolic stuff here too. And you can turn off seeing comment and post scores so downvotes don't exist for me.
I haven't seen nearly as many obvious rage bait bot posts either.
It’s not better, yet. It’s not owned by anyone, except the server owner, you can block any instance you want, join any instance you want and still access the same data. It will be better once it is the knowledge repository that Reddit became before all the “line must go up” entered into it. It’s mainly memes and news, but there are a ton of growing communities that are accruing a wealth of information every day, so I don’t think it will take much longer for it to be better.
Mobile apps, no ads, and no widespread astroturfing. I still use Reddit for product recommendations, but even that has become mostly advertising (oftentimes the link will redirect several times so they get their money).
I don’t like contributing ad revenue or engagement to a company I dislike. I find Reddit leadership morally reprehensible, and for the free market to work, I must avoid giving them money. Searching up products on ad-free RDX Reddit viewer contributes a view, but no engagement or ad revenue while coming at a very small cost to the company which I’ll accept.
And honestly, as a person who finds some of Lemmy’s community to be a bit much, it’s still way better than the bottom of the barrel half AI trash Reddit is now. Lemmy reminds me of old Reddit, occasional insufferable behavior and all, and that’s way better than new Reddit. You miss a lot of the personal stories, but in turn you also read less made up or AI generated garbage.
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
To echo, it's not really better, just different & smaller. Just slightly less toxic. It's not owned by Spez, the greedy little pigboy. 3rd party apps aren't killed for no good reason over here.
Moving to a substantially smaller community of people does have its drawbacks; there is brain drain & stagnation in small hobby communities. Be it roasting coffee, brewing beer, or weed...not nearly as many brains, let alone good brains, and less content generation. There's less knowledge, making it objectively less useful.
I use Sync for Lemmy & idk I find it hard to navigate to, find new communities. Half of the time I stumble upon one by sheer accident.
But the memes can be really good, it's still a news/info source, and for me being a conservative it gives me some insight into how "the other side" thinks, possibly even why.
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!
Federation
Welcome, it’s not better.
It’s not. Redditors keep coming over.
joined a year ago
Hmmm
I haven't been banned for suggesting child molesters don't deserve to live. Can't say that about Reddit.
Happy cake day!
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.
