how is Lemmy going for you?

So far so good. In a smaller community I feel more responsible for contributing to discussions. Others seem to be engaging too with thoughtful comments (not just karma-farming inside jokes).

This is helped by the fact that new interesting threads are not immediately buried in heaps of new content, so you actually have time to think of an answer that someone might actually read and reply to. I realize that this is mostly a function of the current scale of the Fediverse and that the more it grows, the more it might just turn into Reddit.

It's the Fediverse that I have been searching for.

Somebody on Lemmy made this quote I really like:

Twitter is people you care about posting content you don't care about. Reddit is people you don't care about posting content that you do care about

Twitter-like Fedi never clicked for me. I made a bunch of accounts over the course of two, maybe three years, each starting with the intention of maybe making new friends and having a good time. I met a ton of cool people but we never became good friends because I never got really invested into it, simply because my feed was never something I hoped it would be, something exciting.

Lemmy gives me exactly what I was searching for. I didn't use it prior to thr Reddit migration because there were too few people but now I am very happy

I'm just still missing communities that are only on Reddit rn.

Other than that... I'd argue the Lemmy ux is already far superior, so that's great.

Eh, it scratches the itch. I don't touch reddit anymore, outside of web searches. Still, I miss the niche communities that only a massive site like reddit can give life.

i moved to lemmy before the reddit api changes. in january 2023 i stopped using all proprietary software and was looking for alternetives. its way better than reddit, im never going back...

I'd like to see more human posts than just meme posting and news.

Lemmy is great and all. Love it more then I ever did reddit. But it seems like instances are more politically polarized than your average subreddit. It kinda harshes my mellow.

I do like that people feel more genuine as opposed to just broken records repeating overused talking points.

I'm struggling to find niche communities but overall the comments are more human and not just saying what everyone wants to hear for Internet points. I still plan on hosting my own instance soon and I'm excited for that. I do find it annoying as well when I sort by new and it's just thousands of repost from reddit.

I do use it regularly, but I miss some of the niche gaming communities. You can definitely tell there's a lot less activity on here, but hopefully it keeps growing with time.

My problem is that most of the posts are about lemmy or reddit.

Pretty good, it's my Reddit replacement (except for Google searches where I still put site:reddit.com, searching Lemmy doesn't work that well..).

Choosing an instance sucked though.

I went like:

1. sh.itjust.works: Found out they're Canadian, the latency was too much for Europe
2. lemmy.ml: Overall pretty good, I liked that NSFW instances were defederated, so I could browse All without seeing porn. Till I realized there is a slur filter that censors your comments and others. So if someone calls you a 'bitch' on the Fediverse everyone can read it, except you. You see 'removed'
3. lemmy.world: Largest instance, plenty of local content, good policies overall, but the stability was awful (due to DDOS)
4. lemmy.zip: Smaller instance, full federation, super fast and in the EU, I'm staying there for now and moved all my subscriptions and blocked communities (mostly porn, again, I like to browse All) over

Honestly I'm not having a great time. Most of the hobby communities are graveyards. I spend a lot less time here because I'm not interested in tech communities at all.

I think its great

Overall a much more friendly bunch of people here.

Thanks you guys! Youre all awesome!

Redditfugee here. Lemmy pros/cons:

Pros

• I guess it serves as a bit of a nicotine patch for Reddit. I'm no longer active on Reddit, and I spend less time doom scrolling than I used to.
• By and large the community seems alright.

Cons

• Lemmy just isn't the reference omnibus that Reddit is, and I don't think it ever will be. Even down to r/whatisthisthing or r/tipofmytongue I don't think will work on Lemmy, partially because there's going to be eight of each, seven and a half have no traffic.
• The communities I'm interested in have basically no traffic. No one posts anything. I see a lot of posts with no discussion, or one comment saying "I'm a bot."
• There's a kind of stupid problem where, you're scrolling through, say, your All New feed. It's separated into pages instead of infinitely scrolling. Page 2, you find a post you'd like to read. Click it, read the post, back out to the feed, you're on Page 1 of the feed again. You've lost your place. One of the ingredients to that nicotine patch.
• There are too many different forms of idea cancer here. I spent several minutes having to individually block several nearly identical communities for sports ball game results that each had nearly identical bots posting sports ball scores to them, because someone set up a nearly identical community for each team. This I think is a valid use case for the platform, but if you're not interested in sports ball it makes the All feed unusable. I'd also like someone to explain to me why posts from r/buildapc are being "archived" here?

Pretty good. Using it much more and noticed a pretty good uptick in other posting stuff since I created my account.. I'd say I have two feet in the door to a new home. . Edited to clean up as was typing initial response on the go.

Most of the niche communities I followed aren't on here so my usage is drastically lower than before. I find Lemmy to be generally nice as a platform-especially now with infinity for Lemmy out, I've come to forget that I'm no longer on reddit!

Just wish that there was more to go on here. Memes and tech can only keep me scrolling for so long.

It's a lot less of a time sink for me now. I'm on maybe 15 minutes a day.

It's probably because most of my other most frequented forums aren't quite here yet.

It doesn't really have all the communities I'm interested in ... but for most of my looking-at-memes and commenting-on-things needs, it works great. I use lemmy exclusively on mobile and haven't touched reddit on my phone since sync went away, but I still engage with reddit periodically on desktop.

Imo it feels like the reddit migration has died down, but a good chunk the users that have stuck around are actually engaged in their communities. I've been seeing more instances created too, which is cool because it means people are hosting their own.

More recently I've noticed that Sync actually plays embedded videos now, which is probably the best update since its release. It's feeling a lot more user-friendly and that should help it keep growing organically.

The only times I use reddit anymore is browsing with old.reddit a couple times a week. I don't even login to that site now because I don't engage with anything, I just check the news and stuff then come back to Lemmy.

It's been better since moving away from lemmy.world, then Sync being available also helped a lot. But unfortunately as many have noted already, this is not as easy to get into for more casual users so it's heavily biased towards tech topics and communities. Smaller communities will probably take a lot longer to take off if at all and I'm sad about that loss so far.

I use it daily.

Of the two different things I used Reddit for, Lemmy is a 100% replacement for one, but sadly lacking in the other.

1. Current events (news, politics, etc...) the transition to Lemmy was seamless.

2. Tech Support on specific niche software (kdenlive, Scribus, Gimp, etc...) is still lacking. there aren't a lot of communities dedicated to specific hobbies where a person can ask and answer questions from other users.

In regards to #1, there is actually one area where Lemmy has an advantage in my case. Because my local instance is my country instance, having that third "local" option means that I can, without any searching, keep up to date on national current events as well.

it's like being in a Canada only news site, and then if I want, I can hit "all" and see the rest of it. it's super easy in a way that Reddit couldn't be.

I love that Lemmy has a small, but dedicated userbase and much less flamewars than Reddit. Seems like most people are actually here for good content and not just trolling everyone else.

I also like that the feed just ends eventually and I can close the app instead of doomscrolling through the whole night.

And I hope that toxic gamification features like global karma or awards will always stay out of here. The dopamine rushes from those are just bad for my brain and these features are really unneccessary.

I love it very much. Meanwhile I almost forgot, that reddit once was important to me.

Comments on Lemmy tend to have a lot to say while offering a unique perspective. But most of the posts are boring and predictable, especially when it comes to politics.

Literally my entire wall is either:

• extreme tech industry junk
• asks
• cats

I would love some diversity but everything I've subscribed to is either the above, or dead.

For me it seems to have wained a bit, I feel like a lot of casual users have gone silent recently, the content I'm seeing is more specific to niche topics and communities

To be honest I don't use it nearly as much as I used Reddit. Haven't been on Reddit since the fuckening except for a couple of times, but my Lemmy usage is at maybe 10% pf what my Reddit usage was.

Really wish there was more content. I've been trying to post stuff but I never get any comments either. Anything other than the few mainstream communities is just dead

I haven't completely switched to Lemmy yet. I don't get as much of a diversity of views here.

But apart from Political stuff, I think the people here are wonderful and actually helpful.

This might not be an alternative to reddit and gain millions of followers, but nonetheless, It's good in it's own way. Edit: So many likes, did I mention I am somewhat conservative and don't support abortion after 5 months? Shocking, now downvote me I guess

I think it's fine but I admit I don't think it's very fun with one centralized Lemmy instance. Feels like reddit all over again. The idealist in me wanted a distributed network instead, with popular communities spread out across hundreds of instances run by volunteers.

But on the plus side, we can talk without corps being involved and that's really, really nice. I don't even use any big tech sites anymore except github.

I like it but it's missing the low-quality 'non-fiction' relationship post porn I loved to binge on.

this is the most alive of all the fediverse projects. Not without its problems, but I have absolutely no reason to use reddit anymore.

Switched to lemmy 100% after 17+ years of reddit, daily user. I think it's ok but increasingly getting annoyed with a couple things. The rampant extreme politics and phrasing as if it's fact, and people complain about cross posts but I literally see the same exact posts (same community) over and over as I scroll through the feed. Other than that it doesn't nearly have much content but that's to be expected.

I have completely replace Reddit with it. (Save for looking for when I end up there due to trying to solve technical problems). Yeah it’s janky and doesn’t have as much happening but I feel like the userbase overall is much less toxic so more enjoyable to engage with.

Once I found Liftoff, I've used Lemmy exclusively. It's fantastic, I don't feel as intimated about commenting (even though this is my first on this account) I've found most of my interests again in different communities. There are still a few I don't have, but that will sort itself out in time.

Liking it a lot! I was thinking the other day about how we’ve pretty successfully made the jump away from every other thread being about Reddit or technical issues to having many general interest communities and some niche ones that are continuing to diversify.

Obviously we’re not nearly at the scale of Reddit yet (considering the entire Fediverse could fit inside some singular subreddits) but I’ve tried to make up for less content by making more myself and actually engaging with people instead of lurking.

I like not having to scroll through the same standard comments on every post. There might be fewer comments here, but they're higher quality. I mostly used reddit for news which Lemmy covers just as well. Regardless of the API changes and enshitification Reddit simply got too big. Between the marketing and other sorts of vote manipulation, reddit basically stopped providing a useful overview of even news. The hivemind pushed the same dead horse to the front every day.

Where's the fucking porn?

All of the apps I've tried have problems. Most communities have a spam problem. None of the communities I'm interested in exist. I feel like there's almost a fundemental problem with the way that the fediverse works that makes it incompatible with this format, as almost all communities will be focused on generic instances as that's where people will create their accounts. I made my account on feddit.uk but I wouldn't make a community for something that wasn't UK focused, therefore the community doesn't get started.

I miss episode anine episode discussions and isk what im doing wrong but sometimes I find a good instance but cannot access their feed from my account, and I dont wanna create another account or add the subs individually, you even see it has more post than subs most of the time. Aside from that its great, feels like im not required to say something that fishes for upvotes thus I comment a bit more

I do miss some of the more specialist communities on reddit but honestly this is great for just scrolling stuff, and it's completely replaced reddit for that.

Unfortunately, I'm finding Lemmy 2023 just as shallow as Reddit 2023.

My favorite niche communities have come to Lemmy, but they're very inactive. Which is good and bad. There's much less filler content, but less substantial content as well. It's nice not having to scroll through miles of junk to find the good stuff, but I do wish there was a little more good stuff.

Overall, I think I'm glad for the change. I wasted a little too much time on Reddit for sure. Here, at least I can pop on and see that there's nothing new I'm interested in and do something else rather than scrolling through all that filler to find a nugget or two.

It's like moving from Coke to Pepsi. Similar enough in it's own way. It's definitely better than the other budget alternatives

It's actually getting better daily IMO...

It gets better once you find interesting subs. I think it scratches the same itch and I plan to continue using it. I do have some concerns about the community, however. I guess I was hoping it would be less of an echo chamber and have a more nuanced and in depth discussion.

I haven't really found that and I think it's more or less the same as reddit most of the time.

I also miss browsing through the short video subs like /r/crazyfuckingvideos once a week or so just to see some crazy things.

However, I do find there is actually pretty good discussion on tech stuff and you do find some geopolitics/ political discussion if you read through some of the ideological drudgery a bit.

So all in all, I think Lemmy so far has been a positive experience for me and I'm committed to remaining here for the foreseeable future. At the end of the day - it's an open source decentralized community. I'll put up with a lot of shit just because of that. No chance I'd be going back to reddit.

I like it and I think I can say with confidence that I've made the switch from Reddit to Lemmy as my default "internet frontpage."

Still rough in spots, though. The defederation drama is making this a bit of a rocky experience, so I'm not sure I've landed on my final instance just yet. I understand this is an unavoidable aspect of the Fediverse (i.e. relations between instances), but I still haven't settled on an instance where I can say, "Yep, this is the one for me."

On the positive side, I love Infinity for Lemmy, even with some of the remaining bugs, and I love that I can open a discussion that's on the top of my feed and I can still have meaningful interactions with the community. I hope my favorite subs from Reddit will eventually come to life here, because then I'd be golden.

Overall, this all feels like a fresh new start and I love it.

I must admit. I have relapsed to reddit somewhat due to the lack of specific video game communities here. I use Comet for reddit (iOS) which still works

My favorite app didn't port and my main community didn't migrate. I'm still not planning to go back to Reddit, but definitely feeling the change.

It started off okay, but I'm about to give up on Lemmy after a couple months.

My main problems are:

• The comments here are hit-or-miss. Every big thread deteriorates into pedantic arguments. It's seemingly a worsening trend and is on-par with the bullshit you'd see on Reddit.
• Lack of comment moderation in larger communities. If a thread devolves into off-topic arguments or name-calling, the mods should step in.
• The default active post sort is pretty terrible in so many ways. It's much too slow to change and you'll often see repetitive content. Smaller communities tend to have no visibility, but instead I see 5 posts from the same large community.
• The comment sort is bad as well. If the community self-moderates through downvoting, then why are downvoted posts near the top? I think this leads to toxic threads and pointless arguments.
• Lack of any content. I wouldn't mind a bot reposting an RSS feed or something into a community just to start discussion... But many are vehemently against that idea (leading to small communities dying completely). I'd argue the reason [email protected] hasn't died out yet is because of the l4s bot.
• Way too many politics. I'm so tired of seeing political discussion online---but here, you're just bombarded with it, even outside of political communities. Better moderation might help keep things on topic.
• Users tend to browse All. While this gives people an opportunity to see new content, I think this might harm smaller communities in the long run. This is similar to how threads lose quality once they reach the front page on Reddit.

Maybe I'll come back after a year and see how things are. But as of now, Lemmy provides nearly zero value to me.

It reminds me of Reddit when I first joined (2011). I actually uninstalled Relay a couple days ago as I hadn't intentionally opened it in weeks. I'm probably not on here any less than I was on Reddit as some people are saying, but I do tend to browse all most of the time for now. I almost never browsed r/all.

I'll still go to Reddit if a search result takes me there, but even that seems to be happening much less than before.

daily user of Lemmy at this point, fuck Reddit

It's almost perfect... But whenever I get into a new game, especially something kinda niche, I can't find a place to talk about it. I miss that.

One of things that I like most about it that it isn’t algorithmic. When I crash for the night, I look at the most popular over the last 12 hours, and then… I’m done.

Authoritarian propaganda is kind of ruining it for me. I came in excited to help build something together and now I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Maybe I'd recommend an instance that doesn't federate with Hexbear, ExplodingHeads, or Lemmygrad.

I'm really enjoying Lemmy so far. I've posted more here in one and a half months than in 16+ years on reddit astroturfbay. Why?

Because here feels like friendly neighbourhood square where people actually care to listen to each other. Whatever happens here feels way more organic and people-oriented than elsewhere. No algos dictating agendas just because more engagement=more profit.

So yeah, I really like this place.

I'm enjoying it so far. It doesn't have the same user base or niche communities of reddit yet, so for now I'm just doing more general browsing. There just doesn't seem to be enough of a diverse set of interest yet. So at first it was a ton of posts about sync, currently it's a ton of posts about LTT. And it's just full of memes. Definitely could use a wider range of topics and interests.

That said there are a couple of really obnoxious instances that are highly political and as much as I am trying to avoid that, the users of those instances seem to dominate any thread even remotely political. It's quite annoying.

Feels like OG reddit back in the day with less niche subs and with an /all that is more readable (and with the occasional surprise nsfw reddit used to have). I feel that in reddit I had drifted to only reading my own curated sub list, and barely reading /all due to the toxicity

Only rarely do I get back to reddit, mostly because one of the sport subs, which has a repost bot on lemmy, shows an article I want to read the comments on.

Yes sometimes the polarized instances get a bit annoying, I find them managable and interesting to see what these communities are talking about every now and then.

Happy. The only issue I have is scale. IMO there was nothing ground breaking about Reddit as either an idea or a piece of tech, it's value mostly comes from its users. Lemmy does not have the sheer breadth from scale that I enjoyed with Reddit, but hopefully that will come.

I found Lemmy to be better for my mental health. I recently visited Reddit again to follow on a heated topic since Reddit has more info and news, and found my anxiety levels skyrocket due to the toxicity of comments.

While Lemmy has less engagement than Reddit, that also leads to a more level-headed community.

That, and with new Lemmy apps and experiences being developed constantly, I'm liking it here a lot.

It's alright

Well... If I never see a post about tech or a meme again it'll be too soon.

Since Sync came out, absolutely love it! Hope more people join!

I engage a lot more with general communities than I used to because the quality of poster is so much higher here. People are more likely to engage in good faith discussion and offer more than just those low effort redditor joke comments that site has become notorious for. There is just no point commenting in larger communities and threads on reddit, because you'll get buried by lazy meme comments and the one person who does sort by new is mostly likely looking for conflict rather than a conversation.

I use it less, but I actually like it that way, plus I have no urge to go back to Reddit. So all good.

TBH, I think I dislike it only slightly less than reddit. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of the fediverse and what not. However, I see a lot of posts around here saying that lemmy is so much better than reddit, but I don't necessarily agree. Culturally I see a lot of the same behavior between the two. The main difference is there are a lot less "Facebook-like" posts and way more tech nerd-centric opinions. I would even argue that there is a lack of cultural balance. Like most of the people here are extremists in one way or the other (this includes me), and there are less "normal" people. I think this is probably what some of the users here actually want because they thirst for the "good ol' days" of forums before some of nerd culture leaked into the mainstream, but I'm not sure it's my cup of tea. Furthermore something that is sort of both a feature and a downside is that there is way less content here for obvious reasons. It's nice not to have an endless feed, but again, due to cultural imbalance, there isn't much variety. I love using linux, but I don't know if I care to have my feed engulfed by it. I'm not sure if the time I spend in Lemmy is really a net positive, just like how reddit felt. I'd say the most positive aspect of reddit was I could subscribe to a city specific subreddit and actually get news and info that is useful to my day to day life, whereas the info here is just useful for keeping me in my house or absorbed in work.

Please do not tell me to suck it up and contribute my own content. The point of this comment is not to get the community to "fix" lemmy for me but simply to relay an observation.

Found it great a month or two ago. Now, not so much. Gobshites and troll scum seem to be slowly making the place just another platform for bollox. Shame really.

I love it. People complain about the lack of hobbyist spaces so I’m making an active effort to build them up more as time allows. I have considered making an art lemmy instance which may be a potential eventually, but I’m fine either way.