Or at least less so than Reddit. It's good, but, I can't put my finger on it. Even when the content is good, the servers are up, and I'm getting notifications responding to comments, it's never come to me doomscrolling for hours.
Edit: Guys, guys, I'm not trying to say Lemmy should be addictive or Reddit is better because it is. The opposite. I thought being addicted to something was always a bad thing? I was just curious as that I rarely ever see the content droughts people talk about, so I can scroll for as long as I want to with no interruptions, but unlike with Reddit, I don't, and I would want to know a reason why. Is it psychological? Something behind the scenes? The type of people here?
It's not supposed to be. It doesn't jam endless recommendations in your feed once you've gotten at the end of the new, fresh content. I feel like it's a feature, not a bug, to have platforms that don't optimise for time spent on them, because they don't need our attention to show us ads.
I'm so happy this is the top comment when I came in here. We're not centralized social media that requires constant content generation to acquire more views and we shouldn't try to treat it as such. Donate to your instances when you can, contribute to communities you care about with posts/comments, and then when you reach the end of your feed log off. How forums are supposed to be imo.
Exactly. Places/communities like Lemmy can and should serve different functions for different people - newsfeed, forum, meme collection/dumping ground - but the fine line between value and addiction gets obliterated by moneyed interests.
There are algorithms working in the background on Reddit to keep you there. Same with pretty much all “social media”. They aren’t on Lemmy. The point of Reddit is to keep you there, and shove as many ads down your throat as possible. Ads don’t exist here, and no one (as far as i can tell) is making money from you being here.
Yeah, there is less content, but that’s not really the biggest reason.
There are algorithms working in the background on Reddit to keep you there. Same with pretty much all “social media”. They aren’t on Lemmy. The point of Reddit is to keep you there, and shove as many ads down your throat as possible. Ads don’t exist here, and no one (as far as i can tell) is making money from you being here.
I agree with what you're saying about the algorithms sucking you in, but disagree that's the biggest reason. Lemmy just doesn't have a lot of content, browse HOT or go through your subscriptions and you're done pretty quick.
Thunder's latest update added a dismiss read posts feature, it lets you remove read posts on demand as you scroll, "refreshing" the feed with content you haven't seen, but without actually refreshing the page.
Lets you scroll a lot deeper into the feed without it feeling "dead" or "stale".
Reddit's continuous contributions were more shitposts and inside jokes though, so the little I do read here feels a lot more personal and more in depth. It's pretty nice.
I needed excuses to get the hell off my phone more anyway.
For me at least, there’s just not enough content. Not enough communities, with not enough posts with not enough comments. Lemmy still hasn’t reached that tipping point where it can replace sites like Reddit. It fluctuates, but I think it is on the way.
Reddit eventually got super-specific subs because so many people showed up and made more and more niche content that suited the needs of subgroups in communities. For example, lots of big subreddits banned memes, prompting the rise of specific shitposting groups
Social media addiction comes from algorithms designed to psychologically manipulate you into scrolling endlessly to maximize ad impressions. It's not a good thing.
I truly appreciate the fact that I can browse Lemmy for my entertainment, and easily walk away when I need to be an adult and don't auto smash the button when I open my phone.
It's not, but since Lemmy and Reddit seem the same on a surface level (and unlike what many people say, I sort by New and so never see old content), I can doomscroll and waste time on both platforms. However, with Lemmy, this bad habit of mine has been tempered severely, and I don't exactly know why. It's a good thing, but a good thing that just came out of nowhere.
Some people here say because there's no recommendations, which I feel is a good answer, but it feels just a little short. Is that really it?
For me I think it’s the niche communities aren’t built up yet. If I’m looking for a conversation about a specific football team or game, etc there isn’t as much content here that I can find on Reddit.
If not for the fact that the ttrpg community was so important to me on Reddit, I'd probably not have migrated over, as addicted as I was to the generic /all content on Reddit, I'm glad to be rid of it.
But lemmy is yet to be able to sustain the equivalent community, I want to have access to that infinite pool of topical conversation that I can't find anywhere, I won't go back to Reddit but it's just getting smaller here on Lemmy.
I'm excited for it! I'm personally trying to build some of the really niche communities that were big before, like the tiny EarthBound one.
Thing is, though, is the site really growing? After most have just put up with Reddit's bullshit, I can't really find recent statistics of Lemmy's active user base. And the few results I could find just show it's being stagnant, or even shrinking. I could be wrong, though, if it is growing, even better!
We're still in the downturn from users who tried Lemmy, and then stopped using it. They are now dropping off the active usercount, causing it to go down.
Total usercount is still increasing, meaning new users are still finding their way here.
Growing is not linear, particular not when competing with a larger alternative.
What basically needs to happen is that Reddit needs to fuck up a couple of more times. Some smaller stuff will net some users, largest stuff, many. After a while critical mass has been reached and it’ll be easier to grown naturally.
Well, that’s at least what I think needs to happen. I’m fully confident Reddit will fuck up as well. Though, this is a marathon, not a sprint.
We need to up the porn a little to beat reddit. Let's be honest, porn is what wins technology battles. Plus using the reddit app to look at stuff is just fucking miserable. I don't even look at that much but being single currently, it's what I got.
It's not going to happen as most instances will defed as it's not worth having the legal hassle of hosting porn on their own server, including possibly illegal material depending on where they're located. It isn't hard to find porn on the internet, we don't really need it here too.
Yep, not to mention it's hard to find here. Even if I put on all, I can't find any. Plus there aren't that many people posting any even on those instances specifically for it.
Too much repeated content on my feed. I like it, but I need to be able to auto hide previously viewed posts for this platform to be the kind of doomscroller reddit was.
I feel like that's the point? Lemmy doesn't profit from wasting our time, so it has no interest doing so. This means more time for me to do productive things.
Yes exactly, thats what I want from my Lemmy experience. I dont want it to be addictive. The way it is now is honestly so refreshing. I find I am checking my RSS feeds for news and stuff now. I only go on Lemmy to see stuff I want to see. Not stuff that worsens my mood.
I feel like it's visiting a friendly village I love rather than getting lost in a city that's interesting because it's awful. Honestly, I come here as much as I did reddit at this point. Less flashy. More endearing.
Personally, I'd begun to feel shackled by Reddit having gotten so overly moderated in recent years.
When someone is a fucking idiot and says idiot things I should be allowed to tell them they're a fuckin idiot.
Reddit started protecting the idiots' feelings over protecting people's right to tell them they're fucking idiots and maybe that's how the fediverse will become too since people have become so accustomed to it but I like being able to call out the stupidity as much as I like genuine engagement and informative content.
I hate a lot of the low effort I'm a comedian bullshit that reddit allowed to run rampant in the last few years because no one was allowed to tell them they're stupid.
I think reddit applies an algorithm to put content in your feed that they know you want or like or interact with. That will make it more addictive. Lemmy is just grabbing stuff for you, period, with no personalized algorithm as far as I know. I could be wrong but I think thats why it feels different.
reddit manipulates their users just like Facebook and tiktok etc.
On Reddit when i browse r/all I I keep getting surprised on the different communities that exists. On lemmy so far I mostly see tech related stuff. I've ended up browsing both reddit and lemmy.
I check lemmy and it has the same stuff day in and day out or three posts about the same exact thing on the front page for three days. Just not enough content for proper doom scrolling.
I have actually been using Lemmy a lot more the past few days. I haven't had discussions this good on the internet in years. There's no karma so people don't spam the same jokes over and over again, It's actually really good, well constructed discussion most of the time.
Browsing Lemmy is like traveling in a time machine. It's like the internet from 2012 to now didn't happen and people are worried about the Mayan calender ending.
I mean, yea, there isn't nearly as much interesting content. And with the way the "Everything" sort works you end up seeing the same thing 100 times across the 100 different similar subreddits each instance has. Honestly lemmy kind of sucks as a reddit replacement. Trying to find the next option.
You'd get a similarly repetitive/Incoherent experience if you had a feed of every single new post to reddit, except that one would be expanding at a rate of thousands of posts per second, and most of them would be porn. This is why they Invented the subscription feed
The subscription feed is very difficult to populate though. Itt isn't easy to try to find things you are interested in without browsing everything and hoping to stumble across it.
Yes and no, I feels like it absolutely could be as addictive as Reddit but there just isn't enough content being generated for me to powerscroll for hours only to do the same thing the next day
It's a mix of not neverending content (yet) and it's not designed to keep you in. I'm sure Reddit has had people who only work on increasing the doom scrolling.
I think it's a combination of less presence/engagement in niche content, sorting methods not quite being there, and not enough discovery without going out of band to find things
One thing I really miss is the science groups, askscience always had great debate that I haven't yet found here
I took July off from any of this stuff. After Sync released (my preferred app before), I've come to lemmy to try to see how it's going, but honestly, I've lost most of the desire to blindly browse random stuff like I did.
Actually, I've found just the opposite - I've been more likely to spend more time on lemmy/kbin over the last couple of months than I spent on Reddit in years.
It got to the point that I'd just pop onto Reddit, look around, see the same basic variety of botspam, astroturfing and concern trolling, and go do something else. It wasn't even worth posting anything, since any response I got was almost certainly going to be from a bot or a human-who-might-as-well-be-a-bot, and it was going to be the same thing either way - just some shallow bit of stock rhetoric that at best might be sort of tangentially related to what I actually said.
But then I came here and rediscovered the pleasure of reading posts written by actual people who actually think about what they're saying, who will actually read and think about what I actually say in response, then write a response that they've actually thought about.
And that was it - I was hooked in a way I hadn't been for years on Reddit.
That said, it's nowhere near as good now as it was a few months ago, and I have been less active recently. The last big migration in particular, after the API changes went into place, led to both more bots and more humans-who-might-as-well-be-bots, and the quality here went sharply downhill.
It's still better than Reddit though. And it's been improving again of late.
It definitely would be to me if there was more diverse content, I usually stop scrolling after seeing the same news articles reposted over and over again, posts that have been in my feed since yesterday, and one too many posts about Linux/FOSS or whatever.
I still love it for what it is, but it can't keep me interested for as long as Reddit did yet.
I'm talking about the entirety of Lemmy, not just your instance
I also love the privacy/FOSS content, it's just that Reddit left a huge hole for me with normal people content that I hope to see more of here in the future
Endless content can definitely lead to a more addictive platform. Because it's trying to encourage more users to generate their own content, there's certainly less of it, bit definitely less garbage to wade through.
That said, I feel that I'm learning more, sharing more, and interacting with others more.
It's also much nicer than R×ddit, because I've seen so much less: ragebait, fake stories, sensationalism, intentional factual inaccuracies/disinformation, shilling, shitty bots, etc.
I find it just addictive enough. There are definitely lulls in activity, but they're short-lived and I have things I should be doing besides shitposting so it's actually helped me.
The quality, however, is much higher. This can be very subjective, but I do have some real world evidence. The number of times I'd show someone a meme and have them say "Please send that to me" has definitely gone up since I switched to the fediverse.
I find it very addictive actually, at least the endless scrolling lasts a bit longer than in Reddit, tho there is still more top stuff on Reddit (bcs there is more content that gets distilled into good content, whereas I feel like on average I see better content on Lemmy).
Tho if I need some technical review of some obscure product, Reddit is still where I look it up.
For me a big thing is that because Lemmy is so small, it's not diverse. It's mostly liberal-to-leftist nerds from America and Western Europe. I roll my eyes and scroll past whenever there's a post about any Asian country because you know it's just gonna be a bunch of foreigners (whose exposure to the country is limited to news headlines) pretending they know anything. And unlike Reddit there are seldom any locals available to set people straight.
I am kinda glad, and it reminds me of early Digg. When I first used Digg, it didn't tailor the order or content of anything to you, it didn't use an algorithm to keep throwing content at you, changing the order of what you see, and Lemmy reminds me of this.
I'm not here up be addicted or scroll endlessly, if anything, Lemmy feels healthier, like I can walk away and do something else.
I don't know why but personally lemmy is much more addictive than reddit.
The content makes me discover more relevant things and with reddit I felt like been in a loop with always the same content or not relevant content maybe the threads I subscribed to were not the bests.
With Connect app it's exactly like Reddit. Maybe you need to subscribe to more sublemmy or scroll on global and not local. It's literally the same as Reddit minus the amount of reposts, astroturfing and a little less negative. Maybe you miss that?
I think it's primarily because Lemmy doesn't recommend content, whereas Reddit does. (Reddit isn't as blatant as other social media, but I feel like they do recommend content.) I find that I actually have to go out of my way to search for new communities to subscribe to or more content to consume. It's a bit hard and takes time. But I think it's overall healthier to have control over what you see and can't see.
In any case, if/when Lemmy picks up in activity, I don't expect that we'll need recommendations as much to find new content
I can't meet ya on that brother, I don't comment very often, but I feel like I'm terminally on here. I do wish more non-tech related stuff popped up in my feed, but that's the flavor of Lemmy for now I guess. All in all, I like it here
Most of my time on Reddit was because of the constant flow of actually new content and "new to me" content (binging subreddits that I had just found out about).
Lemmy only has a constant flow of actually new content and it's slower.
Right now the biggest barrier for me is the interface. Too many instances favor this very spread out, low information density, optimized for mobile (but not really) look, and group information in ways that are irksome. A certain amount can be fixed by user styles, but some functionality can't, like on kbin when I click on reply notifications and am not actually taken to the context of my reply because the comments have split across multiple pages even though I've set my preferences to infinite scroll. If I'm on another instance, clicking context gives me... well, not the context of my comments, just the damn comment and a series of "load parent comment" links to click. It's, well, irksome.
Most of my gripes aren't insurmountable, but that doesn't change the fact that right now every instance is a little janky to use.
It's really good in small doses, like early Reddit used to be. You can quickly exhaust the best posts of the morning/afternoon/evening before you're basically browsing by "new".
It reminds me of the times when reddit would get notably slower and weirder during certain times of the day. Before it became an endless 24/7 stream of content.
There are a lot of channels that are missing from what i did back in Reddit. Many i have no interest in modding so they most likely wont show up for a long time.
Are you interpreting that as bad or good? It was clear there was some fuckery going on at reddit for the past many years, increasing rage/anger, bots everywhere, engagement focused bullshit.
Is "doom scrolling" a thing you want to be doing? I'm not implying "you could be doing something better with your time" because it's your time to spend. But at the same time, change is good, right? Maybe instead of having one active platform, mix lemmy up with mastodon? Or start watching every Crash Course and Sci Show video that exists. Look up ZeFrank and dash down that rabbit hole for a couple years.
There are so many automated bots posting links every couple of minutes. I feel like I sometimes have to wade through tons of garbage to get to interesting posts. I've been blocking tons of bots and communities but it still feels like it takes effort to find content which isn't what I want. I want somewhere that I can find interesting content when I'm taking a shit. Lemmy isn't quite there yet.
The big difference for me it's the overall lack of comment interaction on posts here. I was addicted to reddit not because of the content but because of the community interaction below the content.
Side note: Just now my phone keyboard did NOT autocorrect to reddit. It appears I have finally doesn't enough fine away from their for my phone to recognize it.
For me it's a little bit more addictive than Reddit since I get more comment replies. This is probably just because I stay away from any big subs on Reddit though.
There a few things that we just haven't crossed the threshold for yet that I found engaging (if not "addictive") at Reddit, several of which were live threads about an event (NFL/NBA/Soccer/F1/etc). We're not big enough here for that yet, where Mastodon is (you can get awesome interaction on hashtags about topics while they're happening).
The other thing was when a post got popular you could scroll through hundreds of comments with at least some thought behind them, and here it's more like 10-25. The content is often better here, there is just less of it.
Which is fine for me, it's just a slightly different experience than I was having at Reddit, but I think some of those things will come with time.
There is less content here than Reddit because there are less users here—less users creating content each day. Each of our comments and posts have far more weight and impact on the Fediverse because of this. The more we push ourselves to engage, create posts, or moderate communities when we normally wouldn’t before, the faster we will see Lemmy grow!
Lemmy isn't giving you that dopamine hit you want? That's likely due to the smaller nature of the Fediverse. Enjoyable content without the feeling your missing something.
Doom scrolling wasn't there in the early days of reddit. Lemmy is still new. I think people just had high hopes and expectations that lemmy would be a 1 to 1 replacement for reddit, but that was never going to happen. Reddit has had years to grow and optimize while lemmy is just a fledgling with a niche user base.
Also I think lemmy is missing that hook or gimmick to get, for lack of better words, the attention seekers here that will make posts and content just for upvotes or to show up on everyone's front page. Not saying lemmy needs to be reddit, but I do think it needs a little extra something than just being a decentralized reddit alternative.
Lemmy has pretty much replaced my other social media scrolling. I probably spend about the same amount of time here as I used to spend flicking between fb and reddit, but I spend more time reading and interacting here.
Weird that I'm actually more engaged with a platform that doesn't really have an aggressive engagement algorithm.
Less content, and the sorting seems to favor posts that are getting comments rather than new and rising posts. So you frequently have posts over a day old that stay at the top slots of your feed
It seems good enough to pass the time to me. But the niche communities on here just aren't as active, or the discussions not as rich. For example the stable diffusion sub I visit hardly gets traffic, and it's mostly people posting pictures. Whereas on Reddit, the was more news and discussions about workflow and resources.
Precisely the opposite. It's great! Especially since I rarely stop due to a lack of content, since I'm always on New (but sometimes I'm prevented from seeing because the server's down).
It was actually because there's been so much content, yet I still spend a relatively healthy amount of time on the site. Why? On the surface, it's the same thing, but in practice, it's not.
It's gotten addicting to me. But not the same way reddit was. I'm glad there's not much politics here.
Although hexbear being federated is like having an angry toddler in the house crying over spilled milk. I've yet to see a post from them that doesn't sound like it's coming from a basement dungeon computer room.
tbh I don’t fall into rabbitholes here the way one may on Reddit, but I feel like the time I spend here is more worthwhile; So the analogy of Lemmy being healthy food, and Reddit being junk food makes sense to me.
I have a habit of scrolling during downtime during the day but I don't have an attachment to lemmy specifically. One thing I like about this app is how mundane a lot of the posts seem, it's not overly exciting and doesn't cause tiktok-style dopamine addiction.
All forms of social media could be argued as being addictive to some degree but lemmy IMO is relatively harmless. Though there is something to be said about rage farming, many of the posts seem to be negative or anger-inducing in some way, but it's not bad compared to many other platforms. And of course there is the ability to filter your feed by blocking certain communities but the personalization in that regard isn't as good as reddit was.
Reddit is crack ... because it took years of cocaine use before users converted it into crack
Lemmy right now is just cocaine .... just keep using it for a few years and you'll eventually start turning the cocaine into crack ... it's still an addiction but right now we believe that we can manage the addiction and use it and not use it at will .. give it time and we will eventually get to the point of doom scrolling endless content like a helpless crack addict. Enjoy Lemmy while you can, we are building a tolerance and we will eventually want to ramp up our usage in a few years and whore ourselves out for the next hit.
Even when someone is really raging in comments, I purposely frame it as sarcasm so I don’t engage. But here I am, engaging. Yep, just like Reddit for me.
To serve the thread topic, I have about an hour a day free for some social media, regardless of the platform mix. Gave up Reddit as it got bumped.
That's because there's no drama here. On reddit there's non stop controversy and sub drama and that kind of shit is addicting whether you realize it or not.
Over the past few years I've reduced my social media use. First, I deleted my Facebook account. That was the best thing I've ever done. Next, I deleted my Twitter, before Musk bought it. Recently, I deleted my main and very old Reddit account. Now I'm on Lemmy.
My time spent on social media has reduced each time. I never really replaced one with another.
I do hope that Lemmy becomes more entertaining and addictive...it just needs more content and I've no doubt it will.
For me it's the ridiculous amount of alt left/communist comments in EVERY thread. Even blocking the worst offending instances I still get a frankly insane amount of comments from delusional people thinking we should all give up our personal possessions and everyone just magically have access to everything at no cost to anyone.
Is someone missing the taste of laziness? This is exactly what I'm talking about. You retards can't help but comment. You have no plan. You deny reality. You just want but don't want to put in the work to actually do anything. Someone told you something about Marx and because you lack the ability to do any actual research you just clump together and scream on here.
I probably spend just as much time on lemmy/kbin as I did on Reddit. The biggest difference is most of my time then was based on consuming content and fishing for any kind of interaction and approval I could. Here I feel like I spend most of my time creating, and interacting with other users who are invested in helping the fediverse grow.
There are definitely less active moments here, but those are the times I usually try to fill in the void with my own content, give someone's community or post a boost so that they see more interaction, and engage in one of the discussions being had in the threads of more active posts.
Plus whenever I'm starved for content, I go over to new, upvote posts as I go, and I usually find something interesting.
I never actually had a Reddit account so there wasn't an opportunity for them to customise a feed to me. That being the case after getting a bumch of random communities subscribed via bot the 'all' feed here seems to largely resemble Reddit for the non-logged in. The only part that's a bit oboxious is the multi-comminity posting where one user sends the same thing to a similar community on mutiple hosts. Hopefully at some point there's a way to create some kind of multi-homed community so they're not so independent of each other.
I never thought Reddit was addictive. I actually spend more time on Lemmy in a day than I did on Reddit. My browsing habits changed though. Reddit is so big I only looked at a few niche subreddits. Lemmy being much smaller I view a much wider range of topics. It's a different and better experience for me.
Do any apps provide native notifications yet? I'd love to get alerts in my notifications bar rather than having to open the app and go through each account.
reddit is driven by primitive monkey brain attraction as shown through popularity.
perhaps subs make the addiction more finely tuned to similarly minded peeps.
lemmy has less than infinite content and a less mainstream non-[purely]hedonistic culture.
if u havent realized:
lemmy tends to be significantly more appealing/valuable to some niches that have strongly established,enthusiastic, talented userbase (such as tech ppl).
it's a minor satisfaction boost but beneficial. if maybe u dont fullheartedly believe in the lemmy mission(free nonprofit decentralized platform), then it seems, additionaly, less satisfying
to build up other unique /c/'s requires: initiative, light work/time, [and usually..] motivation to post.
i personally [tend to..] only post or comment on things im interested in. sometimes thats only linux and android.
when a site like reddit is ranked top site on the inrernet. everyone can be lazy and contribute once a year and thats still more than enough(when u consider scale). there are also a shitton of negatives to that. but they are ignored and swept under the rug.
I think it's just less well curated content due to fewer users because after some amount of time you get to the posts with a low number of upvotes. Just a scale thing.