Reddit feels like a corporate advertising driven hellscape where fear and rage is encouraged.
Lemmy feels like 2010 when the internet world was a lot more simpler and you could actually talk to people.
Yeah Lemmy feels a lot like Reddit from 10-15 years ago. Mostly cordial conversation on a wide variety of topics, the biggest difference I see is the lack of activity in certain communities, which is a bit of a shame. But I guess that's a trade-off.
Give it time. Better to grow organically.
Steve Huffman isn't here, so that's a huge plus.
Steve Huffman? Former moderator of r/jailbait and current CEO of Reddit? That guy?
Self-proclaimed future leader of an apocalyptic survival compound, and obvious Elon wannabe? That Steve Huffman?
3rd party app support...
There are many other reasons, but let's be real. A lot of us ditched reddit because they dropped support for third party apps. Having an interface that isn't trying to constantly milk you for all sorts of monetization schemes matters a lot, as it so happens. Enough to say goodbye to a lot of familiar and large communities with otherwise good information.
Two things that come to mind:
Lemmy's protocol is open, so anybody can make 3rd party apps to work with it. Third party Reddit apps used to be popular when Reddit had an open API, but Reddit destroyed that on purpose.
Because Lemmy isn't run by a singular company, you don't get the same restrictions. Reddit admins had a whole host of rules on what a sub could or could not contain. Many of which were heavy focused on making Reddit more advertiser friendly.
The funniest part of killing 3rd party apps is they cut off a widely used method if collecting more commenting data from the average user. I guess they figured audience style interaction on the official app is worth more.
The official app purportedly has a shit ton of interaction tracking. I can't find the link anymore, but somebody on HN even claimed what they wanted to track was so invasive that he walked out of a job interview for Reddit.
What I can say for sure is that the new Reddit "shreddit" website is absolutely fucking full of tracking. I reverse engineered it for reasons, and every interaction with UI elements was reported back before the actual interaction was allowed to take place.
They definitely gain more value out of user data from interaction tracking than they do from their comments.
And for point one, I use Voyager, which was heavily inspired by Apollo for Reddit, so Voyager makes this place feel more like home.
You can see the number of up votes and down votes.
The API is much more open to third party apps.
The people are generally nicer.
Features are not paywalled.
Code is open source, so anyone and everyone can contribute.
It's kinda cool to go to pretty much any post and go "hey! I know almost everyone in the comment section!", but that's a bit of a double edged sword
Haha, yeah. Luckily it's more "Oh, it's you" and less "Oh, it's you". lol
Though I do tend to block trolls very quickly.
Some apps (like Boost) even let you add tags to people's names.
I always get so confused until I remember the context
Somewhere along the way, I learned that for a village to thrive, the creative people (the artisans, the musicians etc) must move in first, they form the roots, then the rest of the village follows them.
The creative people moved from Digg to Reddit. That's what made Reddit Reddit, not the brand, or the UI, or some genius exec.
The creative people have mass migrated to Lemmy, & hence Lemmy will thrive. How do you know - see where og memes originate. Genius is not the domain of AI, & hence Reddit is Deaddit. We're now just waiting for the rest to follow.
I've yet to see artists migrate here. The artists started on DA, Newgrounds, YT, Tumblr, etc. The professionals moved to Twitter.
Reddit started from geek & tech culture, not creatives. Its ability to foster discussion extended well to not just techies but to everyone. Most creatives I've seen shy away from Reddit.
Creative people in the Reddit/Lemmy village are the geeks & intellectuals
For starters, Lemmy -- which uses open source ActivityPub protocols -- is decentralized and comprised of thousands of independently-run servers, so it's theoretically impossible to take down Lemmy completely. If lemmy.world goes down today and never comes back, the "Lemmy" network will still be online because of the other servers like lemmy.zip and sh.itjust.works that use Lemmy server software (which is currently at version .19 or around there).
Worth nothing: Lemmy is part of the Fediverse, which is an umbrella term to describe all ActivityPub software types. Yes, other software packages also use ActivityPub protocols to communicate... for example, Kbin (the "main" site is kbin.social, it's sorta like their lemmy.world) is a news aggregator like Lemmy and interacts with Lemmy almost seamlessly. There's also Mastodon, a Twitter-like service that currently Kbin users can interact with (but not Lemmy).
In short: it's kinda complex at the moment, and many parts of the Fediverse (which Lemmy belongs to) don't interact with each other directly because they provide different services, but it's important to note that it's really hard to take it down completely because the Fediverse is independently owned and run by different people in different parts of the world. Contrast with Reddit, a service that does have many servers but is owned and run by a single company in America.
Edit: I was wrong, Mastodon users can post on Lemmy instances, but Lemmy users can't post on Mastodon instances. Thanks Baku@aussie.zone for the info!
There's also Mastodon, a Twitter-like service that currently Kbin users can interact with (but not Lemmy).
They can interact with us though, and then we can interact back. We can't really "post" there, but if a mastodonian makes a post in a Lemmy community, us lemmings can see it, and then we can reply to them. But we can't do twitter style posts on their forum
The biggest telltale sign you're talking to a mastodonian rather than a lemming is that you'll see them @ everybody in the entire thread in every single reply, since that's how replies start on twitter and mastodon. I've never actually received a notification for the @'s, I think it's functionally closer to just linking to your user profile than an actual mention, but once you get deep in a thread you'll see every comment starting with 60 different @'s.
I think it's mostly subjective or anecdotal, but what comes to mind:
If anything, the only reason why I still use reddit is for smaller, niche, communities. To that end, yeah Lemmy is smaller, thus the smaller reddit communities are even smaller here. If I find myself wanting to make a post on a given niche topic, I typically post on Reddit AND here. Sometimes, my post on Lemmy will somehow get more comments than reddit still though. Reddit posts seem to fall off after a day or so, that's not typically the case for Lemmy if you do trend something.
At the end of the day though, this is just a social media platform, and the enjoyment you get out of it comes down to you. ☺️ One tip I do have though is to sort by "Top of 6h" or "12h". I don't like the "Hot" sorting on here that much.
I don't think this is definitively "better" than reddit. The functionality of the site is more bare bones. No big hidden features or anything like that. What you see is what you get as far as interfaces go. But I am enjoying it. It reminds me of a much younger Internet and much simpler times. I am loving that Lemmy servers are run by your average joe who just wanted to start up a Lemmy community. No single CEO who only cares about how profitable a site is.
By being federated and decentralized, Lemmy makes it impossible for one idiot billionaire to ruin an entire platform.
In order to "take over" Lemmy, they would have to take over more than 1,300 Instances, in many different countries, instead of one instance in one country.
Last night I made a post on c/asklemmy and that post now has 200 upvotes and a bunch of engagement.
On Reddit, that post would've been removed for some stupid reason or no engagement whatsoever.
Reddit also has a stupid algorithm thing and I could never find the posts from communities I subscribed to on my feed leaving many posts lost.
Serioulsy, Reddit has a moderation problem. Posts gets removed all the time by powertripping mods.
By default? A nicer UI. It still pales compared to classic Reddit, but having things like keyboard shortcuts built in is nice, and it doesn't bog down/fire up a bunch of pop-ups like neo-Reddit.
Reddit, especially the bigger subs - feels really, really stupid lately. And I hate to say that because it sounds so insulting, but it really does feel like the average “IQ” on the site has gone from being this kind of tech/nerd culture of reasonably well educated people to like… old ladies complaining about their ‘entitled’ DoorDash drivers. It often feels like Facebook.
Don’t get me wrong, Lemmy isn’t 100% geniuses or anything and there are some smart people on Reddit, but on Lemmy I’ll actually have back and forth conversations with people and it feels like more people are acting like human beings
Being normal? Reddit has become such a toxic dump lately, Lemmy feels like a walk in the park compared to it.
In terms of the more populous instances, I think Lemmy reminds me of old Reddit before the site went mainstream, minus the jailbait, incest-posting, rampant racism and other degenerate shit that Reddit used to be known for.
I really enjoy the variety and diversity of federation. There are subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) differences each instance brings. It’s refreshing.
The accuracy of the votes (lack or vote fuzzing) and the ability to view the split of upvotes and downvotes individually, as well as who voted for what
The latter point can be seen as a kind of disadvantage though. I don't like the fact that anyone who is an admin on any instance can go to another instance and see the identity of every voter on any post.
No ads
Nice interface that I don’t even mind using the browser
User Content isn’t being used to push lemmy as a stock value.
Not force you to use the shittiest client ever created on mobile.
I've encountered far fewer Nazi shitheads here than on Reddit. That's a point in Lemmy's favor.
Allows me to actually use an interface which isn't awful
Link/comment karma isn't tracked so karma whoring is lessened. This doesn't stop the "meme of the week" stuff or the same basic (but big important) article from 30 sources getting posted to communities, but it helps a bit
As servers are federated, you can block them wholesale. Ones that become infested with shitters might see others defederate from them.
Superior layout, or at least notably better then new reddit... maybe on par with old.
up and downvotes visible and unfuzzed.
Withiut the karma incentive the meme of the week is just the stuff people want to share. Like the recent jeans thing was just people having fun with the meme because it was fun.
I think it's a huge plus that it's not run by big tech corporations. How many such things do we have today?
It allows anyone to host it themselves and still integrate with each other, which is radically more fair and empowering. It's a difference in quality.
You can pick an instance that aligns with the way you like to be. But those instances are still kept in check because if they get too shit, they get defederated.
For example, feddit.uk can operate in a uk-style way for which words we do and don't find offensive, and the level of piss-taking we do.
disclaimer: i am not a web developer or a programmer, so if the language use is semantically incorrect, i apologize—I am merely trying to provide a layman’s explanation.
it’s just a bunch of little “reddits” (general discussion forum websites) that are independently hosted, but have the ability to cross post with one-another (so long as they are “federated”).
lemmy is the underlying technology that lets that happen, not the top level entity (like how reddit is the name of the website that is the forum host). so what you have is a bunch of different independent websites running lemmy that users individually create accounts on, and a lot of those individual websites communicate with each-other to create cohesive “fediverse.”
on the front end, whatever lemmy website someone signs up on, they are able to see all the content created and posted across all the separate websites that have federated together with the initial website the user signed up with.
so in short, you may have signed up with Lemmy Server 1 that has 800 individual forum topics (communities/ or subreddits) but you can also post in and interact with Lemmy Server 2, which is separately hosted and a very specific forum that only allows forum topics about bunny tossing so there are two topics: /BunnyTossing and /BunnyTossingMemes. So long as lemmy servers 1 and 2 are federated you’ll see content from Lemmy Server 1 (your home server) and Lemmy Server 2 (rad tips on bunny tossing).
if in the future your home server defederates with another server, you will no longer see content from that server or be able to interact with it as your user profile from that home server (in this instance Lemmy Server 1). in this situation however there is nothing stopping you from creating a user account on Lemmy Server 2 and continuing to see rad tips on bunny tossing by logging into lemmy server 2 directly.
There's no "algorithm" per se, so you can actually discover new things in your feed, rather than just being fed what they think will keep you scrolling.
Also, you can use whatever app you like (I like Sync personally, but that's because it was my client of choice for Reddit) instead of using their RSS reader stapled to a Wish.com TikTok clone.
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