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.
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 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
this is the most alive of all the fediverse projects. Not without its problems, but I have absolutely no reason to use reddit anymore.
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 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 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.
I like it but it's missing the low-quality 'non-fiction' relationship post porn I loved to binge on.
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 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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, I'm finding Lemmy 2023 just as shallow as Reddit 2023.
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
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.
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.
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.
I use it less, but I actually like it that way, plus I have no urge to go back to Reddit. So all good.
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.
It's actually getting better daily IMO...
It's like moving from Coke to Pepsi. Similar enough in it's own way. It's definitely better than the other budget alternatives
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 was going to say "what authoritarian propaganda" because I don't see any of that shit, but yeah, my instance doesn't federate with those places. The strength and the weakness of a federated system, I suppose!
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.
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.
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 !technology@lemmy.world 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.
Feels good to see it growing, I made an account really fast after lemmy got released, but still used reddit, too. I realized fast this could be the "new reddit" after the API thing and made some commercial posts for lemmy over the last months.
The only thing I am not happy with is the defederation idea. Don't misunderstand, it's good to be free from extremist politics or porn, but in fact reddit isn't that aggressive in the way defederation is done here. You just don't subscribe shit-subs. And this kind of self control would be nice on Lemmy, too. Why I am not able to just defederate my account from stuff I don't want to see would be better, imo.
daily user of Lemmy at this point, fuck Reddit
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.
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.
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 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 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.
Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
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