What are your thoughts on the Lemmy ecosystem?
I’ve been trying it out for the last week. I have my own opinions, but I’d like to hear others and see if we have common ideas on what is good/bad/indifferent about the Lemmy ecosystem.
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Lemmy is a terrible place but after leaving Reddit after a dozen years, it sucks too. No going back. I kinda want to leave Lemmy - such miserable, hateful echo chamber - but, where would I go?
Yeah, that’s more or less how I feel about it. It’s like they say, you can’t go home again.
Me too. I still use Reddit via the website. I think Reddit is also in a negative place at the moment too. It seems that most things I see these days are negatively voted, or Reddit’s algorithm has changed and it mostly shows me negatively voted content in my feed.
80% effective. The porn quality is weak.
Well that’s (porn) what reddit is for!
I spend a lot of time blocking the lewd communities, it’s not good for my mental health
Also true. The lewd communities are numerous and botty and weak
As a ‘front page of the internet’ it has been a pretty great replacement for me as it’s where I go each day to just see what’s going on. However, due to the smaller size you do lose a lot of the activity in more niche communities and the sheer volume of posts/comments compared to Reddit. That’s the biggest downside. Still, you also lose the incessant ads/bad UI/UX decisions and ever accelerating late stage capitalism driven enshittification so that’s a big plus.
However, due to the smaller size you do lose a lot of the activity in more niche communities and the sheer volume of posts/comments compared to Reddit.
That also leads to a lack of diversity of opinions.
Same as reddit when it was new.
I’d actually say Lemmy feels larger over the same timeframe, but that’s just sticking my thumb up in the air sort of measurement.
The problem with growth is that too much, and it ends up trolls and bots making up the majority, and too little growth means it withers on the vines.
With federation (and the ability to defederate), I think the ideal ground can be found. We’ll see though!
Part of the difference I see on Lemmy is that there can be multiples of the same topic area being discussed on different instances with no connection between them and no straightforward method of determining which instance will have the more active discussion.
Usually the number of monthly active users for the comment is a good indication
Active subscriber count should be the more active one, but I agree.
Ideally we’d have native multi a communities right now, so I could see all of my subscribed Linux communities in my Linux multi, all of my subscribed ttrpg in the ttrpg multi, etc.
Definitely an improvement that could be in place. I think letting the user combine the groups to see would be best, because then you can group how you’d like. Having multiple communities with similar topics is no different than reddit, but reddit has multis.
i think there’s plenty diversity outside of .world
That’s part of the issue. There’s a hundred instances that each have their own version of most of the subs, and none of them can see each other without users having to find and follow each of them, or at least look at them to find the most active 2 or 3.
Yeah, I love it and actually prefer it to my old reddit experience for general browsing.
What isn’t quite there yet is the ability to like, sit down all day and scroll and post in a community dedicated to my current hyperfixation of the week. Be it guitar maintenance, some indie game, or whatever.
But reddit also didn’t have that when I started using it. Excited to hang here and watch the garden grow
“can’t scroll all day”
I keep saying that’s a positive thing for other productivity, but sadly, that’s not happening for me. Turns out, I want to sit and bum just as much as I always did before. I’m more likely to actually read articles, but I know meta gets more screen time now. As you said, lemmy doesn’t have those full niche communities. I know, sacrilege to admit around here.
I know, sacrilege to admit around here.
It’s not, but we also try to promote active communities to a wider audience on [email protected]
Is there also something like m.lemmy.world/posts/lemmy.world/c/upcomingcommunities ?
But reddit also didn’t have that when I started using it.
reddit also didn’t have to compete with reddit.
Some of us old folks remember when it had to compete with Digg.
A far more popular competitor that made some unpopular decisions and lost their user base to reddit.
Wasn’t reddit competing with Digg, or whatever else was popular at the time?
I came to reddit from fark, before the digg migration or exodus or whatnot. There was also stumbleupon, and the others are all lost to me.
No but it was competing with Digg and Slashdot until Digg screwed the pooch. It’s been a while, but reddit really owes its size and popularity to Digg 2.0 and the fiasco of bad decisions driven by investors.
I’m talking mostly about the vibrant niche communities the comment above mentioned. That all happened well after the Digg and slashdot stuff. Niche communities grew on reddit relatively unchallenged.
Sure, reddit could have a similar meltdown to Digg, but I don’t think it’s a forgone conclusion. Social media has inertia. The bigger a platform is is the harder it is to lose people, because the mass is the feature.
I’m sure this gets repeated on Lemmy all the time, but I feel like the quality of Reddit posts, even in niche communities about guitar maintenance or whatever, has really gone downhill in the past 10 years or so.
This might come off as mean, but I’ve noticed a significant dumbing-down in terms of what people contribute to Reddit communities but also what people expect to be spoon-fed by those communities. And it’s all presented as this sort of democratization of hobbyist knowledge, where it’s every hobbyist’s duty to educate newcomers on all of the absolute basics and persuade them of why they should care about any of it.
Maybe this is just a side effect of Reddit recommending subreddits to non-subscribers and pushing to become a Facebook-type service for “regular” people - after all, that’s how they make the line go up.
I still prefer old-school forums, which tend to be more insular, less accessible, and expect you to arrive with a modicum of understanding or at least RTFM first. To be blunt, I miss the days when the internet was primarily for geeks.
There’s also a wide and endlessly customizable variety of web/mobile clients, something reddit will apparently never have again.
e: Federation is pretty cool, too.
Not yet but its getting there.
It’s the only site with a similar post/comment structure and a large enough user base to be viable, so in that regard, it’s the only alternative. Culturally, it’s much different. It’s far more left-leaning and hasn’t fallen victim to the same salf-importance and group-think that Reddit users have. It also doesn’t have the same wealth of knowledge Reddit built up over 20 years, though, and it’s prone to petty infighting between communities and instances (and even admins).
Ultimately, I prefer it to Reddit, and never feel the urge to go back. I’m not convinced that Federation is a silver bullet for all of social media’s ills, but I think Lemmy is an interesting project, and I’m interested in seeing how it develops.
Lemmy is an improvement over Reddit in terms of its business structure. We don’t yet know what the downsides will be of decentralized social media at scale, but we know that it beats a tech company that went from venture capital to publicly traded while already deep in enshittification.
Lemmy is not an improvement over Reddit in terms of design: it’s designed the exact same way, so it has the same set of advantages and disadvantages.
The improvement in community is hard to guesstimate, and will change as the site grows. Aside from the company, it was often the users that made Reddit suck, and Lemmy is completely capabe of sucking in the exact same ways.
Well ever since reddit died it’s the best thing around.
deleted by creator
The on-the-fly meme-making by the Trekkies is positively inspiring.
i like the fact that it is not karma driven. like vote on me like you want i don’t look at my karma and care at all how people react
Partially. I think it’s a good drop in replacement for:
- Anything technology oriented, from software to hardware to what different open source projects are up to, to what tech corporations are doing, and various discussions around ecosystems (the internet itself, specific services like Discord or Reddit or LinkedIn, app stores, social networking, etc.)
- Funny memes or other humor
It’s got pretty good coverage of certain topics:
- Politics, at least on specific sub topics
- Science and specific scientific disciplines
It has a few pockets that work for very specific things:
- Specific TV show or movie franchises (looking at you, Star Trek)
- ADHD or neurodivergent support/advice
- Noncredible Defense is actually here. Love it.
And it’s just missing a bunch of things I loved on Reddit:
- Sports, especially the unique culture of the NBA subreddit
- Other specific interests in television, film, music, or other cultural interests.
- Local things in specific cities
- Finance and economics stuff
- Lots of specific interests/hobbies are missing, or just aren’t as active.
- Advice/support for career/work life, especially specific careers (in my case, the legal industry and life as a lawyer)
- Advice/support relating to personal relationships, from parenting to dating to very specific support forums for things like divorce or cancer. Even what does exist here is disproportionately neurodivergent, so the topics of focus seem to be pretty different than what would be discussed in other places.
I used to think it was better than reddit, but I hate to say it, I’ve started to notice facebook meme communities jump onboard. Science memes is amazing and isn’t affected (it seems to be all unique posts I’d never seen), but once those facebook repost meme communities jump onboard, you’re going to end up with all the people that makes facebook rubbish too unfortunately.
I’ve already seen an increase in dumb car meme posts which get reposted 3000x on Facebook (which brings along the same toxic anti-science people). We’re already seeing an increase in people who don’t seem to have much common sense
I want a community which is science and fact oriented, and I’m growing increasingly concerned that as we grow, we’re moving away from that.
But for now, its still awesome in comparison imho (last I looked, many reddit communities were overrun by nutjobs after the mods all left)
You might want to move your account over to mander.xyz and then browse mostly by Local rather than All or Subscribed.
In large measure what you are describing is considered by most people to be harmless - although it is actually not harmless at all.
Anyway, the good news is that this aspect is mainly “contained” within the communities that actually want that. As opposed to e.g. Facebook where it is everywhere (one presumes - I left it even before the pandemic).
There is an ENORMOUS amount of diversity on the Fediverse, more so than anywhere else I’ve seen, and nothing at all like Reddit unless you count the small niche communities, but even there… anytime a post would hit r/all people would comment like “brace yourself, the trolls are coming!”, plus people in those niche subs would browse all and become tainted by it.
I was one of them. I started noticing how defensive my posture was getting, and becoming more snarky, and then even doing that irl at work. Therefore I left Reddit. I almost left Lemmy too, but I refuse to be that way. Us olds (or maybe you aren’t old and instead only mature - or at least talk as if you are haha! 😂) know that we can touch grass and read books - social media is a privilege, not a “right”, and not mandatory for my existence (although it is nice to keep up with things, other than having to use e.g. Google News, so I would have had to investigate finding a good RSS reader).
Reddit started to devolve when the “kids” came in and drowned out all the longer-form, more in-depth discussions involving actual facts, and replaced them instead with “I know you are but what am I?”, “^This”, “I also choose this guy’s wife”, etc. Which don’t get me wrong - humor has its place in the world, it’s just that when here are TENS or even HUNDREDS of such comments, IN A ROW, and they get upvoted whereas someone who writes a longer response gets actively downvoted, plus receives demeaning replies (“hey, tell it to someone who cares <expletive>”), that is when I decided to quit Reddit. Whether I stay here or leave this too, I will not go back to Reddit. Or Facebook.
And most of that I blame the platforms for encouraging people to talk while actively discouraging them from listening. Notice that ads appear between posts, but not between comments, hence they encourage - with their UI elements and such - people posting. One example is how poor their internal search functionality is - oh well, it’s easier just to post my question than to search for an answer. Another example is restricting pinned posts to merely 2 - when they could easily allow like 5 or 10 or something, especially if they allow a folder system. And then even the pinned posts would only show up as being pinned under certain conditions, which users of an app may not see. Omg and don’t even get me started on their official app… 🤮
On Lemmy, it is possible to have good conversations. Make liberal use of the block button to curate what you don’t want though, bc moderation is in short supply, and what is there tends to be heavily biased, so e.g. a person behaving as a dick to someone else is likely to do so to you sometime later, so consider your future self’s mental health as a priority:-).
We’re already seeing an increase in people who don’t seem to have much common sense. I want a community which is science and fact oriented
Common sense is incompatible with science. Science is about testing our fundamental assumptions, assuming nothing.
Well. Common sense is common sense because it can easily be disproven.
Is water an effective alternative to Soda Pop? yes i’d like to think so
The strength of many reddit communities is in the people themselves, and unless you’re really into Linux or star trek, the people aren’t really here.
Okay but also… they aren’t there (Reddit) either, anymore. Who knows where they went - possibly nowhere, or switched to lurking (either here or there), or X, or Mastodon, or Bluesky, or just nowhere.
I almost dropped off of social media altogether myself, after making the mistake of replying to a comment in Chapotraphouse and another in lemmygrad.ml. Sometimes silence is significantly better than having to put up with toxicity.
Aka some of us choose the bear
And the rest are tired of moderating against those onslaughts.
As a tool for forming communities, Lemmy’s mechanics work just fine.
But the process of federation - combined with the prickly nature of certain administrators - means you can have a lively and robust community in (hypothetically) the far-left transgender tankie community that pioneered the application. But then that gets abruptly cut off and squelched in a more popular forum by some late adopters who hate their politics more than they enjoy their technical savvy.
Lemmy.world has a bunch of memes and political screeching because that’s the kind of user its admins choose to encourage. Other communities have more practical interests. But they don’t draw the same kind of crowd, so you won’t see them on the front page of this site, particularly if you only browse Local.
Lemmy.world has a bunch of memes and political screeching because that’s the kind of user its admins choose to encourage.
How are the admins encouraging these users specifically? I have not noticed this, but I have been blocking most politics and meme communities for a while.
The idea behind federation is great but in practice it’s splintered communities far too much to serve its purpose at a large scale.
They’re an idea that big forums are actually awful and you’re better off in smaller communities.
Mostly, it’s a pain because it can be hard to find some escoteric bit of knowledge or expertise when you don’t have a Reddit sized forum to troll through.
But that’s where spaces like Discord excel. Nice, tight communities of hobbyists and specialists who are routinely online and regularly churning out useful content.
Looking for information on Discord can be quite tedious
Not yet but i hope soon. I started to like lemmy
Welcome here, first time I see your instance, seems nice
Depends on what you mean “effective.”
The structure is very similar, and on the surface, it works about the same way. So in that sense, yes.
The lack of centralization improves on reddit - no authoritarian rule-making, no limitation of content by the laws of a single country, etc. - but also adds flaws. The biggest one is the potential for redundant groups on different servers, but also a concern is the potential for someone taking down their server and leaving the users high and dry. (I don’t know exactly what happens to the content in this case, but that could be another issue.)
Practically speaking though, it is not a meaningful replacement for reddit because it is lacking content. I browse “all”, and get fewer total posts that I saw on reddit on my 20 or so subscribed subreddits alone.
Community is the key. Community is what made reddit, and lemmy doesn’t have a developed community. Yet. We can get there, and then discover what other problems with the platform are.
I feel like the decentralization brings some downsides in the quantity of bad actors, extremist views, and the like.
The open platform certainly has an overwhelming advantage over Reddit in other ways, but there seems to be a higher number of trolls, shitheads, wackos, etc and in some cases entire instances dedicated to them.
While these people get banned on Reddit, Lemmy hasn’t yet solved this moderation issue; user accounts are basically disposable and moderation is super distributed, so it’s easy to abuse.
Heres the thing, this is what huamns are. A shithead may be a shithead to one but a golden god to another. A truly open forum will reflect that. Moderation effectively splits different views and both can thrive without interaction with one another (echo chambers). I personally dont mind extremist views because it reminds me they exist and I am of sound mind to ignore them. However, I know not everyone is and I know the dangers of letting extremest views go unchallenged. I doubt technology can help us cover both fronts (open forum of ideas without echo chambers). Education can probably do a lot more. We need to be better humans, accepting of others and critical of ideas instead of people.
higher number of trolls, shitheads, wackos, etc
That’s because they’re actual humans and not 95% bots like Reddit.
Defederation is pretty effective
