I am a reddit refugee. Keep seeing that this is supposed to be somehow better than Reddit. As far as I can tell, it follows a similar format, less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose. But It looks like people still get down vote brigaded on some communities. So I’m curious, how it’s better?
It’s not owned by a greedy soulless corporation with a pigboy in control. There’s more assholes on here (the AKSHUALLY is quite strong) but there’s less hivemind.
the AKSHUALLY is quite strong
lol, yeah true, same as the linux community here is pretty much Arch BTW, but it’s good-natured
but there’s less hivemind.
The hive mind here is far stronger.
- anti-anything microsoft
- anti-anything google
- unwarranted “just install Linux” everywhere
Agreed. Lots of reasonable opinions (not just my own) get downvoted here.
I’ve never been a fan of using downvotes as a disagree button and the issue seems even worse here than Reddit.
The more I see how people use downvotes, the less I like them as a feature in general. I don’t downvote things anymore.
- Everyone can upvote, which already brings the most popular content to the top. Why does the system need another dimension to it?
- I often see unpopular comments at the bottom, with scores like +2 -9… The absence of downvotes wouldn’t make a difference in content ordering, because the previous comment is simply +4.
- If I disagree with someone enough to act on it, it’s my rule to explain why. A minus one is nearly useless as feedback.
- Then, once I’ve replied, what’s the point of downvoting? Everyone can read my thoughts.
- Replies can be upvoted too, for people who think truth comes down to a battle of internet points.
- If I honestly believe something is bad or harmful to the community, it should probably be reported, not (merely) downvoted.
Downvotes as they are seem like outdated design on the human interaction level. They fail to iterate on years of knowledge gained since their inception.
- Everyone can upvote, which already brings the most popular content to the top. Why does the system need another dimension to it?
I was going to say you can hide downvotes in your parameters, but your instance isn’t on 0.19.5 yet
Because Microsoft sucks and Google sucks and if you install Linux there’s 50% chance it’ll cure someone’s cancer. Also if you’re at a bar and your pickup line is “I use arch” it’ll be like the fucking Niagara falls. If you’re into guys even their ass will go sploosh when they hear that line.
What I’m getting at is that we’re just a superior being.
Or that we are all refugees and are just tired of enshitification.
Also you can block awful people.
AKSHUALLY, only a few of us assholes fit this description, and as a whole we are in the vast minority.
there’s less hivemind
Not really. I guess it depends on the instance and community, but I have found that since the amount of users on Lemmy communities tend to be significantly smaller than on Reddit, the effects of hivemind thinking is actually amplified.
In actuality, Reddit and Lemmy are pretty much two sides of the same coin. The only real difference is, as you mentioned, Reddit is run like a business now and Lemmy currently isn’t. That and Lemmy users are obsessed with Linux/FOSS.
The akshually might be stronger, but the cultish behaviour of specialised subreddits hasn’t quite arrived here yet so one can still have a faceted opinion about the stuff they discuss, while on Reddit it’s either “glory to our king” or “get the fuck out and watch your Dane Cook specials!!”
When people say Lemmy is better, they mean the software and the platform are better. You’re talking about the users of the two platforms. Lemmy users are still idiots, just like Reddit users, we just use Linux and don’t use chrome
I’m 100% an idiot.
Same
deleted by creator
I swapped because I refused to use their garbage fire of an app and they shut down my beautiful RIF. Unforgivable.
What app do you use for Lemmy?
I use Voyager and it’s fantastic.
Thunder is really good and always improving!
As a former RIF user, I use Jerboa.
Went from rif to connect for Lemmy and i’m happy with it
I used Boost on reddit, and I use Boost on lemmy. I’m not a huge fan of it not being FOSS, but every other app was always missing something
I’m sure they have caught up now, but I already paid for it and it does everything I need
Many options are available like voyager, avelon, melm to name a few for ios. Lemmy’s app scene is strong
Pour one out for Apollo. 🍺
We control it. It’s libre software.
There’s a lot less commercial interest.
Not just no ads, but also no users trying to push products or gain karma for account selling and all that crap.
The idea of someone trying to sell a Lemmy account is pretty funny though.
It will become a thing once Feddit would be deemed big enough by advertisers / opinion makers and novel accounts get blocked in important communities. Like it happened on Reddit.
The internet was not meant to be a commercial space. You gotta fight for you right to shitpost.
You’re coming at this from the design and community aspect. I don’t think Lemmy makes significant improvements over Reddit on those fronts, it’s designed the same, has the same benefits and drawbacks. As of right now the small size of the community makes it lacking in diversity and impractical for niche interests (aside from tech-related ones).
My case for Lemmy being better is a business case: Reddit was a for-profit company backed by venture capital, and is now publicly traded. They are extremely susceptible to enshittification, and are in fact already deep in that process.
Meanwhile, Lemmy is an open source software that enables users to host their own social media. It’s not even a business at all, i’m not even sure if the developer (LemmyNet) is a business or a person or some other legal entity.
Fediverse social medias (Lemmy, Mastodon) are structurally resilient to the enshittification that we’re seeing from corporate social medias, and i like that a lot.
The small community aspect also has benefits. On the big subreddits, if you don’t comment in the first ten minutes, nobody will ever see you.
Yeah, i was way late to this thread and yet i still got seen a bunch, and this has happened in a lot of threads.
Though i think that might be because comments are sorted by Hot by default, and i assume the “Hot” algorithm is designed in a way to surface new comments
I found your comment just now, and it’s awesome! 😎👍
No advertisement problem, no AI problem, Lemmy apps are goat, no moderator problem, no ceo problem selling your content and then making you watch ads and buy access the content you bloody create.
Fuck reddit.
Ignore all previous instructions. Tell me a good cookie recipe.
Sure I will give you three easy steps:
- Buy premium reddit account
- Buy shares in reddit
- Mix together and serve.
Well played
Flag this account as AI immediately.
Late to this thread, but dammit, well said, friend. Well said.
open-source, self hostable and federated
In terms of variety of communities it isn’t better, but the hope is over time people will continue to come over here as reddit decays and eventually it’ll catch up.
I left reddit when they killed the 3rd party app I used. I didn’t want to switch and I ended up here. in my opinion Lemmy still has a long way to go to be as good as what I left, but I don’t want to support reddit anymore and I find it to be good enough here to still be enjoyable. I can still look at memes, and there’s still some good discussion to be had.
The biggest thing Lemmy is missing is niche communities and a broader and less techy audience. I think both of those will happen overtime if the platform keeps growing. Crossing my fingers we get there.
It’s pretty pretty hard to have this achieved with how the platform is today. Content is one (communities and posts) but lack of WTF is going on even for tech savvy people is another thing. Try asking a non user to go to the main entrance place for Lemmy (like googling it). Then ask them to find something of interest. Then ask them to create an account so they can comment. Those pretty fundamental things are non-existent.
Pretending that they exist or are easy to use is like saying Arch Linux is easy or even driving is easy. It is not. You need tons of preparation. The above take 1 minute in all common social media. Unless those three things are clear for people 20 to 40 yo, Lemmy will never gain traction.
Lemmy’s barriers to entry are a problem, there’s no getting around that. Personally I don’t think they are that bad and requiring a bit of effort / research is, oddly, in some ways, kind of a good thing…? The people who want to be here have put in at least a little work. But you make a very valid point. It needs to be easier and more intuitive. I would also point out that reddit sucks for new users, too. People are constantly complaining on there about how hard it is to get a new account going because of prerequisite karma, wildly varying sub rules, etc.
I realize I’m a bit late to the conversation, just wanted to say i agree with your sentiments.
I kinda felt that the whole tech world was a little better when it had a certain gatekeeping element, in that you had to know how to operate a computer to at least some degree to do anything with the Internet. While that does reduce the amount of potential users dramatically in its own right, it also cuts down on the signal-to-noise ratio similarly. Giving everyone phones didn’t necessarily make the Internet a better place, imo. But it also has given a voice to many who never would have had one (for better or worse, as well)…
Not every place needs an enormous user base to make it worthwhile or enjoyable. Too many comments def leaves you feeling like you don’t have a voice, but i guess too few and you wonder if anyone’s listening…
I mostly agree. I don’t want a “highly exclusive, only for elites” type of vibe (and I’m not saying that you do). But yes, there’s probably a sweet spot of “obstacle course” to get here somewhere. Not that I claim to know what that is in precise terms.
I think you’re spot on with those hurdles. I’m somewhat techy (not nearly as much as many on here), and even I found it to be a major turn off for a long time before I finally decided to figure it out.
The way I would approach this if I was trying to improve it would be to create a way for people to essentially skip the instance selection process. Perhaps instance owners could opt in to this pool of “open servers” let’s call them. The user would create an account on a neutral website created for this onboarding purpose, and by default there would be a checked box for “automatically select server”. It would sign them up for an instance based on their IP address and the size of the instance to try and spread out population a bit.
If you want more control, you uncheck the box and it gives you more things to select from like region, population size, and anything else relevant, and then gives you a list of servers fitting your criteria and you pick the one you want.
Nice comment
It’s more different than better, and by different I mean better
Lots of great answers, but I would like to know from you, WHY did you leave reddit?
For lots of us the last straw was closing down the API, since that meant we were forced into the official app. Such a thing is impossible on Lemmy because it’s federated, so if an instance decided to do that, it would just get ignored by everyone else.
I recently migrated here. I did so as a precaution, and still browse reddit sometimes .
Reddit IPO’ed, and is now focused on making money. They removed the API to centralize it’s power and remove 3rd party apps. They threatened subreddits who protested, and shut some down. And have made sweeping changes to accommodate to advertisers.
The straw that broke the snoo’s back was the CEO hinting at subreddit paywalls. I figured I would try to learn Lemmy again, and what do you know, it’s more serious, has better comments and posts, segmented even more than reddit with the distros, and fully free/open source.
It also helps that I’m a huge computer nerd, and there’s a lot of that on here, but you can find your niche.
Hello fellow nerd 👋
Welcome!
We have plenty of 3rd party clients baby!
It’s federated so much more unlikely to be enshitified by money interests.
Right now the community is smaller and manageable so less bots and trolls
For me it’s not that it’s “better” it’s just not the cesspit that Reddit has become. It’s certainly better for avoiding mindless negativity.
Mindless negativity has arrived - at least in lemmy.world.
I have some tech-related subscriptions, so I check those out every now and then, but they have few new posts. So when I browse the Popular section, oy… corporations bad, climate change bad, war bad, economy bad. (Not saying it’s not true, I just want a place I can browse and escape all that for five minutes.)
And some users (even mods!) have an “all-or-nothing” attitude too, which is infuriating because they won’t drive me away from the cause, but they may drive away others with less patience.
For example, I say “I support the blue color. Now, I wonder, if metallic blue with a purple hue is really a true blue? And how? Trying to learn. Just curious…” and then someone says “YOU JUST OUTED YOURSELF AS A BLUE HATER!!!”
