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.
Well ever since reddit died it’s the best thing around.
Lemmy is the Linux of reddits
I’ve started a few subreddits and not had much engagement. I started a really niche community here and had someone posting to it within hours. Yes, fewer users, but the ones that are here seem to be more willing to engage.
Short answer is No. It suffers from many of the same issues of echo chamber, bias, and bullying. Just on a somewhat smaller scale due to fewer users. And never forget - Winter is coming. There will be a time in the future the bots will notice lemmee and come for it also.
But I suspect this is all a human thing. We are a contentious bunch at best and down right hateful at worst. We build communities only to poison and kill them in the end.
Welcome here!
Copy pasting from a recent thread on /r/RedditAlternatives trying to address usual criticism against Lemmy.
Federation is confusing, people want a single website they can go to
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Go to https://lemm.ee/
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Have a look around, see if the content and the formatting is appealing to you, register an account if you want to be able to curate your feed further
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Go to https://lemm.ee/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world to see communities (equivalent of subs) that might be interesting to you.
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Use Voyager as a mobile app: https://www.lemmyapps.com/Voyager. When they ask for your “instance”, use “lemm.ee”
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If you want more choices for apps, have a look at https://www.lemmyapps.com/
Email has been working on a federation model for decades. People have to remember if they use Gmail or Outlook, but that’s it. It’s similar here.
Several communities have the same name, it’s confusing, active communities are hard to find
Reddit has a similar issue: you have /r/games as the main gaming community, but there is also /r/Gaming, /r/videogames /r/gamers, etc.
How does someone know what the main community is, whatever the platform? Looking at the number of subscribers and active members.
There was the example of beekeeping: if you search for that topic, the most active one is definitely https://mander.xyz/c/beekeeping with 97 users per month.
The others have barely 1 user: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=beekeeping
To find active communities: https://lemm.ee/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world. There are regular threads with active communities on topic such as gardening, movies, board games, anime, science, etc.
Who is going to pay for the server costs?
Here is a link to this question to Lemmy admins: https://lemm.ee/post/41577902
Summary of the answers:
- lowest number so far: lemmy.ml with 0.03€ per user per month
- a few others (feddit.uk, lemmy.zip) have around 0.11$ per user per month
- some instances are running on infrastructure that the admins would be anyway, so it’s virtually “free”
Most of the instances costs are paid using donations. They regularly post financial updates such as this one: https://lemm.ee/post/41235568
Obviously there is a sweet stop where you can minimize the cost by having the maximum number of users on a fixed infrastructure cost.
If you want to have a look at the number of monthly active user (the “MAU” column): https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/
Anyway, $ per user is usually meaningless because most of the servers are small enough to be hosted on some random cheap server - adding more users doesn’t cost more because they are still well below server capacity. Only the biggest servers have to worry about $ per user.
I had posted this earlier this week on this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fiuuo5/how_much_does_it_cost_per_user_to_host_a_lemmy/
There is too much political content
You can block entire servers and specific communities.
Instances to block to avoid political content
Communities to block
- https://lemmy.world/c/news
- https://lemmy.world/c/politics
- https://lemmy.world/c/world
- https://lemmy.ml/c/worldnews
- https://lemmy.ml/c/usa
With those blocked, you are avoiding 95% of the political content. There might be a few other communities that pop up, but blocking them is still one click away.
Lemmy is developped by hardcore tankies and I don’t want to use their software
As Lemmy is federated using an open protocol, there are other options to connect to the communities without using Lemmy itself.
The first one is Piefed: https://piefed.social/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world
The other one is Mbin: https://fedia.io/m/newcommunities@lemmy.world
However, those are stil a bit less mature than Lemmy, so for instance if you want to use mobile apps a lot, Lemmy is a better choice.
On top of that, every Lemmy server is managed by different people. You can see regular criticism of lemmy.ml (the instance managed by the Lemmy devs) on threads such as this: https://lemm.ee/post/33872586 or even dedicated communities like https://lemm.ee/c/meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works
That shows that even the Lemmy devs are not protected from criticism.
There isn’t enough people
Lemmy has 46k monthly active users (https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats) (Mbin and Piefed have around 800 each). Active user is someone who voted, posted or commented.
In comparison, Discuit, which was praised during the API shutdown as “easier to use as it’s centralized” has 234 active users: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/KdiI1akq. Not 234k, 234 total.
For obvious reasons, the activity is not going to match Reddit levels, and niche communities aren’t there.
But it’s not an all or nothing situation. Most people on Lemmy still use Reddit for their niche communities, but are also active on Lemmy. And some niche communities are getting more active on lemmy. https://lemm.ee/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world (!newcommunities@lemmy.world ) promotes them.
Also, having less people provides better interactions, as your comments are less likely to get buried in thousands of others. And bots on Lemmy are quickly spotted and banned, while Reddit doesn’t seem to do much about that: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1fmcelm/askreddit_is_simply_over_run_with_bots/
Because everyone at this point uses Gmail, I prefer to use phone networks as my analogy go to, as usually most people know others with a different carrier
Outlook is still strong, especially for companies using Microsoft, but indeed phone carriers work too.
Why are you actively against lemmy.world?
On Reddit you list several alternative instances, and you somehow left us out.
LW is already the largest community by far, to a point where geographically distant communities cannot stay synchronized
That is a software problem, I thought you guys were all computer experts.
If world wasn’t so big, it would have probably not even been noticed, now it is hopefully getting fixed with the next update, if I understood that right.
Federation works waaay better than when the big reddit influx happened, that was kinda disappointing and I’m glad Lemmy will be prepared better for the next wave.
It’s also a governance problem as well.
If a billionaire buys LW tomorrow for a few millions because they host most of the Lemmy active communities and users, and prevent instance migration overnight, how many users are going to go through the hassle of creating new accounts from scratch, create new communities? That could kill the platform, with the LW starting to show ads and only being compatible with an enshitiffied app, so most users would probably go back to Reddit.
Also, there has been some concerning behaviour from LW mods, which know they can just go with it as people are already on their communities and are not going to move: https://lemmy.world/post/20947890?scrollToComments=true
If a billionaire buys LW tomorrow
lol that is a new one.
concerning behaviour from LW mods
Would you look at that, a mod of a big community for heated discussion said or did something that people took offence to. Surely must be the instance’s fault, would not happen anywhere else.
Fair. I don’t agree with most of your points, but you make a good argument.
I still think we over prioritize decentralization. Federation is important, but’s not a primary feature to be sold to users. It’s not because we need a thousand instances. It’s so that if Gmail gets too enshittified that we have another email option.
World is where the activity is, and you do a reasonable job of balancing that.
World is where the activity is, and you do a reasonable job of balancing that.
It depends.
!movies@lemm.ee is more active than !movies@lemmy.world in monthly active users.Same for !showsandmovies@lemm.ee and !television@lemmy.world, which also doesn’t have any moderator besides bot accounts.
!movies@lemm.ee is more active than !movies@lemmy.world in monthly active users.
You are doing a good job there, also with advertising the community, but I’ll say again that the world community looks more healthy to me, it’s a variety of different users posting there, while the ee one consists half of emperors and your effort to try and force this, actually it is only three topics that have been created by non moderators on the first page.
How does someone know what the main community is, whatever the platform? Looking at the number of subscribers and active members.
I don’t disagree but this is also kind of sad. We’re just recreating the same issue on Reddit of “definitive” subreddits controlled by whichever moderators were there first, and once a mass of people settles there, it becomes virtually impossible for smaller alternatives to grow.
You’re also basically just telling people to go to whichever community happens to be on Lemmy.world. Which means centralization on one instance, which is the opposite of how this place was sold.
Edit: Ignore the double comment.
I’m not
!movies@lemm.ee is more active than !movies@lemmy.world in monthly active users.
Same for !showsandmovies@lemm.ee and !television@lemmy.world, which also doesn’t have any moderator besides bot accounts.
!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com definitely outclasses any other piracy community
!greentext@sh.itjust.works is the most active for green text
!map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz is the best community for maps
About mods power tripping, you can have a look at !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com . I reported there an example which shows that you can create a better community over a power tripping mod.
deleted by creator
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The userbase is too small for now. But I hope more people start coming over from Steve Huffman’s hellhole.
Platform-wise, it’s already proven that it’s a viable alternative (with some advantages even - the federated nature for one), but content-wise, it has A LOT to catch up (because let’s be honest - in addition to all the bullshit and toxic people, Reddit has tons of useful information and good people still).
Well, I deleted my r account the day they fucked over the app developers. Been here since, so I guess it’s a decent alternative. Not as much current content and it’s 90% politics on the front page… That can be filtered out though.
The militant Linux missionaries though, they get blocked. They show up in most tech threads and it got old a year ago.
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)
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?
Everyone’s experiences will be different. There is hate everywhere, and here too. It doesn’t feel worse to me then anywhere else, so that’s already pretty great in my book.
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.
I was a 15 year Reddit veteran and modded a couple dozen communities over there. I’ve moved over here with no regrets. The only thing that takes me back to Reddit is search results, and that’s getting less and less as more people have abandoned it and deleted comments.
The amount of bots there now is astounding. It’s making me believe in the Dead Internet Theory.
Yes for me it’s absolutely a viable alternative. It’s still small and that has pros and cons. The overall quality of discourse is high because it’s a fairly hip crowd that has found Lemmy and joined. Feels more like the early days of the social web, before social media shat the bed. But being small has cons too. Some communities just aren’t here, and a lot of the ones here are small and less active. But there’s absolutely a viable base here that can grow over time. I’m glad that the internet figured this out because we were too dependent on Reddit before - it had totally consumed all concepts of online community and that was okay before the enshittification got into high gear. Lemmy from its inception is structurally designed not to go down that path. So spend time here. Share it. Help it grow. Start a niche sub and feed it.
I personally think it’s a ton better. The platform is a bit less mature, but the people are much nicer and the filtering/blocking is lightyears ahead
And you can say fuck without being auto banned or something. Not a big thing but sometimes it’s nice to not have to sugarcoat everything.
Fuck yeah!
I wanted to ironically say something mean to you, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it :(
I’m autistic, I would’ve thanked you for the compliment
No. Reddit has a userbase that allows it to be all things to everyone.
Lemmy has a userbase that allows it to be a pretty good linux disscussion forum.
Once you venture away from technology, its crickets. There’s a community here specifically for the Cleveland Guardians. It’s dead quiet. The Guardians are even in the ALDS right now…granted they’re down 0-2 in the best of 7 series…but the ONLY post since they started the playoffs, is me asking why the community was so dead. That topic has 0 replies despite being posted days ago. On reddit, I wouldn’t have even needed to make that post, because there would be topics on almost every minute thing the Guardians have done right, and wrong, since the playoffs began.
And then I’d get heckled for saying that Ketchup is the hot dog derby champion. Now and forever! But on here? Nothin…
Start posting updates for your team. Even if it’s lonely talking to an empty room. Try to post a couple times a week with news or trivia or… old players new restaurants or whatever they do when they retire. We’re so little here that we can’t afford to lurk. Be the content you want to see.
Or post to the sports community rather than a specific team
Update: WE NEED TO BEAT THE YANKEES!!!
I’m almost completely indifferent to sports, but fuck the Yankees.
Yeah all of my hobbies are ghost towns here. I don’t care about Linux, US politics or Communism so I filtered them out. Now all that’s left is general interest posts and AI generated porn.
It seems to be sport dependent, I just opened !cfb@fanaticus.social and stumbled upon a 120 comments thread from 5 days ago: https://fanaticus.social/post/4293058
You can probably post about this on !mlb@lemmy.ml, it seems the most active baseball community.
I was a Reddit veteran for years, I hate Reddit now and don’t use it mostly due to getting random permabans. Lemmy functions well - much better than that dog shit site Reddit, but it’s not there yet in terms of communities and activity. There is very little local/regional activity that I miss most from Reddit. Overall, it’s effective in the technical sense, but content-wise it is still a very small fraction of what Reddit is unfortunately. And I am not confident it ever will be a true replacement. Will also add that Lemmy is EXTREMELY FAR LEFT, to a disturbing point. If you are a centrist, you will be silenced.
