For me, it’s a few things.
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A way to burn time that doesn’t feel like a digital sugar rush.
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Support, camaraderie, and kindness, primarily from /r/stopdrinking.
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Niche stuff, like ideas for local hiking and backpacking trips, propaganda posters, and kayaking info.
I love the communities for my hobbies. I hope they will be just as active as on reddit.
Same here! Crossing my fingers hard and commenting and posting way more than I did for years on Reddit.
I have to say that I totally agree with the notion of looking for something that isn’t. ‘digital sugar rush’.
I enjoyed the deeper and harder discussions around politics, theology and philosophy. However, I only ever posted when I had something to add to the conversation as a lot of the subs I was in were modded by experts, and I’m at best an interested layperson.
I think for the moment at least, I need to brave commenting more. I guess we will have to so is we can attract the same experts to this platform, and get the same level of discussion.
thank you! that’s how we gonna make this work
I think I need to find communities that were closer to what I subbed on reddit before I post. I mostly liked meme subs and a lot of the main communities aren’t fragmented enough yet for me to post memes on specific shoes/movies/gnaew I like yet. But I’ve been commenting a lot! ✊🏾
It’s going to take time. Reddit took many years to develop that level of niche communities. We’ve got a really nice surge of momentum right now, so it makes it easier to keep commenting when everything is exciting and growing. But when we do have a lull in activity, try to keep that same energy and stay active. I’m also commenting like 10x more than I used to in Reddit.
It’s important to enjoy the journey, right now we still don’t have many of the communities we were used to on Reddit, but we do have an environment that is way more positive and hopeful than the jaded feeling of Reddit in 2023. I’m trying not to worry about the niche communities too much and just enjoy the things I couldn’t do on reddit, like poke my head into a wide variety of groups and be welcomed in by other users who are happy to engage. On reddit people were much more hostile to each other by default. As long as we maintain these positive vibes, the communities will organically grow back over time.
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Yeah! I’m all here for that. Feels good to be a part of something like this
This so much. And if you’re thinking of starting a new hobby, there is a sub for it to help you get started. Not only do you have a group of veterans to ask your newb questions to, but lots of them have curated FAQs and starter guides to get you rolling. Reddit honestly improved my life in many ways for this reason.
Hobbies are really the thing. And a source for funny videos. I don’t need the big subreddits for politics and news, much as I tend to get sucked into them, but I do really like having a wide range of subforums for my niche interests. It’s much easier to find someone to talk to about a small tabletop RPG on a large aggregate site than it is to search for sufficiently active independent forums.
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Advice on choosing between two things that are only marginally different.
I’d take the smaller one, but that’s just me.
Hilarious.
Product reviews, restaurant recommendations (regional searches on Reddit for Vacationing/etc was awesome), tourist recommendations - this was the truly useful part of Reddit that will take Lemmy a very long time to catch up to.
I’ll second this one. All the niche communities made me feel like I was connected to the world around me in really organic way. I wasn’t being advertised at, I was experiencing life alongside other people with my shared interests.
The smaller communities for specific interests (music genres, hobbies, etc).
Reviews and opinions. With Google results becoming worse by the hour, fake reviews flooding Amazon, paid reviews in almost every site/blog, when I’m about to purchase something I’m not 100% sure about I just search reddit to see what actual people are saying about it.
And last but not least - mostly sane discussions for news/articles with nested comments and a voting system. Lemmy already offers everything needed for that, what remains to be seen is how the community develops and grows.
A massive search engine registered database containing years of knowledge from millions of people. Its going to be hard to replicate that.
Unless we copy it onto here.
So this is the third time I’ve brought that up. I should probably specify I’m willing to do all the necessary work myself, I just don’t have any money for it.
can you elaborate?
So, there’s people that have used the Reddit API to make basically a backup of it. If I could get a copy of that, I could very likely translate it into something Lemmy can read. Then, I’d go somewhere with protective laws in case Reddit gets involved and set up a special instance that just serves old Reddit content.
Then, to re-use an example from one of my earlier comments here, you could seamlessly go to !SpeculateEvolution@fediverseredditclone.ru and see u/CanadaPlus101’s post about metal and aquatic aliens.
So sort of create a read-only Lemmy instance that re-creates the accounts and posts from archived Reddit?
Exactly!
Oh hey, look, here’s the exact software for doing it already written!
I wonder if someone started this already. It would be great if we can search through old Reddit for collective knowledge even post-Reddit Inc.
The trick is just hosting it. I don’t know how much data that would be. I guess it might not be too bad since it’s just text. Again, if anyone wants to fund it I’ll make it happen. Otherwise we’ll have to wait for the next person to set it up.
amazing circlejerk subs
i’ll miss chicanery the most
u/shittymorph
I know everyone is going to miss shittymorph but I am really going to miss sprog. There was something magical about finding one of his poems buried in a comment chain.
Greatest shitposter I ever knew
Oh gosh yes. I’m really going to miss houseplantcirclejerk and namenerdcieclejerk.
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Recommendations and reviews about everything under the sun from actual users and not sponsored ad reviews.
I’m looking for community engagement without the homogenised superculture. I’d like to be able to discuss books on a small book community without someone jumping in with “I also choose this guy’s dead wife” or “not my proudest fap” because it’s a low effort way of garnering meta-points. I also like the lack of an account-based point system.
So far Lemmy is delivering and so I’m engaging here a lot more actively than I ever did on Reddit.
Exactly, it wasn’t like this before. But the past couple years in every post in every subreddit I keep colapsing the same top comments until I find a decent comment tree with meaningful conversation.
There was also a huge problem with people posting the same comments over and over. After browsing for 10 years you could read the title and assume the top 5 comments.
Comments used to be the best part. So many different opinions, made me say “hmm haven’t thought it that way” but now I just say why bother.
Mainly news. Not just world/region but hobby news.
So far just the world/region news is here, which aren’t particularly great discussions if you’re trying not to get hotheaded.
I liked using r/all to kinda keep tabs on what news what getting lots of attention. I don’t want “all news” - that’ll just upset me. But the big stories rising to the top from the hivemind were helpful
Ironically Reddit mostly became a “filter google bullshit response” site. I miss the community stuff from Reddit of 5 years ago, I think Lemmy is heading in a good direction.
I liked that any time I was interested in any topic I could type it in and get to a community discussing it instantly.
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Distraction
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Discussion
What was good about reddit is that the front page could be interacted with as a quick way to burn some downtime and distract your eyeballs with cute cats or “holdmy____”, or it could be interacted with as a series of rabbit holes that could easily eat up hours of time.
Beyond interacting with content, the discussion around the content was the thing that kept me coming back for 10 years, even after I abandoned Twitter and Facebook years ago.
So far, the fediverse seems like a throwback and an innovation at the same time, and I mean that in the best possible sense.
- Distraction
- Discussion
Nailed it!
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I was mostly on reddit for the information I got from the niche communities I joined. Posts regarding GPU passthrough for virtual machines, the configurations people used, problem solving for those virtual machines, I loved all of it. I only lurked though, very very rarely did I even comment, on here I’m trying to be more active. I’m hoping that as communities grow, I can get the same information I got from the reddit subs I lurked on
I’ll co-sign all of that! Niche stuff is why I was on Reddit.
Fitness for FTM guys, my city’s local page, subs for my dogs’ specific breeds, Jewish cooking. The communities that grew organically in n niche spots brought me a lot of joy.
Also hey! Kayaking! If you know of a Lemmy community for it, I’m game! Always nice to run into other paddlers.
Seconding FTMFitness, but Lemmy doesn’t have an active general fitness community yet, and getting the average trans guy to stop using centralized platforms is like pulling teeth because the knowledge of technology and privacy among trans men is dismal. I gave up on seeing trans men in FOSS and the decentralized web at any large scale after seeing how many of them chose to keep using Twitter despite the Elon Musk protests because the Fediverse is scary.
That’s great stuff! I really hope we can build Lemmy up so that it scratches our niche itch.
There’s an unpopulated kayaking sub I found yesterday: https://lemmy.ml/c/kayaking (Not sure if I’m sharing that link correctly or in a way that makes it easy to navigate.)
I posted a photo yesterday. Would be awesome to help get it off the ground!
try tagging it as !kayaking@lemmy.ml, or @kayaking (this latter one is for users on kbin, mastodon, etc.) for a more fediverse-inclusive link! that way, you’re not sending people to a specific instance
Thank you!
Have you found a Jewish cooking niche here yet? Because I would absolutely be into that! I’m not good at cooking, but one of the few exceptions to that is that I make fantastic challah, and I’m always up for sharing that.
No longer the case on current day reddit, but in the past in the news subreddits, when an article was clickbait one of the top comments would usually point out that it was click bait and why. And that made reddit for me a very useful source to get news from all over the world because it was easy to skip through the biased/clickbait articles.
Then also the specific gaming communities. Lemmy is far to small to have a community for every single game so that’s a big loss for me.
This.
Plus the shitty humor. There was a time when the memes and shit-posts were actually fun (or at least somewhat creative.)
Then the Facebook and Instagram crowd moved in and reddit was reduced to 9gag re-posts and selfies with zero context.
I feel so old writing out those words…
That’s probably how this will end up too if it takes off in the same way Reddit did though.
You either die a 9gag or you live long enough to become a 4chan
I wonder how much interest there is in bringing /u/alternate-source-bot to the news communities/sublemmies/magazines/whatever we are calling them now. I feel like there could be some utility but I haven’t seen any bots in the wild yet, and I don’t want to spam or otherwise overload instances.
