I’m honestly more afraid to offer an opinion or ask a question on Lemmy because there’s always some high and mighty jackass that thinks they are the final authority on whatever topic and rather than have a discussion, people seem to just resort to name calling.

At least, that has been my experience.

Otherwise I’ve enjoyed it. It can be a cool place once you figure out how to block the malcontents.

I think Lemmy has steadily been getting better. For having a good conversation, I think this is the best platform, everyone here seems like actual people I would run into irl.

What I think is still lacking is a way to search up anecdotal evidence on something, that I still heavily rely on reddit for. For instance if I type in google “french press coffee brew time” the only valuable results with the in-depth info I’m looking for are usually youtube videos, which are too long, or reddit threads. So I usually just end up adding site:reddit.com for all those type of search results.

But lemmy is getting good. I could see it replacing some info sources for the more tech-y niches I follow in the near future

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.

It has been growing, but it depends on the community the people who are submitting posts of each community. It also depends on the engagement of the discussion and whether participation decays or is allowed to decay into toxicity.

I think Lemmy could be doing a lot more than Reddit, like showing who votes what, but people want the ability without the responsibility or transparency. It’s ironic because not only is it perfectly visible to the admins, but there are ways you can get a pretty good idea of who’s performing them as a normal . It would help not just in the sense of getting a better idea of why or where someone is coming from and prevent false suspicions, but it would also allow you to keep different groups of users whose recommendations might be something you would like to prioritize over other submissions or whose moderation you’d like to favor over the standard. Abusing the transparency would be easy to denounce and moderate, too.

In regards to the modlog, I don’t think it’s doing enough, the text in the reason field might as well be “word” and the transparency isn’t compensating for the lack of a resolution process that many if not all social networks seem to want to skip. There are still things like no notification of mod actions that affected your comments or your user, and some decisions, like allowing mods to ban you, remove some of your comments while allowing others to remain, shaping or serving a narrative without giving you the ability to delete or edit your contributions while the ban is in place, give foreign instances and communities more power than they should have.

There’s no way to contest modlog actions within the modlog, and the maturity of the people has been proven to be very, very questionable when they’ve been outed. It has also adopted reddit’s policy of obfuscating the moderator performing an action even though creating an alt is easier than ever and many of them already have them, which works against the supposed commitment to transparency.

But it’s very slightly better than reddit’s, and there’s nothing like shadow bans here. Parting observations, don’t feed your carnivore pet vegetables if you aren’t prepared to go all the way to seek and get an approved diet and dietary supplements for a bonafide veterinary, and it’s funny seeing all the anarchy people not have a problem with the present power imbalance between the users and the leadership within the current system, but then again, they have a nice instance with the label.

Overall, fuck spez.

I’m pooping on the toilet right now.

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

Effective? No. Considering the purpose of all internet communities is to grow and have diversity, it’s not effective. Aside from the currently low number of users, the fact that you can have the same community in different instances means a community will never grow large enough. Add to that the “you’re literally killing children if you’re a centrist” people and all the tankies, and what you have here is a leftist circlejerk that will remain small and irelevant enough to suit its need to be an echo chamber without any actual diversity. So maybe it’s effective from that point of view? Idk.

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

• Go to https://lemm.ee/

• 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

• Go to https://lemm.ee/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world to see communities (equivalent of subs) that might be interesting to you.

• Use Voyager as a mobile app: https://www.lemmyapps.com/Voyager. When they ask for your “instance”, use “lemm.ee”

• 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

• https://lemmygrad.ml/
• https://hexbear.net/

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/

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…

An effective alternative in every sense of the word to Reddit? Nope, not by a long shot, but that’s mostly a function of time and general awareness that the platform exists. For now, it’s a great place for better political debate than what Reddit offers, and in general the memes feel more intimate, like you’re viewing something that a lemmy user might have made rather than triple deepfried imgur vomit all over Reddit.

Nah. Lemmy is nothing like Reddit, it’s actually good.

Yeah on Reddit at this point it feels to me by bots for bots. Maybe the bots here are just better but it feels more human.

I switched from Reddit to Lemmy cold turkey, not willing to put up with that user hostile enshitification shiticane reddit was going through. There are a few communities that I really miss (/r/weightroom) but new Lemmy things (/c/tenforward) that give me joy. The Internet is getting pretty shitty but Lemmy is a great small corner of it that’s resistant to much of that fuckery

Depends on what you are looking for. I think Lemmy works great and I only really go to reddit when a google search leads me there for something. Though I do miss the niche communities and the “there is a subreddit for everything”.

Lemmy is also healthier, I used to just scroll through reddit for literal hours, it’s possible to reach an end of sort for the time.

Good:

• I can use it for mobile without a first party app.

Bad

• There aren’t as many communities here as there were on Reddit.
• There isn’t that much content as on Reddit. Also, while the meme ratio of content feels the same to Reddit, the non-meme Lemmy content is rather small.
• Comment conversation seems lacking.
• Moderation tools are rather limited and heavily dependent on defederation to function.
• The idea of “start your own” mindset in the design makes community formation just as bad as Reddit. There doesn’t seem to be any tools for a more collaborative approach to running subs or instances.