this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy

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Now that a lot of the commotion has subsided I'm just curious to know how y'all are finding the Lemmy experience in general and whether you use it regularly like you did reddit?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Comments on Lemmy tend to have a lot to say while offering a unique perspective. But most of the posts are boring and predictable, especially when it comes to politics.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think politics is supposed to be entertaining or necessarily innovative, fam.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Really wish there was more content. I've been trying to post stuff but I never get any comments either. Anything other than the few mainstream communities is just dead

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think it's fine but I admit I don't think it's very fun with one centralized Lemmy instance. Feels like reddit all over again. The idealist in me wanted a distributed network instead, with popular communities spread out across hundreds of instances run by volunteers.

But on the plus side, we can talk without corps being involved and that's really, really nice. I don't even use any big tech sites anymore except github.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

I engage a lot more with general communities than I used to because the quality of poster is so much higher here. People are more likely to engage in good faith discussion and offer more than just those low effort redditor joke comments that site has become notorious for. There is just no point commenting in larger communities and threads on reddit, because you'll get buried by lazy meme comments and the one person who does sort by new is mostly likely looking for conflict rather than a conversation.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (10 children)

this is the most alive of all the fediverse projects. Not without its problems, but I have absolutely no reason to use reddit anymore.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

To be honest I don't use it nearly as much as I used Reddit. Haven't been on Reddit since the fuckening except for a couple of times, but my Lemmy usage is at maybe 10% pf what my Reddit usage was.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I do miss some of the more specialist communities on reddit but honestly this is great for just scrolling stuff, and it's completely replaced reddit for that.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I must admit. I have relapsed to reddit somewhat due to the lack of specific video game communities here. I use Comet for reddit (iOS) which still works

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have completely replace Reddit with it. (Save for looking for when I end up there due to trying to solve technical problems). Yeah it’s janky and doesn’t have as much happening but I feel like the userbase overall is much less toxic so more enjoyable to engage with.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I like it but it's missing the low-quality 'non-fiction' relationship post porn I loved to binge on.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Liking it a lot! I was thinking the other day about how we’ve pretty successfully made the jump away from every other thread being about Reddit or technical issues to having many general interest communities and some niche ones that are continuing to diversify.

Obviously we’re not nearly at the scale of Reddit yet (considering the entire Fediverse could fit inside some singular subreddits) but I’ve tried to make up for less content by making more myself and actually engaging with people instead of lurking.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I like not having to scroll through the same standard comments on every post. There might be fewer comments here, but they're higher quality. I mostly used reddit for news which Lemmy covers just as well. Regardless of the API changes and enshitification Reddit simply got too big. Between the marketing and other sorts of vote manipulation, reddit basically stopped providing a useful overview of even news. The hivemind pushed the same dead horse to the front every day.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

All of the apps I've tried have problems. Most communities have a spam problem. None of the communities I'm interested in exist. I feel like there's almost a fundemental problem with the way that the fediverse works that makes it incompatible with this format, as almost all communities will be focused on generic instances as that's where people will create their accounts. I made my account on feddit.uk but I wouldn't make a community for something that wasn't UK focused, therefore the community doesn't get started.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

My favorite niche communities have come to Lemmy, but they're very inactive. Which is good and bad. There's much less filler content, but less substantial content as well. It's nice not having to scroll through miles of junk to find the good stuff, but I do wish there was a little more good stuff.

Overall, I think I'm glad for the change. I wasted a little too much time on Reddit for sure. Here, at least I can pop on and see that there's nothing new I'm interested in and do something else rather than scrolling through all that filler to find a nugget or two.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (7 children)
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately, I'm finding Lemmy 2023 just as shallow as Reddit 2023.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Feels like OG reddit back in the day with less niche subs and with an /all that is more readable (and with the occasional surprise nsfw reddit used to have). I feel that in reddit I had drifted to only reading my own curated sub list, and barely reading /all due to the toxicity

Only rarely do I get back to reddit, mostly because one of the sport subs, which has a repost bot on lemmy, shows an article I want to read the comments on.

Yes sometimes the polarized instances get a bit annoying, I find them managable and interesting to see what these communities are talking about every now and then.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My favorite app didn't port and my main community didn't migrate. I'm still not planning to go back to Reddit, but definitely feeling the change.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

I miss episode anine episode discussions and isk what im doing wrong but sometimes I find a good instance but cannot access their feed from my account, and I dont wanna create another account or add the subs individually, you even see it has more post than subs most of the time. Aside from that its great, feels like im not required to say something that fishes for upvotes thus I comment a bit more

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Authoritarian propaganda is kind of ruining it for me. I came in excited to help build something together and now I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Maybe I'd recommend an instance that doesn't federate with Hexbear, ExplodingHeads, or Lemmygrad.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

I was going to say "what authoritarian propaganda" because I don't see any of that shit, but yeah, my instance doesn't federate with those places. The strength and the weakness of a federated system, I suppose!

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I use it less, but I actually like it that way, plus I have no urge to go back to Reddit. So all good.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I'm really enjoying Lemmy so far. I've posted more here in one and a half months than in 16+ years on ~~reddit~~ astroturfbay. Why?

Because here feels like friendly neighbourhood square where people actually care to listen to each other. Whatever happens here feels way more organic and people-oriented than elsewhere. No algos dictating agendas just because more engagement=more profit.

So yeah, I really like this place.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's like moving from Coke to Pepsi. Similar enough in it's own way. It's definitely better than the other budget alternatives

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It started off okay, but I'm about to give up on Lemmy after a couple months.

My main problems are:

  • The comments here are hit-or-miss. Every big thread deteriorates into pedantic arguments. It's seemingly a worsening trend and is on-par with the bullshit you'd see on Reddit.
  • Lack of comment moderation in larger communities. If a thread devolves into off-topic arguments or name-calling, the mods should step in.
  • The default active post sort is pretty terrible in so many ways. It's much too slow to change and you'll often see repetitive content. Smaller communities tend to have no visibility, but instead I see 5 posts from the same large community.
  • The comment sort is bad as well. If the community self-moderates through downvoting, then why are downvoted posts near the top? I think this leads to toxic threads and pointless arguments.
  • Lack of any content. I wouldn't mind a bot reposting an RSS feed or something into a community just to start discussion... But many are vehemently against that idea (leading to small communities dying completely). I'd argue the reason [email protected] hasn't died out yet is because of the l4s bot.
  • Way too many politics. I'm so tired of seeing political discussion online---but here, you're just bombarded with it, even outside of political communities. Better moderation might help keep things on topic.
  • Users tend to browse All. While this gives people an opportunity to see new content, I think this might harm smaller communities in the long run. This is similar to how threads lose quality once they reach the front page on Reddit.

Maybe I'll come back after a year and see how things are. But as of now, Lemmy provides nearly zero value to me.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

It's actually getting better daily IMO...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It gets better once you find interesting subs. I think it scratches the same itch and I plan to continue using it. I do have some concerns about the community, however. I guess I was hoping it would be less of an echo chamber and have a more nuanced and in depth discussion.

I haven't really found that and I think it's more or less the same as reddit most of the time.

I also miss browsing through the short video subs like /r/crazyfuckingvideos once a week or so just to see some crazy things.

However, I do find there is actually pretty good discussion on tech stuff and you do find some geopolitics/ political discussion if you read through some of the ideological drudgery a bit.

So all in all, I think Lemmy so far has been a positive experience for me and I'm committed to remaining here for the foreseeable future. At the end of the day - it's an open source decentralized community. I'll put up with a lot of shit just because of that. No chance I'd be going back to reddit.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

One of things that I like most about it that it isn’t algorithmic. When I crash for the night, I look at the most popular over the last 12 hours, and then… I’m done.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's almost perfect... But whenever I get into a new game, especially something kinda niche, I can't find a place to talk about it. I miss that.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Feels good to see it growing, I made an account really fast after lemmy got released, but still used reddit, too. I realized fast this could be the "new reddit" after the API thing and made some commercial posts for lemmy over the last months.

The only thing I am not happy with is the defederation idea. Don't misunderstand, it's good to be free from extremist politics or porn, but in fact reddit isn't that aggressive in the way defederation is done here. You just don't subscribe shit-subs. And this kind of self control would be nice on Lemmy, too. Why I am not able to just defederate my account from stuff I don't want to see would be better, imo.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm enjoying it so far. It doesn't have the same user base or niche communities of reddit yet, so for now I'm just doing more general browsing. There just doesn't seem to be enough of a diverse set of interest yet. So at first it was a ton of posts about sync, currently it's a ton of posts about LTT. And it's just full of memes. Definitely could use a wider range of topics and interests.

That said there are a couple of really obnoxious instances that are highly political and as much as I am trying to avoid that, the users of those instances seem to dominate any thread even remotely political. It's quite annoying.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Happy. The only issue I have is scale. IMO there was nothing ground breaking about Reddit as either an idea or a piece of tech, it's value mostly comes from its users. Lemmy does not have the sheer breadth from scale that I enjoyed with Reddit, but hopefully that will come.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

TBH, I think I dislike it only slightly less than reddit. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of the fediverse and what not. However, I see a lot of posts around here saying that lemmy is so much better than reddit, but I don't necessarily agree. Culturally I see a lot of the same behavior between the two. The main difference is there are a lot less "Facebook-like" posts and way more tech nerd-centric opinions. I would even argue that there is a lack of cultural balance. Like most of the people here are extremists in one way or the other (this includes me), and there are less "normal" people. I think this is probably what some of the users here actually want because they thirst for the "good ol' days" of forums before some of nerd culture leaked into the mainstream, but I'm not sure it's my cup of tea. Furthermore something that is sort of both a feature and a downside is that there is way less content here for obvious reasons. It's nice not to have an endless feed, but again, due to cultural imbalance, there isn't much variety. I love using linux, but I don't know if I care to have my feed engulfed by it. I'm not sure if the time I spend in Lemmy is really a net positive, just like how reddit felt. I'd say the most positive aspect of reddit was I could subscribe to a city specific subreddit and actually get news and info that is useful to my day to day life, whereas the info here is just useful for keeping me in my house or absorbed in work.

Please do not tell me to suck it up and contribute my own content. The point of this comment is not to get the community to "fix" lemmy for me but simply to relay an observation.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

daily user of Lemmy at this point, fuck Reddit

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I like it and I think I can say with confidence that I've made the switch from Reddit to Lemmy as my default "internet frontpage."

Still rough in spots, though. The defederation drama is making this a bit of a rocky experience, so I'm not sure I've landed on my final instance just yet. I understand this is an unavoidable aspect of the Fediverse (i.e. relations between instances), but I still haven't settled on an instance where I can say, "Yep, this is the one for me."

On the positive side, I love Infinity for Lemmy, even with some of the remaining bugs, and I love that I can open a discussion that's on the top of my feed and I can still have meaningful interactions with the community. I hope my favorite subs from Reddit will eventually come to life here, because then I'd be golden.

Overall, this all feels like a fresh new start and I love it.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I love Lemmy! I've got accounts across several instances, and I have totally replaced my reddit scrolling with Lemmy.

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