I was looking for a Reddit alternative for years. I would have been cool with anything non-corporate, but figured it would take ages to build.

It’s incredible what Lemmy has turned into so quickly. A Reddit alternative went from being impossible to actually existing within a matter of weeks.

I know this comment could receive some negative feedback, but Lemmy lacks diversity in its userbase, compared to Reddit (or Tumblr in the old times). It's just a feeling, when I scroll through comments and posts on Lemmy, I picture most of the users as 16-46 yo white males.

EDIT: changed "45" to "46", see comment below.

It's worth stepping back a moment to appreciate that it's actually worked. Whether it will continue is another story, but Lemmy became a successful and viable alternative to Reddit. That's worthy of praise and celebration, and it couldn't be done without the admins and mods of .world who've made this place into what it is.

Lemmy is like 1/2 of what reddit was able to do for me. I haven't gone back to reddit since the exodus, I deleted all my posts and my account and never went back. But even now when I need information on anything from a community it's always reddit that pops up with the information that I need. I understand this is because of userbase and interacting with it but lemmy has not been able to do that effectively yet.

Granted I did post about a fish for my fishtank here and it was answered actually pretty quickly.

I think I'm just not understanding what instances and the feddiverse is. Most posts I'm interested in have like 1 or 2 comments, and half the time they're not useful interactions. It just feels kind of dead here. And again I understand it's because of the lack of interaction and userbase. But to say it's better than reddit or the best alternative is being a little frivolous.

It isn't about "winning". Lemmy can coexist with any Fediverse application, and that's the beauty of it. Everyone on the Fediverse wins.

To the people who want Lemmy to be more active, if you want that, you have to be part of it.

The internet adage is that on any forum 10% of users comment, and 1% post. Lemmy needs to break out of that paradigm, and users should be disproportionately active compared to user/activity on Reddit.

People like posting in places where other people are already posting. It’s a snowball effect. That’s why meme communities have managed to take off; the 1% of users can pump out a huge amount of memes in a short time and make the place feel more lively than it actually is, which in turn kickstarts it and makes it lively for memes.

I make posts mostly in non-meme communities because I think Lemmy should have that too. Some posts are just links but a lot of them are original content. I think it adds value but I simply cannot, as one person, post the kind of volume that memeposters can. These more niche communities need people to post.

If you are subscribed to an interest community, I strongly encourage posting new threads there.

TLDR:

This “the alternatives are great” gaslighting stuff has got to stop. We’ve all tried it and we’re all still here, for good reason. Reddit sucks but the fediverse sucks even more.

Oh the irony in this comment... The only person being gaslit is yourself.

And secondly - a lot of people don't know that you can now block instances individually and that defederation/blocking is not really that big of a deal anymore.

Honestly, there's a reason hype has died down. The site has all the same problems as other alternatives.

After the initial hype, it's only as big as a reasonably large individual subreddit. In fact, here are the top weekly posts of lemmy's federation partners and T_D's exodus site. The latter edges out the former slightly in upvotes and much more substantially in comments, and it's just a single community. Even in the fairly small category of "biggest extant reddit alternative", lemmy doesn't take first prize.

Same content problem as all the others: roughly half of the posts are politics of a uniform orientation, and the other half are reposted facebook memes.

Reddit's killer app is the presence of a sizable community for every little niche thing, and that's not there. Unless your only interests are politics (within roughly .3 standard deviations of the median Huffpo writer) or Facebook memes, it's not a viable alternative.

Competition: Sure, it's federated in theory, but the block-happy, drama-centric culture means that, if an alternative were to pop up with the userbase of 2012 Reddit (or even 2018 Reddit), it'd get defederated almost immediately. Open federation solves the "dozens of sites competing for the same thousand-or-so people" problem. Closed federation just pretends to do so.

This is basically all the same issue: not enough users. It's so dumb. "Lemmy isn't as good as Reddit because everyone isn't there yet. But ya, Reddit sucks." /face-palm Then come over and get users to come over instead of saying there's not enough people.

Some of the people in that reddit thread are unreasonably angry that some people moved to Lemmy.

I'll never understand loving a company so much that anyone who doesn't like it is automatically deemed a bad person. Why is a stranger's choice of social media so personal to some of these people? Why are they so livid?

I'm not even going to quote the specific comments I'm referring to just in case I get banned. One of them was comparing the entire lemmyverse to the subreddits that were banned over explicitly only having content about hating strangers for existing.

I'm happy I left if that what I'm "missing out" on.

I love it because the apps are much better.. The regular reddit app has too many notifications, and red reader is too boring, and laggy. I'm using liftoff and it is so much better

Everyone in that thread has Stockholm syndrome. They're so used to being force fed shit that they couldn't possibly believe that an online platform could be run any differently than Reddit.

And, everyones total misunderstanding of the fediverse. Yea, no wonder it's all tech people here, dumbass

When I was recruiting people during r/place and the protests, I found most of the issue being proper user guides to get people to sign up. Lemmy may be pretty confusing, especially to non-techies.

I mean the sentiment in the comments in that thread is not at all positive. The damage the tankies/hexbear/lemmygrad has done to the reputation of lemmy is not negligible.

imho It's important to help people stear away from those places when they join lemmy except if that is their intention.

I always have to laugh when I see an ostensibly pro-lemmy comment that says:

"Reddit mods are out of control"

Do these people understand that basically the whole idea behind a Federated system is that community owners have significantly more moderation power than they do on commercial platforms? If someone's main problem with Reddit was unchecked mod power, I have some bad news for them...

OMG reading through that comment chain - no not this one, the one on old-reddit.com - makes me remember what Reddit (outside of the tiny niche subs) is like, . Leadership flows down-hill, and it is not just spez over there, it is his entire empire of hate, small-mindedness, and bigotry. Who on earth would see what Elon did to Twitter and think, "me 2!" (then overthrow the mods who loved the communities that they themselves built, replacing them with scabs who ban the humans and upvote the bots)?

Edit: for those who cannot bring themselves to go THERE, I brought it here for your amusement - you're welcome:-P.

Leaving reddit was a good idea, joining Lemmy, I'm not so sure anymore.

The userbase here is not really diverse in itself, so the whole platform gets this large echo chamber vibe. And with "not diverse" I don't mean hostile or anything, just very homogeneous. Overwhelmingly left and far left on the political spectrum, embracing all things LGBT+, high nerd & tech factor; and if you don't belong to or identify with either of those factions, you get downvoted to oblivion, and worse yet, mod removed and banned for no factual reason.

What made reddit strong as a platform was that you had the right kind of diversity and a big enough userbase to not spiral out of control, unless the top management fucked up.

On Lemmy, instance admins are (or become) often the worst offenders, making any interactions with users on their instance tiresome, unless you regurgitate the same stuff that has been said there over and over and over again.

While Lemmy is gradually growing and the whole federation is a pretty good concept too I have one question about lemmy and it's future.

1. Since it's just two devs maintaining the whole project (I know there are many open source contributors but the project is on them right?) what if they get tired of the project or go MIA? Can a fork be made and that can be maintained as a replacement of lemmy?

2. How are and will be the SEO of the lemmy's instances? Reddit reached a wide audience due to that. It's nice to have a niche set of audience at the start but that should not be the case forever right?

Jesus. Look at those comments. Reddit has gotten considerably worse since the exodus.

Reddit sucked in 2008 and it sucks now. It only has value because people were too lazy to implement a proper openid system in any of the forum software packages over the years. There's no reason any community needs to be hosted on reddit. Forums SEO just like reddit when searching for answers except everyone has divested from the internet and given control to a handful of ruthless corporations who just want to hoover up all the data so they can train their live chat AI bots.

If you want lemmy to be better you have to contribute even if it means not being showered in validation and praise. The echo chamber era is over.

there were other options?

calls Lemmy and Reddit a forum

As a forum user, please don't...

Forums are so much better than whatever Lemmy and Reddit are, the problem is none exist in the same "everything in the same place and people can create subsections" form.