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?
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.
I think I want to love it just slightly more than I actually love it, there’s so much potential and I LOVE that it’s FOSS by it’s very nature but it’s a little lacking as it stands which has both negative and positive results
Switched to lemmy 100% after 17+ years of reddit, daily user. I think it’s ok but increasingly getting annoyed with a couple things. The rampant extreme politics and phrasing as if it’s fact, and people complain about cross posts but I literally see the same exact posts (same community) over and over as I scroll through the feed. Other than that it doesn’t nearly have much content but that’s to be expected.
The lemmy experience is so much better than reddit in one way: the Lemmy website on the phone just let’s you use it, no more “This community is only available from the app” and have to use the desktop website, or the log in with Google pop up. I don’t want to use the app, I don’t want to log in on mobile.
I learn something new every week about subjects I was decided on for a long time, forcing me to re-evaluate. It seems like there are more knowledgeable people here than on Reddit. I do wish our visualnovels community was more active, but alas, it’s a more niche subject that’s bound to grow slowly.
My opinion is probably in line with most; that for general “news” it’s just fine. For niche topics, most aren’t here or at least aren’t as robust as Reddit
There are two relatively minor features that I do wish would be implemented:
homepage defaults to Subscribed instead of all, or at least a way to set that as the default
a quick jump to top of page button that stays present when you’ve scrolled way down the page. Not sure if that was a RIF addition or native to Reddit, but that was a nice quality of life feature
I was commenting a fair bit early on, but have stopped so much cause that’s just how I react to social media.
Have completely stopped using Reddit after baconreader died, and check Lemmy once, maybe twice a day. Nowhere near what I did Reddit but such is the way of things.
It has led me to go properly check out Mastodon so I’m more active over there (but still not really active)
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.
I mean it’s all been a decision from Admins. Let instances defederate from each other but let users decide on their own. A warning label would be enough, something like: your comments/post on this instance wouldn’t be seen from other users of your home instance or something like that.
I mean the solution actually is, people have Lemmy accounts for different stuff, this isn’t a practical solution when the Normie’s hit Lemmy in the future.
I’ve seen admins asking for more fine-grained moderation tools. Maybe eventually things will work the way you’re hoping. Here’s a quote from a Beehaw admin,
an unfortunate reality we’ve also found is we just don’t have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don’t scale well.
Defederating prevents trolls on another instance from coming into comments in local communities to harass people. From an admin/mod perspective you have to take some kind of action to stop that.
Damn that’s ass. But also I can’t help but feel the community is full of idiots. There’s 0 reason to stay on reddit unless you like getting fucked in the ass by corpos
I think it still needs to grow and get more stable. I find any browsing all that there isn’t enough there for me to use it in the same way I used reddit.
For the first month or so, I would say it was about 40% of my SNS usage, now it’s probably about 20-30%. Hopefully as more and more people use it, we get more users and more stable instances.
It depends. I’m on two instances, sopuli and beehaw. Both of them are really welcoming and cool, and I can interact with people without worrying about being bullied or harassed or attacked by random trolls just because they don’t like what I say (and trust me, suffering those actions while being neurodivergent is way worse than suffering those actions while being neurotypical).
But I think that more than 70% of the content I see comes from one single instance. Excluding beehaw (they defederated that other instance, and I agree with that), I think that sopuli also has similar communities that are like abandoned or with low amount of content. That’s something I don’t like.
I liked beehaw, but I stopped using it when one of the admins alyaza or whatever her name is started being a total asshole and basically violating all of their own rules (not assuming good faith discussions, being aggressive, etc, etc).
It sucks too, because I really liked the community but I didn’t want to invest any more time there because it seemed like the capricious whims of an overzealous admin with an agenda could tear it all down(sound familiar). Ironically, they have an article on beehaw about people just quietly leaving a place because assholes ruin it. Which is what I did. They say they want to be inclusive and diverse, but it absolutely didnt feel welcoming when that admin went on a tear.
There isn’t a better community on lemmy though.
I am on here and not on reddit but it’s not even in the ballpark of what reddit used to be. Id honestly go back to Reddit in a heartbeat if RiF was allowed to exist.
I honestly think, if there was a Lemmy 2.0 it should be more of a hub/spoke model where you could create an account on a hub, then subscribe to whatever spokes you want. But not every instance needs to have dozens of subunits. It just waters everything down.
Basically imagine reddit, but where all subreddits were their own thing.
I personally was in for lemmy since the beginning, actually participated a bit building the first idea for another similar idea in 2018 to the fediverse, but I didn’t have the capacity to participate more.
Now, I love that people seem to enjoy Lemmy and I’m excited for its growth!
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