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?
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.
Reddit had some great aspects. Niche communities about hobbies I might be interested in had wikis with intros on how to get started being something I miss.
My biggest issue with the Lemmy community is we seem to have brought the thirst-communities and the meme communities in great numbers but the hobby communities are really lacking.
Generally speaking I’m not interested in pics of attractive celeb number 7864 and while memes are fun their over abundance was why I was looking for a new content aggregator before the API changes.
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 !technology 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.
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.
I also feel like Lemmy is less toxic and therefore more enjoyable. On Reddit I would never browse the default front page or r/all because it’s a cesspool, but I can browse All on Lemmy and it’s quite enjoyable. That’s actually how I found this thread 🙂
“My partner is being completely unreasonable and her family hates me and wants us to fail just because I have a secret second family I keep locked in the basement.”
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.
I do wish NSFW was more granular. A lot of the things I’d like on my feed wouldn’t necessarily be what you’d want to have open in the office but I also don’t want it to be full of porn. Not anti-porn or anything I just don’t want it in my feed 24/7.
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.
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.
And shoving it in the dirty corner where only the clued in people know how to get to it just isn’t a good gameplan for reaching critical mass.
But, as noted elsewhere, the fediverse has some legal hurdles with the issue that corporations have thoughtfully removed for themselves, so even if it’s the smart move for user growth it might be the dumb move for staying out of prison.
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.
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.
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.
Feels like a small club (not that I attended much clubs), I often recognize some usernames. In big social medias, there are so many users posting that you don’t often see the same user often enough to recognize their username. On Lemmy, you get sort of mini celebrities, they’re always on the front page (I sort by All/Hot).
Add comment