What are your thoughts on the Lemmy ecosystem?
I’ve been trying it out for the last week. I have my own opinions, but I’d like to hear others and see if we have common ideas on what is good/bad/indifferent about the Lemmy ecosystem.
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On the one hand, I find idle browsing on Lemmy to be a lot more enjoyable than reddit. I see more stuff that I’ve never seen before, and I see less unfunny, uninteresting stuff.
On the other hand: I drew a comic and posted it to what is basically the only Lemmy comic group. I wanted to give Lemmy an honest chance, so that was the only place I shared it. I figured it’d be a nice change of pace since the group is almost entirely reposts from reddit.
My comic started to get some traction, and then the only mod in the only Lemmy comic group removed it for profanity. The profanity in question was the word “balls”.
A few days later I mentioned this story on reddit. Someone asked to see the comic, so I posted it to r/comics, and a few hours later it hit the front page of r/all.
So in my opinion, Lemmy suffers from a lot of the same problems as reddit (like petty tyrant mods), and some of those problems are exacerbated by its small size.
The strength of many reddit communities is in the people themselves, and unless you’re really into Linux or star trek, the people aren’t really here.
As a tool for forming communities, Lemmy’s mechanics work just fine.
But the process of federation - combined with the prickly nature of certain administrators - means you can have a lively and robust community in (hypothetically) the far-left transgender tankie community that pioneered the application. But then that gets abruptly cut off and squelched in a more popular forum by some late adopters who hate their politics more than they enjoy their technical savvy.
Lemmy.world has a bunch of memes and political screeching because that’s the kind of user its admins choose to encourage. Other communities have more practical interests. But they don’t draw the same kind of crowd, so you won’t see them on the front page of this site, particularly if you only browse Local.
I’ve stopped using reddit completely. I do tend to check twitter a lot though.
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.
The on-the-fly meme-making by the Trekkies is positively inspiring.
Partially. I think it’s a good drop in replacement for:
- Anything technology oriented, from software to hardware to what different open source projects are up to, to what tech corporations are doing, and various discussions around ecosystems (the internet itself, specific services like Discord or Reddit or LinkedIn, app stores, social networking, etc.)
- Funny memes or other humor
It’s got pretty good coverage of certain topics:
- Politics, at least on specific sub topics
- Science and specific scientific disciplines
It has a few pockets that work for very specific things:
- Specific TV show or movie franchises (looking at you, Star Trek)
- ADHD or neurodivergent support/advice
- Noncredible Defense is actually here. Love it.
And it’s just missing a bunch of things I loved on Reddit:
- Sports, especially the unique culture of the NBA subreddit
- Other specific interests in television, film, music, or other cultural interests.
- Local things in specific cities
- Finance and economics stuff
- Lots of specific interests/hobbies are missing, or just aren’t as active.
- Advice/support for career/work life, especially specific careers (in my case, the legal industry and life as a lawyer)
- Advice/support relating to personal relationships, from parenting to dating to very specific support forums for things like divorce or cancer. Even what does exist here is disproportionately neurodivergent, so the topics of focus seem to be pretty different than what would be discussed in other places.
Yes for me it’s absolutely a viable alternative. It’s still small and that has pros and cons. The overall quality of discourse is high because it’s a fairly hip crowd that has found Lemmy and joined. Feels more like the early days of the social web, before social media shat the bed. But being small has cons too. Some communities just aren’t here, and a lot of the ones here are small and less active. But there’s absolutely a viable base here that can grow over time. I’m glad that the internet figured this out because we were too dependent on Reddit before - it had totally consumed all concepts of online community and that was okay before the enshittification got into high gear. Lemmy from its inception is structurally designed not to go down that path. So spend time here. Share it. Help it grow. Start a niche sub and feed it.
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…
Start posting updates for your team. Even if it’s lonely talking to an empty room. Try to post a couple times a week with news or trivia or… old players new restaurants or whatever they do when they retire. We’re so little here that we can’t afford to lurk. Be the content you want to see.
Update: WE NEED TO BEAT THE YANKEES!!!
I’m almost completely indifferent to sports, but fuck the Yankees.
Or post to the sports community rather than a specific team
Yeah all of my hobbies are ghost towns here. I don’t care about Linux, US politics or Communism so I filtered them out. Now all that’s left is general interest posts and AI generated porn.
It seems to be sport dependent, I just opened [email protected] and stumbled upon a 120 comments thread from 5 days ago: https://fanaticus.social/post/4293058
You can probably post about this on [email protected], it seems the most active baseball community.
As a ‘front page of the internet’ it has been a pretty great replacement for me as it’s where I go each day to just see what’s going on. However, due to the smaller size you do lose a lot of the activity in more niche communities and the sheer volume of posts/comments compared to Reddit. That’s the biggest downside. Still, you also lose the incessant ads/bad UI/UX decisions and ever accelerating late stage capitalism driven enshittification so that’s a big plus.
Yeah, I love it and actually prefer it to my old reddit experience for general browsing.
What isn’t quite there yet is the ability to like, sit down all day and scroll and post in a community dedicated to my current hyperfixation of the week. Be it guitar maintenance, some indie game, or whatever.
But reddit also didn’t have that when I started using it. Excited to hang here and watch the garden grow
I’m sure this gets repeated on Lemmy all the time, but I feel like the quality of Reddit posts, even in niche communities about guitar maintenance or whatever, has really gone downhill in the past 10 years or so.
This might come off as mean, but I’ve noticed a significant dumbing-down in terms of what people contribute to Reddit communities but also what people expect to be spoon-fed by those communities. And it’s all presented as this sort of democratization of hobbyist knowledge, where it’s every hobbyist’s duty to educate newcomers on all of the absolute basics and persuade them of why they should care about any of it.
Maybe this is just a side effect of Reddit recommending subreddits to non-subscribers and pushing to become a Facebook-type service for “regular” people - after all, that’s how they make the line go up.
I still prefer old-school forums, which tend to be more insular, less accessible, and expect you to arrive with a modicum of understanding or at least RTFM first. To be blunt, I miss the days when the internet was primarily for geeks.
But reddit also didn’t have that when I started using it.
reddit also didn’t have to compete with reddit.
Some of us old folks remember when it had to compete with Digg.
A far more popular competitor that made some unpopular decisions and lost their user base to reddit.
No but it was competing with Digg and Slashdot until Digg screwed the pooch. It’s been a while, but reddit really owes its size and popularity to Digg 2.0 and the fiasco of bad decisions driven by investors.
I’m talking mostly about the vibrant niche communities the comment above mentioned. That all happened well after the Digg and slashdot stuff. Niche communities grew on reddit relatively unchallenged.
Sure, reddit could have a similar meltdown to Digg, but I don’t think it’s a forgone conclusion. Social media has inertia. The bigger a platform is is the harder it is to lose people, because the mass is the feature.
Wasn’t reddit competing with Digg, or whatever else was popular at the time?
I came to reddit from fark, before the digg migration or exodus or whatnot. There was also stumbleupon, and the others are all lost to me.
“can’t scroll all day”
I keep saying that’s a positive thing for other productivity, but sadly, that’s not happening for me. Turns out, I want to sit and bum just as much as I always did before. I’m more likely to actually read articles, but I know meta gets more screen time now. As you said, lemmy doesn’t have those full niche communities. I know, sacrilege to admit around here.
I know, sacrilege to admit around here.
It’s not, but we also try to promote active communities to a wider audience on [email protected]
Is there also something like m.lemmy.world/posts/lemmy.world/c/upcomingcommunities ?
However, due to the smaller size you do lose a lot of the activity in more niche communities and the sheer volume of posts/comments compared to Reddit.
That also leads to a lack of diversity of opinions.
Less niche topics, but higher quality content
Depends on the topic. From what I can tell, Lemmy skews young and technical and towards certain personalities and interests, so there are going to be topics that go to those strengths, but also topics where the discussions get mired down in either discussing the basics or get stuck in a pretty unsophisticated understanding of the topic.
It’s obvious with the hyper local discussions (where should I eat in this city when I visit), because there just aren’t enough knowledgeable people to form a quorum for quality discussion. But it’s also true in many of the hobby/interest discussions, simply because there aren’t enough people to where good discussion encourages more high quality discussion in a feedback loop.
And whoa man is that a bigger deal that I realized. I still comment and snoop on Reddit infrequently but I’m active here. Less trolls. Minimal bots. Lots of high quality comments.
Yes I miss the niche at times but honestly? This is home now.
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’ve had no need to return to Reddit at all.
Using mbin at fedia.io,
I have access to Lemmy (Reddit-like) and Mastodon (Twitter-like)
I grew very tired of Reddit’s Bot-Spam and AI-bot drivel, over 50% of the shit you see/read on Reddit is copy-pasta old shit or completely fabricated.
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
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Go to https://lemm.ee/
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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
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Go to https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] to see communities (equivalent of subs) that might be interesting to you.
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Use Voyager as a mobile app: https://www.lemmyapps.com/Voyager. When they ask for your “instance”, use “lemm.ee”
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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/[email protected]. 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
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/[email protected]
The other one is Mbin: https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]
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/[email protected]
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/[email protected] ([email protected] ) 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/
deleted by creator
How does someone know what the main community is, whatever the platform? Looking at the number of subscribers and active members.
I don’t disagree but this is also kind of sad. We’re just recreating the same issue on Reddit of “definitive” subreddits controlled by whichever moderators were there first, and once a mass of people settles there, it becomes virtually impossible for smaller alternatives to grow.
You’re also basically just telling people to go to whichever community happens to be on Lemmy.world. Which means centralization on one instance, which is the opposite of how this place was sold.
Edit: Ignore the double comment.
Lemmy is developped by hardcore tankies and I don’t want to use their software
I think the main point about this is that, so far, the development has been completely politically neutral and developers have in no way interfered with any instance having other political opinions.
So they have been more neutral than Reddit developers even if they are public about their tankies ideas on their personal publications.
Furthermore, it’s open source, so it could be forked any time if needed, unlike Reddit.I agree with you, that’s just a point I’ve seen raised quite a few times in the past, in a similar way to https://old.lemmy.sdf.org/post/17733
There was an infamous post by feditips against Lemmy, but it seems to have been removed
Because everyone at this point uses Gmail, I prefer to use phone networks as my analogy go to, as usually most people know others with a different carrier
Outlook is still strong, especially for companies using Microsoft, but indeed phone carriers work too.
Why are you actively against lemmy.world?
On Reddit you list several alternative instances, and you somehow left us out.
LW is already the largest community by far, to a point where geographically distant communities cannot stay synchronized
Fair. I don’t agree with most of your points, but you make a good argument.
I still think we over prioritize decentralization. Federation is important, but’s not a primary feature to be sold to users. It’s not because we need a thousand instances. It’s so that if Gmail gets too enshittified that we have another email option.
World is where the activity is, and you do a reasonable job of balancing that.
World is where the activity is, and you do a reasonable job of balancing that.
It depends.
[email protected] is more active than [email protected] in monthly active users.Same for [email protected] and [email protected], which also doesn’t have any moderator besides bot accounts.
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its effective for me, but I always find myself going back to reddut due to the data thats already there.
as the fediverse continues to grows, I’m sure my reliance on visiting reddit will begin to go down
Been on Lemmy a few months now and it feels like moving from shitty Digg to fresh Reddit. I had canceled my account on Reddit even before the last enshitification, and kept just reading. Lemmy feels good enough to participate in posting and commenting. Small is good.
It’s feels to me like how the ancient redditors said reddit worked.
Some servers come closer to reddit like world which copied all the popular subs.
Others are definitely smaller communities, maybe a post or two a day and plenty of discussion.
I feel great about it all so far.
Yes, it has the vibes of pre-Digg 2.0-exodus reddit, which is why I haven’t gone back (well, except for porn lol)
Definitely feels more like reddit used to feel - though with caveats.
Indeed. With no central control, it seems easier for a single individual/org to dominate any given discussion, but otherwise it seems close to what reddit originally claimed to be.
I’ve used them both the exact same way, which kept me away from a lot of the junk on Reddit until they killed my access via Apollo. Then I just switched over and subbed pretty much the same topics.
