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179 comments

  • Commenting on a post doesn't feel like yelling into a void, comments are more than a number here. Also people are always trying to be helpful, which is so nice compared to reddit.

  • I love the whole premise, brought by the ActivityPub protocol, that no individual or group has full control of the whole.

    It isn't like nobody wants to become Lemmy's Spez. Plenty people do; they simply can't.

  • By the users, for the users. Almost all they instance admins are just like everyone else. We just know some it infrastructure.

    • It's not constantly being tweaked and reworked to look and perform worse for the sake of profit.
    • Fewer fascists
    • Fewer people who are completely illiterate and can't follow a conversation that's already laid out in an easy to read format.
    • Community rules are not so bloated that only the mods and their friends can make top level posts in the biggest communities.
    • 3rd party clients

  • Feels like I'm talking to normal people again,

    I went on a bit of a rant during a recent low point personally, but still hold the opinion.

    Reddit is full of people who want to be right and don't understand when a discussion is over. Constant misreading of comments to fit their narrative or enable them to try to correct, even if it doesn't make any sense, but they have to have the last word.

    People actually make comments rather than the same 10 jokes reused over and over.

    I don't feel like I can hold a decent conversation where my mind can be broadened or changed like here or traditional forums, it's just an opportunity to hyperfocus on one thing for upvotes.

    • You do find this sort of person in Lemmy too, but it's easy enough to block them out.

    • I once got a reply on reddit to a comment I had made ten years earlier. I looked at the person's comment history, and every single comment that I botheted to look at was a reply to things that were at least five years old. Reddit is not only full of weirdos, it's full or weirdos who will put in tremendous effort to be weirdos. I'm glad I purged my history on there.

  • I like that it's slower moving and the moderation is open. I like that the different instances have different culture.

    I like that the content and discussion generated is open and will remain open forever. I don't have to worry about the content being locked away behind a paywall or bad company direction.

    I love that the platform is open to alternative technology and values open source and copy left philosophies.

  • Shitters often self segregate. The Donald or FatPeopleHate would get run out of existing instances, start their own, then go to defed hell. Contrast with reddit where they were allowed to fester in the name of "valuable conversation"

  • I pretty much gave up on Reddit when I saw someone get 200 upvotes for making an Among Us joke in response to a school shooting.

    Haven't seen that kind of callousness on Lemmy, which is nice.

  • Reddit is just karma-based ego battles with no room for actual discourse. Lemmy is small and highly community-oriented so no one cares about that stuff.

  • Subreddits could often be narrowly focused to a severe degree.

    r/whatisthisthing would routinely remove comment chains that were tangent to the topic of identifying the thing posted. Say someone posted a picture of a Betamax tape and said "What is this thing?" Someone identifies it as a Betamax tape, links to the WIkipedia page, mentions that it was Sony's competitor to VHS, etc. Que a tangent where someone says "VHS won the format war and became basically the only standard available, so for a long time we didn't call the format by its name; commercials for movies would say "now available to own on video" and we called the machine a "VCR." And someone else says 'There was actually an early and unsuccessful format called VCR, it didn't do well and is pretty rare though." And all these comments get removed and the commenters get 7 day bans.

    I've yet to see that brand of "the kind of anal retentive you only get from welding someone's ass crack shut from spine to scrotal seam" here.

    • Yeah, that really bugs me when Iook at r/askreddit. The mods only seem to allow seem to allow generic personal questions or questions about sex.

      Edit: it looks like three moderation is better now! Although it's still mostly about sex.

  • Less privacy invasion, less corporate, less fash, less incoherent fury, less trolling, less need to doomscroll.

  • There are a lot of areas in which I do prefer Reddit, but there are two critical ones where the Threadiverse -- and it's not just Lemmy, got mbin and company -- win:

    • Open source. I'd rather be contributing to a project. Well, in theory, someone could make closed software, but you can use an entirely open-source stack if you want.
    • Third party client use is permitted. I don't want to be required to run someone's software on my computer. Too many privacy issues, kills room for improvement. This change is what sent me off Reddit.

    There are some minor benefits as well:

    • Currently small enough that it's not a big target for spammers and such.
    • The federated structure has some substantial benefits. It tends to force more competition, I think, rather than just having the first person who sits on a community name owning it. It makes the system highly resistant to full failure -- I've seen instances go down, but not once since I've joined has the whole Threadiverse gone down. Early Reddit in particular had days where it was unavailable. There is no one Reddit company with total control over content -- individual instances may defederate or choose what content to permit directly on themselves, but there's no one person whose whim chooses what everyone can see. Ironically, a number of peole seem to have showed up here because they wanted heavier content moderation, but what they wanted it on was on their instance so that they didn't see stuff -- the Threadiverse as a whole is less moderated, which I prefer; I can choose an instance that doesn't defederate and make my own content calls.
    • A selection of server software and Web interfaces to choose from. I disliked the new Reddit Web UI, but old.reddit.com, while usable, was simply dead, receiving no further work. I have about five Web UI options on my own home instance alone, none of which are dead.
    • Dark mode out-of-box. I've always preferred light-on-dark interfaces. Dark-on-light was only popularized when Apple pointed out -- reasonably, for the time, early 1980s -- that most data people were working with reflected paper documents, which for reasons of ink use, were almost always dark-on-light, and it'd be nice to have onscreen stuff reflect the actual documents. But in a mostly-paperless world, nothing was keeping us on dark-on-light except inertia from an earlier period.
    • It looks like the auto-renumbering feature for numbered lists in Markdown, which I always felt was a major misfeature, was disabled.

  • Fewer of the obsessive stickler mods that delete posts and bans users and kills the community by reposting content to gain internet points.

179 comments