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  • I think matured reddit is literally correct. People here at least seem older.

    However people here definitely are also of a certain group. Which is not too surprising - it's a certain demographic taken from Reddit, not a random subsample. This is not really a good thing.

    People here also seem more extreme in their political opinions (as in, not very "usual" or "casual" political views). This makes discussions a bit one-sided and polarized... But then again political discussions on reddit have always been so nice and proper and productive in comparison right /s

    However I also see a lot of reasonable people and a lot of hope. I see more politeness (mostly outside of any political stuff).

    I also like that people have choices - choice of instance and choice of client for example.

    There's some good and bad but for me it's basically reddit with a bit less activity and slightly different experience but not significantly so. I'm confident that more people will come over time and that will solve most issues. And the benefits will still be there by then.

    • I like how on Lemmy we can actually talk about things such as Climate Change. If the question is 1 + 1 = ? then we can discuss whatever the actual solution might be - whether it be 3, -1, 1.9, 2.1, whatever - as opposed to "it's not even happening and you are stupid for thinking that it is".

      That's not even Right vs. Left, it should just be Polite, and it is Engaging and Fun or at least more so than getting yelled at by bots and toddlers on Reddit.

  • For the first few months on the platform, I noticed these trends that I would end up agreeing with later on:

    • Liking, or straight up adoring Linux
    • Disliking, or straight up despising cars
    • Everyone is left-wing and liberal
    • Israel stinks
    • Rainbows galore
    • Big companies are cringe
    • Independent media is based
    • Products made by big companies are known to be spyware
    • The Chromium "open-source" browser, as well as the engine that it uses, is basically the reason why Firefox is dying out
    • Right-wing politicians are bad
    • Piracy is basically fighting for freedom of information on the internet, especially when big companies tend to be so overprotective of their intellectual property in situations where they don't really need to
    • Free, open source software is basically the future
    • The European Union is basically where everyone on Lemmy lives in real life, and if not, it's where everyone wants to live (which is my case given that I'm from Morocco)

    Other very notable points that I have when comparing Reddit with Lemmy are the following:

    • The community is very passionate yet very small, it kinda feels like Animal Crossing
    • Goddammit, having multiple instances federating with each other is such an amazing thing that literally nobody can wholly own the thing and make crappy decisions that end up ruining the whole thing at once (cough cough Twitter)
    • API is free, API is free, API is free
    • Being such an obscure platform, it has helped me tremendously with cutting down on social media usage due to how insanely addicting it can be at times, sometimes in the worst possible scenarios, like when you have an exam tomorrow

    I'm pretty grateful that I made the decision to ditch Reddit for good. I really like this place, and I mean a lot. I wouldn't be called "Resol van Lemmy" if it weren't for Spez being such an ass.

  • My overall analysis is positive. Not a full perfect score, but better than Reddit. (Note: ++/+/=/-/-- indicated in comparison with Reddit, not in absolute terms.)

    • [++] Migrating to avoid bad admins works great in practice. And it imposes a limit on how shitty any admin team can be, as nobody wants to see mass exodus from their instances.
    • [=] Your typical Lemmy moderator is as clueless as the Reddit one on things like transparency and nurturing a good relationship with the other users.
    • [--] Mod tools? Which mod tools?
    • [-] Overall less content, even if you're in an instance that doesn't defed other instances willy-nilly. It's still enough to keep you entertained across the day, as casually glancing across threads.
    • [++] The userbase used to be better, but it's still leagues above the one in Reddit. Your typical Lemmy user seems way more eager to understand what others say, abler to follow a simple reasoning without "I dun unrurrstand" tier idiocy, and less eager to boss you around with uncalled advice.
    • [=] Same fucking love for genetic fallacies here as in Reddit.
    • [-] Witch hunting is actually worse here than it is in Reddit.
    • [-] As well as intrusive political discussion in non-political posts and communities.

    • genetic fallacies?

      • A genetic fallacy is a claim that something is true/false based on its origin. It's a catch-all term for ad hominem, appeal to authority, appeal to novelty/tradition, etymological fallacy, so goes on.

        Users in both Reddit and Lemmy really, really love to engage in this fallacy. I don't know why, but if I had to take a guess, it's because taking into account the origin of a claim in a non-fallacious way prevents them from voicing certainty on a matter, and plenty here/there have an irrational hatred against doubt.

    • I generally agree, but there is absolutely no way that witch hunting is worse here than on reddit. There was a shitton of doxxing and people being very aggressive over minor things, like YouTube drama. Also the Boston Bombing incident? It's not even close.

    • Most everything here seems spot-on, as to be expected from you who are careful with your words so that they can be relied upon:-).

      But there is one aspect that doesn't mesh with my own experiences. I am not doubting that you are seeing it, but personally I have not seen much serious witch-hunting since leaving Reddit, or rather, since I blocked hexbear and lemmygrad.ml. Can you elaborate more on that? Is it limited more to certain communities, or certain instances? I wonder if I am merely leading a charmed existence here that differs from the norm, but even if so, that would mean that curation is possible to avoid that.

      I did see a LOT of that in Reddit subs though, so it could be that my standard of comparison was perturbed from that side of the matter.

      And Reddit did change me: I used to be proud of never blocking anyone at all, always ready for conversation with pretty much anyone who was even halfway trying, but now I do it and don't think twice when I realize that someone is not trying at all. So... perhaps I've blocked away this entire aspect of Lemmy, which if so, I will consider a success rather than its opposite:-).

      • I'll ping @Hubi@feddit.de, so I can address both comments together, OK?

        I'm aware that this depends a lot on the sampling, and it's influenced by sampling biases, but I do think that witch hunting has become a bigger problem here than it is in Reddit. Specially when it comes to two things:

        • Right wingers. That Lemmy often conflates with alt right (taking the whole by its part). If you don't go out of your way to show overt signs of being left-wing, someone here will eventually assume that you're right-wing, and start screeching.
        • CSAM and paedophilia. Probably fuelled by recent events, where some fuckhead was actually posting CSAM to Lemmy World.

        I don't think that this is coming specially from Lemmygrad and Hexbear users; it seems to me like a more general problem.

        Then there's the case of a certain admin team of a large instance, weaponising witch hunting to silence criticism against two governments (Russian Federation and The People's Republic of China) as if it was xenophobia (i.e. hostility geared towards people, not abstract structures of power), without explicitly saying "we won't tolerate criticism against certain governments here". That admin team is however a special case.

        in Reddit I was mostly hanging around small subreddits, where the problem doesn't seem as bad. In the meantime it's possible that I notice this more in Lemmy because, in other aspects, the userbase is better behaved. So yeah, I'm aware that this might not be accurate for other posters.

  • I'm less settled on Lemmy, but fully settled in the Threadiverse. Basically I see Lemmy like my current Linux distro: It's good and getting the job done, but I'm always watching the next iteration in the ecosystem.

    That said, I feel like I've landed on a good host and alternate frontend that I like. And I LOVE that I can choose my host and frontend.

    • Basically I see Lemmy like my current Linux distro

      This is also a really good thing. The only problem I see is that it's a little more complicated if sites would change their backend.

      Like, imagine in 10 years Lemmy isn't the hottest threadiverse backend any more and now it's something else. But what about the existing sites? It's infeasible for all users to manually migrate their accounts to other, newer instances and they might not want to either (they might like their current instance).

      So given that situation, instances need a migration path to a newer backend. But that seems more complicated than switching a Linux distro for as a single individual.

      • Indeed. Data longevity is a concern for me in general. There have been enough Lemmy instances that have disappeared (including once I used to be on) that our ability to become a massive first-hand knowledge center (like Reddit) is endangered.

        I know user portability is getting active attention. I'm hoping at some point there's a cohesive solution where all our data is in our own hands and we can plop it on to any instance of any service with a few simple steps.

      • It's already happening with discuss.online, they're building their own backend. It shouldn't be too hard to migrate but I agree that multiple backend would increase complexity

    • but I’m always watching the next iteration in the ecosystem.

      As you should be:-). Plus don't forget that you can host your own instance too - be it Lemmy, Kbin, Mbin, discuss.online's newer thing, or whatever.

      And it's only 0.19.3 alpha software - there's so much room to contribute to it, or at least watch it grow:-).

      Likewise as people get deeper into Linux, "distros" become far less relevant bc you no longer depend on others to make those decisions for you, and can make anything happen that you want, at any time.

  • (I'm making this post so that people who love Lemmy can help me understand, not to hate. I want to love Lemmy)

    I've been on Lemmy since the reddit migration and every day I dislike it more.

    I never understand what people are talking about when they say they like Lemmy for the "closer community", most posts I see barely have any comments, and the ones that are there mostly look no different to what I used to see on Reddit.

    the smaller community results in less posts about less topics, so it's difficult for me to find anything I'm interested in. on Reddit I could join dozens of videogame-specific or niche hobby subs and they'd all be at least a little active, here it seems the only posts I can get to show in my feed are environmental and big tech doomerism and occasionally some Linux discussion, with very few memes or otherwise just funny/easy posts. I like talking about Linux, sure, but I don't want a sinking feeling in my gut every time I wanna scroll idly.

    there just seems to be a lot of toxicity here on top of everything. I'm constantly seeing people arguing or being rude about Linux opinions, big tech/privacy topics, etc. I worry it's a bit more of an echo chamber than reddit ever was for me as well. I feel there are just a lot of perspectives I'm not getting here.

    I left reddit because I hate the business decisions they're making, but every day I get closer to going back. I don't want to support such a shitty company that treats users more like cattle than customers, but I'm struggling to adjust to Lemmy even all these months later.

    • If you wanna go back to reddit and can use the app, then go and i am seriously, i browse and post on lemmy mostly but i still browse reddit on the web browser for the nicher staff, without an account

      You shouldn't feel pressure to use something that is suppose to be for fun and downtime.

      My grips with lemmy are mainly On the UI side, user a lot of client, like eternity(formerly infinity for reddit) had a lot of bugs and can't find a satisfactory client) but other than that i like lemmy

      On reddit i felt too overwhelming with the amount of users, to post or comment or someone already said what i wanted to say

      You could also take a break from lemmy weeks or even months and comeback with a fresh mind to see if your feelings on it changed

    • very few memes or otherwise just funny/easy posts.

      Really? That's most of what I see when browsing /all.

    • Smaller population makes it feel like more of an echo chamber. Or maybe it is a bigger one because of smaller population. Still trying to figure that one out myself.

  • Reddit but with less content (which is fine), I browse by top past 6 or 12 hours, and just check in once or twice a day.

    Also I don't know about more mature... There's a lot more people here arguing and gatekeeping and generally being weird about Linux for some reason.

    I mean, I like Linux, I use it a lot, but these people make it their identity, like it's an obsession, and they violently hate people who dare to use Windows.

    ...I get the impression these are actual grown adult men and women, acting like big babies :-P

    There's a lot of people here engaging with Linux discussion in a normal healthy manner too of course, just the weird ones are the loudest, you know? It's off putting.

  • On Reddit I would feel like I was speaking to one individual all the time. All of the top comments were like they were written by the same person. Here I think everyone is unique

    • Huh, interesting that that's your experience. One of the things I've found myself disliking here is that the power users seem to drive even more of the conversation. I have never seen so much Star Trek content in my life because by chance two particularly active users happen to be big on Star Trek. I've got nothing against the Star Trek stuff but it catches my attention, you know?

      I suppose it's possible that the reddit experience I'm comparing it to was quite different from the usual one. It's also possible there's just something else making me notice specific names more here than there. It's not the end of the world, and I'm much more likely to post comments than threads so I'm not doing a lot to help the situation anyway

      • You are not wrong - the entire experience in the Fediverse is foundationally different than Reddit. In the latter, you mostly would visit niche subs, and then supplement with the popular subs when you ran out of content there. Although in those, I mostly would avoid talking, bc it was so toxic (did you notice how defensive you became on Reddit? Yeah, we all were that way), and eventually got to where I could barely stand to read most content either bc it was just so freaking juvenile.

        ^This. And my Ax. I also choose this guy's wife. And so on.

        It would even be fun if it were like 1-5 comments and you just scroll on down to read the real stuff... but damn, soon enough it became pretty much all there was, period. HUNDREDS of them IN A ROW. Or at least 90%, with anyone deviating from that norm getting pounced upon, and thereby their subsequent obvious defensiveness and eventual demise painful to see (as every conversation simply wound down to the side not participating in group-think simply giving up and walking away).

        When Reddit collapsed, I came here, but I was leaving Reddit either way. It just became un-fun.:-(

        Anyway, whereas here, niche communities barely exist, getting a post a week perhaps rather than one per hour, just to throw out some numbers but ofc ymmv. So you do see more the finer grain details of individual posters, simply because of how much smaller the entire Fediverse community itself is. Which sort of gives it more character?:-D

        And spending more time on All rather than the niche communities becomes more mandatory, plus spending less time here overall. Though I do not think of that as a bad thing at all - we should be doing things other than merely gabbing at one another, even if only in order to have more to talk about:-).

  • Technically speaking Lemmy's improved a fair amount since before it blew up in popularity (compared to pre-Reddit API shenanigans), but it's still lacking in a variety of other areas, e.g. moderation tools & lack of any sort of modmail to avoid having to coordinate off-site, user tools/settings related to privacy and federation such as hiding profile elements or the opposite like enabling a microblog-esque mode for federating with Mastodon/Misskey/etc., and some other odds and ends (like not being able to mute/disable notifications for posts/comments, sorry OP!).

    Culturally speaking Lemmy has similar problems as other federated platforms in that to this day no one seems to have worked out a way to better communicate them so that they're more widely adopted and grow significantly beyond the early adopter Linux/techie crowds (Mastodon's very gradually been getting there though). Some people also much prefer that, which is part of why and how these platforms have remained that way, but they seem to forget that small communities can exist within larger communities, and with well-developed federated platforms, ideally one could better curate their spaces more than they ever could in more popular corporate platforms.

    Also regarding content, it's in a weird spot. There's a decent amount of it, but part of the problem is that it's neither all that varied nor original. There's a glut of news, political/technology mainly, memes/shitposts, many of which being older and thus reposted, and some mix of technology posts in general, then there's kind of everything else. If we were to throw together BS percentages, I'd maybe guess at like 32/32/32 of news/memes/tech, with the remaining 4% being everything else.

    The issue then is, much of that content you can easily find on more popular platforms with greater variety and also originality, with potentially timelier posting, so outside of principles, what's the draw of any of the Lemmy instances? I think there's greater potential with more topic-focused instances (e.g. programming.dev/ani.social/etc.) and original content. That is, compared to the corporate models of attempting to be everything for everyone but really no one, and in turn also opaquely barring/removing/demonetizing creative content due to some ambiguous advertiser/copyright compliance measures.

    Unfortunately you hit a causal conundrum where there aren't enough people yet for others to justify contributing original material, and there's not enough original material to draw enough people here to justify creating it and on and on. Classic network effect situation, in other words, which in turn also affects variety and timeliness of posts, and leaves everything in an awkward limbo state until several somethings start to change.

  • I’m with my people—Linux nerds and fringe liberals. If the horde finally comes for us, I’ll be proud to stand with my Lemmings.

    Plus, this place finally got me proficient with Docker, so that was nice.

  • It's about the same, but the lower pop moves the page at a glacial pace. One other major difference: less suspicious content. I left Reddit for two reasons. One, negative content experience crowding out the positive. Two, I loved rif. Since the APIcalypse I've bounced around a little bit looking to make a home somewhere. My experience is that tech is great but techies don't always share all the same interests as me. So it feels like there's just not enough diversity in interesting content.

    I miss the tiny fan sub I used to run, but it would never take off here, on any instance. I could never go back- Reddit is broken. I just wish more of us left. I don't know that this place has matured, but where it's at right now is good enough to keep scratching my itch for sharing content and ideas online.

  • I find it more neckbeard than Reddit, and I mean that in the most offensive way. Reddit was big enough that there were lots of places they either didn’t participate or were so rare as to not be annoying. They’re everywhere here on the big, fully federated servers.

    By the same token, the semi-federated, more restrictive instances (yes, I mean beehaw) are actually quite nice places and really does feel like a mature place to casually discuss things.

    In general, though, lemmy is a desert or ghost town of vibrant niche, non-IT focused communities with regular participation.

  • I actually appreciate the slower content on Lemmy. Keeps me from continually scrolling for that dopamine hit.

  • I like the smaller, early internet feeling, but miss the niche communities. Although Reddit is so damn huge that even the niche communities have so many comments that unless you catch something right when it's posted, anything you say gets lost in the flood.

  • I'm really happy with it. People here are mostly thoughtful, smart, and post interesting content. Less fighting, less toxicity, no shills in political discussions because it's not big enough, no corporate astroturfing (the closest we come to that is adderall spam ha ha).

    It feels healthier to me than reddit, which I think I had probably been addicted to. Being on Kbin I never have to run out of content because of the "microblogs" section which has Mastodon, and my multireddit style "collections" (like this news one). But I also find it easier to put my phone down.

    Also I find it hilarious that although I do still see occasional screeching about US liberals, over here it's because the poster wants "the libs" to be more left wing not more right wing.

  • I have noticed that many users are highly technical. I am not technical at all yet I am here because my technical friend showed me how to sign up and which app to use. I think people from marketing background should create guides / poster on how to use Lemmy for people like me who dont have a technical friends.

331 comments