this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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The enshittification of Reddit has been evident ever since the new design rolled out. Unusable on mobile devices. Does less, using more memory and bandwidth.
When "New" Reddit came out, it was just shockingly bad. If they didn't keep old.reddit.com online, they would have killed the site then. Until very recently I couldn't even view all child comments within the main thread, and it still takes at least twice as long to load any page.
Coming to Lemmy has been a breath of fresh air. The site is much more responsive than Reddit despite most instances running on a single VPS or something.
That's because the Lemmy webapp focuses on being lean and functional rather than shoving as much telemetry and megabytes of JavaScript bloat as they can to do LESS than the old Reddit webapp could while using 10-20 times MORE resources.
New Reddit is not completely unusable on an intermittent, crammed full 3G connection where Old Reddit just works, but is known to be actively user hostile and somehow cramming full a huge 1080p phone display with only 2 or 3 comments and having to preload for hours for a full thread.
Lemmy server is also blazing fast and being written in Rust which encourages memory safety does help it function better on smaller instances and serve both local and federated clients faster despite having less resources to do so. I really really hope this replaces Reddit in the mainstream and people learn basic concepts about federated media to future proof the free Internet.
It has been a real breath of fresh air and so far it seems more sustainable to spread the bandwidth between smaller instances than let a megacorp fund the infrastructure to serve everyone in a walled garden which will later be enshittified into garbage once a critical mass is already lured in.
You're right! The front page of Reddit is nearly 8x larger than Lemmy.ml, and took almost 7x longer to load than Lemmy.
Uncached loading results:
Lemmy: 3.3 MB, 39 requests in 1.85 seconds
Old Reddit: 6.3 MB, 60 requests in 4.53 seconds
New Reddit: 24.5 MB, 351 requests in 12.21 seconds
The first issue I noticed with new reddit was the missing sidebar. Is that functionality that I should have easily found or is it still missing after all this time?
I was actually shocked when I've discovered how much data Reddit app uses compared to RiF for example.