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As much as I'd like it to be, it doesn't have the network effect/popularity that Reddit does. It covers maybe 70-80% of my Digg+ needs, but there are many topics/subs I want that Lemmy just doesn't have.
"Be the change you want to see" is always there: if a topic/sub doesn't exist, you can always create it yourself. But no good deed goes unpunished, so you're now the owner/moderator...
It satisfies my social media addiction, but will be years before it shows up on many search results.
it's effective for wasting my time in a less frustrating manner, for whatever that's worth
Depends on what you mean "effective."
The structure is very similar, and on the surface, it works about the same way. So in that sense, yes.
The lack of centralization improves on reddit - no authoritarian rule-making, no limitation of content by the laws of a single country, etc. - but also adds flaws. The biggest one is the potential for redundant groups on different servers, but also a concern is the potential for someone taking down their server and leaving the users high and dry. (I don't know exactly what happens to the content in this case, but that could be another issue.)
Practically speaking though, it is not a meaningful replacement for reddit because it is lacking content. I browse "all", and get fewer total posts that I saw on reddit on my 20 or so subscribed subreddits alone.
Community is the key. Community is what made reddit, and lemmy doesn't have a developed community. Yet. We can get there, and then discover what other problems with the platform are.
I feel like the decentralization brings some downsides in the quantity of bad actors, extremist views, and the like.
The open platform certainly has an overwhelming advantage over Reddit in other ways, but there seems to be a higher number of trolls, shitheads, wackos, etc and in some cases entire instances dedicated to them.
While these people get banned on Reddit, Lemmy hasn’t yet solved this moderation issue; user accounts are basically disposable and moderation is super distributed, so it’s easy to abuse.
Defederation is pretty effective
higher number of trolls, shitheads, wackos, etc
That's because they're actual humans and not 95% bots like Reddit.
It works for me because I'm into a lot of the stuff discussed on Lemmy. My biggest problem with reddit was that at some point they seemed eager to smoosh all the subs together into one big Basic Betty fest. For example having r/all be a mandatory sub and having a million default subs...It kind of felt like towards the end everyone was discussing the same stuff on every sub, and it was basically the same stuff being discussed on Twitter (and many posts were just pics of tweets).
I know Lemmy kinda has some similar issues, but because the whole ecosystem is its own niche it still works for me.
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.
Yeah the mods can be annoying on here. Lots of times someone has replied to me and by the time I get to it it’s “comment removed by mod” without even an explanation. I wanted to know what that person had to say, even if it was a dumbfuck thing to say. These things only work with interaction, and if you’re stifling interaction on a platform that is starved for it then you’re not making it better, you’re making it worse.
The only reason I use it is because Reddit killed the mobile app I was using. Lemmy is less useful to me by every metric, and I still use Reddit when searching for stuff on desktop, never Lemmy.
Nah. Lemmy is nothing like Reddit, it's actually good.
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.
Okay but also... they aren't there (Reddit) either, anymore. Who knows where they went - possibly nowhere, or switched to lurking (either here or there), or X, or Mastodon, or Bluesky, or just nowhere.
I almost dropped off of social media altogether myself, after making the mistake of replying to a comment in Chapotraphouse and another in lemmygrad.ml. Sometimes silence is significantly better than having to put up with toxicity.
Aka some of us choose the bear
And the rest are tired of moderating against those onslaughts.
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.
kinda so-so, so far. shows promise but I've also run more immediately into what could be called 'reddit rot'. For example mod behavior that resembles russian bot farms, etc.
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.
There's also a wide and endlessly customizable variety of web/mobile clients, something reddit will apparently never have again.
e: Federation is pretty cool, too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's alright but I think the low res weird mouse thing mascot isn't the best, I've always hated reddit's smug bastard shitty alien thing though.
Also it feels relatively empty even though there's data to back there being half a million users.
Also the language filtering is super imperfect to the point I can't use it, so I have to manually filter out 500 non-english communities.
It will take years for Lemmy to take off in much the same way as Reddit had slowly built up.
As I and other mentioned before, the main downside of Lemmy is that the community you care about isn't here (and frankly, I don't know if they will even come here at all). Like, we don't have AskHistorians here, and the Lemmy for your hometown or country is either quiet or just completely died. So, I end up having no choice but to return to Reddit to keep in touch with those communities. However, as someone who is privacy conscious since Reddit now sells your data to train AI, I try to log in to Reddit with Tor. But even with the Onion site of Reddit, it won't let me log in at most times because of technical discrepancy with stupid captchas or something. Sometimes I could log in via Tor but most times I'm not able to.
Anyhow, I would love Lemmy to take off as soon as possible but there is teething problem common in new communities. But the pessimistic side of me thinks it may not since so many people have become too invested in Reddit. And the latter intentionally hooked people in for the worst reasons.
Welcome here!
Copy pasting from a recent thread on /r/RedditAlternatives trying to address usual criticism against Lemmy.
Go to https://lemm.ee/
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
Go to https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] to see communities (equivalent of subs) that might be interesting to you.
Use Voyager as a mobile app: https://www.lemmyapps.com/Voyager. When they ask for your "instance", use "lemm.ee"
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.
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.
Here is a link to this question to Lemmy admins: https://lemm.ee/post/41577902
Summary of the answers:
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/
You can block entire servers and specific communities.
Instances to block to avoid political content
Communities to block
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.
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.
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/
sweet stop
I think you mean sweet spot. Now I'm wondering if it's a typo or an eggcorn.
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.
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.......
That's not true! Besides Linux, there's also ⭐Star Trek:-) ✨
Ah. Yes. I do stand corrected. Lemmy is home to MULTIPLE subject matters that I equally don't care about.
Ah so then you know what you have to do then.
Become an Arch user btw. 🤪
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.
My spoon is likewise just too big.
Partially. I think it's a good drop in replacement for:
It's got pretty good coverage of certain topics:
It has a few pockets that work for very specific things:
And it's just missing a bunch of things I loved on Reddit:
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.
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.
I would say no to me it's more like IRC. Its small enough to be not noticed by influence operations as much and each instance has its own personality just like IRC networks. It's a great mix of local community and access to a wider view points.