I am a reddit refugee. Keep seeing that this is supposed to be somehow better than Reddit. As far as I can tell, it follows a similar format, less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose. But It looks like people still get down vote brigaded on some communities. So I’m curious, how it’s better?
I recently migrated here. I did so as a precaution, and still browse reddit sometimes .
Reddit IPO’ed, and is now focused on making money. They removed the API to centralize it’s power and remove 3rd party apps. They threatened subreddits who protested, and shut some down. And have made sweeping changes to accommodate to advertisers.
The straw that broke the snoo’s back was the CEO hinting at subreddit paywalls. I figured I would try to learn Lemmy again, and what do you know, it’s more serious, has better comments and posts, segmented even more than reddit with the distros, and fully free/open source.
It also helps that I’m a huge computer nerd, and there’s a lot of that on here, but you can find your niche.
Hello fellow nerd 👋
Welcome! Don’t take this wrong, but why didn’t you come sooner? Reddit has had paywalls for as long as I can remember. r/TheLounge is an example of a famous one but any subreddit could enable restricting themselves to premium only.
That’s actually new information to me! The news was pointing to a broader push to subscriptions for subreddits site wide. Definitely not doing that.
I also admit that I am deeply unhappy with reddits enshittification. I’ve been on reddit for over a decade and joined when I was in highschool. Moving was the last thing I wanted, but I’m more aware of the big-corp-monopoly we’re all suffering under. This is part of it.
I ripped the bandage off a few months before they shut down the API. I had to quit RIF cold turkey. I wanted it to be “my choice” if that makes sense. The official Reddit app just didn’t do it for me.
I hope you enjoy your time here! I’ve liked it. My biggest piece of advice is to be the content you want to see. There is a lot less content here than Reddit. That’s good and bad. Good because you get bored a little easier and move on lol, but bad because it can get a little boring. It’s gotten a lot better though!
The other thing, and this is just a pet peeve lol, is that the proper way to link to communities is like
!community@instance. A lot of people try to doc/communitywhich doesn’t work. If you do!communityalone it will link to the local community which could totally not exist or have different rules etc.example: !programming@programming.dev
My biggest piece of advice is to be the content you want to see.
Totally agree with this. BUT just know that for some Lemmy’s, they get suspicious pretty quick.
My account is less than a month old. I found a vast hole of the kind of content I want to see, so I started posting a lot. Starting communities, replying to replies on my posts, etc.
And pretty much every day I get called variations of being a troll, spammer, trumper and/or russian asset.
Doesn’t keep me from posting, and I think it’s hilarious. But just a heads up to anyone reading. Tho this thread is old so maybe no one will. But I found this thread just now, so… lol
Typical comment quality is off the chain. Leddit has been going downhill for years in this area.
Can you explain why? Not sure I follow
Pun threads
Puns are their own rewords!
Pubes are there own returds!
- fucking every redditor now
No spez?
Listen, I won’t dig into all the tech and philosophy of decentralization and anti-corporate ownershipa. There are other people here for that. But let me tell you why I am enjoying it: it’s small, it ends, and it feels like early internet.
I load up Lemmy, and see a series of disjointed memes, or a current ongoing meme (like pondering the orb) and absorb that for a short while. I see a couple world news articles, a couple about Trump and a couple about places that aren’t the US. I read an article about Ryzen’s new chips not performing well on Windows and see someone’s retro-gaming setup. Then, after about 10-15 minutes of scrolling, I go “oh hey, I remember this post from yesterday”, and then I close Lemmy because, and this is the important part, I’ve hit the end of new content in my feed.
I still get the news, I still take in a couple memes about the current state of politics, or a celebrity flying her plane altogether too much, but I am never stuck here. There’s no one trying to rage bait me for the sake of user engagement, and any argument I find myself in wraps up and moves on. I don’t feel disconnected, but I am also never completely absorbed, and my life is better for it. Sure, sometimes while I am waiting in a line I load Lemmy only to discover there’s nothing new for me in the hour since I’ve closed it. Sometimes I do the age old, “looking to busy myself”, close Lemmy because there’s nothing to see, immediately open Lemmy because I am looking for something to occupy my Internet poisoned brain. But being bored for a minute here and there is worth it, if it means a lot more free time because I am no longer absorbed in the rat race of infinite scrolling social media.
I think Lemmy is better in a series of ways, but the one that really matters is that it helps me put down my phone, and do things that I enjoy.
I haven’t been banned for suggesting child molesters don’t deserve to live. Can’t say that about Reddit.
It has good mobile apps (And multiple options, depending on what you like).
Open mobile app support
Ad free (depending on the app and instance, but its pretty easy to get Lemmy without ads)
No CEO to make whacky, unpopular decisions without clear purpose or recourse
No shareholders whose priorities will always take precedence over the users
There’s also something to be said for being part of a smaller community
Of course any and all problems can occur in microcosm within a particular instance or community, but it’s trivial to just block that instance/community. As for brigading, bullying, and harassment, Lemmy offers no solutions to human nature, unfortunately.
Lemmy offers no solutions to human nature
This is an excellent way to phrase it lol
Smaller community means your comment will get some actual attention
Federation, this makes it immune to large-scale disruptions because a single instance may go down or a couple of instances may go down at the same time, but the entire network cannot be taken offline all at once without taking the internet itself offline.
Life on Lemmy (and reddit/social media in general) becomes a lot better when you turn off vote displays
Yep, and they don’t matter so who gives a shit.
They affect visibility so they still matter to an extend
I agree that votes don’t matter at all. Now please, except my humbly casted vote for you in the upward direction :D But no, I think psychologically speaking, votes actually do kind of matter because of mob mentality. If the first thing you see is something overwhelmingly negative, you’re more likely to think negatively. This was tested and seems to be the case, if people see a bunch of negative comments on something, they are more like to join in on the mob and downvote or be negative
Less locked down than Reddit. No CEO bent on taking your user created content and charging for it. No CEO trying to polish a turd for advertisers to make $$ while simultaneously completely taking for granted and disregarding the mods and users that actually make Reddit exist. No communities captured by shills and groupthink. Well…except for places like hexbear or some .ml, but there’s no pretenses there. You know what you’re getting into. Lemmy is more egalitarian, plenty of apps for mobile devices, people generally have a discussion and not just be the retread cheap quip for upvotes.
Also, Reddit IMO has gotten “colder” for lack of a better word. People don’t upvote. You’re more likely to be criticized for a position than engaged with. Opinions that disagree with the hive mind are often quickly downvoted regardless of whether or not the position has validity.
Lemmy is just more chill.
People don’t upvote. You’re more likely to be criticized for a position than engaged with. Opinions that disagree with the hive mind are often quickly downvoted regardless of whether or not the position has validity.
i experience this constantly on lemmy.
There were multiple actions described. You’re saying that you experience one of them. Or maybe you experience more than one. Or maybe we don’t know, because you didn’t make it clear, which might make us want to downvote you, which suggests that you often experience being downvoted. :-)
i experience this constantly on lemmy.
Me too!
We have plenty of 3rd party clients baby!
I prefer Lemmy, even tho it can be a little too reddit-like. But the mods do seem to be a bit less ban-happy, so that’s a good thing.
But since I vote for third parties, I get pretty much the same hateful comments I got when I was on Reddit. But hey, at least I’m not banned! :)
So as someone else said, more assholes here, but less hivemind.
Reddit cannot be browsed on mobile because they blocked 3rd party apps.
It’s not controlled by one single entity. Everyone can spin up their own instance and host their communities, and you can block instances that deserve it. And the software is completely open source and stuff, and it obviously works with all kinds of third-party clients and doesn’t try to monetize the API. And we don’t have spez, so that’s of course another benefit. And no ads! I could go on and on…
