Ask Lemmy

27315 readers

2050 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Rules: (interactive)

1) Be nice and; have fun

Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them

2) All posts must end with a '?'

This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?

3) No spam

Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.

4) NSFW is okay, within reason

Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].

5) This is not a support community.

It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.

6) No US Politics.

Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]

Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

What is the difference between Lemmy and Reddit from the average user standpoint? (feddit.org)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/asklemmy

47 comments fedilink hide all child comments

From purely practical point of view, what is the selling point of Lemmy for the average user who does not care about the theoretical benefits of software or the open source software movement?

Assumptions:

The average user will never host a instance.
The average user is not interested in volunteering or moderation.
The average user is not looking for NSFW communities or any controversial communities.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] GrymEdm 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Reddit:

It has a much larger user base and many heavily specialized boards that nevertheless stay reasonably active.
It's a collection of echo chambers. Dissent is usually stomped out by mass downvoting and heavy moderation/bans. It's rare to find a board that allows arguments for a long period of time. Agree with the board's users/mods or get silenced. Posted rules do not matter, and you can definitely be hateful in ways that violate posted rules so long as that type of hate is acceptable on that board.
So many users mean that getting content to succeed is a crapshoot. Often posts become lost in the noise, especially on busy boards.
I left about a year ago, but apparently there's a lot of bot/AI slop on boards now.

Lemmy:

Much smaller user base. Heavily specialized boards move slowly if they exist at all. It's not unusual to see boards where it's just one/a few people posting with days in between new content.
More ability to have disagreements. Whether it's because moderating a smaller # of users is easier, the mods are less authoritarian, or whatever you are more likely to be able to disagree. Don't be blatantly racist, celebrating violence, clearly trolling, etc. and you'll probably remain able to participate. I'm sure this isn't universal on all boards, but it's my experience on many boards.
For all that I believe the above point, there are still "echo chamber" moments on Lemmy. Sometimes it seems people may be downvoted simply because they are already downvoted. It's still way less egregious than on Reddit, and such is human nature I suppose.
Fewer users means you are more likely to get some engagement on your post, at least in my experience. I never sorted my feed by new posts on Reddit because it was an avalanche of posts of questionable quality, so I only saw whatever content had already succeeded. On Lemmy I can look for new posts and see most if not all content on the boards I enjoy.