One thing I don't like about the approach of blocking things is that the frontpage of reddit still allowed some level of discovery. If something in a niche community got hot enough it would break into my feed even though I didn't subscribe to that community. It was a cool way to expand my content on an occasional basis.

If I'm going to only view my subscribed list on lemmy then I have to also manually go out and intentionally discover new communities. That's hard, because some of my favorite small reddit communities were ones I never would have thought to search for.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That got me very confused as I never had that happening on my Reddit feed. I had to go back to Reddit to notice that I actually had that setting disabled.

Anyway, I don't think something like that would really work on Lemmy. Reddit has his algorithm that devours your privacy, chews on your data and spits out results that may or may not interests you. Lemmy is much more simple than that. IIRC it's "algorithm" is little more than a logarithmic curve and the (very based) devs are committed to user privacy, so your data will never get analyzed, not even to sugar coat your feed. For me it's a feature, though I get that not everyone might feel that way.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

the (very based) devs are committed to user privacy, so your data will never get analyzed

All credit to the devs, but Lemmy isn't great on privacy. Your votes are technically public, and there is no way to guarantee what you delete or edit is actually deleted and edited. You're right the data is not used to customize your feed, but not because it's private. It isn't.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You are right. I don't mind the upvotes being public, I do mind the deletion thing (although it's an inherent flaw of federation, hard to get around it) but both are points against it having good privacy.

I guess what I meant is that the platform makes no attempt at linking your online persona to anything else. It doesn't even collect IP adresses and has very poor logging - btw this is actually a liability with the ongoing CSAM issue.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That got me very confused as I never had that happening on my Reddit feed.

Same for me, and I never had trouble finding new content. Discovering subreddits (and communities) through word-of-mouth worked perfectly fine.

Also, unlike Reddit, Lemmy has a community browser.