this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy

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Now that a lot of the commotion has subsided I'm just curious to know how y'all are finding the Lemmy experience in general and whether you use it regularly like you did reddit?

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[–] [email protected] 145 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So far so good. In a smaller community I feel more responsible for contributing to discussions. Others seem to be engaging too with thoughtful comments (not just karma-farming inside jokes).

This is helped by the fact that new interesting threads are not immediately buried in heaps of new content, so you actually have time to think of an answer that someone might actually read and reply to. I realize that this is mostly a function of the current scale of the Fediverse and that the more it grows, the more it might just turn into Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

I find I tend to get more replies here.

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[–] [email protected] 103 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

It's the Fediverse that I have been searching for.

Somebody on Lemmy made this quote I really like:

Twitter is people you care about posting content you don't care about. Reddit is people you don't care about posting content that you do care about

Twitter-like Fedi never clicked for me. I made a bunch of accounts over the course of two, maybe three years, each starting with the intention of maybe making new friends and having a good time. I met a ton of cool people but we never became good friends because I never got really invested into it, simply because my feed was never something I hoped it would be, something exciting.

Lemmy gives me exactly what I was searching for. I didn't use it prior to thr Reddit migration because there were too few people but now I am very happy

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm just still missing communities that are only on Reddit rn.

Other than that... I'd argue the Lemmy ux is already far superior, so that's great.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago

Eh, it scratches the itch. I don't touch reddit anymore, outside of web searches. Still, I miss the niche communities that only a massive site like reddit can give life.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i moved to lemmy before the reddit api changes. in january 2023 i stopped using all proprietary software and was looking for alternetives. its way better than reddit, im never going back...

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

There's good reason to love Lemmy, and since joining I've also gone very Foss and privacy centric but I just feel like it's a bit quiet, maybe it's just me

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd like to see more human posts than just meme posting and news.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Yeah, I'd love to have my niche communities back as well

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I'm struggling to find niche communities but overall the comments are more human and not just saying what everyone wants to hear for Internet points. I still plan on hosting my own instance soon and I'm excited for that. I do find it annoying as well when I sort by new and it's just thousands of repost from reddit.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago

Lemmy is great and all. Love it more then I ever did reddit. But it seems like instances are more politically polarized than your average subreddit. It kinda harshes my mellow.

I do like that people feel more genuine as opposed to just broken records repeating overused talking points.

[–] Shagdaddy 31 points 1 year ago

I do use it regularly, but I miss some of the niche gaming communities. You can definitely tell there's a lot less activity on here, but hopefully it keeps growing with time.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (5 children)

My problem is that most of the posts are about lemmy or reddit.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

It's not as bad as it was a month ago. Already the content feels more diverse.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Pretty good, it's my Reddit replacement (except for Google searches where I still put site:reddit.com, searching Lemmy doesn't work that well..).

Choosing an instance sucked though.

I went like:

  1. sh.itjust.works: Found out they're Canadian, the latency was too much for Europe
  2. lemmy.ml: Overall pretty good, I liked that NSFW instances were defederated, so I could browse All without seeing porn. Till I realized there is a slur filter that censors your comments and others. So if someone calls you a 'bitch' on the Fediverse everyone can read it, except you. You see 'removed'
  3. lemmy.world: Largest instance, plenty of local content, good policies overall, but the stability was awful (due to DDOS)
  4. lemmy.zip: Smaller instance, full federation, super fast and in the EU, I'm staying there for now and moved all my subscriptions and blocked communities (mostly porn, again, I like to browse All) over
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[–] babatazyah 23 points 1 year ago

Honestly I'm not having a great time. Most of the hobby communities are graveyards. I spend a lot less time here because I'm not interested in tech communities at all.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think its great

Overall a much more friendly bunch of people here.

Thanks you guys! Youre all awesome!

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Most of the niche communities I followed aren't on here so my usage is drastically lower than before. I find Lemmy to be generally nice as a platform-especially now with infinity for Lemmy out, I've come to forget that I'm no longer on reddit!

Just wish that there was more to go on here. Memes and tech can only keep me scrolling for so long.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Redditfugee here. Lemmy pros/cons:

Pros

  • I guess it serves as a bit of a nicotine patch for Reddit. I'm no longer active on Reddit, and I spend less time doom scrolling than I used to.
  • By and large the community seems alright.

Cons

  • Lemmy just isn't the reference omnibus that Reddit is, and I don't think it ever will be. Even down to r/whatisthisthing or r/tipofmytongue I don't think will work on Lemmy, partially because there's going to be eight of each, seven and a half have no traffic.
  • The communities I'm interested in have basically no traffic. No one posts anything. I see a lot of posts with no discussion, or one comment saying "I'm a bot."
  • There's a kind of stupid problem where, you're scrolling through, say, your All New feed. It's separated into pages instead of infinitely scrolling. Page 2, you find a post you'd like to read. Click it, read the post, back out to the feed, you're on Page 1 of the feed again. You've lost your place. One of the ingredients to that nicotine patch.
  • There are too many different forms of idea cancer here. I spent several minutes having to individually block several nearly identical communities for sports ball game results that each had nearly identical bots posting sports ball scores to them, because someone set up a nearly identical community for each team. This I think is a valid use case for the platform, but if you're not interested in sports ball it makes the All feed unusable. I'd also like someone to explain to me why posts from r/buildapc are being "archived" here?
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[–] Possible_EmuWrangler 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Pretty good. Using it much more and noticed a pretty good uptick in other posting stuff since I created my account.. I'd say I have two feet in the door to a new home. . Edited to clean up as was typing initial response on the go.

[–] FlashZordon 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's a lot less of a time sink for me now. I'm on maybe 15 minutes a day.

It's probably because most of my other most frequented forums aren't quite here yet.

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[–] Badass_panda 18 points 1 year ago

It doesn't really have all the communities I'm interested in ... but for most of my looking-at-memes and commenting-on-things needs, it works great. I use lemmy exclusively on mobile and haven't touched reddit on my phone since sync went away, but I still engage with reddit periodically on desktop.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

It's been better since moving away from lemmy.world, then Sync being available also helped a lot. But unfortunately as many have noted already, this is not as easy to get into for more casual users so it's heavily biased towards tech topics and communities. Smaller communities will probably take a lot longer to take off if at all and I'm sad about that loss so far.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Imo it feels like the reddit migration has died down, but a good chunk the users that have stuck around are actually engaged in their communities. I've been seeing more instances created too, which is cool because it means people are hosting their own.

More recently I've noticed that Sync actually plays embedded videos now, which is probably the best update since its release. It's feeling a lot more user-friendly and that should help it keep growing organically.

The only times I use reddit anymore is browsing with old.reddit a couple times a week. I don't even login to that site now because I don't engage with anything, I just check the news and stuff then come back to Lemmy.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I use it daily.

Of the two different things I used Reddit for, Lemmy is a 100% replacement for one, but sadly lacking in the other.

  1. Current events (news, politics, etc...) the transition to Lemmy was seamless.

  2. Tech Support on specific niche software (kdenlive, Scribus, Gimp, etc...) is still lacking. there aren't a lot of communities dedicated to specific hobbies where a person can ask and answer questions from other users.

In regards to #1, there is actually one area where Lemmy has an advantage in my case. Because my local instance is my country instance, having that third "local" option means that I can, without any searching, keep up to date on national current events as well.

it's like being in a Canada only news site, and then if I want, I can hit "all" and see the rest of it. it's super easy in a way that Reddit couldn't be.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

I love it very much. Meanwhile I almost forgot, that reddit once was important to me.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I love that Lemmy has a small, but dedicated userbase and much less flamewars than Reddit. Seems like most people are actually here for good content and not just trolling everyone else.

I also like that the feed just ends eventually and I can close the app instead of doomscrolling through the whole night.

And I hope that toxic gamification features like global karma or awards will always stay out of here. The dopamine rushes from those are just bad for my brain and these features are really unneccessary.

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[–] jmanjones 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Comments on Lemmy tend to have a lot to say while offering a unique perspective. But most of the posts are boring and predictable, especially when it comes to politics.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Literally my entire wall is either:

  • extreme tech industry junk
  • asks
  • cats

I would love some diversity but everything I've subscribed to is either the above, or dead.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I like it but it's missing the low-quality 'non-fiction' relationship post porn I loved to binge on.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

I haven't completely switched to Lemmy yet. I don't get as much of a diversity of views here.

But apart from Political stuff, I think the people here are wonderful and actually helpful.

This might not be an alternative to reddit and gain millions of followers, but nonetheless, It's good in it's own way. Edit: So many likes, did I mention I am somewhat conservative and don't support abortion after 5 months? Shocking, now downvote me I guess

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (6 children)

For me it seems to have wained a bit, I feel like a lot of casual users have gone silent recently, the content I'm seeing is more specific to niche topics and communities

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

To be honest I don't use it nearly as much as I used Reddit. Haven't been on Reddit since the fuckening except for a couple of times, but my Lemmy usage is at maybe 10% pf what my Reddit usage was.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think it's fine but I admit I don't think it's very fun with one centralized Lemmy instance. Feels like reddit all over again. The idealist in me wanted a distributed network instead, with popular communities spread out across hundreds of instances run by volunteers.

But on the plus side, we can talk without corps being involved and that's really, really nice. I don't even use any big tech sites anymore except github.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Really wish there was more content. I've been trying to post stuff but I never get any comments either. Anything other than the few mainstream communities is just dead

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[–] merthyr1831 13 points 1 year ago (10 children)

this is the most alive of all the fediverse projects. Not without its problems, but I have absolutely no reason to use reddit anymore.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Switched to lemmy 100% after 17+ years of reddit, daily user. I think it's ok but increasingly getting annoyed with a couple things. The rampant extreme politics and phrasing as if it's fact, and people complain about cross posts but I literally see the same exact posts (same community) over and over as I scroll through the feed. Other than that it doesn't nearly have much content but that's to be expected.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Liking it a lot! I was thinking the other day about how we’ve pretty successfully made the jump away from every other thread being about Reddit or technical issues to having many general interest communities and some niche ones that are continuing to diversify.

Obviously we’re not nearly at the scale of Reddit yet (considering the entire Fediverse could fit inside some singular subreddits) but I’ve tried to make up for less content by making more myself and actually engaging with people instead of lurking.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Once I found Liftoff, I've used Lemmy exclusively. It's fantastic, I don't feel as intimated about commenting (even though this is my first on this account) I've found most of my interests again in different communities. There are still a few I don't have, but that will sort itself out in time.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I like not having to scroll through the same standard comments on every post. There might be fewer comments here, but they're higher quality. I mostly used reddit for news which Lemmy covers just as well. Regardless of the API changes and enshitification Reddit simply got too big. Between the marketing and other sorts of vote manipulation, reddit basically stopped providing a useful overview of even news. The hivemind pushed the same dead horse to the front every day.

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[–] Donebrach 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have completely replace Reddit with it. (Save for looking for when I end up there due to trying to solve technical problems). Yeah it’s janky and doesn’t have as much happening but I feel like the userbase overall is much less toxic so more enjoyable to engage with.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

I miss episode anine episode discussions and isk what im doing wrong but sometimes I find a good instance but cannot access their feed from my account, and I dont wanna create another account or add the subs individually, you even see it has more post than subs most of the time. Aside from that its great, feels like im not required to say something that fishes for upvotes thus I comment a bit more

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately, I'm finding Lemmy 2023 just as shallow as Reddit 2023.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

My favorite niche communities have come to Lemmy, but they're very inactive. Which is good and bad. There's much less filler content, but less substantial content as well. It's nice not having to scroll through miles of junk to find the good stuff, but I do wish there was a little more good stuff.

Overall, I think I'm glad for the change. I wasted a little too much time on Reddit for sure. Here, at least I can pop on and see that there's nothing new I'm interested in and do something else rather than scrolling through all that filler to find a nugget or two.

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