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] 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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (6 children)
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I must admit. I have relapsed to reddit somewhat due to the lack of specific video game communities here. I use Comet for reddit (iOS) which still works

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[–] kava 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It gets better once you find interesting subs. I think it scratches the same itch and I plan to continue using it. I do have some concerns about the community, however. I guess I was hoping it would be less of an echo chamber and have a more nuanced and in depth discussion.

I haven't really found that and I think it's more or less the same as reddit most of the time.

I also miss browsing through the short video subs like /r/crazyfuckingvideos once a week or so just to see some crazy things.

However, I do find there is actually pretty good discussion on tech stuff and you do find some geopolitics/ political discussion if you read through some of the ideological drudgery a bit.

So all in all, I think Lemmy so far has been a positive experience for me and I'm committed to remaining here for the foreseeable future. At the end of the day - it's an open source decentralized community. I'll put up with a lot of shit just because of that. No chance I'd be going back to reddit.

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[–] halo5 10 points 1 year ago

It's actually getting better daily IMO...

[–] poopsmith 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It started off okay, but I'm about to give up on Lemmy after a couple months.

My main problems are:

  • The comments here are hit-or-miss. Every big thread deteriorates into pedantic arguments. It's seemingly a worsening trend and is on-par with the bullshit you'd see on Reddit.
  • Lack of comment moderation in larger communities. If a thread devolves into off-topic arguments or name-calling, the mods should step in.
  • The default active post sort is pretty terrible in so many ways. It's much too slow to change and you'll often see repetitive content. Smaller communities tend to have no visibility, but instead I see 5 posts from the same large community.
  • The comment sort is bad as well. If the community self-moderates through downvoting, then why are downvoted posts near the top? I think this leads to toxic threads and pointless arguments.
  • Lack of any content. I wouldn't mind a bot reposting an RSS feed or something into a community just to start discussion... But many are vehemently against that idea (leading to small communities dying completely). I'd argue the reason [email protected] hasn't died out yet is because of the l4s bot.
  • Way too many politics. I'm so tired of seeing political discussion online---but here, you're just bombarded with it, even outside of political communities. Better moderation might help keep things on topic.
  • Users tend to browse All. While this gives people an opportunity to see new content, I think this might harm smaller communities in the long run. This is similar to how threads lose quality once they reach the front page on Reddit.

Maybe I'll come back after a year and see how things are. But as of now, Lemmy provides nearly zero value to me.

[–] 1bluepixel 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I like it and I think I can say with confidence that I've made the switch from Reddit to Lemmy as my default "internet frontpage."

Still rough in spots, though. The defederation drama is making this a bit of a rocky experience, so I'm not sure I've landed on my final instance just yet. I understand this is an unavoidable aspect of the Fediverse (i.e. relations between instances), but I still haven't settled on an instance where I can say, "Yep, this is the one for me."

On the positive side, I love Infinity for Lemmy, even with some of the remaining bugs, and I love that I can open a discussion that's on the top of my feed and I can still have meaningful interactions with the community. I hope my favorite subs from Reddit will eventually come to life here, because then I'd be golden.

Overall, this all feels like a fresh new start and I love it.

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[–] Snapz 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My favorite app didn't port and my main community didn't migrate. I'm still not planning to go back to Reddit, but definitely feeling the change.

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[–] Anonymousllama 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's like moving from Coke to Pepsi. Similar enough in it's own way. It's definitely better than the other budget alternatives

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's almost perfect... But whenever I get into a new game, especially something kinda niche, I can't find a place to talk about it. I miss that.

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[–] TheRedSpade 9 points 1 year ago

It reminds me of Reddit when I first joined (2011). I actually uninstalled Relay a couple days ago as I hadn't intentionally opened it in weeks. I'm probably not on here any less than I was on Reddit as some people are saying, but I do tend to browse all most of the time for now. I almost never browsed r/all.

I'll still go to Reddit if a search result takes me there, but even that seems to be happening much less than before.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Feels like OG reddit back in the day with less niche subs and with an /all that is more readable (and with the occasional surprise nsfw reddit used to have). I feel that in reddit I had drifted to only reading my own curated sub list, and barely reading /all due to the toxicity

Only rarely do I get back to reddit, mostly because one of the sport subs, which has a repost bot on lemmy, shows an article I want to read the comments on.

Yes sometimes the polarized instances get a bit annoying, I find them managable and interesting to see what these communities are talking about every now and then.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

One of things that I like most about it that it isn’t algorithmic. When I crash for the night, I look at the most popular over the last 12 hours, and then… I’m done.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I'm really enjoying Lemmy so far. I've posted more here in one and a half months than in 16+ years on ~~reddit~~ astroturfbay. Why?

Because here feels like friendly neighbourhood square where people actually care to listen to each other. Whatever happens here feels way more organic and people-oriented than elsewhere. No algos dictating agendas just because more engagement=more profit.

So yeah, I really like this place.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I found Lemmy to be better for my mental health. I recently visited Reddit again to follow on a heated topic since Reddit has more info and news, and found my anxiety levels skyrocket due to the toxicity of comments.

While Lemmy has less engagement than Reddit, that also leads to a more level-headed community.

That, and with new Lemmy apps and experiences being developed constantly, I'm liking it here a lot.

[–] sturmblast 9 points 1 year ago

daily user of Lemmy at this point, fuck Reddit

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Authoritarian propaganda is kind of ruining it for me. I came in excited to help build something together and now I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Maybe I'd recommend an instance that doesn't federate with Hexbear, ExplodingHeads, or Lemmygrad.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I was going to say "what authoritarian propaganda" because I don't see any of that shit, but yeah, my instance doesn't federate with those places. The strength and the weakness of a federated system, I suppose!

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

I'm enjoying it so far. It doesn't have the same user base or niche communities of reddit yet, so for now I'm just doing more general browsing. There just doesn't seem to be enough of a diverse set of interest yet. So at first it was a ton of posts about sync, currently it's a ton of posts about LTT. And it's just full of memes. Definitely could use a wider range of topics and interests.

That said there are a couple of really obnoxious instances that are highly political and as much as I am trying to avoid that, the users of those instances seem to dominate any thread even remotely political. It's quite annoying.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Happy. The only issue I have is scale. IMO there was nothing ground breaking about Reddit as either an idea or a piece of tech, it's value mostly comes from its users. Lemmy does not have the sheer breadth from scale that I enjoyed with Reddit, but hopefully that will come.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Since Sync came out, absolutely love it! Hope more people join!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well... If I never see a post about tech or a meme again it'll be too soon.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I use it less, but I actually like it that way, plus I have no urge to go back to Reddit. So all good.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I engage a lot more with general communities than I used to because the quality of poster is so much higher here. People are more likely to engage in good faith discussion and offer more than just those low effort redditor joke comments that site has become notorious for. There is just no point commenting in larger communities and threads on reddit, because you'll get buried by lazy meme comments and the one person who does sort by new is mostly likely looking for conflict rather than a conversation.

[–] chk232 8 points 1 year ago

It's alright

[–] AstroViking 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Found it great a month or two ago. Now, not so much. Gobshites and troll scum seem to be slowly making the place just another platform for bollox. Shame really.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

TBH, I think I dislike it only slightly less than reddit. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of the fediverse and what not. However, I see a lot of posts around here saying that lemmy is so much better than reddit, but I don't necessarily agree. Culturally I see a lot of the same behavior between the two. The main difference is there are a lot less "Facebook-like" posts and way more tech nerd-centric opinions. I would even argue that there is a lack of cultural balance. Like most of the people here are extremists in one way or the other (this includes me), and there are less "normal" people. I think this is probably what some of the users here actually want because they thirst for the "good ol' days" of forums before some of nerd culture leaked into the mainstream, but I'm not sure it's my cup of tea. Furthermore something that is sort of both a feature and a downside is that there is way less content here for obvious reasons. It's nice not to have an endless feed, but again, due to cultural imbalance, there isn't much variety. I love using linux, but I don't know if I care to have my feed engulfed by it. I'm not sure if the time I spend in Lemmy is really a net positive, just like how reddit felt. I'd say the most positive aspect of reddit was I could subscribe to a city specific subreddit and actually get news and info that is useful to my day to day life, whereas the info here is just useful for keeping me in my house or absorbed in work.

Please do not tell me to suck it up and contribute my own content. The point of this comment is not to get the community to "fix" lemmy for me but simply to relay an observation.

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[–] basskitten 7 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately the communities that I'm interested in didn't really move. I tried very hard to just quit Reddit cold turkey, but instead I've dialed it back to only 4-5 core topics that I'm interested in. For general doomscrolling I mostly use Apple News now. I check Lemmy every day or two but it's hard to get stuck in when the discussions I'm interested in aren't really flourishing here. Hopefully it grows over time.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I love it. People complain about the lack of hobbyist spaces so I’m making an active effort to build them up more as time allows. I have considered making an art lemmy instance which may be a potential eventually, but I’m fine either way.

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[–] davetansley 7 points 1 year ago

Pretty good. It's my default morning scroll, at least.

I've got a lot more comfortable with it since using Alexandrite on desktop and Sync on mobile.

The only thing really missing at the moment is content. It tends to be good for the high profile stuff, but a bit lacking for the niche stuff. I still sneak back to the other place on occasion to catch up on smaller communities... hopefully that will come with time.

[–] kaden_99 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wish there was a big enough wrestling community

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] query 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

A bit annoyed about defederations and community blocks. If an instance wants to be an island by itself, fine, but you shouldn't have to stay up to date with random announcements from each instance to figure out all the places you need to have an account to access all the content you want to.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

In general, it's been pretty good. Stuff is a bit unstable every now and then, but most of that changed when I switched away from lemmy.world.

There's a couple of things to contend with though. There's less content than there was on Reddit. This ultimately doesn't matter that much for general browsing, as there is still plenty. But for more niche communities it now means barely any content. Even with larger topics like Formula 1 it's quite noticeable that there's a lot less people in there. It's great during big discussions, but any smaller links or discussions often only have like 1 or 2 responses. For other communities it's even worse. Some of the genres I listen to have basically nothing going on, while on Reddit the community was at least large enough to have a few nice discussions every moe and then. The same with many games that I really liked.

Another problem is federation with more (politically) extreme instances like lemmygrad, hexbear, and some right wing crap that was luckily defederated before I could remember their names. On the one hand, I don't want defederation based on political opinion alone to be the norm. But neither do I particularly like getting constantly called a "lib" (even though I'm quite left wing compared to the national average) or get to read constant discussions on these topics wherever I go. I come here to read about fun stuff, unwind a bit, not to constantly read about people defending dictatorships. Hexbear is especially interesting, since their users also add a lot of fun memes and good content. But then equally they brigade comment sections and overwhelm anyone who disagrees with them.

Ending on a positive note: the software (apps, backend, frontend, etc) have really gotten a lot better over the past months. I'm using Connect at the moment and I really enjoy it. Bugs keep disappearing, to the point where I now have very few complaints. Apps is why I left Reddit, so seeing that we're now (imo) in a better place than Reddit is a good thing.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I'm interacting with it far more and in far more varied contexts than I had been on reddit for several years. Overall, there isn't as much useful or entertaining activity in total of course, but the signal to noise ratio is soooooo much higher.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I'm loving it. I'm following a lot (about 500 communities) so I'm always seeing new content. It did take a while to find everything I wanted to see though.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I like it. I feel more comfortable to engage with others. I still have some communities on reddit that I go back to for specific information, but other then that, full transition.

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

Aside from the russian shills, fine and dandy.

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