Lemmy

The “Not enough mod tools” complaint is valid and I hope that improves as the platform moves forward.

I DO NOT get the disdain for the Lemmy userbase. I’ve been here for the past 4-5 months and can say I’ve had so many more meaningful and fulfilling conversations here on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit in the 10 years I was there.

I think it’s the same situation as between a small town and a big city. Reddit is huge and with a large number of people; you’re going to statistically get a larger number of assholes. Not to mention there are tens of thousands of people commenting on anything that hits r/all, so there’s no chance someone else is going to read your 1 comment that is drowning in a sea of other comments.

Lemmy feels more like a small town. Things move a little slower here, but there’s less competition to have your voice heard, and I end up seeing some of the same users time and time again across the Fediverse. I think that smaller feel means more people have a chance to see your content without it getting drowned out by the masses, which means more opportunity to make connections.

Some people suck, but Lemmy has been fucking awesome for me so far and I love this place because of that.

Redditalternatives has two types of folks who visit it, the smaller one thinks reddit is shit because of the choices the employees make. The larger one thinks reddit is shit because spooky woke moralist SJW shills paid by George Soros are censoring free speech via coordinated downvote, report, and ban campaigns.. Sometimes a person occupies both groups.

The former group likes Lemmy et. al. The latter gets on here, sees a pro union post top of all, shits themselves dehydrated, and leaves to write screeds like that one.

As a 10+ year reddit user who has switched 98% to Lemmy, only checking reddit on my computer every couple days: Lemmy is completely fine, and I have seamlessly transitioned from Reddit.

Its userbase is more technical than Reddit's, and there's not as much content. But it is a perfectly good Reddit alternative. I find it isn't as addictive as reddit, which is awesome. I just wish there were more educational communities akin to AskHistorians, AskScience, etc.

Say we're going to leave Reddit if the API changes go through

Actually leave Reddit

Refuse to elaborate

Get called toxic by the people who chose to stay

Lotta people coming here from Reddit expecting 1:1 replacement, and then get pissy that the 2 man dev team that's just trying to keep up with this sudden burst in activity isn't at parity with the multi-million dollar company that's been developing their site for almost 2 decades.

Honestly, I'm just tired of the constant comparison. Lemmy can be it's own thing. It's a work in progress and it has a lot of promise, but for anyone looking for their reddit experience, there's really only one place to get that.

"I don't like Reddit.

Its interface is ugly as sin. There are fewer users there and they're all pretentious, extremely liberal, and anti American."

-Some Digg user circa 2008/2009 (probably)

This feels like it was written by someone who has never been on Lemmy because that has not been my experience at all.

Reddit is fucking full of bots astroturfing right wing political nonsense and we’re not getting that on Lemmy because those instances are often defederated.

Or, you know, he’s one of those guys who signed up for world when he should have gone to exploding heads.

The only times I've seen toxicity like this is ironically whenever there is a big wave of reddit user influx, things usually settle down for a while as they adapt to the cultures here (or get banned), it's not as much of an Eternal September as much as it is a Irregularly Scheduled September.

Most of the active comms here are smaller but better quality than their subreddit equivalent. You even get good discussions here on memes sometimes. (Politics and News here still could be better, though.)

For someone who's been very unhappy with the state of social media for quite a while, Lemmy is a breath of fresh air, even though there are definitely growing pains.

I'd rather deal with this supposedly "toxic" lemmy userbase than sift through a thousand comment post where 900 are bot reposts on reddit

Guy is hundred percent right. Lemmy is a echo chamber for a certain demographic as vast majority of users are in it.

We either have tech, or politics. Literally every topic ends up in either. We also don't have the differing opinions aspect as just about every debater talks like they're just the different shade of the same color.

Even spicy news that would make any other site a warzone of opinions just echo chambered here. Literally everyone agrees on one conclusion and random two comments that disagree with that having at least -15 points.

Lol, the user doesn't seem to realize that if everywhere you go and comment, if absolutely everyone is an asshole, then maybe it's you that's the problem...

I mean, is it? Because I've found it to be an overall better experience so far. Am I just not going to the right instances/communities? I mean, I get that there are some fucked up places in the Fediverse, but I haven't been actively looking for them, and I haven't accidentally stumbled across anything so far.

I miss the random non tech centric communities from Reddit. The userbase here, across the fediverse as a whole gravitates towards more tech focused aspects and while that's fine, you miss out on the random topics / subreddits you'd find on Reddit.

(The answer isn't also 'just start that community here', specially I miss randomly getting topics from subjects I wouldn't even search for, but just get surfaced because of the shear amount of content and users Reddit has)

It sounds like the real complaint is that it's different.

Because yeah it's certainly not more toxic. That's laughable. My interactions here have been overwhelmingly better than on reddit.

And the other complaints boil down to "it's small and new, yuck"... Yeah that's a good thing usually. There have been terrible attacks with CSAM but people are handling it and luckily I've never seen a single image like that. On reddit it was not uncommon to see mutilated humans without wanting to even though there was far more time and resources available to prevent that

I think there is some valid complaints to be had against being swarmed by fanatics on Lemmy but there is no way it’s more toxic than Reddit. For the most part I’d say the community is very much the same between the major Lemmy instances and Reddit. Just with more FOSS evangelism and Linux love.

TL;DR: no. Definitively no.

NTL;R: Okay... let me chew on this.

Lemmy as a whole is definitively more toxic than Reddit

For me, at least, non-contributive ("toxic") [see footnote*] behaviour would be: assumptions (including witch hunting), decontextualisation, "didn't read but still replying lol lmao", insults, "I dun unrurrstand", whining + entitlement, and "chrust me" = "I take you for gullible". And those things happen far, far less in Lemmy than in Reddit.

For the poster complaining about Lemmy, "toxic" would be, instead:

• pedants - pedants are fine as long as context-aware. And even then, I don't recall a single pedant screeching at my L3 broken English here, unlike in Reddit.
• purity testers - this can be interpreted 1000 ways.
• concern trolls - yet another thing far more present in Reddit than here...
• contrarians - "oh no what I say should be put in a holy altar, how do you dare to disagree with MEEEEEE?". Sorry but contrarians are leagues above the sort of circlejerking that you see in Reddit, where you'd get 1000 weaboos screeching because you wrote "animes".
• "ackshyually" - refer to what I mentioned already about context. Those "ackshyually" are caused by decontextualisation, that happens far more often in Reddit.

I know that what I'm going to say is anecdotal, but it's still worth sharing: I see the difference specially because I used to moderate a small Reddit sub, and I mod a Lemmy comm nowadays. People here are more reasonable and contributive; I barely need to intervene here, and even then 99% of the time it's like "don't do that" "okay". In Reddit though? Well.

I was on Lemmy.word for slightly over a month and posted many times across numerous communities and instances, so I definitively gave it my best shot.

Depending on which instances yours federates with, you'll get a different experience. lemmy.world and lemm.ee in special tend to gather Reddit-like critters alongside a few good posters, so instances where behaviour is a bit more monitored (such as beehaw) tend to defederate them.

Also Lemmy has backend issues

I'm no coder to claim that the issues are "backend" or "frontend". Instead I'll say the issues that I see:

• papercuts, like the bell icon staying even after you checked all messages
• a lack of mod tools
• rarely lemmy.ml (the instance that I'm in) slows down.
• In the past it used to show errors and refuse to load, but I don't recall this happening nowadays. ~~And it never showed a downtime banana.~~
• can't cross-instance linking posts in a convenient way

So... come on, the platform works. It has its issues, it's likely worse from lemmy.world due to the amount of posters, but it works.

Bad actors

Name them. Otherwise it boils down to "chrust me". Unless referring to the CSAM event below.

lemmy.world comm being bombarded with CSAM [...] Imagine if a subreddit had to be shut down because of this.

I seriously believe that the approach taken by the lemmy.world admins to close down !lemmyshitpost was more sensible than the actions that I'd expect any Reddit instance (oh wait, there's only Spez's) to take. If the same happened in 2023 Reddit, here's what would likelyhappen:

• subreddit mods ask for help to the admins, "we're being bombarded with CSAM". They hear admin crickets in return.
• mods lock subreddit to avoid the bombardment. u/ModCodeOfConduct forces them to reopen.
• mods eventually give up and leave. The sub becomes unmoderated and attracts paedophiles until you got a full paedo ring..
• the paedo ring grows large enough to get a mod outrage of 9001 subs.
• Spez deletes the sub while making a public announcement, like "WE SNOOS STAND AGAINST PAEDOPHILIA!" (cough former Reddit admin Aimée Challenor cough cough)
• the original userbase of the subreddit has no equivalent community to go to, because unlike in Lemmy you're expected to have a single sub per subject.

and sees an influx of kinder people

Dude. You're in Reddit. That's the pot calling the kettle black. Reddit makes even Faecesbook's community look wholesome in comparison, it's on par with modern Twitter. Lemmy is considerably nicer than Reddit.

And if you still want something nicer there's always Beehaw. I'm being serious - for people who want/need an environment with more monitored behaviour, it's a go-to place. Provided of course that you don't want to eat the cake and have it too, by behaving in a way that you don't want others to, otherwise they'll show you the door.

Oh I agree. Maybe not toxic per se, but extremely out of touch. I think what happened is it just became a bigger echo chamber, because from the already echo chamber reddit, all the people who are the type to switch to the fediverse (privacy focused, foss lovers) are on lemmy, with their opinions being spouted back at them, so it feels like everyone agrees, when really they're a minority.

The biggest differing opinion between reddit and lemmy that I see is lemmy's insistence that absolutely everyone should switch to linux. Of course I saw that on reddit a bit too, but it always had some pushback.

And of course there's also the ignorance of the fediverse's problems. Like people just can't comprehend why someone wouldn't switch to Mastodon or Lemmy.

This doesn't apply to all topics though. There is still some good discussion here. Sometimes it can be better than reddit.

What's weird is I don't experience this on hacker news. People seem to be a lot less out of touch, and have a wider variety of opinions. Not entirely sure why, maybe because it's had time to mature?

Lol. I don't have an account anymore, but I was able to lookup the post on Google and found it. Dude seems to be getting ripped apart a bit. It's pretty funny.

There’s some real holier-than-thou types online that just have to be heard. And when Lemmy doesn’t want to listen to their main character ramblings they crack the shits and run back to Reddit with the other main characters

Maybe I'm being unfair, but somehow when I read complaints like this about "purity" and "insufferable" and all that, I always assume it's "they downvoted and insulted me when I made a bigoted joke about like transpeople or something".

Elitism ? definitly. Especially linux. But toxic ? I only saw cordials talks in here, with a few trolls here and there.

As for csam I never saw any scrolling a bit every days. I saw people talking about another instance encouraging it and troll spamming, it but never once saw it myself.

What I saw on reddit without searching was almost daily gore. And definitly sone real csam (this was a long time ago, seems to be fixed now)

lol people are def nicer here. This guy just misses his little friends.

I have noticed this too. It's better just to not interact. At the end of the day, I just wanted a better link aggregator than what reddit became and it works nicely for that.

I mean... My own experience here completely agrees with their overall appraisal of the situation.

The only reason I'm still here instead of back there is 3rd party app support...but rather than 100% of my Reddit time becoming 100% Lemmy time, it's more like 100% of my Reddit time becoming 20% still Reddit, from a computer, 20% Lemmy on mobile, and 15% in disbelief that I'm spending time on Facebook, and the remaining 45% of that time I used to spend on Reddit, I'm just not spending it on social media anymore.

So yeah. Lemmy wants to be a reddit alternative, but for me it's just not. It's similar, but with less content overall, less relevant and less interesting content, less interesting comments, and on average a worse community. Other than the shitty spez business practices (which are a big deal, don't get me wrong), Lemmy's just "Reddit, but worse in every way" to me.

Unless Lemmy gets better, it'll never be more than an occasional visit for me...and if Reddit were for some reason to right the ship, shit can spez, and reintroduce 3rd party app support, I'd probably go back in a heartbeat.

I find Lemmy uses to be a little pretentious oft times, extremely narrow minded in it's left leaning views. Very Reddit like in that last regard, perhaps more so.

At the same time, I do find a lot of insightful, clear headed individuals and some genuinely good people, but that also exists on Reddit.

The people running this site are better by far and the mods a little more level headed, but I don't expect that to last because power always corrupts.

I've already seen some people modding a stupid number of places, which is always a bad sign.

We'll see where this place ends up, but it is not as liberated and people here want to believe, and not as immune to corruption as they think.

Less trolls here that just want to argue with everyone over everything

maybe it needs a little curation, but once you've blocked the instances, communities and users that are personally annoying to you, it's a fun and engaging place with the usual share of human noise. Maybe some people are happy to have reddit choosing what deserves to reach your eyes, I like to do it myself :)

One thing I've noticed about the alternatives subreddit, is there is a lot of people persuading people against alternatives. It's almost like there was some organising to persuade people there was no alternative.

I mean, when you factor in you'd probably get removed, or shadow-banned, or have your posts removed for mentioning Lemmy, it feels like there is a multifaceted approach to discouraging folk from leaving the reddit teet.

While there is an element of truth, it's scattered in with exaggeration and only focussing on negatives. The objective was to say Lemmy bad, staying good.

No way is Lemmy more toxic than reddit. I find those "well ackshually" folks are much less here.