Is Lemmy an effective alternative to Reddit?

As a ‘front page of the internet’ it has been a pretty great replacement for me as it’s where I go each day to just see what’s going on. However, due to the smaller size you do lose a lot of the activity in more niche communities and the sheer volume of posts/comments compared to Reddit. That’s the biggest downside. Still, you also lose the incessant ads/bad UI/UX decisions and ever accelerating late stage capitalism driven enshittification so that’s a big plus.

Yeah, I love it and actually prefer it to my old reddit experience for general browsing.

What isn’t quite there yet is the ability to like, sit down all day and scroll and post in a community dedicated to my current hyperfixation of the week. Be it guitar maintenance, some indie game, or whatever.

But reddit also didn’t have that when I started using it. Excited to hang here and watch the garden grow
- But reddit also didn’t have that when I started using it.
  
  reddit also didn't have to compete with reddit.
- "can't scroll all day"
  
  I keep saying that's a positive thing for other productivity, but sadly, that's not happening for me. Turns out, I want to sit and bum just as much as I always did before. I'm more likely to actually read articles, but I know meta gets more screen time now. As you said, lemmy doesn't have those full niche communities. I know, sacrilege to admit around here.
- I’m sure this gets repeated on Lemmy all the time, but I feel like the quality of Reddit posts, even in niche communities about guitar maintenance or whatever, has really gone downhill in the past 10 years or so.
  
  This might come off as mean, but I’ve noticed a significant dumbing-down in terms of what people contribute to Reddit communities but also what people expect to be spoon-fed by those communities. And it’s all presented as this sort of democratization of hobbyist knowledge, where it’s every hobbyist’s duty to educate newcomers on all of the absolute basics and persuade them of why they should care about any of it.
  
  Maybe this is just a side effect of Reddit recommending subreddits to non-subscribers and pushing to become a Facebook-type service for “regular” people - after all, that’s how they make the line go up.
  
  I still prefer old-school forums, which tend to be more insular, less accessible, and expect you to arrive with a modicum of understanding or at least RTFM first. To be blunt, I miss the days when the internet was primarily for geeks.
- i think thats somewhat of an advantage
However, due to the smaller size you do lose a lot of the activity in more niche communities and the sheer volume of posts/comments compared to Reddit.

That also leads to a lack of diversity of opinions.
- Same as reddit when it was new.
  
  I'd actually say Lemmy feels larger over the same timeframe, but that's just sticking my thumb up in the air sort of measurement.
  
  The problem with growth is that too much, and it ends up trolls and bots making up the majority, and too little growth means it withers on the vines.
  
  With federation (and the ability to defederate), I think the ideal ground can be found. We'll see though!
- i think there's plenty diversity outside of .world
There's also a wide and endlessly customizable variety of web/mobile clients, something reddit will apparently never have again.

e: Federation is pretty cool, too.
Once upon a time, there was Then Reddit, and Now Reddit was Then forums. One day, Future Lemmy will be Now Reddit, and Now Reddit will be Now Forums.

Welcome here!

Copy pasting from a recent thread on /r/RedditAlternatives trying to address usual criticism against Lemmy.

Federation is confusing, people want a single website they can go to

Go to https://lemm.ee/
Have a look around, see if the content and the formatting is appealing to you, register an account if you want to be able to curate your feed further
Go to https://lemm.ee/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world to see communities (equivalent of subs) that might be interesting to you.
Use Voyager as a mobile app: https://www.lemmyapps.com/Voyager. When they ask for your "instance", use "lemm.ee"
If you want more choices for apps, have a look at https://www.lemmyapps.com/

Email has been working on a federation model for decades. People have to remember if they use Gmail or Outlook, but that's it. It's similar here.

Several communities have the same name, it's confusing, active communities are hard to find

Reddit has a similar issue: you have /r/games as the main gaming community, but there is also /r/Gaming, /r/videogames /r/gamers, etc.

How does someone know what the main community is, whatever the platform? Looking at the number of subscribers and active members.

There was the example of beekeeping: if you search for that topic, the most active one is definitely https://mander.xyz/c/beekeeping with 97 users per month.

The others have barely 1 user: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=beekeeping

To find active communities: https://lemm.ee/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world. There are regular threads with active communities on topic such as gardening, movies, board games, anime, science, etc.

Who is going to pay for the server costs?

Here is a link to this question to Lemmy admins: https://lemm.ee/post/41577902

Summary of the answers:

lowest number so far: lemmy.ml with 0.03€ per user per month
a few others (feddit.uk, lemmy.zip) have around 0.11$ per user per month
some instances are running on infrastructure that the admins would be anyway, so it's virtually "free"

Most of the instances costs are paid using donations. They regularly post financial updates such as this one: https://lemm.ee/post/41235568

Obviously there is a sweet stop where you can minimize the cost by having the maximum number of users on a fixed infrastructure cost.

If you want to have a look at the number of monthly active user (the "MAU" column): https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/

Anyway, $ per user is usually meaningless because most of the servers are small enough to be hosted on some random cheap server - adding more users doesn't cost more because they are still well below server capacity. Only the biggest servers have to worry about $ per user.

I had posted this earlier this week on this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fiuuo5/how_much_does_it_cost_per_user_to_host_a_lemmy/

There is too much political content

You can block entire servers and specific communities.

Instances to block to avoid political content

Communities to block

With those blocked, you are avoiding 95% of the political content. There might be a few other communities that pop up, but blocking them is still one click away.

Lemmy is developped by hardcore tankies and I don't want to use their software

As Lemmy is federated using an open protocol, there are other options to connect to the communities without using Lemmy itself.

The first one is Piefed: https://piefed.social/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world

The other one is Mbin: https://fedia.io/m/newcommunities@lemmy.world

However, those are stil a bit less mature than Lemmy, so for instance if you want to use mobile apps a lot, Lemmy is a better choice.

On top of that, every Lemmy server is managed by different people. You can see regular criticism of lemmy.ml (the instance managed by the Lemmy devs) on threads such as this: https://lemm.ee/post/33872586 or even dedicated communities like https://lemm.ee/c/meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works

That shows that even the Lemmy devs are not protected from criticism.

There isn't enough people

Lemmy has 46k monthly active users (https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats) (Mbin and Piefed have around 800 each). Active user is someone who voted, posted or commented.

In comparison, Discuit, which was praised during the API shutdown as "easier to use as it's centralized" has 234 active users: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/KdiI1akq. Not 234k, 234 total.

For obvious reasons, the activity is not going to match Reddit levels, and niche communities aren't there.

But it's not an all or nothing situation. Most people on Lemmy still use Reddit for their niche communities, but are also active on Lemmy. And some niche communities are getting more active on lemmy. https://lemm.ee/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world (!newcommunities@lemmy.world ) promotes them.

Also, having less people provides better interactions, as your comments are less likely to get buried in thousands of others. And bots on Lemmy are quickly spotted and banned, while Reddit doesn't seem to do much about that: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1fmcelm/askreddit_is_simply_over_run_with_bots/

Lemmy is developped by hardcore tankies and I don’t want to use their software

I think the main point about this is that, so far, the development has been completely politically neutral and developers have in no way interfered with any instance having other political opinions.
So they have been more neutral than Reddit developers even if they are public about their tankies ideas on their personal publications.
Furthermore, it's open source, so it could be forked any time if needed, unlike Reddit.
- I agree with you, that's just a point I've seen raised quite a few times in the past, in a similar way to https://old.lemmy.sdf.org/post/17733
  
  There was an infamous post by feditips against Lemmy, but it seems to have been removed
- Yeah, people who point on Dev's political inclination are just stupid
Because everyone at this point uses Gmail, I prefer to use phone networks as my analogy go to, as usually most people know others with a different carrier
- Outlook is still strong, especially for companies using Microsoft, but indeed phone carriers work too.
sweet stop

I think you mean sweet spot. Now I'm wondering if it's a typo or an eggcorn.
- You're correct
How does someone know what the main community is, whatever the platform? Looking at the number of subscribers and active members.

I don't disagree but this is also kind of sad. We're just recreating the same issue on Reddit of "definitive" subreddits controlled by whichever moderators were there first, and once a mass of people settles there, it becomes virtually impossible for smaller alternatives to grow.

You're also basically just telling people to go to whichever community happens to be on Lemmy.world. Which means centralization on one instance, which is the opposite of how this place was sold.

Edit: Ignore the double comment.
- I'm not
  
  !movies@lemm.ee is more active than !movies@lemmy.world in monthly active users.
  
  Same for !showsandmovies@lemm.ee and !television@lemmy.world, which also doesn't have any moderator besides bot accounts.
  
  !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com definitely outclasses any other piracy community
  
  !greentext@sh.itjust.works is the most active for green text
  
  !map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz is the best community for maps
  
  About mods power tripping, you can have a look at !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com . I reported there an example which shows that you can create a better community over a power tripping mod.
How does someone know what the main community is, whatever the platform? Looking at the number of subscribers and active members.

I don't disagree but this is also kind of sad. We're just recreating the same issue on Reddit of "definitive" subreddits controlled by whichever moderators were there first, and once a mass of people settles there, it becomes virtually impossible for smaller alternatives to grow.

You're also basically just telling people to go to whichever community happens to be on Lemmy.world. Which means centralization on one instance, which is the opposite of how this place was sold.
Why are you actively against lemmy.world?

On Reddit you list several alternative instances, and you somehow left us out.
- LW is already the largest community by far, to a point where geographically distant communities cannot stay synchronized
  
  https://lemmy.world/post/20575394?scrollToComments=true
  
  https://lemmy.world/post/14728407?scrollToComments=true

Yeah, but no, but yeah.

On Lemmy, individual communities aren't big enough to be communities but the community is big enough to be a community.

So any post that makes it to the front of the entire Fediverse has quite a few familiar faces and feels like old reddit would.

The issue I find with wanting Lemmy to be as big as Reddit is, you're pining for an era of Reddit that doesn't exist anymore. You can't go back to 2011-2020 Reddit. It isn't there to go back to. Bot posts aren't just indistinguishable on occasion, they're upvoted all the same, by other bots.

This is the best you've got. Pitch a tent and make the most of it, fam.

Unfortunately the bot problem is coming to Lemmy.

Bots posting content is already a thing here, and then taking up front page space is already a thing.

Lemmy is speed running "How to lose your sense of community".
- I don’t agree, the longer I’ve been here the more familiar usernames I see, so to me it’s been improving.
- Do you have examples of such bots?
- Lemmy is developing. Lemmy will be a second Reddit. It will be...
- I disagree somewhat bc of one very crucial factor: here bots exist but they tend to be labelled as such. Look in your settings on the web UI if you find this not to be the case.
  
  You click on a user account, then click block them, repeat just a handful of times and then bam, pretty much you have blocked all the bots there are. Yes it takes effort - it's not done by default - but at least it's possible, whereas on Reddit there is simply nothing that can be done, with virtually any amount of effort. Over there they are baked right into the system... right?
  
  And here the bots are, or even can be, helpful. A bot that you know is a bot is a good bot, or at least an honest one.:-)

Yes for me it’s absolutely a viable alternative. It’s still small and that has pros and cons. The overall quality of discourse is high because it’s a fairly hip crowd that has found Lemmy and joined. Feels more like the early days of the social web, before social media shat the bed. But being small has cons too. Some communities just aren’t here, and a lot of the ones here are small and less active. But there’s absolutely a viable base here that can grow over time. I’m glad that the internet figured this out because we were too dependent on Reddit before - it had totally consumed all concepts of online community and that was okay before the enshittification got into high gear. Lemmy from its inception is structurally designed not to go down that path. So spend time here. Share it. Help it grow. Start a niche sub and feed it.

No. Reddit has a userbase that allows it to be all things to everyone.

Lemmy has a userbase that allows it to be a pretty good linux disscussion forum.

Once you venture away from technology, its crickets. There's a community here specifically for the Cleveland Guardians. It's dead quiet. The Guardians are even in the ALDS right now......granted they're down 0-2 in the best of 7 series......but the ONLY post since they started the playoffs, is me asking why the community was so dead. That topic has 0 replies despite being posted days ago. On reddit, I wouldn't have even needed to make that post, because there would be topics on almost every minute thing the Guardians have done right, and wrong, since the playoffs began.

And then I'd get heckled for saying that Ketchup is the hot dog derby champion. Now and forever! But on here? Nothin.......

Start posting updates for your team. Even if it's lonely talking to an empty room. Try to post a couple times a week with news or trivia or.... old players new restaurants or whatever they do when they retire. We're so little here that we can't afford to lurk. Be the content you want to see.
- Or post to the sports community rather than a specific team
- Update: WE NEED TO BEAT THE YANKEES!!!
Yeah all of my hobbies are ghost towns here. I don't care about Linux, US politics or Communism so I filtered them out. Now all that's left is general interest posts and AI generated porn.
- !inktober@sh.itjust.works
  
  !homebrewing@sopuli.xyz
  
  !homeimprovement@lemmy.world
  
  !gardening@lemmy.world
  
  !foodporn@lemmy.world
  
  !newcommunities@lemmy.world
- My spoon is likewise just too big.
That's not true! Besides Linux, there's also ⭐Star Trek:-) ✨
- Ah. Yes. I do stand corrected. Lemmy is home to MULTIPLE subject matters that I equally don't care about.
It seems to be sport dependent, I just opened !cfb@fanaticus.social and stumbled upon a 120 comments thread from 5 days ago: https://fanaticus.social/post/4293058

You can probably post about this on !mlb@lemmy.ml, it seems the most active baseball community.

Platform-wise, it's already proven that it's a viable alternative (with some advantages even - the federated nature for one), but content-wise, it has A LOT to catch up (because let's be honest - in addition to all the bullshit and toxic people, Reddit has tons of useful information and good people still).

Short answer is No. It suffers from many of the same issues of echo chamber, bias, and bullying. Just on a somewhat smaller scale due to fewer users. And never forget - Winter is coming. There will be a time in the future the bots will notice lemmee and come for it also.

But I suspect this is all a human thing. We are a contentious bunch at best and down right hateful at worst. We build communities only to poison and kill them in the end.

I think it has potential to be better in a way Reddit can never be, but the two biggest instances do so little moderation their userbase might as well be "people banned from too many subredits".

I assumed the killer feature of Lemmy would be "zero reply guys" but instance owners seem willing to tolerate them in the interests of faux-engagement. But the irony is this sort of "engagement" actually scares new users away.
- Forgive my ignorance, but what's a zero-reply guy?

I last logged into Reddit in 2022.

There's a lot of things missing - especially niche communities - but there's enough people to get into silly debates with and enough memes for me to scroll each day.

Depends on what you mean "effective."

The structure is very similar, and on the surface, it works about the same way. So in that sense, yes.

The lack of centralization improves on reddit - no authoritarian rule-making, no limitation of content by the laws of a single country, etc. - but also adds flaws. The biggest one is the potential for redundant groups on different servers, but also a concern is the potential for someone taking down their server and leaving the users high and dry. (I don't know exactly what happens to the content in this case, but that could be another issue.)

Practically speaking though, it is not a meaningful replacement for reddit because it is lacking content. I browse "all", and get fewer total posts that I saw on reddit on my 20 or so subscribed subreddits alone.

Community is the key. Community is what made reddit, and lemmy doesn't have a developed community. Yet. We can get there, and then discover what other problems with the platform are.

I feel like the decentralization brings some downsides in the quantity of bad actors, extremist views, and the like.

The open platform certainly has an overwhelming advantage over Reddit in other ways, but there seems to be a higher number of trolls, shitheads, wackos, etc and in some cases entire instances dedicated to them.

While these people get banned on Reddit, Lemmy hasn’t yet solved this moderation issue; user accounts are basically disposable and moderation is super distributed, so it’s easy to abuse.
- higher number of trolls, shitheads, wackos, etc
  
  That's because they're actual humans and not 95% bots like Reddit.
- Defederation is pretty effective
- Heres the thing, this is what huamns are. A shithead may be a shithead to one but a golden god to another. A truly open forum will reflect that. Moderation effectively splits different views and both can thrive without interaction with one another (echo chambers). I personally dont mind extremist views because it reminds me they exist and I am of sound mind to ignore them. However, I know not everyone is and I know the dangers of letting extremest views go unchallenged. I doubt technology can help us cover both fronts (open forum of ideas without echo chambers). Education can probably do a lot more. We need to be better humans, accepting of others and critical of ideas instead of people.

The strength of many reddit communities is in the people themselves, and unless you're really into Linux or star trek, the people aren't really here.

Okay but also... they aren't there (Reddit) either, anymore. Who knows where they went - possibly nowhere, or switched to lurking (either here or there), or X, or Mastodon, or Bluesky, or just nowhere.

I almost dropped off of social media altogether myself, after making the mistake of replying to a comment in Chapotraphouse and another in lemmygrad.ml. Sometimes silence is significantly better than having to put up with toxicity.

Aka some of us choose the bear

And the rest are tired of moderating against those onslaughts.
As a tool for forming communities, Lemmy's mechanics work just fine.

But the process of federation - combined with the prickly nature of certain administrators - means you can have a lively and robust community in (hypothetically) the far-left transgender tankie community that pioneered the application. But then that gets abruptly cut off and squelched in a more popular forum by some late adopters who hate their politics more than they enjoy their technical savvy.

Lemmy.world has a bunch of memes and political screeching because that's the kind of user its admins choose to encourage. Other communities have more practical interests. But they don't draw the same kind of crowd, so you won't see them on the front page of this site, particularly if you only browse Local.
- Lemmy.world has a bunch of memes and political screeching because that's the kind of user its admins choose to encourage.
  
  How are the admins encouraging these users specifically? I have not noticed this, but I have been blocking most politics and meme communities for a while.
- The idea behind federation is great but in practice it's splintered communities far too much to serve its purpose at a large scale.

I would say no to me it's more like IRC. Its small enough to be not noticed by influence operations as much and each instance has its own personality just like IRC networks. It's a great mix of local community and access to a wider view points.

"Am I ugly?" (Link to butthole pics on Onlyfans)

"Too the moon with this new crypto scam!!!"

Been on Lemmy a few months now and it feels like moving from shitty Digg to fresh Reddit. I had canceled my account on Reddit even before the last enshitification, and kept just reading. Lemmy feels good enough to participate in posting and commenting. Small is good.

I was a 15 year Reddit veteran and modded a couple dozen communities over there. I've moved over here with no regrets. The only thing that takes me back to Reddit is search results, and that's getting less and less as more people have abandoned it and deleted comments.

The amount of bots there now is astounding. It's making me believe in the Dead Internet Theory.

On the one hand, I find idle browsing on Lemmy to be a lot more enjoyable than reddit. I see more stuff that I've never seen before, and I see less unfunny, uninteresting stuff.

On the other hand: I drew a comic and posted it to what is basically the only Lemmy comic group. I wanted to give Lemmy an honest chance, so that was the only place I shared it. I figured it'd be a nice change of pace since the group is almost entirely reposts from reddit.

My comic started to get some traction, and then the only mod in the only Lemmy comic group removed it for profanity. The profanity in question was the word "balls".

A few days later I mentioned this story on reddit. Someone asked to see the comic, so I posted it to r/comics, and a few hours later it hit the front page of r/all.

So in my opinion, Lemmy suffers from a lot of the same problems as reddit (like petty tyrant mods), and some of those problems are exacerbated by its small size.

Yeah the mods can be annoying on here. Lots of times someone has replied to me and by the time I get to it it’s “comment removed by mod” without even an explanation. I wanted to know what that person had to say, even if it was a dumbfuck thing to say. These things only work with interaction, and if you’re stifling interaction on a platform that is starved for it then you’re not making it better, you’re making it worse.
- The modlog shows the deleted comments. Example: https://sopuli.xyz/modlog/23366
Sorry for that. You should definitely report it on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
like petty tyrant mods

i think that's one of the big reasons why federation is a thing; a petty mod in one community in an instance has no say in the same community in another instance.

I personally think it's a ton better. The platform is a bit less mature, but the people are much nicer and the filtering/blocking is lightyears ahead

And you can say fuck without being auto banned or something. Not a big thing but sometimes it's nice to not have to sugarcoat everything.
- Fuck yeah!
I wanted to ironically say something mean to you, but I couldn't bring myself to do it :(
- I'm autistic, I would've thanked you for the compliment
I'm guessing that filtering helps make it nicer, I see way more nasty and extreme shit on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit. I want to like Lemmy, but I can't recommend it to anyone I know because of how toxic the base experience has been.

May I ask what you filtered out to make it seem like "the people are much nicer" on a day to day basis? Genuine question, not sarcasm.
- Same as I did when using reddit. I add a filter almost every time I see something that I feel like doesn't belong on my feed. Comment sections are also filtered on the app I use.
  
  I can screenshot and dm you my list of filters, if you'd like. I would prefer not posting them publicly
- For me, I blocked the political subs and it helped a lot. But idk what content is bothering you. Are you looking at local to lemmy.ca? Idk anything about that instance. Lemmy.world seems pretty chill, it has the reputation of being the most mainstream instance

It’s feels to me like how the ancient redditors said reddit worked.

Some servers come closer to reddit like world which copied all the popular subs.

Others are definitely smaller communities, maybe a post or two a day and plenty of discussion.

I feel great about it all so far.

Definitely feels more like reddit used to feel - though with caveats.
- Indeed. With no central control, it seems easier for a single individual/org to dominate any given discussion, but otherwise it seems close to what reddit originally claimed to be.
  
  I’ve used them both the exact same way, which kept me away from a lot of the junk on Reddit until they killed my access via Apollo. Then I just switched over and subbed pretty much the same topics.
Yes, it has the vibes of pre-Digg 2.0-exodus reddit, which is why I haven't gone back (well, except for porn lol)

Well, I deleted my r account the day they fucked over the app developers. Been here since, so I guess it's a decent alternative. Not as much current content and it's 90% politics on the front page.... That can be filtered out though.

The militant Linux missionaries though, they get blocked. They show up in most tech threads and it got old a year ago.

Hello my dear friend. Can I ask you what distro you are running?
- WRONG here's why Arch is the best, and I know because I spent 13 years getting my first install running
Yeah the politics is annoying at this point, it feels like 60% on the front page is politics. I'm glad when the US votes are finally over.

Permanently Deleted

The on-the-fly meme-making by the Trekkies is positively inspiring.

We have less people, We have a better signal to noise ratio. So far we seem to have been spared the idiot community rules, like the moderators of r/music telling you that you need to go to tip of my tongue to crowdsource a list of songs with a certain theme, well they only accept a very narrow genre of music. Upvotes and down votes don't absolutely sink or blow up a post, you can say something relatively controversial here and not have it get buried.

We have some discoverability problems that they're working on. We're lacking a lot of niche interests. You're not going to find a sub here for every trade and game that exists. A significant amount of our traffic is just posts from other places with a minimum amount of discussion.
Upvotes and down votes aren't magically universal across every node. Some of the smaller fringe nodes can end up with delays and receiving posts.

I stopped reading Reddit At the very beginning of the API wars. It's honestly so much more healthy here.

Lemmy is the Linux of reddits

I imagine we all have different use cases, my idea of Lemmy succeeding may not be your idea.

That being said, as a replacement for Reddit, where I can scroll through the top say 50 posts once or twice a day, it absolutely fits the bill.

Engagement is much better for me here, I imagine due to the smaller size of the community, that lends itself to their being much less useless garbage comments and much more constructive or informative discussion.

The above being said, I do wish there were more people here.

Wholeheartedly agree. Not too many more though I hope. Once a platform reaches a certain point all the general public arrives and everything goes to shit. You have to keep your corner of the internet nerdyish to avoid this. Been true since the early 2000s for forums and then social media.
I imagine the reason why comments here are more constructive is because Lemmy is perceived to have a high technicality-threshhold (you have to be somewhat familiar with technology to make an account here - even though that's not true). That leads to only people with a high enough motivation to sign up here.

I think it's important that we grow and find new users, not because I seek growth, but because I seek diversity. We need more people, more opinions, and more different perspectives.

Of course not. People discuss like three topics in here.

!inktober@sh.itjust.works

!homebrewing@sopuli.xyz

!homeimprovement@lemmy.world

!gardening@lemmy.world

!foodporn@lemmy.world

!newcommunities@lemmy.world
Its tiny compared to reddit so it has more of a monoculture. If it grows it might get more diverse
Linux, politics, and the occasional meme that doesn't fit in either of the other two categories.
- I was thinking Linux, neurodivergence, and communism.
- I don't see politics as much since I blocked many communities from lemmy.world, including politics, news, people twitter, and of course political memes. IMO "scaled", or "hot" sorting should be default or something cause the "All" page was almost always American politics from these subs because of the high votes. Though not as much of a problem since the blocking so that's nice.
Beans, poop guy (it was drugs for sure), politics bait, and I didn't know the 4th
- Linux.

It satisfies my social media addiction, but will be years before it shows up on many search results.

So far so good. Its like the early days of reddit and I dread all that trash I left behind there coming here. I only miss sipstea.

What is sipstea?
- You could make our own community for that, but that's not my business. "Kermit sips tea"
  
  That one?

80% effective. The porn quality is weak.

I spend a lot of time blocking the lewd communities, it's not good for my mental health
- Also true. The lewd communities are numerous and botty and weak
Well that's (porn) what reddit is for!

Less niche topics, but higher quality content

And whoa man is that a bigger deal that I realized. I still comment and snoop on Reddit infrequently but I'm active here. Less trolls. Minimal bots. Lots of high quality comments.

Yes I miss the niche at times but honestly? This is home now.
Depends on the topic. From what I can tell, Lemmy skews young and technical and towards certain personalities and interests, so there are going to be topics that go to those strengths, but also topics where the discussions get mired down in either discussing the basics or get stuck in a pretty unsophisticated understanding of the topic.

It's obvious with the hyper local discussions (where should I eat in this city when I visit), because there just aren't enough knowledgeable people to form a quorum for quality discussion. But it's also true in many of the hobby/interest discussions, simply because there aren't enough people to where good discussion encourages more high quality discussion in a feedback loop.

it's effective for wasting my time in a less frustrating manner, for whatever that's worth

I've started a few subreddits and not had much engagement. I started a really niche community here and had someone posting to it within hours. Yes, fewer users, but the ones that are here seem to be more willing to engage.

For conversation about various subjects with broad appeal and a left wing slant, sure.

For tech support or info on niche topics, not at all. Lemmy is not big enough, old enough, or easily indexed by search engines.

The porn is also pretty mid tbh

Permanently Deleted

Partially. I think it's a good drop in replacement for:

Anything technology oriented, from software to hardware to what different open source projects are up to, to what tech corporations are doing, and various discussions around ecosystems (the internet itself, specific services like Discord or Reddit or LinkedIn, app stores, social networking, etc.)
Funny memes or other humor

It's got pretty good coverage of certain topics:

Politics, at least on specific sub topics
Science and specific scientific disciplines

It has a few pockets that work for very specific things:

Specific TV show or movie franchises (looking at you, Star Trek)
ADHD or neurodivergent support/advice
Noncredible Defense is actually here. Love it.

And it's just missing a bunch of things I loved on Reddit:

Sports, especially the unique culture of the NBA subreddit
Other specific interests in television, film, music, or other cultural interests.
Local things in specific cities
Finance and economics stuff
Lots of specific interests/hobbies are missing, or just aren't as active.
Advice/support for career/work life, especially specific careers (in my case, the legal industry and life as a lawyer)
Advice/support relating to personal relationships, from parenting to dating to very specific support forums for things like divorce or cancer. Even what does exist here is disproportionately neurodivergent, so the topics of focus seem to be pretty different than what would be discussed in other places.

television

!showsandmovies@lemm.ee

Film

!movies@lemm.ee

Parenting

!parenting@lemmy.world

Yeah on Reddit at this point it feels to me by bots for bots. Maybe the bots here are just better but it feels more human.

This biggest thing that helped me was putting the app icon in the same spot on my phone as my old reddit app

Lemmy is a terrible place but after leaving Reddit after a dozen years, it sucks too. No going back. I kinda want to leave Lemmy - such miserable, hateful echo chamber - but, where would I go?

Everyone's experiences will be different. There is hate everywhere, and here too. It doesn't feel worse to me then anywhere else, so that's already pretty great in my book.
Yeah, that's more or less how I feel about it. It's like they say, you can't go home again.
- Me too. I still use Reddit via the website. I think Reddit is also in a negative place at the moment too. It seems that most things I see these days are negatively voted, or Reddit's algorithm has changed and it mostly shows me negatively voted content in my feed.

I was a Reddit veteran for years, I hate Reddit now and don't use it mostly due to getting random permabans. Lemmy functions well - much better than that dog shit site Reddit, but it's not there yet in terms of communities and activity. There is very little local/regional activity that I miss most from Reddit. Overall, it's effective in the technical sense, but content-wise it is still a very small fraction of what Reddit is unfortunately. And I am not confident it ever will be a true replacement. Will also add that Lemmy is EXTREMELY FAR LEFT, to a disturbing point. If you are a centrist, you will be silenced.

It reminds me a lot of Reddit in the first few years.

I initially joined Reddit because Aaron Swartz’s involvement convinced me it wasn’t going to go the route of other corporate social platforms, but I think Swartz would have been far more at home on Lemmy.

Lemmy communities have the potential to be just as toxic.

That said, the broad majority of interactions I have are very positive.

It really depends on the community choice. I tend to choose Lemmy communities rather than "reddit refuge" communities.

I imagine that plays a big part in my personal experience.

I figure with Lemmy having much fewer users, there's less potential for toxic communities to form.
- And toxic instances can get defedarated
Yeah, I have made the experience that most communities on the german-speaking feddit.de were great, but after that had technical issues and went down for 4 months (!), the content isn't as good anymore and the users are more frustrating.

Not for science fiction literature, guitar pedals, and synthesizers which was primarily what I went to Reddit for in the first place. There was some effort to get those communities going here back during the mass migration here from Reddit, but they've never really thrived. It sucks, but I'm not going back. I take a peek at r/synthesizers on occasion, and really it's just a gaggle of self-promoting synthtubers and umpteen iterations of "what should I buy?".

Yeah, there used to be an instance for mostly synthesizer related stuff but they shut down and no alternative community took off. There also used to be a relatively active sci-fi community but then some drama happened and it died down a lot.
- There also used to be a relatively active sci-fi community but then some drama happened and it died down a lot.
  
  Interesting, is it documented somewhere?
- Mine still exists, but no one posts there much. Including me. https://lemm.ee/c/synthesizers

Current reddit is not like "reddit" anymore for a while... nothing is forever

14 year Reddit person and leaving was for the best. After the initial "what am I doing", it branched to me checking out Mastodon, then pixelfed, and then Fediverse is awesome. My only real beef is the sports situation is not it. Outside of that I haven't used reddit for a year and don't miss it honestly.

Same here, was on Reddit since 2010.

I remade an account because some of my communities aren’t big enough here. But the quality of interaction through the fediverse is much much better.

For sports, Reddit has utterly ruined them because in the app they show the results for every F1 Grand Prix as soon as the race finishes in an unremovable “trends” tile. I often can’t watch live, and so I had almost every race this season spoiled.

In terms of design, I find Lemmy to be basically a 1:1 replacement for Reddit. It's a link aggregator with communities, comments, and voting.

I like it a lot, even though the communities are smaller and there's less content. It's just a nicer communal experience for me compared to Reddit. I feel more pressure to actually comment since the communities are smaller and every little bit helps, lol.

Effective? No. Considering the purpose of all internet communities is to grow and have diversity, it's not effective. Aside from the currently low number of users, the fact that you can have the same community in different instances means a community will never grow large enough. Add to that the "you're literally killing children if you're a centrist" people and all the tankies, and what you have here is a leftist circlejerk that will remain small and irelevant enough to suit its need to be an echo chamber without any actual diversity. So maybe it's effective from that point of view? Idk.

Aside from the currently low number of users, the fact that you can have the same community in different instances means a community will never grow large enough.

Isn't !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com an example of a community which grew large enough to become the reference?
- Not sure. I can't remember right now why I blocked dbzer0 completely, but my filters are blocking this instance. Which I guess is another side of the same coin: defederation (and allowing entire instances to be blocked) also contributes to fragmentation of communities. I had no idea the largest piracy community is on dbzer0, so I would subscribe to another piracy community on another instance, and thus split the memberships even more.

it's perfectly fine but there's not enough users

true but recently I've been seeing a slight increase in user activities... 📈

A large part of what's hindering Lemmy is search engine visibility, the "append reddit to your query" trend is really helping Reddit while it can sometimes be somewhat difficult to find content on Lemmy or the fediverde more broadly

for me, yeah. Honestly much better

Lemmy is free and libre, but I sorely miss my world news and Ukraine updates.

!ukraine@sopuli.xyz - obviously not as big as the Ukraine subreddit but there's always new posts.

What do you miss about world news on Reddit?
Try Telegram and the Moon of Alabama for that.
- if you want the most demented conspiracy theories, sure

As much as I'd like it to be, it doesn't have the network effect/popularity that Reddit does. It covers maybe 70-80% of my Digg+ needs, but there are many topics/subs I want that Lemmy just doesn't have.

"Be the change you want to see" is always there: if a topic/sub doesn't exist, you can always create it yourself. But no good deed goes unpunished, so you're now the owner/moderator...

Also, !fedigrow@lemm.ee is dedicated to community growing
- Nice. Thanks for sharing that.

The only reason I use it is because Reddit killed the mobile app I was using. Lemmy is less useful to me by every metric, and I still use Reddit when searching for stuff on desktop, never Lemmy.

Not yet but i hope soon. I started to like lemmy

Welcome here, first time I see your instance, seems nice

Well ever since reddit died it's the best thing around.

The userbase is too small for now. But I hope more people start coming over from Steve Huffman's hellhole.

I think Lemmy has steadily been getting better. For having a good conversation, I think this is the best platform, everyone here seems like actual people I would run into irl.

What I think is still lacking is a way to search up anecdotal evidence on something, that I still heavily rely on reddit for. For instance if I type in google "french press coffee brew time" the only valuable results with the in-depth info I'm looking for are usually youtube videos, which are too long, or reddit threads. So I usually just end up adding site:reddit.com for all those type of search results.

But lemmy is getting good. I could see it replacing some info sources for the more tech-y niches I follow in the near future

On r/, i only really followed my interests - cats, cannabis, crochet, etc. Those topics getting less action here forced me to follow more communities. It surprised me how much i enjoy the general ask, news, eli5, til, art communities that i never would have followed when i had more niche content.

Why do all your interests start with a c... :)

Can probably add chicks in there if you are a guy too.
- I was going down the list, got high, and forgot what i was doing.

Yes. It’s different, but good.

I switched from Reddit to Lemmy cold turkey, not willing to put up with that user hostile enshitification shiticane reddit was going through. There are a few communities that I really miss (/r/weightroom) but new Lemmy things (/c/tenforward) that give me joy. The Internet is getting pretty shitty but Lemmy is a great small corner of it that's resistant to much of that fuckery

/r/weightroom

There is !fitness@lemmy.world, but it could be more active indeed

I used to think it was better than reddit, but I hate to say it, I've started to notice facebook meme communities jump onboard. Science memes is amazing and isn't affected (it seems to be all unique posts I'd never seen), but once those facebook repost meme communities jump onboard, you're going to end up with all the people that makes facebook rubbish too unfortunately.

I've already seen an increase in dumb car meme posts which get reposted 3000x on Facebook (which brings along the same toxic anti-science people). We're already seeing an increase in people who don't seem to have much common sense

I want a community which is science and fact oriented, and I'm growing increasingly concerned that as we grow, we're moving away from that.

But for now, its still awesome in comparison imho (last I looked, many reddit communities were overrun by nutjobs after the mods all left)

We’re already seeing an increase in people who don’t seem to have much common sense. I want a community which is science and fact oriented

Common sense is incompatible with science. Science is about testing our fundamental assumptions, assuming nothing.
- Well. Common sense is common sense because it can easily be disproven.
You might want to move your account over to mander.xyz and then browse mostly by Local rather than All or Subscribed.

In large measure what you are describing is considered by most people to be harmless - although it is actually not harmless at all.

Anyway, the good news is that this aspect is mainly "contained" within the communities that actually want that. As opposed to e.g. Facebook where it is everywhere (one presumes - I left it even before the pandemic).

There is an ENORMOUS amount of diversity on the Fediverse, more so than anywhere else I've seen, and nothing at all like Reddit unless you count the small niche communities, but even there... anytime a post would hit r/all people would comment like "brace yourself, the trolls are coming!", plus people in those niche subs would browse all and become tainted by it.

I was one of them. I started noticing how defensive my posture was getting, and becoming more snarky, and then even doing that irl at work. Therefore I left Reddit. I almost left Lemmy too, but I refuse to be that way. Us olds (or maybe you aren't old and instead only mature - or at least talk as if you are haha! 😂) know that we can touch grass and read books - social media is a privilege, not a "right", and not mandatory for my existence (although it is nice to keep up with things, other than having to use e.g. Google News, so I would have had to investigate finding a good RSS reader).

Reddit started to devolve when the "kids" came in and drowned out all the longer-form, more in-depth discussions involving actual facts, and replaced them instead with "I know you are but what am I?", "^This", "I also choose this guy's wife", etc. Which don't get me wrong - humor has its place in the world, it's just that when here are TENS or even HUNDREDS of such comments, IN A ROW, and they get upvoted whereas someone who writes a longer response gets actively downvoted, plus receives demeaning replies ("hey, tell it to someone who cares <expletive>"), that is when I decided to quit Reddit. Whether I stay here or leave this too, I will not go back to Reddit. Or Facebook.

And most of that I blame the platforms for encouraging people to talk while actively discouraging them from listening. Notice that ads appear between posts, but not between comments, hence they encourage - with their UI elements and such - people posting. One example is how poor their internal search functionality is - oh well, it's easier just to post my question than to search for an answer. Another example is restricting pinned posts to merely 2 - when they could easily allow like 5 or 10 or something, especially if they allow a folder system. And then even the pinned posts would only show up as being pinned under certain conditions, which users of an app may not see. Omg and don't even get me started on their official app....... 🤮

On Lemmy, it is possible to have good conversations. Make liberal use of the block button to curate what you don't want though, bc moderation is in short supply, and what is there tends to be heavily biased, so e.g. a person behaving as a dick to someone else is likely to do so to you sometime later, so consider your future self's mental health as a priority:-).

I've had no need to return to Reddit at all.

Using mbin at fedia.io,

I have access to Lemmy (Reddit-like) and Mastodon (Twitter-like)

I grew very tired of Reddit's Bot-Spam and AI-bot drivel, over 50% of the shit you see/read on Reddit is copy-pasta old shit or completely fabricated.

What do we mean by effective?

One might say that the effectiveness of reddit is its niche communities that allow each and every user to find somewhere they feel like they belong. Not only this, the complexity of niches gives rise to interesting information that bubbles to the surface and front page of the platform where more users have exposure. One might contribute this to the quantity of users on reddit's platform, and also the discoverability of the platform itself.

Personally, I think Lemmy is decently effective now aside from the saturation in political and tech news and memes. I think things will get better as for-profit companies squeeze more and more people out of their platforms, and people look to alternatives rather than dropping their digital consumption habits.

I do think discoverability is still a downfall of Lemmy, from both internal and external views. I want to better find /communities from inside the platform and via a search engine should my use and value of Lemmy increase. Wonder how development has gone on this front.

Ultimately, the FOSS nature of Lemmy is one of its greatest strengths. It can improve over time, ripping features from the big players without the destiny of being killed eventually if not profitable. I think this characteristic alone gives rise to the potential of Lemmy to be very effective over time.

I do think discoverability is still a downfall of Lemmy, from both internal and external views. I want to better find /communities from inside the platform and via a search engine should my use and value of Lemmy increase. Wonder how development has gone on this front.

https://lemmyverse.net/communities
- Yep that helps me find communities from within Lemmy. I just also remembered that Sync has this feature too.
  
  External visibility and discoverability is still an issue

It has been growing, but it depends on the community the people who are submitting posts of each community. It also depends on the engagement of the discussion and whether participation decays or is allowed to decay into toxicity.

I think Lemmy could be doing a lot more than Reddit, like showing who votes what, but people want the ability without the responsibility or transparency. It's ironic because not only is it perfectly visible to the admins, but there are ways you can get a pretty good idea of who's performing them as a normal . It would help not just in the sense of getting a better idea of why or where someone is coming from and prevent false suspicions, but it would also allow you to keep different groups of users whose recommendations might be something you would like to prioritize over other submissions or whose moderation you'd like to favor over the standard. Abusing the transparency would be easy to denounce and moderate, too.

In regards to the modlog, I don't think it's doing enough, the text in the reason field might as well be "word" and the transparency isn't compensating for the lack of a resolution process that many if not all social networks seem to want to skip. There are still things like no notification of mod actions that affected your comments or your user, and some decisions, like allowing mods to ban you, remove some of your comments while allowing others to remain, shaping or serving a narrative without giving you the ability to delete or edit your contributions while the ban is in place, give foreign instances and communities more power than they should have.

There's no way to contest modlog actions within the modlog, and the maturity of the people has been proven to be very, very questionable when they've been outed. It has also adopted reddit's policy of obfuscating the moderator performing an action even though creating an alt is easier than ever and many of them already have them, which works against the supposed commitment to transparency.

But it's very slightly better than reddit's, and there's nothing like shadow bans here. Parting observations, don't feed your carnivore pet vegetables if you aren't prepared to go all the way to seek and get an approved diet and dietary supplements for a bonafide veterinary, and it's funny seeing all the anarchy people not have a problem with the present power imbalance between the users and the leadership within the current system, but then again, they have a nice instance with the label.

Overall, fuck spez.

There’s no way to contest modlog actions within the modlog, and the maturity of the people has been proven to be very, very questionable when they’ve been outed. It has also adopted reddit’s policy of obfuscating the moderator performing an action even though creating an alt is easier than ever and many of them already have them, which works against the supposed commitment to transparency.

!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com helps a bit with that

I'm honestly more afraid to offer an opinion or ask a question on Lemmy because there's always some high and mighty jackass that thinks they are the final authority on whatever topic and rather than have a discussion, people seem to just resort to name calling.

At least, that has been my experience.

Otherwise I've enjoyed it. It can be a cool place once you figure out how to block the malcontents.

Is water an effective alternative to Soda Pop? yes i'd like to think so

It works for me because I'm into a lot of the stuff discussed on Lemmy. My biggest problem with reddit was that at some point they seemed eager to smoosh all the subs together into one big Basic Betty fest. For example having r/all be a mandatory sub and having a million default subs...It kind of felt like towards the end everyone was discussing the same stuff on every sub, and it was basically the same stuff being discussed on Twitter (and many posts were just pics of tweets).

I know Lemmy kinda has some similar issues, but because the whole ecosystem is its own niche it still works for me.

It feels like a more-manageable, more-personal, bite-sized version of Reddit. It scratches the itch, but I spend less time here overall than I used to on Reddit.

As others have said, as a "front page" with voting and real people in the comments, I like it. It's like hanging out at the one locals' coffee shop in a small hippie college town somewhere. You don't get to talk about everything you might like, and there's a definite vibe, but the people are generally polite, informed, and surprisingly cosmopolitan. That's where Lemmy really shines in relation to reddit, the quality and accessibility of conversation on general interest and shitpost threads. Even assuming they're not overrun with bots, and they likely are, the biggest subreddits are just noise and fake internet points, or at best a passing conversation with a stranger on a bus.

I still go to reddit for (American) football and mechanical keyboards, but for the former I don't even bother participating, because we've got a fun handful of folks here (to extend the coffee shop analogy, imagine a table in the back with a few professors who fondly remember going to a big football school 20 years ago). For the latter I can get the occasional fix here, and I seek that out, but I like seeing the pretty aluminum rectangles and sharing the little bit I've learned with newbies. To the extent there's still a baby splashing around in the bathwater, I'd prefer not to throw it out, but I'm clear-eyed about reddit's trajectory, and "home" is here.

Lemmy is fine, but less busy than reddit.

There's the complete absence of u/spez being a cunt, so you have to adjust to the idea of your experience not being constantly downgraded.

Similar, just smaller. It keeps me from going on Reddit but tbh, I would be back there in a second if I didn't have to use their app or use the browser.

It's working for me, but might not be for everyone.

I like that when I scroll through the comments, I recognize names. Commenting feels less like shouting into a random crowd, and more like having a conversation at a party where strangers may pop in and out.

There's definitely less content. If you're looking for something to doom scroll, you're going to burn through everything quickly, but for me, I open it up when I'm bored, see what's new, and in 5-10 minutes, I'm all caught up and back to the real world.

Not everybody is looking to ween themselves back from constant social media, but it's turned into a benefit for me.

Depends on what you are looking for. I think Lemmy works great and I only really go to reddit when a google search leads me there for something. Though I do miss the niche communities and the "there is a subreddit for everything".

Lemmy is also healthier, I used to just scroll through reddit for literal hours, it's possible to reach an end of sort for the time.

I just love it here. But I also know that while most communities are really nice, we rely a lot on two (2) individuals who provide a sizeable part of Lemmy's content (Picard and PugJesus). We should all try to do our part!

@fossilesque@mander.xyz : am I a joke to you?
- hell, you post all the time yourself, blaze!
- And both of them indeed!
And FlyingSquid
Me, dreaming of the day when I am no longer a prolific poster

Nah. Lemmy is nothing like Reddit, it's actually good.

If you pick a good, internally stable instance, it's great. Local can be more curated to your tastes, All can be more general.

Good:

I can use it for mobile without a first party app.

Bad

There aren't as many communities here as there were on Reddit.
There isn't that much content as on Reddit. Also, while the meme ratio of content feels the same to Reddit, the non-meme Lemmy content is rather small.
Comment conversation seems lacking.
Moderation tools are rather limited and heavily dependent on defederation to function.
The idea of "start your own" mindset in the design makes community formation just as bad as Reddit. There doesn't seem to be any tools for a more collaborative approach to running subs or instances.

the non-meme Lemmy content is rather small.

Did you have a look at the active communities promoted on !newcommunities@lemmy.world ?

Comment conversation seems lacking.

Depends on the topic:

https://thelemmy.club/post/18078930

https://thelemmy.club/post/18062524

https://thelemmy.club/post/18124400

The idea of “start your own” mindset in the design makes community formation just as bad as Reddit. There doesn’t seem to be any tools for a more collaborative approach to running subs or instances.

!fedigrow@lemm.ee

its effective for me, but I always find myself going back to reddut due to the data thats already there.

as the fediverse continues to grows, I'm sure my reliance on visiting reddit will begin to go down

Sure it's the same thing without all the corporate interference. Reddit was small once.

I'm here because I like the idea of defederated social media, but I hope there will be further attempts at making even better alternatives.

kinda so-so, so far. shows promise but I've also run more immediately into what could be called 'reddit rot'. For example mod behavior that resembles russian bot farms, etc.

Feel free to report it on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Thanks! It was so blatant I was wondering if I'm just getting older.

Unfortunately not because this place simply isn't big enough to have the niche communities that reddit has. Not to mention the slow pace of the front page.

I've been using a combination of Lemmy and Imgur to replace reddit for the most part. But when I need a question on a specific topic answered by a real human, I still have to go to reddit. That's all I use it for now, though. There's also the fact that Imgur is no better than reddit. No 3rd party apps, and the official app collects all the data it can off your phone and sells it to Facebook. You can block the connection with the DuckDuckGo app, but that doesn't excuse the fact that this is fucked up. (FWIW, the Lemmy app Voyager doesn't sell any of your data. Unsure about others but Sync definitely does.)

this place simply isn't big enough to have the niche communities

Yeah. Wanted to recommend Lemmy to a friend, but the few topics they were mainly interested in had little to no engagement.
Yeach there are only few exceptions where lemmy communities shine through. And its mostly linux or programing related stuff.
- !inktober@sh.itjust.works
  
  !homebrewing@sopuli.xyz
  
  !homeimprovement@lemmy.world
  
  !gardening@lemmy.world
  
  !foodporn@lemmy.world
  
  !newcommunities@lemmy.world
  
  !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl
  
  !communities@ponder.cat

Not yet but its getting there.

Yep. Uninstalled rif is fun and installed Sync. The fediverse is not as active, but fills the same need.

The only real issue I have is that there aren’t that many active communities for more niche topics. I hope it’ll get there someday, but for now we have Linux or Star Trek, take your pick. :P

What are your interests?

There are plenty of niche communities promoted on !newcommunities@lemmy.world
- It depends. Usually I’m just looking for some game or show I like. The few of those I’ve looked into that have a community have like a handful of users, infrequent posts, or auto-posted threads with no comments beyond the bot post.
  
  EDIT: Also, do you know how to get to your link on Memmy? For me it just brought me back to the main feed.

It's alright but I think the low res weird mouse thing mascot isn't the best, I've always hated reddit's smug bastard shitty alien thing though.

Also it feels relatively empty even though there's data to back there being half a million users.

Also the language filtering is super imperfect to the point I can't use it, so I have to manually filter out 500 non-english communities.

It's a Lemming!
Also it feels relatively empty even though there’s data to back there being half a million users.

45k monthly active users

Best I've found, but definitely suffers from lack of network effect

not in the slightest. But the apps are free

i like the fact that it is not karma driven. like vote on me how you want i don't look at my karma and care at all how people react

I like using both

It will take years for Lemmy to take off in much the same way as Reddit had slowly built up.

As I and other mentioned before, the main downside of Lemmy is that the community you care about isn't here (and frankly, I don't know if they will even come here at all). Like, we don't have AskHistorians here, and the Lemmy for your hometown or country is either quiet or just completely died. So, I end up having no choice but to return to Reddit to keep in touch with those communities. However, as someone who is privacy conscious since Reddit now sells your data to train AI, I try to log in to Reddit with Tor. But even with the Onion site of Reddit, it won't let me log in at most times because of technical discrepancy with stupid captchas or something. Sometimes I could log in via Tor but most times I'm not able to.

Anyhow, I would love Lemmy to take off as soon as possible but there is teething problem common in new communities. But the pessimistic side of me thinks it may not since so many people have become too invested in Reddit. And the latter intentionally hooked people in for the worst reasons.

Like, we don’t have AskHistorians here,

There's !askhistorians@lemmy.world , but it indeed lacks actual historians

For the country and town communities, I'm always impressed how busy the !melbourne@aussie.zone daily threads are

It's great. Not enough people, though.

I've stopped using reddit completely. I do tend to check twitter a lot though.

Mostly agree with what others said, it's fine for me.

Perhaps just a subjective opinion that isn't bound to technology - I find moderators much more trigger happy when it comes to deletion and even banning.

It has a long way to go but it's a good start. The community is very homogenous right now (maybe excluding some of the mainly politically focused servers). It's predominantly male tech people right now and it shows in what is active and the general vibes of discussions. My hope is not only for more niche communities to grow, but also for a lot more diversity of interests and of people in general. We need more women's voices on here for sure. I miss that diversity from reddit. Things have been steadily, if slowly, growing so far from what I can tell, so hopefully over time all this will improve.

For help on current topics, like how certain things work in a newly released game, I check https://old.reddit.com/ without an account to see what they have.

For doomscrolling/visiting niche themed subs?
Lemmy works equally fine, and with a clearer conscience to boot.

EDIT That said, I do sometimes miss certain hobby subs, such as a Tekken or Toki Pona community.
There aren't any active ones last time I checked.

It depends on your tastes. It's effective for me as I enjoy quite a bit of the popular content here (like Linux stuff), but we need far more activity for other topics.

I'm pooping on the toilet right now.

Lemmy is an improvement over Reddit in terms of its business structure. We don't yet know what the downsides will be of decentralized social media at scale, but we know that it beats a tech company that went from venture capital to publicly traded while already deep in enshittification.

Lemmy is not an improvement over Reddit in terms of design: it's designed the exact same way, so it has the same set of advantages and disadvantages.

The improvement in community is hard to guesstimate, and will change as the site grows. Aside from the company, it was often the users that made Reddit suck, and Lemmy is completely capabe of sucking in the exact same ways.

It's the only site with a similar post/comment structure and a large enough user base to be viable, so in that regard, it's the only alternative. Culturally, it's much different. It's far more left-leaning and hasn't fallen victim to the same salf-importance and group-think that Reddit users have. It also doesn't have the same wealth of knowledge Reddit built up over 20 years, though, and it's prone to petty infighting between communities and instances (and even admins).

Ultimately, I prefer it to Reddit, and never feel the urge to go back. I'm not convinced that Federation is a silver bullet for all of social media's ills, but I think Lemmy is an interesting project, and I'm interested in seeing how it develops.

It's not bad, it doesn't have the massive amount of people to keep niche communities going, but for big broad general topics it's fairly solid. It could use some video and GIF support, but maybe it's just my instance that doesn't support it.

https://catbox.moe/ can be used to host videos and gifs
- But if it doesn't display in the page and I have to go to a secondary site, it makes it cumbersome enough that I look for that experience elsewhere, like Bluesky.

No. Lemmy posts are always left leaning. There is no right and no center. Thats disheartening. Next to that most communities are too small so no viable discussions follow. Most communities die in months.

Then again, reddit.com doesnt exist anymore because some schmucks have taken over, resulting in obtrusive ads, profiling and tracking.

I dont post on reddit anymore. Still follow some subs though because they just dont have an alternative.

I went from 1 source (reddit) to several(lemmy, mastodon, 4chan, 9gag). And still it feels empty. Mostly because while some memes are nice, 4chan is filled with morons and 9gag... That's a "racist app" according to its own users. But it doesn't stop there. A lot of posts there are just vile. Not just right wing nut job, no, they are worse. And masto is mostly the same as lemmy.

!conservative@lemmy.world

!conservative@lemm.ee

!conservative@sh.itjust.works ?
Tbh, Lemmy leaning strongly to the left is a big plus for me. I mean, it's easy to find right leaning or centrist communities everywhere. A clearly left leaning space is a gem I'm happy to help preserve and nurture. I'm saying that without offense in mind. But I feel the majority of social networks / boards / microblogging sites lean farther to the right than Lemmy.
- It helps that Lemmy is developed and maintained by Communists, so Leftists have a stronghold on Lemmy that won't be able to go away.
Depends on the instance. Lemmy.world is liberal, ie right leaning, Hexbear.net is leftist, it depends on which instance you pick.

If you mean "is it full of bougie shitlibs having a circle jerk" then yes, in that vein, it's just like reddit.