How is Lemmy better than Reddit?
How is Lemmy better than Reddit?
I am a reddit refugee. Keep seeing that this is supposed to be somehow better than Reddit. As far as I can tell, it follows a similar format, less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose. But It looks like people still get down vote brigaded on some communities. So I'm curious, how it's better?
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We control it. It's libre software.
You're coming at this from the design and community aspect. I don't think Lemmy makes significant improvements over Reddit on those fronts, it's designed the same, has the same benefits and drawbacks. As of right now the small size of the community makes it lacking in diversity and impractical for niche interests (aside from tech-related ones).
My case for Lemmy being better is a business case: Reddit was a for-profit company backed by venture capital, and is now publicly traded. They are extremely susceptible to enshittification, and are in fact already deep in that process.
Meanwhile, Lemmy is an open source software that enables users to host their own social media. It's not even a business at all, i'm not even sure if the developer (LemmyNet) is a business or a person or some other legal entity.
Fediverse social medias (Lemmy, Mastodon) are structurally resilient to the enshittification that we're seeing from corporate social medias, and i like that a lot.
Open mobile app support
Ad free (depending on the app and instance, but its pretty easy to get Lemmy without ads)
No CEO to make whacky, unpopular decisions without clear purpose or recourse
No shareholders whose priorities will always take precedence over the users
There's also something to be said for being part of a smaller community
Of course any and all problems can occur in microcosm within a particular instance or community, but it's trivial to just block that instance/community. As for brigading, bullying, and harassment, Lemmy offers no solutions to human nature, unfortunately.
Everyone’s talking about the tech, but I’ll talk about the user base. When you make a post or comment on Reddit, it often feels like you get lost in some black hole of other posts or comments. No one sees your comment because there are 1000 other comments on the same post.
At Lemmy, there are fewer users and fewer comments, but your comments actually get seen. People upvote. I weirdly get way more upvotes at Lemmy than I did at Reddit, in spite of the smaller user base here. Because of that, I’m way more active here than I was on Reddit.
open-source, self hostable and federated
It’s more different than better, and by different I mean better
In terms of variety of communities it isn't better, but the hope is over time people will continue to come over here as reddit decays and eventually it'll catch up.
I left reddit when they killed the 3rd party app I used. I didn't want to switch and I ended up here. in my opinion Lemmy still has a long way to go to be as good as what I left, but I don't want to support reddit anymore and I find it to be good enough here to still be enjoyable. I can still look at memes, and there's still some good discussion to be had.
The biggest thing Lemmy is missing is niche communities and a broader and less techy audience. I think both of those will happen overtime if the platform keeps growing. Crossing my fingers we get there.
Lots of great answers, but I would like to know from you, WHY did you leave reddit?
For lots of us the last straw was closing down the API, since that meant we were forced into the official app. Such a thing is impossible on Lemmy because it's federated, so if an instance decided to do that, it would just get ignored by everyone else.
It's federated so much more unlikely to be enshitified by money interests.
Right now the community is smaller and manageable so less bots and trolls
Overall, it isn't yet. Reddit has more developed niche subs, more in-depth posts and comments, and enough content even if you filter out the low effort stuff. Where Lemmy is better is that it is decentralized and not run like a corporate dictatorship with zero respect for its users the way Reddit is.
I recently migrated here. I did so as a precaution, and still browse reddit sometimes .
Reddit IPO'ed, and is now focused on making money. They removed the API to centralize it's power and remove 3rd party apps. They threatened subreddits who protested, and shut some down. And have made sweeping changes to accommodate to advertisers.
The straw that broke the snoo's back was the CEO hinting at subreddit paywalls. I figured I would try to learn Lemmy again, and what do you know, it's more serious, has better comments and posts, segmented even more than reddit with the distros, and fully free/open source.
It also helps that I'm a huge computer nerd, and there's a lot of that on here, but you can find your niche.
Hard to put into words. "Better" as in "more free" (as in freedom and no cost). Everything is maintained communally and so you and your data are not sold (out) for money.
Simple, no Karma whoring, real people to argue, no bots posting fake stories about something that happened related to the post, and best of all, controlled by users and not corporate people.
Decentralization.
That in itself is a huge advantage. Otherwise it's just Reddit 2.0
Listen, I won't dig into all the tech and philosophy of decentralization and anti-corporate ownershipa. There are other people here for that. But let me tell you why I am enjoying it: it's small, it ends, and it feels like early internet.
I load up Lemmy, and see a series of disjointed memes, or a current ongoing meme (like pondering the orb) and absorb that for a short while. I see a couple world news articles, a couple about Trump and a couple about places that aren't the US. I read an article about Ryzen's new chips not performing well on Windows and see someone's retro-gaming setup. Then, after about 10-15 minutes of scrolling, I go "oh hey, I remember this post from yesterday", and then I close Lemmy because, and this is the important part, I've hit the end of new content in my feed.
I still get the news, I still take in a couple memes about the current state of politics, or a celebrity flying her plane altogether too much, but I am never stuck here. There's no one trying to rage bait me for the sake of user engagement, and any argument I find myself in wraps up and moves on. I don't feel disconnected, but I am also never completely absorbed, and my life is better for it. Sure, sometimes while I am waiting in a line I load Lemmy only to discover there's nothing new for me in the hour since I've closed it. Sometimes I do the age old, "looking to busy myself", close Lemmy because there's nothing to see, immediately open Lemmy because I am looking for something to occupy my Internet poisoned brain. But being bored for a minute here and there is worth it, if it means a lot more free time because I am no longer absorbed in the rat race of infinite scrolling social media.
I think Lemmy is better in a series of ways, but the one that really matters is that it helps me put down my phone, and do things that I enjoy.
Why did you, personally, leave Reddit?
Less locked down than Reddit. No CEO bent on taking your user created content and charging for it. No CEO trying to polish a turd for advertisers to make $$ while simultaneously completely taking for granted and disregarding the mods and users that actually make Reddit exist. No communities captured by shills and groupthink. Well…except for places like hexbear or some .ml, but there’s no pretenses there. You know what you’re getting into. Lemmy is more egalitarian, plenty of apps for mobile devices, people generally have a discussion and not just be the retread cheap quip for upvotes.
Also, Reddit IMO has gotten “colder” for lack of a better word. People don’t upvote. You’re more likely to be criticized for a position than engaged with. Opinions that disagree with the hive mind are often quickly downvoted regardless of whether or not the position has validity.
Lemmy is just more chill.
25% of reddit comments are chatgpt trash if not worse. It used to be an excellent Open Source Intelligence tool but now it's just a bunch of fake supportive and/or politically biased bots
I will miss reddits extremely niche communities, but I believe Lemmy has reached the inflection point to eventually reach the same level of niche communities
No corporate control
The form of this kind of social media has got the same set of upsides and downsides as it does on Reddit. It won’t be exactly the same because the people are different, but the problems aren’t that different and the people aren’t that different either.
As a mostly lurker I find the experience pretty similar. I scroll through and find some interesting articles, bits of news, memes. It’s a slower pace, but I think in time it'll grow faster. People migrate over occasionally, but there may be a critical mass moment when it’s big enough that lots of people start flooding over. Or it won’t and it’ll just fizzle out to nothing over time, who knows. For the moment it’s good enough for me to have replaced Reddit entirely.
As for things that are better: you get a lot more control over how you want to experience it. There’s no singular controller always dragging the experience down toward profitability. There are clients a-plenty, the api is open, you can control what parts of the network you see and which you don’t. It does take some effort, of course.
As for worse, because there’s no singular entity controlling the network, there’s going to be some very dark corners. You can block them (many will be blocked by individual server operators already), but they’re still there and they get to carry the Lemmy name and newcomers are most likely to experience it.
Just my thoughts on the subject, it’s been discussed a lot, I’m sure other people have quite different perspectives.
You're on lemmy.world, which is pretty much exclusively Reddit refugees, so you probably won't see much difference in culture there, but that's what I consider the main advantage.
As in, I left Reddit when I noticed the toxic culture was fucking with my mental health.
Lemmy isn't particularly great anymore in this regard either, but still magnitudes better.It still falls into some of the same pitfalls that Reddit had (groupthink, reflexive commenting, power-tripping mods), but some of those problems I don't know that there's a way to get around them in this format, they're just a human nature sort of issue. I appreciate that Lemmy doesn't appear to be owned by a giant mega-corp trying to harvest our "intellectual", but we'll see how that pans out in the future. I've just gotten used to every online service I've used eventually going to shit.
I like that there's no advertising at the moment, I don't know that I would mind it so much if there was advertising, as long as it was kept minimal. I know these things don't just happen for free and if money is needed to help keep the lights on and such.
You've gotten plenty of replies, so I'm sure this has been said. There's nothing to make the content or behavior better. The thing that's better is it isn't controlled by a single entity. If 9ne of the hosts tries to use their power to restrict API calls, for example, the other instances can ignore them. Anyone can always spin up new instances as well.
That said, one instance (Lemmy.world) has far more users and communities than any other, which isn't ideal. If they were to just cut ties with everyone else then a lot of people and communities would become lost. This doesn't have to be the case, and hopefully it diversifies, but it is the case right now.
spez has no power here.
Lemmy isn't a single website like reddit.com is. It's rather a collection of decentralised servers ("instances") offering the same service (one very similar to reddit). It's often compared to e-mail - just as Gmail users can talk to Outlook users, lemmy.world users can post and comment on lemmy.ml from their home instance.
What this does is it removes the centralised aspects of Reddit - if a community has powertripping mods one can make an alternate community (like on Reddit). But this goes a step above - powertripping server admins can be reigned in by simply switching instances.
No company owns every single Lemmy instance. That's the only guarantee you are getting; however, that's where all of the tiny differences come from.
Reddit is owned and controlled by a corporation (Condé Nast.) They disabled 3rd party Reddit apps to force people onto the official Reddit app which also broke many third party moderation tools. This disproportionately impacted power users, frequent posters, and mods-- in other words, the people who made Reddit the important community it was.
They showed an unwillingness to listen to their community or work with the unpaid volunteer moderators, instead banning the moderators who took part in the Reddit Blackout and replacing them with mods willing to cooperate with the enshittification of the site.
They've been mangling the web interface to be uglier and less usable (old.reddit.com is still up, but the mobile version of old.reddit.com is gone). They've been experimenting with ways to show more ads and subtler ads.
Lemmy is open source and federated so it can't get bought up by a company and cored out for shareholder value. You can use different instances, or a variety of apps. You can use (or create your own) third party tools for accessibility and moderation.
Lemmy is currently a smaller universe than Reddit was, but it has a high ratio of good posters and moderators who care personally about their own communities, so hopefully it continues to grow.
It's not flogging your data, forcing you into using shitty apps or generally selling you for stock value.
When one instance enshittifies itself you can just block it.
Also, no greedy little pigboy Spez.
It's not, but it's old Reddit with more attributes that prevent a transition to corporate Reddit so I'll take it.
It depends on your values. In terms of front page content it's pretty similar, except with more Linux. The niche communities are kind of lacking, but then you get to have entire hobbyist run niche servers like the one I'm on.
IMO that's where lemmy really shines: as a truly community owned collection of boards.
I was practically forced to move to other platforms, including Lemmy, because Reddit's way of dealing with things is absolute garbage. Their app is garbage, their ethics are garbage, their admins and moderators are garbage.
In short I got permabanned on the entirety of Reddit after confronting a moderator in my favorite sub violating their own (and Reddit's) rules and content policy. Which eventually led being banned on the sub by said moderator, and later Reddit got triggered as I was "avoiding a ban" with an alternative account (which happened accidentally).
Since then it's been impossible to get in contact with admins, and they've been autobanning any new accounts I tried to set up. I've been trying to appeal my bans dozens of times in the past year, but never get an actual response from an actual admin, I doubt they even have humans working at Reddit at this point. That's on my 8+ year old account..
Previously I also got permabanned on dozens of subs for commenting in a sub that was supposedly brigading, I didn't even have any harmful intention or said anything worthwhile of a ban, yet all those completely unrelated subs banned me for "participating" in the brigade thing.
It just shows what absolute trash moderators and admins of Reddit are. They're all only playing their own little agendas. They're only destroying their own community with stuff like this. I miss my favorite communities, but I absolutely don't miss the garbage surrounding it.
It's not commercial. Your data isn't being harvested to advertise to you.
The mods and admins aren't usually far-right radical preppers, that creates a more pleasant environment.
There are not quite as many trolls yet and at least some mods are rational.
The admins are about the same degree of terrible though, but without the fascist coddling.
You own your data, you can self-host your own Lemmy instance and still connect to other Lemmy instances (Like what I do)
Also you can share whatever you want, no one tells you "If you say that again I'll ban you from the entire network". And of course, there are no ads or algorithms showing you what their owners want you to see. It's freedom.
Welcome to Lemmy! Enjoy your stay.
The functions are more or less supposed to be like how Reddit used to be (a link, comment, information and sometimes image aggregator). Here are some differences, though:
- Many varieties of apps to access the Lemmy API (the reason why many people had migrated from Reddit in 2023 to begin with). It's even partially compatible with Mastodon apps/accounts (the Fediverse's closest analogue to Twitter)
- Power tripping asshole mods and admins exist here just like anywhere else, but they alone can't ruin all of Lemmy, unlike Reddit. Even the original creators, despite holding a couple of disagreeable and harmful views, has made something that's larger than themselves.
- There's isn't a dedicated team tied to deepening the owner's pockets by finding ways to make the experience worse. Development progress is slow but it is continually in the interest of the community.
- No ads! But please try to support your instance if you can!
- A public modlog makes a huge difference, even if the mod action originators are still anonymous. By being honest with which of your account(s) were unfairly banned/silenced, you can make a public appeal (just in the form of a post from another instance). If it is a case of the aforementioned power-trippers, extreme bias, or tyrannical rules (but some instances like Beehaw have strict rules for good reason), then it is easy for everyone to see that, and you can make your home on the new Lemmy instance and have a good time. If you're just a piece of shit troll, that's also clear as day and then none of the networks will want you and ban you independently or you will get such notoriety that you will be blocked/banned/defederated.
It’s not owned by a conglomerate that has the misaligned goal of harvesting your data for profit. The fediverse’s goals far closer match the goals of the average poster.
But don’t think this solves the human condition. As a whole we are attention seeking, validation needing, ass holes every single one. I wouldn’t expect much difference in the posters or the mods.
It’s not controlled by one single entity. Everyone can spin up their own instance and host their communities, and you can block instances that deserve it. And the software is completely open source and stuff, and it obviously works with all kinds of third-party clients and doesn’t try to monetize the API. And we don’t have spez, so that’s of course another benefit. And no ads! I could go on and on…
The main point is that nobody owns the whole, so nobody can fuck it whole up, not even admins - like Steve "Greedy Pigboy" Huffman did with Reddit.
Past that, it's mostly community tendencies and software differences, not "hard" contrasts:
- Yes, you can be vote-brigaded here. There's no global karma though, so no big consequence for being vote-brigaded.
- Disingenuous, whiny, assumptive, fallacious, "lol lmao" users (you know... like the typical Reddit user) are present here, but I feel like the ratio of those users vs. decent people is smaller here.
- Some mods are arseholes, some are decent, nothing changes in this matter. However it's easier to get away from arsehole mods here.
- Blocking here is not a way to prevent being contacted further. It's just a way to remove an annoyance from your sight, like it used to be in Reddit. If being harassed, contact the relevant admins.
Additionally people often say that echo chambers here are stronger, but I might not be the best person to ponder about this (as I'm left-wing in both social and economical matters, so... if there's an echo chamber I'm part of it).
I like the choose your own adventure element. If you want strong content moderation you can go to Beehaw; if you want something more catch all, Lemmy.world is good; if you're a Stalinist, you have at least three solid options.
The instances talk to each other, but many fulfill slightly different functions.
At Reddit, it seems the stupidest posts often get thousands of upvotes. Here, they're lucky if they get 50. So that makes me feel less crazy, I guess.
At the end of the day, we all loved Reddit at one point, but it is clear where it is heading with all the random mtx stuff, adding some annoying standard social media features, making asshole greedy corpo decisions etc.
One big one for me is that the opinions seems a lot more varied, but I think Reddit has been flooded with bots for the past few years.No spez?
Less chat bots on Lemmy, and they seem to be easily identifiable and ignored/reported.
Lemmy isn't quite at that sweet spot where there are enough daily users to get niche content and information from a group of knowledgeable people - but some communities seem to be quite active and helpful already.
I'd love to get to the point where we have a big science/history community and get some non-celebrity AMA's that have genuine interaction.
I'm more than happy for Lemmy to stay "underground" for a good while, slowly building communities. Once things hit a critical mass and wind up on corporate radar, lemmy will get swarmed and another migration will happen with the same core groups that joined lemmy early.
I wouldn't say "better", because then people will assume, as you have, that it solves all of the problems with Reddit. Lemmy solves certain specific problems that are evident on Reddit. Namely the centralized ownership of the platform and the enshittification that can result from that.
It doesn't solve the problem of certain bad-faith user behaviours like downvote brigading, trolling, etc. If anything, those problems are a bit worse in the fediverse since ban evasion is really easy. We recently had a problem with a troll who spent two months posting incel stuff to a variety of different communities, and when he got banned from one instance he would just create a new account with a different instance. He went through like 15 accounts, though he does appear to have finally given up as of a week ago.
You can’t really get kicked off.
The audience is mostly the same so you're not going to find many differences there. It's mostly the platform and its philosophy you'll find a difference in.
It’s not what it does — it’s how it does it.
Lemmy is a form of social media that truly belongs to its users, including you, not a soulless commercial entity. You want to change the code? You can do that. Run your own instance? Host your own community? Make your own moderation rules? There are instances at all corners of the political compass each with the freedom to use Lemmy how they so desire.
Lemmy is yours, to use however you see fit, and with the mutual consent of other server operators and their users. It’s radically different from a business.
To me the way it's better is that it's more free in a sense. For one it does not even attempt to limit what software you use for browsing it, but also if you very dislike certain people/content, like-minded people can host their server without losing access to most of the other content, while being able to block the unwelcome instances and users.
Downvote brigading is not a technical problem though, but a people problem, isn't it? So the solution against that would be stricter moderation, maybe banning a few more instances (but that's not really a good solution unless it's very extreme), and making people downvote less.
Hmm, thinking about it, maybe a daily per-user "downvote budget" would be an interesting experiment? To see if it would be effective. Or with an other interval, but still not too long, and maybe partly connected to account active days (not account age).it's not. still have power hungry mods that ban and block your messages on the slightest disagreement. it's still a cesspool, but mostly because of the public.
Smaller community means your comment will get some actual attention
It's more Linux memes for me.
The votes don't matter. Reddit trains you to be addicted to the endorphins from updoots. The more you use Lemmy, you find that no one cares about karma, half the people sort by "new" anyway, and even if you wanted to know your karma, you'd probably have to figure it out with pencil and paper yourself.
It's easier to start new communities, there is a mod log that shows everything the mods do, and if something is off, you can generally just send a message to the server admin(s) and they will reply. You know, like normal human beings.
There are fewer people, which means less content, but also more of a community feeling. It's like how reddit used to be in the good ol' days.
Check out the different clients available at LemmyApps.com or the Lemmy Apps Directory.
Democracy manifest!
Third party apps
No ads disguised as posts.
For me its multiple reasons.
I really like the aspect and feeling of a small bonded community. There are a lot of people that are fairly active on Lemmy and you see them quite often.
The next thing is, that I personally had the experience, that people on Lemmy are much kinder than on Reddit. There are so many kind people on Lemmy and I had a lot of useful conversations that aren't like two monkeys throwing poop at each other.
What's also a really good thing is, is the fact of redundancy and federation. The fact that there are multiple instances, each with a unique style and feeling, is good so that everyone can find an instance that suits their needs(or they can host their own one if they want to). There are also sometimes multiple communities for the same topic on difference instances. I as example have blocked lemmy.ml due to their modding behaviour and I don't want to support this. This also means, that I won't engage in their Linux and askLemmy community's, but this isn't to bad, since both have duplicates on other instances.
It has good mobile apps (And multiple options, depending on what you like).
I'm here. :)
Much more diverse opinions mainly because there are more non-Americans percentage wise.
The only benefits I care about is that Lemmy has "third party" apps
So.. Two things..
I have a funny story regarding modding on Lemmy..
Ran into two bad mods the other day (related to the same convo). But, gist of the story is, I got into a discussion with someone who heavily exaggerated and claimed I wanted to kill an entire minority, as I only 80% agreed with them (they were basically demanding government benefits which would cause a huge issue if applied to other communities which was required to be fair , and they couldn't even set the parameters of the rules for it). A Beehaw admin freely ignored the outrageous comment that the other mod made, and branded me instantly as "starting a fight".
As I was deleting my Beehaw account, I noticed that same non-beehaw mod had actually been in a thread I had also posted in a month ago which was discussing more conservative people moving to Lemmy (I'm VERY left). They basically said in the discussion they were constantly needing to remove "conservative" and people who were trying to start fights . This was ironic because doing the huge exaggeration thing and calling someone a derogatory name is basically out of the conservative playbook (and they were certainly the only ones fighting), and anywhere else it would be seen as rediculous behavior.
People in that thread though also made it sound like the rest of Lemmy was a cesspool. This colored my opinion of Lemmy and I realised my opinion came from that same thread, so, I didn't want to leave beehaw, and only took the leap recently.
I was actually hugely surprised by Lemmy World. Everyone is a lot more respectful here than I expected and I think its even a better safe space than beehaw, where . There are a lot more connected instances, so the bad actors get drowned out easier, and it promotes a healthy discussion, where science is encouraged. We might not all agree, but it's a lot easier to avoid echo chambers. The science memes community is also AWESOME on Lemmy and beats anywhere else imho.
Reddit on the other hand, doesn't seem to have good moderation (most mods are unpaid and the power hungry ones will try to manage hundreds of communities). It has degraded into people fishing for karma , and has a higher percentage of abusive people who also likely abuse others on facebook (many aussie subs have degraded into far right wing where science is discouraged and people purposely try to push an echo chamber). THere are a lot of good mods here though, and if you don't like a community, you can block it and find another one.. The cool part is that I suspect over time, this will eventually keep mods honest.
The biggest problem is that Reddit SHOULD have acted on FatPeopleHate, the Donald and Female Dating strategy. They didn't act on jailbait either apparently. Those people established themselves permanently into the community, grew to some of the largest communities and the moment mods left, many of those same communities likely did a power grab too. Reddit staff don't really care either, and since the people running the servers don't seemingly care (similar to facebook), it simply encourages them
With Lemmy you can make an account on one instance and set default sort to the top posts for the past hour, make an account on a different instance and set default sort on that account to top posts in the last 12 hours or Hot or whatever, bookmark them both, and have a neverending stream of new content.
People already noted other reasons that I agree with but my current setup being 2 accounts with default sort set up like that, I vastly prefer this to Reddit's layout
Mass down voting was not the reason I left Reddit. Was it why you left? If so then, we'll, sure, maybe it's not better for you lol. Lemmy doesn't track your total points (or "karma" as some call it) which most people seem to appreciate.
Others have already nailed some of the best reasons so I'll just say Welcome.
You can practice dogpiling to your heart's content.
Users are kinder, discussion is better. There's no need to drive engagement so there's no algo pushing conflict and outrage to the fore.
It tells you when there are new comments on a post u already saw. Getting down voted and whatnot is a reflection on the ppl doing it not the system they're using
It's the same format with the same people. The only difference is that Lemmy is decentralized. Besides, it isn't monetized at the moment, so there are no ads or other nuisances.
Honestly, it looks like Lemmy sadly became more and more similar to Reddit in that regard. I remember times when it was different and people were way more civil.
That's not to say all good people are gone, and if you move away from politics and Linux, there's a treasure trove of nice and welcoming people in here.
In any way, welcome!
When you think about it, every sarcastic comment you make on Reddit now makes Google better. Reddit is too corporate, but who wouldn't want to spread seriously good information on Reddit, to be picked up by the google machine? People need to know about the benefits of eating a little piece of rock a day.
It's not reddit, that's good enough
You can use a client that doesn't offend your eyes.
Reddit cannot be browsed on mobile because they blocked 3rd party apps.
less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose.
Depends on where you landed and your political alignment, but lemmy.world is fairly reasonable at least by what I'm looking for. If you start saying radical things like "Mao's Great Leap Forward" wasn't a very good thing on certain instances, you may be banned from there, but with your account residing here, it wont be deleted.
Mobile apps, no ads, and no widespread astroturfing. I still use Reddit for product recommendations, but even that has become mostly advertising (oftentimes the link will redirect several times so they get their money).
I don’t like contributing ad revenue or engagement to a company I dislike. I find Reddit leadership morally reprehensible, and for the free market to work, I must avoid giving them money. Searching up products on ad-free RDX Reddit viewer contributes a view, but no engagement or ad revenue while coming at a very small cost to the company which I’ll accept.
And honestly, as a person who finds some of Lemmy’s community to be a bit much, it’s still way better than the bottom of the barrel half AI trash Reddit is now. Lemmy reminds me of old Reddit, occasional insufferable behavior and all, and that’s way better than new Reddit. You miss a lot of the personal stories, but in turn you also read less made up or AI generated garbage.
In terms of how it's structured, it has the potential to be better, but also the potential to be not much better. in terms of the community and getting downvoted for petty reasons - it's the same as Reddit. Welcome to Lemmy!
So when people say "better" in this context, most likely they mean the general feel tha objective reasons inpacting day to day user experience.
The objectively better features are open source nature and the decentralization - but this may actually make user experience worse (meaning more complicated to understandandget into).
As for the "better feeling" aspect, it just feels more like Reddit used to be once upon a time. Everything is more natural. Reddit is a very mainstream and corporate place and you can feel it for at least few years now.
Lemmy, where the votes are made up and karma don't matter
i would say its sufficiently less toxic then reddit (i think bcs lemmy is a small website)
I've been avoiding the political BS and finding it much better. Easier to avoid the vitriolic stuff here too. And you can turn off seeing comment and post scores so downvotes don't exist for me.
I haven't seen nearly as many obvious rage bait bot posts either.
It’s not better, yet. It’s not owned by anyone, except the server owner, you can block any instance you want, join any instance you want and still access the same data. It will be better once it is the knowledge repository that Reddit became before all the “line must go up” entered into it. It’s mainly memes and news, but there are a ton of growing communities that are accruing a wealth of information every day, so I don’t think it will take much longer for it to be better.
Federation, this makes it immune to large-scale disruptions because a single instance may go down or a couple of instances may go down at the same time, but the entire network cannot be taken offline all at once without taking the internet itself offline.
To echo, it's not really better, just different & smaller. Just slightly less toxic. It's not owned by Spez, the greedy little pigboy. 3rd party apps aren't killed for no good reason over here.
Moving to a substantially smaller community of people does have its drawbacks; there is brain drain & stagnation in small hobby communities. Be it roasting coffee, brewing beer, or weed...not nearly as many brains, let alone good brains, and less content generation. There's less knowledge, making it objectively less useful.
I use Sync for Lemmy & idk I find it hard to navigate to, find new communities. Half of the time I stumble upon one by sheer accident.
But the memes can be really good, it's still a news/info source, and for me being a conservative it gives me some insight into how "the other side" thinks, possibly even why.
Federation
I am a new Lemmy user (and new to this fediverse, although I have more fediverse experience from other decentralized platforms such as Matrix). I've been liking Lemmy, for the pupose it's thought for, a thread-focused platform (while Mastodon, for example, is post-focused, microblogging). For starters, no advertisements nor sponsorship nor tracking (yet my adblock is active everytime anyways). Possibility of integrating multiple kinds of platforms through ActivityPub (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc). Open and accessible API. Definitely, not only Lemmy is way better than Reddit, but the fediverse is way better than any mainstream social network.
The biggest upside to my Lemmy experience, so far, has been that you can stay within you communities, and actually have a decent conversation about the topics being posted. On reddit, it's consistently been the exact opposite of that.
I get that not everyone is this way, but there are a lot of really, really frustrated people. Every comment ends up being either ragebait, an argument, or is neither, but still gets downvoted into fuck all, because people cannot differentiate a different opinion, from an incorrect one
Welcome, it’s not better.
I prefer Lemmy, even tho it can be a little too reddit-like. But the mods do seem to be a bit less ban-happy, so that's a good thing.
But since I vote for third parties, I get pretty much the same hateful comments I got when I was on Reddit. But hey, at least I'm not banned! :)
So as someone else said, more assholes here, but less hivemind.