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Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
Bullybeard @lemm.ee

What made you join Lemmy?

I was a long time reddit user, and made a couple new accounts as throwaways last year from different emails but they kept getting shadowbanned everytime I tried to post, comment or send a message. Just last night, my 3 year old account I had no issues using it at all got shadowbanned as soon as I sent a message. It's just so frustrating how hard reddit is moderated and there's no explanations given either they just shadowban you and I don't even know where to ask anyone either I installed Lemmy, hoping it'll be a good alternative and it is great and a lot of things I like about reddit, but there's a significant lack of the type of communities that I browsed in reddit. Hopefully I'll find them here or more people will join and it'll be better. So what made you install Lemmy and what did you wish Lemmy had?

126 comments

  • Reddits CEO.

    Reddit just isn't fun without Reddit is fun.

    • I still have RiF installed for the nostalgia.

      • I left it on my phone for a long time. Then I started to get worried about it not being maintained.

  • The self-destruction of Reddit and the much greater toxicity. Leftist communities here are far more chill than Reddit as well.

  • I'd quit stop using Reddit quite some tine ago, mostly a philosophical thing. Saw on Mastodon mention about a Reddit (aka Usenet 2.0) like replacement on Lemmy so, here I am.

    I had been using Boost on Reddit, so I grabbed that as well as play with other apps like Jerboa, Raccoon.

  • I used other Fediverse platforms since about 2022 and was keen to find one that replicated a more reddit-like style.

  • I used old.redditcom exclusively, so the app thing never affected me personally. But when the admins started extorting those devs, and lying about it... I started looking for the exits. The day I wrote it off entirely was when they casually announced they'd reject and ignore the site-wide protest of moderators who do all their work, for free.

    You can't own a community.

    You can enable them... or you can abuse them. Reddit chose abuse. The enshittification had been undeniable since 2016, when fascists choked the front page, and the admin response was 'everybody play nice.'

    The company doesn't make anything. The site is an empty box. Every worthwhile conversation on some arcane niche, every thread pruned of idiot bastards, is something users made. It's not even like Facebook or Youtube, where a significant chunk of (eugh) "content" is profit-driven. A forum is just people talking.

    Moral disgust aside, I immediately knew - the quality was fucked. Posts would keep happening. Comments would abound. But the only reason Reddit worked was that voting filters the best stuff toward the top. The same filter does not work on crap mixed with crap. That's all there's going to be. Bots and fascists yapping at one another in approved tones of voice. r/Funny with five hundred names.

    Dumb bastards tried to sell a recipe for stone soup.

  • I found out about Lemmy when the api thing happened but since Infinity was still working, I stayed. But because I like open source stuff and I wanna be part of the fediverse and support it, I joined Lemmy.

  • I already quit many corporate social media platforms in the years before, switching to decentralized alternatives for some of them (Mastodon mainly), but was still active on Reddit somehow. Then during the Reddit blackout protest, it was as good a time as any to check out and switch to Lemmy. Its downsides for me are also part of the upside: there is no endless scrolling to be done.

  • I installed Lemmy, hoping it'll be a good alternative

    So what made you install Lemmy

    If you interact with a website through an app, you are ceding both functionality and power. Angry Birds is an app, Signal is an app, Reddit and Lemmy are websites with URLs and you are duplicating the function of a browser if you use anything else.

    I'd heard of Lemmy (and Raddle) since the late 2010s, and put them in the "things I'd like to pivot to at some point" category. The main subreddit that I posted on (a transgressive mix of edgy, caring, partisan, and weird) was quarantined and then finally banned in 2020. As a result I quit using reddit altogether, but after a few months I poked around and realized people from that sub had started a forked instance of Lemmy as a refuge.

    The one thing that's lackluster is the search function. Everything else is superior.

  • I got temp banned for saying antizionist things, while I was banned I began to look for an open source alternative which lead me here. Early on I used .world but after finding out about Blahaj Lemmy I switched :3

  • I finally lost patience with almost every interaction on Reddit becoming a knife fight. No other platform I use(d) is like that. I'd post something, reply to something, or whatever and invariably someone would be needlessly aggressive and hostile. Any attempts to engage on anything beyond a surface level were either mocked or misunderstood ("it's not that deep bro" - get out of here with that attitude). In general it was socially exhausting and I was tired of it.

    I've not found that's the case here, so this is what I use instead.

  • Joined about a year or two before the reddit API fiasco.

    • I really don't like ads+tracking and didn't want my posts supporting a company like reddit
    • I'm an advocate of FOSS
    • reddit has inherent pressures to censor content based on mass media pressure and profit, and to permit anti-social far right trolls
    • reddit punishes proxy users, where many instances here allow me to protect myself while posting here
    • didn't like the new reddit layout - even before I came here, I was lurking for a year or two on alternate frontends
    • I believed federation was a good strategy at building a better reddit alternative

    But also, it actually had some communities at the time. If it were more dead, or unfederated, I'm not sure if I would have put as much effort in building communities.

  • Reddit is heavily American-centric.

    At least on Lemmy, there can be multiple communities with the same name with different rules, focus, region, and culture.

  • Early last year I decided I wanted to join social media so I'd periodically look up lists of different social media websites and I joined the ones I vibed with. Lemmy was on one of those lists. I've been having such a great time so far! 😃

  • Happy new year and welcome to Lemmy!

    TL:DR; Reddit sucked, I got bored when it was offline. Lemmy has similar moderation BUT a transparent modlog. Post grouping, more niche communities I'd like to see.

    I had first heard about Mastodon in early 2022, but since I wasn't into Twitter-style posting I kind of forgot about it and moved on.

    The quality of discussions I was having on Reddit had noticeably declined over the years, and top posts were bots posting reposts, and the top comments under those posts started to become straight up copied from past top comments.

    Compact mode got turned off, and later the apps had an outage in March 2023, so it was actually out of boredom when I had stumbled across Lemmy for the first time. It was a tiny thing of around a few hundred active users across all sites then.

    API pricing scandal happened a few months later, my distaste for Reddit increased and simultaneously Lemmy's popularity exploded. So for June I made it my transition period to convince others to join, and in July I made my farewell post, swearing never to post or comment on Reddit ever again. I peek into Reddit on occasion but Lemmy had fully replaced my Reddit habit by September.

    Conversations here have been far more lively, nuanced, mature. It doesn't always happen, as there are immature clowns and trolls here like anywhere, but we have reasonable people who are able to have a productive conversation while having positions at odds with each other. This virtually never happened on Reddit.

    Tip for you, there are some types of comments allowed on some communities but banned or frowned upon on others. If you get a comment removed, check the modlog, filtering for your username as to why it may be. It may feel like censorship or power tripping, but at least it is more open and transparent. You can make an account on another server or post on different communities, if it's simply a matter of differing philosophies with the controlling admins.

    I'd want to see grouping features of communities, and also there are a number of bounties on features that would be great to see. Development isn't fast so I just have to be patient. More niche topics would be cool to have.

  • In no particular order as to why I left Reddit to join Lemmy:

    • Reddit became a chore just to see good content. (This is even after the fact of filtering out unrelated or unwanted subreddits in my feed.)
    • The comment sections on Reddit became worse and worse with more joke/meme comments than actually related comments, low effort comments, bot spam, and the burial of your comment for no one to see, (or care to reply to,) if you were to comment on a post or comment more than 24 hours after it's original posting. (Most of the time it felt like you had maybe 8 hours before it seemed to be a waste to comment.) Why would anyone stick around to comment or reply if nearly no one is going to engage?
    • (Like many others have mentioned in the comments,) if you mentioned or talked about anything that wasn't considered good, you were often blasted with downvotes and/or comments.
    • How often you saw rinse and repeat content, questions, and sometimes comments. (I'll admit. I took part in the rinse and repeat content 'sharing' and I wish I hadn't done it for so long. The karma whoring was real for me.)
    • Concerns (then later the reality check,) about how much Reddit is an echo chamber.
    • /u/Spez showing us who he really is.
    • Not liking the direction Reddit was heading. Writing on the wall when they fired Victoria Taylor
    • The API fiasco.
    • Movement towards IPO.

    Lemmy doesn't have any of these problems that I've experienced. Lemmy feels very much like a grass roots movement and I like that. I wish the communities that I am a part of had more active users, but that will more likely come with time.

126 comments