New here. Migrated from Reddit. Still trying to figure out Lemmy - what’s everyone’s experiences like coming from Reddit and does Lemmy serve as a good alternative? Pros and cons/differences?
I was a fairly active member at Reddit with a good social standing, I made 1 “controversial” comment and I got perma-banned… this sucks. I mostly followed music pages like r/TheBeatles and loved to just rant about Beatles albums, Paul McCartney’s latest tour, discuss new releases from other artists and also movies/TV shows. I can’t think of any other website that offers that kind of forum-like discussion other than Lemmy?
I really did always hate that Reddit felt like a massive echo chamber. The way the system works with upvotes and downvotes, if I said anything people don’t agree with, I’d get massively downvoted. I once got temporary ban for saying I preferred Zelda Breath of the Wild over Tears of the Kingdom… it really felt like I was treading on egg shells. My perma-ban happened in a discussion within the r/EveryoneKnowsThat search for a lost wave song. Really petty.
I’ve always hoped somebody would create basically a clone of Reddit, but without the politics and without being overly-policed. Where people aren’t pushed away for respectfully voicing their opinion. Is Lemmy the answer?
I made 1 “controversial” comment and I got perma-banned… this sucks. … Is Lemmy the answer?
That’s really going to depend on you. What sort of “controversial” comment?
If you engage in ableist, racist, or LGBTQ-phobic commenting, you’re going to have a bad time. Other than that sort of thing, you’ll probably be fine, with some exceptions:
- There are two Marxist-Leninist instances that can be problematic (mainly a minority of their users, tbf).
- Some mods and instance admins can be ban-happy.
- There’s a larger than average population of neurodivergent people here so, that is sometimes a cause of the second item and miscommunication (we’re trying!).
- You may run into unexpected rules depending on where you’re posting. Individual instances (kinda like “reddits”) have server-wide policies. Communities (aka comms, the equivalent of a subreddit) usually also have their own policies. This means being aware of where you are posting and commenting (ie. don’t expect shitting on communist ideals to go well on an M-L instance, even if the community is related to something else).
- It’s important to be aware that Unix Surrealism is the best comic in the Fediverse.
- There are a lot of Linux users and tech nerds here. Don’t be frightened if you find yourself getting a bit FLOSS-curious. We’re generally happy to try to lend a hand to people who hit bumps at the beginning of their open-source journey.
If you’re good with that stuff and can find out start a comm for Beetles discussions, there’s a good chance that you’ll have a good time.
What sort of “controversial” comment?
Looks like it was really just another rando-ban. A mod having a bad day.
Thanks, all really good feedback. I’ve managed to find a few ‘somewhat’ active communities to join like for my local city which has about 1000~ subscribers. Not as bad as I was expecting to be honest… that’s enough user base for me to give Lemmy a shot I think.
I guess every social media platform has its politics
Try some of the kbin/mbin instances. I find the interface much more similar to old reddit. But welcome to the fediverse! kbin.social and kbin.run (mbin) are pretty good.
You should also check out the Lemmy third party apps like Mlem or Voyager as they’re gorgeous.
https://alexandrite.app is nice for the desktop.
Idea: Try exclusively using Lemmy for a week.
If you love it, switch. If you hate it, don’t. If you miss Reddit, use both.
I use both. I like both. But I also want Lemmy to become the norm.
I like using reddit is fun app. So I’m hoping for a Lemmy is fun app.
I’ve heard Sync for Lemmy is a bit similar.
I’ve been using sync for Lemmy since the 3rd partocalypse of 23, and I haven’t been back to reddit since. It’s been enjoyable being on Lemmy, and the folks are usually pretty awesome here. I can second the niche interest thing though, but I’ve always used reddit in a curated general content fashion, so Lemmy is plenty sufficient in that regard.
I found I had to block a large number of communities from my feed that were very narrow minded. Once I did some diligent editing, however, Lemmy has become my daily browse and I’m happy with the change. I still use reddit for some of the niche communities that don’t have a counterpart here, but the larger topics (news, memes, technology) are well covered and open to discourse.
You, I don’t know you, but I like you.
Thanks for curating your feed instead of reporting everything you dislike, fighting or harassing people.
Peace
For general browsing, news, technology, mainstream topics etc… it’s much better than reddit, less toxic, better vibe.
It’s very small though, so I’ve found two areas where it is just not a replacement:
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Specific, smaller niche interests, they might have a community here but it is often empty and quiet or just non existent.
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Sports, specifically a place to chat during live events. There’s not enough people to support that.
So it depends what you are looking for and how niche your interests are.
I’ve mostly stopped using reddit and am in here now. But I still end up there occasionally. Not much these days though.
spot on
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I moved over to it after the initial Reddit exodus and haven’t really looked elsewhere. It’s not quite a full replacement in terms of content and engagement obviously. It’s good for broader stuff like memes, politics/games/movies/etc in general, but not so much for the specific. There are quite a few games I used to spend a lot of time discussing on their subreddits, but they’re basically ghost towns here for a lot of them.
There are also some more specific community leanings. You’re gonna see a LOT of Star Trek and Linux related stuff.
But overall, I’m happy enough with it knowing it’s a non-privatized space to talk.
It’s the best I’ve found, but I wouldn’t call it a “good” alternative myself no.
Many others have commented on the small communities/lack of niche communities so I’ll simply say I agree with the takes in this thread there.
Personally though, I generally find Lemmy to be far less tolerant of any dissenting opinions across most communities. And man do I mean any. There’s a plethora of topics that aren’t even worth trying to discuss here because if you introduce the slightest bit of nuance to a hardline take you’ll be downvoted, insulted, and ignored.
A quick example that comes to mind are services such as Spotify/Youtube. To make a long story short, I find that I use Youtube often enough that I don’t mind paying for Youtube premium. They need to make money somehow to continue providing that service and I can’t fucking stand ads so hey sure it’s worth the monthly payment to me. I’m a pretty satisfied customer all things considered.
Try offering that perspective in any related thread and you’ll be called bootlicker and made to feel like you’re propping up Satan himself for daring to pay for Youtube and be happy to do so.
There’s other, similar topics. Some are easier to avoid, like the FuckCars community. I was a pretty big fan of that community on reddit but on Lemmy most threads seem to truly believe we need to go 100% no cars at all and there is no middleground damnit. Other topics manage to work their way into damn near any thread. Biden could literally pull a child and puppy from a burning building and there will always be comments about how he’s still a genocidal maniac and basically evil. That entire war is basically just not worth talking about here imo.
And then there’s little stuff. For example, don’t ever say you use Windows here lest a whole horde of people jump in to call you an idiot for not having switched to Linux I mean really what’s wrong with you using the most popular OS in the world by a large margin. Stuff like that.
So I guess to summarize my feelings here, I personally believe the echo-chamber is far worse on Lemmy than reddit and that’s primarily due to the smaller community. A lot of likeminded people came to Lemmy and we’re missing a lot of middleground opinions that come naturally with a larger, more diverse population. Too many people view everything as black and white and if you sit in grey both extremes are against you.
There are absolutely exceptions; I have seen respectful discourse on the site. But the general trend I perceive here is that the echo-chamber is far worse.
Interesting points. I feel a bit let down then and not sure I’ve found what I’m looking for.
One question… Say a new season of your favourite TV show just dropped, where do you go online to discuss it? I’m surprised that in 2024 it’s difficult to find somewhere online to just talk about topics. I do love Instagram but that’s more picture based, X/Threads are just random shouts into a void, Facebook is Facebook… I struggle to think of any options other than Reddit, sadly. But I’m open to suggestions and just curious to know where people would immediately turn - to see what other people are saying about the show.
I think the poster above is right in most ways, but it’s also pretty easy to see around the negatives.
Give it a try for a month and see what your experience is like. Block a couple servers/communities and you might find it’s rather nice here.
My reply was a lot wordier, so I just wanted to say I 100% agree with pelotron here. They have the right of it IMO.
I focused pretty hard on the negatives because many other posters here have already hit a lot of the highlights and I felt they left out the negatives. It’s certainly not all bad. Absolutely try it out.
Just to start off: I would recommend experiencing it for yourself first. A lot of people hold a very different perspective from me, even just in this thread. Maybe it’s the specific communities I frequent that are like this, I dunno. But it certainly is worth giving a chance if nothing else. Costs you nothing more than however much time you decide is worth investing into seeing if the site is a good fit for you. And also, I truly believe Lemmy has the potential to grow into something greater than it is currently. Which is why I’m still here checking it daily. I don’t find it’s a good replacement right now, but I have hope that it has the best shot at becoming a good replacement.
I hate to say it, but generally if I want to see discussion around a new game/TV show/book/whatever I find Reddit to still be the best place to do that. IMO, Reddit’s overall quality has dipped quite a bit (browsing /r/all) but the smaller communities are often still good. Of course, all it takes is one shithead mod to ruin that, but I suppose I’ve gotten lucky.
I took steps to distance myself from reddit with the 3rd party app fiasco. I never bother browsing /r/all anymore, I don’t use reddit on mobile anymore, stuff like that. But I hopped into Old School Runescape recently and, well, just look at the OSRS community on Lemmy. The top posts are 9/10 months old. So I browse r/2007scape in order to discuss the game.
There’s a great silver lining to Lemmy being so small though: one person can make a large difference. I believe with enough effort it’s possible for one person to grow communities on here and that’s pretty cool. I don’t have the time/energy to do that, so I go to where others are already gathered to discuss things But, if you’ve got the mind for it, there’s opportunity to be the change you want to see. It’s just not going to be easy and it’s going to be slow.
For example, don’t ever say you use Windows here lest a whole horde of people jump in to call you an idiot for not having switched to Linux
Just copy Linux Mint onto an USB stick. No need to boot it, you hang it around your neck like a cross, and display it to raging pinguinoids to pacify them.
I am using Debian, in case you were wondering.
Lemmy needs to figure out a way to “group” similar communities from different instances. That is the biggest flaw by far.
And maybe it’s just my app but I keep seeing the same posts over and over from different groups.
I really like it. Tech comminities & some others are very bouyant & interesting but niche communities really struggle. Even direct replacements of big subreddits struggle. Hopefully this improves.
One tip from my own experience. I use Voyager & blocked a load of US politics keywords.
And another, I subscribed to as many interesting Lemmy communities as i could then browse Home feed in the main & occasionally All to see if any other interesting communities crop up that could be worth joining.
Welcome & enjoy.
First welcome a lot of the users here are ex reddit
Lemmy is young it doesn’t quite have the traffic reddit does BUT it also has less of the crap.
There are instances or subs here that will delete your comment or ban you simply for posting something that disagrees with the predetermined consensus they are going for. And no, I’m not talking about racist or abusive comments, just generic shit that may not perfectly align with their narrow personal Overton window. I’m not going back to Reddit, but I wouldn’t say there is a robust and diverse discussion here either. A lot of groupthink, or perceived groupthink…because dissenting opinions get straight up deleted.
Not like I havent seen that happen but I immediately block communities for doing this once so I‘m not seeing this much lately.
Hello fellow Reddthat user!
because dissenting opinions get straight up deleted.
You should call mods out when that happens as a public service. If I learn this happens a lot on certain subs I will stop using them even if it didn’t happen to me.
Unfortunately it’s not quite there in terms of numbers. Many niche communities that exist on reddit simply don’t here or have very low activity. The ones that do are typically better than on reddit though.
Lemmy is good but very, very small in comparison to Reddit.
For example, /r/mildyinteresting has 286k subscribers. Lemmy has around 51k active users across the entire platform and all of it’s communities. And /r/mildyinteresting is a misspelling of the even more popular /r/mildlyinteresting (23.4 million subscribers).
Even some of the niche gaming communities are larger on Reddit (/r/Kenshi, 145k; /r/factorio, 370k).
However, the small community feel is much more pronounced here on the federated Lemmy servers. You’ll see the same names pop up so everyone isn’t a complete stranger. Third party app support is miles ahead of Reddit’s crappy app. And if you don’t like your instance for any reason you can hop to another one easily.
You’ll see certain trends on trending communities here. There’s a lot more posts on Linux, Star Trek, and Tech news that isn’t as pronounced on Reddit unless you subscribe specifically to them. The meme community is top notch though and doesn’t have the incel and misogyny issues that plague Reddit.
Despite how small Lemmy is, I think it’s worth spending time here. After the huge spike in users last June, there was a bit of a decline, but now it’s slowly but surely growing again.
For example, /r/mildyinteresting has 286k subscribers. Lemmy has around 51k active users across the entire platform and all of it’s communities. And /r/mildyinteresting is a misspelling of the even more popular /r/mildlyinteresting (23.4 million subscribers).
Even some of the niche gaming communities are larger on Reddit (/r/Kenshi, 145k; /r/factorio, 370k).
I would take those numbers with a grain of salt. Reddit tends to artificially pump these numbers, for instance geodefaults have millions of subs but only a few hundreds actively participating
/r/mildyinteresting has 286k subscribers.
The real number of active users on average reddit subs is probably far less than 50% of reported numbers. I can imagine that every year the percentage of real vs reported subscriptions falls another 10% or so, as accounts are abandoned and rando-banned etc.
In strict technical terms, yeah it’s okay, albeit with the shortcomings to be expected of a smaller development team. In terms of population and activity with this format, I think it may be at the top compared to alternatives as well.
There’s still others and other software options though for this format that people could try, which honestly may even be technically better, but lacking population/activity means they’re in an odd spot.
The first of these you’ll read about on here are likely Kbin/Mbin, possibly followed by PieFed or still-in-development Sublinks. Kbin/Mbin is definitely the runner-up in terms of federated Reddit-alternatives, as it was one of the few options available at the time people were leaving Reddit.
PieFed and Sublinks have emerged more recently with different priorities and approaches compared to Lemmy, but with the same desire to offer a federated option for people to deploy.
The last you may read about around here would be of stuff like Discuit, Lobste.rs, Raddle (and any other sites built with Postmill), Tildes, and the like, which are all most like Reddit in terms of their being stand-alone sites, unconnected to any others running the same underlying server software. However each of these, I think, may have lower population than the cumulative population of the Lemmy network of sites.
All that said, cutting to your last question: ultimately it heavily depends on the instance/site you settle into.
Lemmy isn’t a monolith, which is both its greatest strength and weakness compared to Reddit. You may be able to find a Lemmy instance/site that heavily blocks out politics and moderates lightly, but the irony of this is that it means it may have to be overly-policed to achieve that, and might appear less active in the process from heavy disconnection/defederation from any instances/sites that permit political posts/discussion.
Right now though, much of Lemmy is heavily political, and it’s arguably because of lax moderation to keep political posts/discussions to relevant communities, which is itself probably in part because of lacking moderation tools to enable lighter touches to redirect posts/discussions.
Nevertheless, it’s possibly the best option fitting the format available at the moment given the rest, but if Lemmy and federation doesn’t suit you you might check out Tildes or Discuit. Although be advised: Tildes remains invite only for now.
Links to all options/alternatives mentioned:
- Kbin, flagship site: Kbin Social
- Mbin. No flagship, check list of instances.
- PieFed, flagship site: PieFed Social
- Sublinks. No flagship, still in-development as drop-in replacement for Lemmy.
- Discuit. Not federated, but open source.
- Lobste.rs. Not federated, but open source. Requires invite.
- Raddle. Not federated, built on open source Postmill.
- Tildes. Not federated, but open source. Requires invite.
One last point, I swear, but if you do stick around and just want to chat about tv shows, movies, and music, I’d recommend visiting:
!moviesandtv@lemm.ee
!movies@lemm.ee
!music@lemmy.world
!casualconversation@lemm.eeHonestly I think any general/casual discussion community would welcome posts about those subjects as well, which there are a number of across Lemmy sites to check out.
Thank you for thé communities list!
And Squabbler.co
Welcome. Its been great for me so far. Whatever instance you are currently on the amount of politics and echo chamber does matter. So feel free to comment and enjoy. If you have a complaint try another instance (or even Kbin) to see if this helps. Also to note that there is much more control about what communities and people you can interact with
