Hi everyone, I’m new to Lemmy and looking to get involved. I am curious about what major differences you have experienced here vs Reddit as I am hoping this is a nice alternative.
I’ve personally experienced aggressive overreach and biased moderation on Reddit, and I was wondering if you have experienced a different environment here. If so, are there ways to get the word out about sites like this that might be viable alternatives?
More granularly/specifically, are there any topics that you might have discussed on both platforms and had a different experience? What have you seen here that has been a vast upgrade over Reddit? Thanks for any guidance!
Welcome! Lemmy is so much better that it’s not even the same league. The lack of algorithm by itself is amazing.
Lemmy: violent revolution
Reddit: aita for family stuff
I highly recommend starting your subscriptions from scratch. I was following all the drama subs on Reddit, and more times than not, I walked away stressed and raged.
On Lemmy, I joined interest and conversation communities, and of course you’ll run into trolls and assholes occasionally, they are everywhere and can’t be avoided entirely, but overall, I think people are much more accepting and willing to have a discussion rather than yell at each other all the time.
Unless of course you support AI or Fascism. You probably won’t have a great time here.
Lemmy:
- Perfect for users who want to be able to post on a modest pace.
- Lacks the thousands of micro-communities reddit has
- Doesn’t tie karma voting to be able to post at all
- Doesn’t have a bunch of “QoL” nuisances that Reddit has
- Doesn’t have Spez and shitty corporations invested into the platform
Reddit:
- Perfect for users who want to post constantly (once they’re over the prissy karma and time to wait to be able to post elsewhere)
- Has thousands of micro-communities that Lemmy doesn’t
- Does tie karma voting to be able to post at all
- Has unnecessary features nobody asked for
- Has Spez and shitty corporations invested in the platform
Mutually Shared:
- Both have shitty moderators at any given time.
Mutually shared:
- People upvote things that make them feel good, downvote things that make them feel bad.
- People getting in the way of a hate train are plastered.
I feel like People are more willing to engage meaningfully here.
My main complaint is that there isn’t that much of a history of answered questions. Where reddit night actually have solved or answered your problem or question andes ago…
But that’s all the more reason to contribute to lemmy.
deleted by creator
Lemmy allows unlimited (within reason) inserts of images and other media in the body of posts and comments. Reddit does not. Lemmy also supports more marktown text styles than reddit does.
Therefore, Lemmy > reddit.
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Lower traffic. Sort of a given, but reddit has more users. I like elements of this, Lemmy being small makes the vibe more conversational, people also seem more helpful in technical communities on Lemmy than Reddit. But while there’s a quality over quantity, there’s a severe lacking in quantity. Lemmy communities are taking awhile to flesh out and communities I would expect to be somewhat active can go months without a post.
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Userbase cultural differences. Reddit is a bit of a catch-all now. Some of the old redditor stereotypes are actually breaking down a little, people aren’t really pseudo-intellectual turbo nerds ready to ackshully your post anymore, they’re just kind of angry and stupid like the rest of the internet. Lemmy users in my experience are either very friendly, pseudo-intellectual turbo nerds, or you quickly find out the real reason they were banned from reddit and came here (racism, from what I can tell). It’s sort of a cross-section of people who would be dissatisfied with reddit in its current state, but hasn’t developed a voice of its own yet.
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Moderation seems pretty active so far. I’ve seen a couple of people get banned from communities but it does seem like they were knowingly breaking rules and generally being jerks. I do wonder how well the lower traffic communities are moderated though. I’ve not seen a lot of mod drama or anything here but perhaps I’ve just missed it when it happens.
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Toxic wastelands. From what I can see there are big swaths of Lemmy your average user finds to not be worth going to, instances seem to block them by default. It may sound funny, but I actually consider this to be a healthy thing. The fouler the fertilizer the sweeter the flower, I think having concentrated places for weirdos to congregate keeps them from spilling into the rest of the site, and the existence of these places means there’s a substrate of users who will likely stick around, making it so the traffic never dips Lemmy into true obscurity. The trick is keeping them from festering into something truly awful, which I couldn’t begin to guess how to prevent.
I believe that much of the internet’s current issues come from constantly shutting down the weird and toxic places. It just causes them to spread into everywhere else. I think containment is a far better strategy and is closest to how our society worked before the Internet as well. Let the weirdos be weird on their own and out of sight from normal people so you don’t have 12 year olds mixing with not nut jobs on the same platform. Instead they always shut those places down by force and the roaches scatter.
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Lower traffic, you see a lot of the same users every day, the social experience is more intimate, in a way.
There are bots that try to blend in here but they are orders of magnitude fewer than on reddit.
There is still the problem of biased mods favoring power users over normal users, and bending or modifying their own communities rules to accommodate them.
Reminder: The Fediverse is more than just Lemmy.
This is also a very important distinction between the two: Reddit is just reddit.com, it’s controlled by Spez and can’t communicate to anything outside of reddit.
Lemmy is a bunch of Lemmy instances, plus a Mbin, PieFed, and whatever else comes along. Nobody really controls it. You can even be subscribed to communities and magazines from all three and you might not even realize it. You can leave an instance you don’t like, hop on another one, and still have all your favorite places.
3 1/2 years here, and I feel like I have pretty honest takes but of course ymmv.
Moderation can be hit or miss depending on the community. Some have a heavy hand, others are light. Some have rules like no discussing AI and can lead to a ban, gaming has a rule I keep forgetting of it’s really a “gaming news” community and you’ll have posts removed that are just about gaming, etc. Long story short, always read the sidebar rules before posting, and don’t take it personally if a post is removed. Check to see if there’s another community that your post may fit better in. There are some jerk mods, but we make fun of them at !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
As for topics, I mean you’re with a bunch of star trek/linux nerds here, just like reddit early platform adopters are tinkerers and nerds so you’ll notice a lot of conversations will eventually point towards those topics. There is more virtue signalling here, no matter what you’re going to have someone tell you you shouldn’t even mention X or Y and you’re horrible for it. Just tune them out, or argue, whatever you want. Have confidence in what you post.
The cool thing is we’re small enough where you can get to know people here, you’ll see similar usernames every once in a while and it feels like an actual community. It’s also small enough where you can have an impact if you choose to. A lot of people come and say “We don’t have X community”. That’s where you get to make that community if you want, and grow it to something cool. I’ve found that there are people here interested in the niche things, but most are too afraid to build a community around it. We have !fedigrow@lemmy.zip if that’s something you would like help with.
A lot of us were involved with the beginnings of other platforms. Some even help creating said platforms. So yeah more makers/creators than most areas online. If we dont like a ‘thing’ quite a few of us simply…make a variation of said thing. or a whole new thing! on reddit, theres more passive aggressive one liners, more consumption, and more “stay on our app/platform!!”
Also for the fediverse theres less platform vs platform its more platform with platform .
Lemmy works with Piefed which works with mastodon and all the rest. We are all interop unlike the rest of the internet.
Oof. In case you don’t know, your home instance is pretty much the poster boy on the Threadiverse for biased moderation. Unless you picked them specifically for their political stance, you may be better off hopping instances now. There’s also quite a few instances and users that block .ml, which means quite a bit of content you won’t see.
Biggest difference is no dealing with that cunt /u/spez
