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?
You just have to choose the right instance. Federation does address those problems.
Right now our options remain limited because its still early days and the platform isn’t large enough yet. But in the long run, whichever servers do a good job of limiting extremism without being overly authoritarian in moderation will continue to thrive and grow, and servers where the admins are petty and/or politically biased will slowly die.
How is that functionally different from finding or creating a different subreddit? On reddit if you got banned from a subreddit, you could just join a different subreddit about the same topic.
If you ran afoul of a moderator, sure, you could create another subreddit with a name like r/xyz_2 or r/xyzAnarchy. But it would only ever be an alternative, it could never replace the original community, partially because the name was already reserved.
More importantly, if you ran afoul if an admin, there was nowhere to go. The reddit admins exercise absolute control over the content that is allowed on that site. On Lemmy, people will just leave the server if the admins pull a spez.