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?
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.
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
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.