What are your thoughts on the Lemmy ecosystem?
I’ve been trying it out for the last week. I have my own opinions, but I’d like to hear others and see if we have common ideas on what is good/bad/indifferent about the Lemmy ecosystem.
Yes for me it’s absolutely a viable alternative. It’s still small and that has pros and cons. The overall quality of discourse is high because it’s a fairly hip crowd that has found Lemmy and joined. Feels more like the early days of the social web, before social media shat the bed. But being small has cons too. Some communities just aren’t here, and a lot of the ones here are small and less active. But there’s absolutely a viable base here that can grow over time. I’m glad that the internet figured this out because we were too dependent on Reddit before - it had totally consumed all concepts of online community and that was okay before the enshittification got into high gear. Lemmy from its inception is structurally designed not to go down that path. So spend time here. Share it. Help it grow. Start a niche sub and feed it.
No. Reddit has a userbase that allows it to be all things to everyone.
Lemmy has a userbase that allows it to be a pretty good linux disscussion forum.
Once you venture away from technology, its crickets. There’s a community here specifically for the Cleveland Guardians. It’s dead quiet. The Guardians are even in the ALDS right now…granted they’re down 0-2 in the best of 7 series…but the ONLY post since they started the playoffs, is me asking why the community was so dead. That topic has 0 replies despite being posted days ago. On reddit, I wouldn’t have even needed to make that post, because there would be topics on almost every minute thing the Guardians have done right, and wrong, since the playoffs began.
And then I’d get heckled for saying that Ketchup is the hot dog derby champion. Now and forever! But on here? Nothin…
Start posting updates for your team. Even if it’s lonely talking to an empty room. Try to post a couple times a week with news or trivia or… old players new restaurants or whatever they do when they retire. We’re so little here that we can’t afford to lurk. Be the content you want to see.
Or post to the sports community rather than a specific team
It seems to be sport dependent, I just opened [email protected] and stumbled upon a 120 comments thread from 5 days ago: https://fanaticus.social/post/4293058
You can probably post about this on [email protected], it seems the most active baseball community.
Yeah all of my hobbies are ghost towns here. I don’t care about Linux, US politics or Communism so I filtered them out. Now all that’s that’s left is general interest posts and AI generated porn.
Less niche topics, but higher quality content
And whoa man is that a bigger deal that I realized. I still comment and snoop on Reddit infrequently but I’m active here. Less trolls. Minimal bots. Lots of high quality comments.
Yes I miss the niche at times but honestly? This is home now.
Yeah on Reddit at this point it feels to me by bots for bots. Maybe the bots here are just better but it feels more human.
As a ‘front page of the internet’ it has been a pretty great replacement for me as it’s where I go each day to just see what’s going on. However, due to the smaller size you do lose a lot of the activity in more niche communities and the sheer volume of posts/comments compared to Reddit. That’s the biggest downside. Still, you also lose the incessant ads/bad UI/UX decisions and ever accelerating late stage capitalism driven enshittification so that’s a big plus.
Yeah, I love it and actually prefer it to my old reddit experience for general browsing.
What isn’t quite there yet is the ability to like, sit down all day and scroll and post in a community dedicated to my current hyperfixation of the week. Be it guitar maintenance, some indie game, or whatever.
But reddit also didn’t have that when I started using it. Excited to hang here and watch the garden grow
But reddit also didn’t have that when I started using it.
reddit also didn’t have to compete with reddit.
No but it was competing with Digg and Slashdot until Digg screwed the pooch. It’s been a while, but reddit really owes its size and popularity to Digg 2.0 and the fiasco of bad decisions driven by investors.
I’m talking mostly about the vibrant niche communities the comment above mentioned. That all happened well after the Digg and slashdot stuff. Niche communities grew on reddit relatively unchallenged.
Sure, reddit could have a similar meltdown to Digg, but I don’t think it’s a forgone conclusion. Social media has inertia. The bigger a platform is is the harder it is to lose people, because the mass is the feature.
Wasn’t reddit competing with Digg, or whatever else was popular at the time?
I came to reddit from fark, before the digg migration or exodus or whatnot. There was also stumbleupon, and the others are all lost to me.
“can’t scroll all day”
I keep saying that’s a positive thing for other productivity, but sadly, that’s not happening for me. Turns out, I want to sit and bum just as much as I always did before. I’m more likely to actually read articles, but I know meta gets more screen time now. As you said, lemmy doesn’t have those full niche communities. I know, sacrilege to admit around here.
I know, sacrilege to admit around here.
It’s not, but we also try to promote active communities to a wider audience on [email protected]
Is there also something like m.lemmy.world/posts/lemmy.world/c/upcomingcommunities ?
However, due to the smaller size you do lose a lot of the activity in more niche communities and the sheer volume of posts/comments compared to Reddit.
That also leads to a lack of diversity of opinions.
Mostly agree with what others said, it’s fine for me.
Perhaps just a subjective opinion that isn’t bound to technology - I find moderators much more trigger happy when it comes to deletion and even banning.
For help on current topics, like how certain things work in a newly released game, I check https://old.reddit.com/ without an account to see what they have.
For doomscrolling/visiting niche themed subs?
Lemmy works equally fine, and with a clearer conscience to boot.EDIT That said, I do sometimes miss certain hobby subs, such as a Tekken or Toki Pona community.
There aren’t any active ones last time I checked.Welcome here!
Copy pasting from a recent thread on /r/RedditAlternatives trying to address usual criticism against Lemmy.
Federation is confusing, people want a single website they can go to
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Go to https://lemm.ee/
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Have a look around, see if the content and the formatting is appealing to you, register an account if you want to be able to curate your feed further
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Go to https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] to see communities (equivalent of subs) that might be interesting to you.
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Use Voyager as a mobile app: https://www.lemmyapps.com/Voyager. When they ask for your “instance”, use “lemm.ee”
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If you want more choices for apps, have a look at https://www.lemmyapps.com/
Email has been working on a federation model for decades. People have to remember if they use Gmail or Outlook, but that’s it. It’s similar here.
Several communities have the same name, it’s confusing, active communities are hard to find
Reddit has a similar issue: you have /r/games as the main gaming community, but there is also /r/Gaming, /r/videogames /r/gamers, etc.
How does someone know what the main community is, whatever the platform? Looking at the number of subscribers and active members.
There was the example of beekeeping: if you search for that topic, the most active one is definitely https://mander.xyz/c/beekeeping with 97 users per month.
The others have barely 1 user: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=beekeeping
To find active communities: https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected]. There are regular threads with active communities on topic such as gardening, movies, board games, anime, science, etc.
Who is going to pay for the server costs?
Here is a link to this question to Lemmy admins: https://lemm.ee/post/41577902
Summary of the answers:
- lowest number so far: lemmy.ml with 0.03€ per user per month
- a few others (feddit.uk, lemmy.zip) have around 0.11$ per user per month
- some instances are running on infrastructure that the admins would be anyway, so it’s virtually “free”
Most of the instances costs are paid using donations. They regularly post financial updates such as this one: https://lemm.ee/post/41235568
Obviously there is a sweet stop where you can minimize the cost by having the maximum number of users on a fixed infrastructure cost.
If you want to have a look at the number of monthly active user (the “MAU” column): https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/
Anyway, $ per user is usually meaningless because most of the servers are small enough to be hosted on some random cheap server - adding more users doesn’t cost more because they are still well below server capacity. Only the biggest servers have to worry about $ per user.
I had posted this earlier this week on this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fiuuo5/how_much_does_it_cost_per_user_to_host_a_lemmy/
There is too much political content
You can block entire servers and specific communities.
Instances to block to avoid political content
Communities to block
- https://lemmy.world/c/news
- https://lemmy.world/c/politics
- https://lemmy.world/c/world
- https://lemmy.ml/c/worldnews
- https://lemmy.ml/c/usa
With those blocked, you are avoiding 95% of the political content. There might be a few other communities that pop up, but blocking them is still one click away.
Lemmy is developped by hardcore tankies and I don’t want to use their software
As Lemmy is federated using an open protocol, there are other options to connect to the communities without using Lemmy itself.
The first one is Piefed: https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]
The other one is Mbin: https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]
However, those are stil a bit less mature than Lemmy, so for instance if you want to use mobile apps a lot, Lemmy is a better choice.
On top of that, every Lemmy server is managed by different people. You can see regular criticism of lemmy.ml (the instance managed by the Lemmy devs) on threads such as this: https://lemm.ee/post/33872586 or even dedicated communities like https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected]
That shows that even the Lemmy devs are not protected from criticism.
There isn’t enough people
Lemmy has 46k monthly active users (https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats) (Mbin and Piefed have around 800 each). Active user is someone who voted, posted or commented.
In comparison, Discuit, which was praised during the API shutdown as “easier to use as it’s centralized” has 234 active users: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/KdiI1akq. Not 234k, 234 total.
For obvious reasons, the activity is not going to match Reddit levels, and niche communities aren’t there.
But it’s not an all or nothing situation. Most people on Lemmy still use Reddit for their niche communities, but are also active on Lemmy. And some niche communities are getting more active on lemmy. https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] ([email protected] ) promotes them.
Also, having less people provides better interactions, as your comments are less likely to get buried in thousands of others. And bots on Lemmy are quickly spotted and banned, while Reddit doesn’t seem to do much about that: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1fmcelm/askreddit_is_simply_over_run_with_bots/
Why are you actively against lemmy.world?
On Reddit you list several alternative instances, and you somehow left us out.
LW is already the largest community by far, to a point where geographically distant communities cannot stay synchronized
Lemmy is developped by hardcore tankies and I don’t want to use their software
I think the main point about this is that, so far, the development has been completely politically neutral and developers have in no way interfered with any instance having other political opinions.
So they have been more neutral than Reddit developers even if they are public about their tankies ideas on their personal publications.
Furthermore, it’s open source, so it could be forked any time if needed, unlike Reddit.I agree with you, that’s just a point I’ve seen raised quite a few times in the past, in a similar way to https://old.lemmy.sdf.org/post/17733
There was an infamous post by feditips against Lemmy, but it seems to have been removed
Because everyone at this point uses Gmail, I prefer to use phone networks as my analogy go to, as usually most people know others with a different carrier
Outlook is still strong, especially for companies using Microsoft, but indeed phone carriers work too.
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Best I’ve found, but definitely suffers from lack of network effect
Good:
- I can use it for mobile without a first party app.
Bad
- There aren’t as many communities here as there were on Reddit.
- There isn’t that much content as on Reddit. Also, while the meme ratio of content feels the same to Reddit, the non-meme Lemmy content is rather small.
- Comment conversation seems lacking.
- Moderation tools are rather limited and heavily dependent on defederation to function.
- The idea of “start your own” mindset in the design makes community formation just as bad as Reddit. There doesn’t seem to be any tools for a more collaborative approach to running subs or instances.
the non-meme Lemmy content is rather small.
Did you have a look at the active communities promoted on [email protected] ?
Comment conversation seems lacking.
Depends on the topic:
- https://thelemmy.club/post/18078930
- https://thelemmy.club/post/18062524
- https://thelemmy.club/post/18124400
The idea of “start your own” mindset in the design makes community formation just as bad as Reddit. There doesn’t seem to be any tools for a more collaborative approach to running subs or instances.
It’s feels to me like how the ancient redditors said reddit worked.
Some servers come closer to reddit like world which copied all the popular subs.
Others are definitely smaller communities, maybe a post or two a day and plenty of discussion.
I feel great about it all so far.
Definitely feels more like reddit used to feel - though with caveats.
Indeed. With no central control, it seems easier for a single individual/org to dominate any given discussion, but otherwise it seems close to what reddit originally claimed to be.
I’ve used them both the exact same way, which kept me away from a lot of the junk on Reddit until they killed my access via Apollo. Then I just switched over and subbed pretty much the same topics.
If you’re looking for hundreds of microcommunities, lots of activity by the hour from anyone or anything .etc then Lemmy is not going to do it for you. We’re a year in and Lemmy’s userbase is basically a piss of a squirt to Reddit’s volume. And that could get at you if you’re someone that just needs something to read or want some interactivity whereas Lemmy is just more of a stop and then go kind of approach.
Been on Lemmy a few months now and it feels like moving from shitty Digg to fresh Reddit. I had canceled my account on Reddit even before the last enshitification, and kept just reading. Lemmy feels good enough to participate in posting and commenting. Small is good.
I would say no to me it’s more like IRC. Its small enough to be not noticed by influence operations as much and each instance has its own personality just like IRC networks. It’s a great mix of local community and access to a wider view points.
“Am I ugly?” (Link to butthole pics on Onlyfans)
“Too the moon with this new crypto scam!!!”
It feels like a more-manageable, more-personal, bite-sized version of Reddit. It scratches the itch, but I spend less time here overall than I used to on Reddit.