I am a reddit refugee. Keep seeing that this is supposed to be somehow better than Reddit. As far as I can tell, it follows a similar format, less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose. But It looks like people still get down vote brigaded on some communities. So I’m curious, how it’s better?
It’s not what it does — it’s how it does it.
Lemmy is a form of social media that truly belongs to its users, including you, not a soulless commercial entity. You want to change the code? You can do that. Run your own instance? Host your own community? Make your own moderation rules? There are instances at all corners of the political compass each with the freedom to use Lemmy how they so desire.
Lemmy is yours, to use however you see fit, and with the mutual consent of other server operators and their users. It’s radically different from a business.
It still falls into some of the same pitfalls that Reddit had (groupthink, reflexive commenting, power-tripping mods), but some of those problems I don’t know that there’s a way to get around them in this format, they’re just a human nature sort of issue. I appreciate that Lemmy doesn’t appear to be owned by a giant mega-corp trying to harvest our “intellectual”, but we’ll see how that pans out in the future. I’ve just gotten used to every online service I’ve used eventually going to shit.
I like that there’s no advertising at the moment, I don’t know that I would mind it so much if there was advertising, as long as it was kept minimal. I know these things don’t just happen for free and if money is needed to help keep the lights on and such.
A very obvious solution to groupthink is to do away with the silly voting system. I don’t know why they kept it. A very simple solution would have been to just assign votes to a topic based on how much attention it’s getting. In simple terms, If opposed has 10,000 people that have viewed it, 1,000 people have left a comment, compared to a post that has 100,000 views and 15 comments, you can tell which one should have more attention score. The upvote and downvote system is too easily used as a dislike or like system. Many of us have the maturity to upvote something because we think it’s a good discussion point even if we don’t agree with what the person is saying. But a lot of people don’t think that way mentally. They see something, they read it, immediately go into toxic hater mode and just downvote it for no reason
The problem is that you then end up with sites based on attention, leading you into the (imo even bigger) pitfall of every other social media site, where things like attention-grabbing, clickbait, and sensationalist content has a massive advantage. Look at what gets sorted to the top on platforms where that is the main metric, things like Mr. Beast’s low-brow, cacophonus videos, children’s content, scantily clad women and softcore porn, and gambling or otherwise particularly addictive content. Even focusing on comment count alone means a focus on topics that are both broad-appeal and controversial, more like what you get out of Twitter’s trending topics: mostly politics and flamewars rather than experts sharing their research, or artists sharing their (non-pornographic) art.
Don’t get me wrong, voting isn’t a perfect system at all, but it correlates with quality far better than engagement does.
It’s more Linux memes for me.
Less chat bots on Lemmy, and they seem to be easily identifiable and ignored/reported.
Lemmy isn’t quite at that sweet spot where there are enough daily users to get niche content and information from a group of knowledgeable people - but some communities seem to be quite active and helpful already.
I’d love to get to the point where we have a big science/history community and get some non-celebrity AMA’s that have genuine interaction.
I’m more than happy for Lemmy to stay “underground” for a good while, slowly building communities. Once things hit a critical mass and wind up on corporate radar, lemmy will get swarmed and another migration will happen with the same core groups that joined lemmy early.
I’m not a celebrity. AMA!
Honestly? Muuuuuuuuuuuch nicer Posts. I see so many more wholesome Posts here. FFS, even the GreenText’s are more wholesome.
I could use some of that, can you recommend some communities?
No spez?
NO SPEZ. That’s enough
The “fuck /u/spez” wave is one of my last, and favorite, Reddit memories haha
I swapped because I refused to use their garbage fire of an app and they shut down my beautiful RIF. Unforgivable.
Pour one out for Apollo. 🍺
What app do you use for Lemmy?
I used Boost on reddit, and I use Boost on lemmy. I’m not a huge fan of it not being FOSS, but every other app was always missing something
I’m sure they have caught up now, but I already paid for it and it does everything I need
I’ve never used Boost. What sorts of things does it have that FOSS apps are lacking?
I wouldn’t be able to tell you at this point friend. I can’t remember what I wasn’t liking about the other apps in the first place, and I have no idea the progress they have made. I’d be willing to bet at least a few are on par now
Many options are available like voyager, avelon, melm to name a few for ios. Lemmy’s app scene is strong
I’d recommend Eternity for Lemmy, same developer as Infinity for Reddit, and FOSS. I too tried a bunch of Lemmy apps and I settled on Eternity because it’s pretty much a complete app. I don’t miss any features.
Thunder is really good and always improving!
I use Voyager and it’s fantastic.
Went from rif to connect for Lemmy and i’m happy with it
As a former RIF user, I use Jerboa.
It’s the same format with the same people. The only difference is that Lemmy is decentralized. Besides, it isn’t monetized at the moment, so there are no ads or other nuisances.
The form of this kind of social media has got the same set of upsides and downsides as it does on Reddit. It won’t be exactly the same because the people are different, but the problems aren’t that different and the people aren’t that different either.
As a mostly lurker I find the experience pretty similar. I scroll through and find some interesting articles, bits of news, memes. It’s a slower pace, but I think in time it’ll grow faster. People migrate over occasionally, but there may be a critical mass moment when it’s big enough that lots of people start flooding over. Or it won’t and it’ll just fizzle out to nothing over time, who knows. For the moment it’s good enough for me to have replaced Reddit entirely.
As for things that are better: you get a lot more control over how you want to experience it. There’s no singular controller always dragging the experience down toward profitability. There are clients a-plenty, the api is open, you can control what parts of the network you see and which you don’t. It does take some effort, of course.
As for worse, because there’s no singular entity controlling the network, there’s going to be some very dark corners. You can block them (many will be blocked by individual server operators already), but they’re still there and they get to carry the Lemmy name and newcomers are most likely to experience it.
Just my thoughts on the subject, it’s been discussed a lot, I’m sure other people have quite different perspectives.
less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose.
Depends on where you landed and your political alignment, but lemmy.world is fairly reasonable at least by what I’m looking for. If you start saying radical things like “Mao’s Great Leap Forward” wasn’t a very good thing on certain instances, you may be banned from there, but with your account residing here, it wont be deleted.
Genocide bad will get you banned from .world , bunch of extremist
Not .world at least. Check out /c/Tankiejerk for some examples of what I’m talking about.
You can run your own instance and votes don’t really matter.
Welcome to Lemmy, where the content is sparse and the votes don’t matter!
I’m trying to think of a funny way for Ryan to misunderstand Lemmy, but nothing comes to mind.
Winks?
Personally, because I’m not banned for whatever reason a mod made up that day.
It’s smaller for sure, but I’m sure it’ll grow. I think once there’s enough content here you’ll see it as a just a different Reddit.
It’s still pretty easy to get banned on Lemmy. It’s still just human mods.
Oh I’m sure I can be, but Reddit if goofy about it. I was permanently banned for “arguing” with a mod on r/ask the Donald after I… asked a question. They’re a sensitive bunch
Did you ask if people think Trump has been acting weird lately? Not an accusation, just asking a question.
lol no, it was a few years back. I asked how an alpha male can whine so much. I know it’s against their rules technically because it was “anti trump” but it’s a legitimate question lol. They talk about being alpha males and those snowflake libs… but then vote for a guy that whines more than my spoiled brat nephew
Ha ha!
It’s pretty hard to get banned on all instances of Lemmy. Particularly, your own.
Less locked down than Reddit. No CEO bent on taking your user created content and charging for it. No CEO trying to polish a turd for advertisers to make $$ while simultaneously completely taking for granted and disregarding the mods and users that actually make Reddit exist. No communities captured by shills and groupthink. Well…except for places like hexbear or some .ml, but there’s no pretenses there. You know what you’re getting into. Lemmy is more egalitarian, plenty of apps for mobile devices, people generally have a discussion and not just be the retread cheap quip for upvotes.
Also, Reddit IMO has gotten “colder” for lack of a better word. People don’t upvote. You’re more likely to be criticized for a position than engaged with. Opinions that disagree with the hive mind are often quickly downvoted regardless of whether or not the position has validity.
Lemmy is just more chill.
People don’t upvote. You’re more likely to be criticized for a position than engaged with. Opinions that disagree with the hive mind are often quickly downvoted regardless of whether or not the position has validity.
i experience this constantly on lemmy.
i experience this constantly on lemmy.
Me too!
There were multiple actions described. You’re saying that you experience one of them. Or maybe you experience more than one. Or maybe we don’t know, because you didn’t make it clear, which might make us want to downvote you, which suggests that you often experience being downvoted. :-)
The mods and admins aren’t usually far-right radical preppers, that creates a more pleasant environment.
