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.
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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/newcommunities@lemmy.world 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/newcommunities@lemmy.world. 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/newcommunities@lemmy.world
The other one is Mbin: https://fedia.io/m/newcommunities@lemmy.world
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/meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works
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/newcommunities@lemmy.world (!newcommunities@lemmy.world ) 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/
deleted by creator
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.
sweet stop
I think you mean sweet spot. Now I’m wondering if it’s a typo or an eggcorn.
You’re correct
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
Yeah, people who point on Dev’s political inclination are just stupid
How does someone know what the main community is, whatever the platform? Looking at the number of subscribers and active members.
I don’t disagree but this is also kind of sad. We’re just recreating the same issue on Reddit of “definitive” subreddits controlled by whichever moderators were there first, and once a mass of people settles there, it becomes virtually impossible for smaller alternatives to grow.
You’re also basically just telling people to go to whichever community happens to be on Lemmy.world. Which means centralization on one instance, which is the opposite of how this place was sold.
Edit: Ignore the double comment.
I’m not
!movies@lemm.ee is more active than !movies@lemmy.world in monthly active users.
Same for !showsandmovies@lemm.ee and !television@lemmy.world, which also doesn’t have any moderator besides bot accounts.
!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com definitely outclasses any other piracy community
!greentext@sh.itjust.works is the most active for green text
!map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz is the best community for maps
About mods power tripping, you can have a look at !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com . I reported there an example which shows that you can create a better community over a power tripping mod.
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
That is a software problem, I thought you guys were all computer experts.
If world wasn’t so big, it would have probably not even been noticed, now it is hopefully getting fixed with the next update, if I understood that right.
Federation works waaay better than when the big reddit influx happened, that was kinda disappointing and I’m glad Lemmy will be prepared better for the next wave.
It’s also a governance problem as well.
If a billionaire buys LW tomorrow for a few millions because they host most of the Lemmy active communities and users, and prevent instance migration overnight, how many users are going to go through the hassle of creating new accounts from scratch, create new communities? That could kill the platform, with the LW starting to show ads and only being compatible with an enshitiffied app, so most users would probably go back to Reddit.
Also, there has been some concerning behaviour from LW mods, which know they can just go with it as people are already on their communities and are not going to move: https://lemmy.world/post/20947890?scrollToComments=true
If a billionaire buys LW tomorrow
lol that is a new one.
concerning behaviour from LW mods
Would you look at that, a mod of a big community for heated discussion said or did something that people took offence to. Surely must be the instance’s fault, would not happen anywhere else.
Fair. I don’t agree with most of your points, but you make a good argument.
I still think we over prioritize decentralization. Federation is important, but’s not a primary feature to be sold to users. It’s not because we need a thousand instances. It’s so that if Gmail gets too enshittified that we have another email option.
World is where the activity is, and you do a reasonable job of balancing that.
World is where the activity is, and you do a reasonable job of balancing that.
It depends.
!movies@lemm.ee is more active than !movies@lemmy.world in monthly active users.Same for !showsandmovies@lemm.ee and !television@lemmy.world, which also doesn’t have any moderator besides bot accounts.
!movies@lemm.ee is more active than !movies@lemmy.world in monthly active users.
You are doing a good job there, also with advertising the community, but I’ll say again that the world community looks more healthy to me, it’s a variety of different users posting there, while the ee one consists half of emperors and your effort to try and force this, actually it is only three topics that have been created by non moderators on the first page.
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Lemmy is a terrible place but after leaving Reddit after a dozen years, it sucks too. No going back. I kinda want to leave Lemmy - such miserable, hateful echo chamber - but, where would I go?
Everyone’s experiences will be different. There is hate everywhere, and here too. It doesn’t feel worse to me then anywhere else, so that’s already pretty great in my book.
Yeah, that’s more or less how I feel about it. It’s like they say, you can’t go home again.
Me too. I still use Reddit via the website. I think Reddit is also in a negative place at the moment too. It seems that most things I see these days are negatively voted, or Reddit’s algorithm has changed and it mostly shows me negatively voted content in my feed.
The strength of many reddit communities is in the people themselves, and unless you’re really into Linux or star trek, the people aren’t really here.
As a tool for forming communities, Lemmy’s mechanics work just fine.
But the process of federation - combined with the prickly nature of certain administrators - means you can have a lively and robust community in (hypothetically) the far-left transgender tankie community that pioneered the application. But then that gets abruptly cut off and squelched in a more popular forum by some late adopters who hate their politics more than they enjoy their technical savvy.
Lemmy.world has a bunch of memes and political screeching because that’s the kind of user its admins choose to encourage. Other communities have more practical interests. But they don’t draw the same kind of crowd, so you won’t see them on the front page of this site, particularly if you only browse Local.
Lemmy.world has a bunch of memes and political screeching because that’s the kind of user its admins choose to encourage.
How are the admins encouraging these users specifically? I have not noticed this, but I have been blocking most politics and meme communities for a while.
tldr: they prove in real time that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter
longer: the biggest three reasons to me are:
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they look the other way when their users are clearly using automated means to down vote & brigade leftist viewpoints.
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they block entire instances with viewpoints they disagree with through defederation like a nanny state instead of letting you make the decision for yourself as a adult.
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they ignore comments personally attacking leftists users even though it’s against their own instance’s rules, but are hyper vigilant on known leftist commenters.
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The idea behind federation is great but in practice it’s splintered communities far too much to serve its purpose at a large scale.
They’re an idea that big forums are actually awful and you’re better off in smaller communities.
Mostly, it’s a pain because it can be hard to find some escoteric bit of knowledge or expertise when you don’t have a Reddit sized forum to troll through.
But that’s where spaces like Discord excel. Nice, tight communities of hobbyists and specialists who are routinely online and regularly churning out useful content.
Looking for information on Discord can be quite tedious
Finding the right Discord can be hard. But when you’re in a community where people are pinning things to channels and wiki-ing / linking them out, its a fantastic source for info.
Okay but also… they aren’t there (Reddit) either, anymore. Who knows where they went - possibly nowhere, or switched to lurking (either here or there), or X, or Mastodon, or Bluesky, or just nowhere.
I almost dropped off of social media altogether myself, after making the mistake of replying to a comment in Chapotraphouse and another in lemmygrad.ml. Sometimes silence is significantly better than having to put up with toxicity.
Aka some of us choose the bear
And the rest are tired of moderating against those onslaughts.
Lemmy is an improvement over Reddit in terms of its business structure. We don’t yet know what the downsides will be of decentralized social media at scale, but we know that it beats a tech company that went from venture capital to publicly traded while already deep in enshittification.
Lemmy is not an improvement over Reddit in terms of design: it’s designed the exact same way, so it has the same set of advantages and disadvantages.
The improvement in community is hard to guesstimate, and will change as the site grows. Aside from the company, it was often the users that made Reddit suck, and Lemmy is completely capabe of sucking in the exact same ways.
It’s working for me, but might not be for everyone.
I like that when I scroll through the comments, I recognize names. Commenting feels less like shouting into a random crowd, and more like having a conversation at a party where strangers may pop in and out.
There’s definitely less content. If you’re looking for something to doom scroll, you’re going to burn through everything quickly, but for me, I open it up when I’m bored, see what’s new, and in 5-10 minutes, I’m all caught up and back to the real world.
Not everybody is looking to ween themselves back from constant social media, but it’s turned into a benefit for me.
Lemmy is the Linux of reddits
No. Lemmy posts are always left leaning. There is no right and no center. Thats disheartening. Next to that most communities are too small so no viable discussions follow. Most communities die in months.
Then again, reddit.com doesnt exist anymore because some schmucks have taken over, resulting in obtrusive ads, profiling and tracking.
I dont post on reddit anymore. Still follow some subs though because they just dont have an alternative.
I went from 1 source (reddit) to several(lemmy, mastodon, 4chan, 9gag). And still it feels empty. Mostly because while some memes are nice, 4chan is filled with morons and 9gag… That’s a “racist app” according to its own users. But it doesn’t stop there. A lot of posts there are just vile. Not just right wing nut job, no, they are worse. And masto is mostly the same as lemmy.
Tbh, Lemmy leaning strongly to the left is a big plus for me. I mean, it’s easy to find right leaning or centrist communities everywhere. A clearly left leaning space is a gem I’m happy to help preserve and nurture. I’m saying that without offense in mind. But I feel the majority of social networks / boards / microblogging sites lean farther to the right than Lemmy.
It helps that Lemmy is developed and maintained by Communists, so Leftists have a stronghold on Lemmy that won’t be able to go away.
Depends on the instance. Lemmy.world is liberal, ie right leaning, Hexbear.net is leftist, it depends on which instance you pick.
Platform-wise, it’s already proven that it’s a viable alternative (with some advantages even - the federated nature for one), but content-wise, it has A LOT to catch up (because let’s be honest - in addition to all the bullshit and toxic people, Reddit has tons of useful information and good people still).
Not yet but its getting there.
It’s alright but I think the low res weird mouse thing mascot isn’t the best, I’ve always hated reddit’s smug bastard shitty alien thing though.
Also it feels relatively empty even though there’s data to back there being half a million users.
Also the language filtering is super imperfect to the point I can’t use it, so I have to manually filter out 500 non-english communities.
It’s a Lemming!
Also it feels relatively empty even though there’s data to back there being half a million users.
45k monthly active users
Similar, just smaller. It keeps me from going on Reddit but tbh, I would be back there in a second if I didn’t have to use their app or use the browser.
Well, I deleted my r account the day they fucked over the app developers. Been here since, so I guess it’s a decent alternative. Not as much current content and it’s 90% politics on the front page… That can be filtered out though.
The militant Linux missionaries though, they get blocked. They show up in most tech threads and it got old a year ago.
Yeah the politics is annoying at this point, it feels like 60% on the front page is politics. I’m glad when the US votes are finally over.
Hello my dear friend. Can I ask you what distro you are running?
WRONG here’s why Arch is the best, and I know because I spent 13 years getting my first install running
Best I’ve found, but definitely suffers from lack of network effect
14 year Reddit person and leaving was for the best. After the initial “what am I doing”, it branched to me checking out Mastodon, then pixelfed, and then Fediverse is awesome. My only real beef is the sports situation is not it. Outside of that I haven’t used reddit for a year and don’t miss it honestly.
Same here, was on Reddit since 2010.
I remade an account because some of my communities aren’t big enough here. But the quality of interaction through the fediverse is much much better.
For sports, Reddit has utterly ruined them because in the app they show the results for every F1 Grand Prix as soon as the race finishes in an unremovable “trends” tile. I often can’t watch live, and so I had almost every race this season spoiled.
On r/, i only really followed my interests - cats, cannabis, crochet, etc. Those topics getting less action here forced me to follow more communities. It surprised me how much i enjoy the general ask, news, eli5, til, art communities that i never would have followed when i had more niche content.
Why do all your interests start with a c… :)
Can probably add chicks in there if you are a guy too.
I was going down the list, got high, and forgot what i was doing.
