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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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.
Current reddit is not like “reddit” anymore for a while… nothing is forever
If you pick a good, internally stable instance, it’s great. Local can be more curated to your tastes, All can be more general.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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it’s effective for wasting my time in a less frustrating manner, for whatever that’s worth
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.
Short answer is No. It suffers from many of the same issues of echo chamber, bias, and bullying. Just on a somewhat smaller scale due to fewer users. And never forget - Winter is coming. There will be a time in the future the bots will notice lemmee and come for it also.
But I suspect this is all a human thing. We are a contentious bunch at best and down right hateful at worst. We build communities only to poison and kill them in the end.
I think it has potential to be better in a way Reddit can never be, but the two biggest instances do so little moderation their userbase might as well be “people banned from too many subredits”.
I assumed the killer feature of Lemmy would be “zero reply guys” but instance owners seem willing to tolerate them in the interests of faux-engagement. But the irony is this sort of “engagement” actually scares new users away.
Forgive my ignorance, but what’s a zero-reply guy?
A “reply guy” (wikipedia) is someone who responds to posts/comments in an annoying (usually smug/condescending) way, like what you think of when you think of a “redditor”. Big platforms like Reddit like reply-guys because they generate engagement (often someone telling the reply-guy to f-off) it’s also not a behavior that an algorithm can recognize, so human mods/admins are needed to curb it.
Over time, if Reply-guys are not banned they tend to make the overall ecosystem too exhausting to participate in, and (authentic, desireable) engagement declines.
i think corgana meant zero people who reply with meaningless comments just for the sake of replying, like those tiresome one-line joke threads that choke up every big subteddit.
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Partially. I think it’s a good drop in replacement for:
- Anything technology oriented, from software to hardware to what different open source projects are up to, to what tech corporations are doing, and various discussions around ecosystems (the internet itself, specific services like Discord or Reddit or LinkedIn, app stores, social networking, etc.)
- Funny memes or other humor
It’s got pretty good coverage of certain topics:
- Politics, at least on specific sub topics
- Science and specific scientific disciplines
It has a few pockets that work for very specific things:
- Specific TV show or movie franchises (looking at you, Star Trek)
- ADHD or neurodivergent support/advice
- Noncredible Defense is actually here. Love it.
And it’s just missing a bunch of things I loved on Reddit:
- Sports, especially the unique culture of the NBA subreddit
- Other specific interests in television, film, music, or other cultural interests.
- Local things in specific cities
- Finance and economics stuff
- Lots of specific interests/hobbies are missing, or just aren’t as active.
- Advice/support for career/work life, especially specific careers (in my case, the legal industry and life as a lawyer)
- Advice/support relating to personal relationships, from parenting to dating to very specific support forums for things like divorce or cancer. Even what does exist here is disproportionately neurodivergent, so the topics of focus seem to be pretty different than what would be discussed in other places.
Yes. It’s different, but good.
I just love it here. But I also know that while most communities are really nice, we rely a lot on two (2) individuals who provide a sizeable part of Lemmy’s content (Picard and PugJesus). We should all try to do our part!
Me, dreaming of the day when I am no longer a prolific poster
And FlyingSquid
@fossilesque@mander.xyz : am I a joke to you?
And both of them indeed!
hell, you post all the time yourself, blaze!
Trying to be the change I want to see!
🙌 ❤️
For conversation about various subjects with broad appeal and a left wing slant, sure.
For tech support or info on niche topics, not at all. Lemmy is not big enough, old enough, or easily indexed by search engines.
The porn is also pretty mid tbh
Nah. Lemmy is nothing like Reddit, it’s actually good.
Not yet but its getting there.
