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 owned by a greedy soulless corporation with a pigboy in control. There’s more assholes on here (the AKSHUALLY is quite strong) but there’s less hivemind.
the AKSHUALLY is quite strong
lol, yeah true, same as the linux community here is pretty much Arch BTW, but it’s good-natured
I think the arch thing is just a meme. I asked a genuine question about which distro to use and got a range of suggestions but none of them were arch.
about which distro to use and got a range of suggestions but none of them were arch.
I think Debian is usually the strongest contender here.
I almost never hear anyone suggest Debian!
My baseless opinion is that having a variety of instances with varying ethoses means that there’s a good home instance for everyone (not just the verysmart, young, white, male, liberal a la Reddit), and federation means that that variety of people are intersecting and interacting a lot more than if instances were completely separate. At the same time, it still feels like a small community, or maybe a bunch of small communities. There seems to be a lot less of the snarky clapbacks and unpopular opinions getting nuked that’s typical of other social media.
(not just the verysmart, young, white, male, liberal a la Reddit)
Nope, we’ve also got the verysmart middle-aged white male liberals here, and some Communists too!
There seems to be a lot less of the snarky clapbacks
And almost no low-effort, “cult of personality” mememetic responses. I was going to list some but it’s been a year since I’ve been on that wretched site and I’ve purged my mind of them. But you know, the ones where you can basically predict the top comment before opening the page, probably propagated by the prevalence of bots on the site.
Also you can block awful people.
Also awful people tend to use same awful instances, so you can block a lot of awful people in just a couple of clicks!
there’s less hivemind
Not really. I guess it depends on the instance and community, but I have found that since the amount of users on Lemmy communities tend to be significantly smaller than on Reddit, the effects of hivemind thinking is actually amplified.
In actuality, Reddit and Lemmy are pretty much two sides of the same coin. The only real difference is, as you mentioned, Reddit is run like a business now and Lemmy currently isn’t. That and Lemmy users are obsessed with Linux/FOSS.
AKSHUALLY, only a few of us assholes fit this description, and as a whole we are in the vast minority.
Hi. I’m an asshole. Nice to meet you! Looking forward to upsetting you later on a shitpost thread! 😊 👋
looks at your history
I dunno, you seem alright to me. Maybe I’m the asshole?
🎵 and you smell like one too🎵
The akshually might be stronger, but the cultish behaviour of specialised subreddits hasn’t quite arrived here yet so one can still have a faceted opinion about the stuff they discuss, while on Reddit it’s either “glory to our king” or “get the fuck out and watch your Dane Cook specials!!”
but there’s less hivemind.
The hive mind here is far stronger.
- anti-anything microsoft
- anti-anything google
- unwarranted “just install Linux” everywhere
You forgot Firefox
Agreed. Lots of reasonable opinions (not just my own) get downvoted here.
I’ve never been a fan of using downvotes as a disagree button and the issue seems even worse here than Reddit.
The more I see how people use downvotes, the less I like them as a feature in general. I don’t downvote things anymore.
- Everyone can upvote, which already brings the most popular content to the top. Why does the system need another dimension to it?
- I often see unpopular comments at the bottom, with scores like +2 -9… The absence of downvotes wouldn’t make a difference in content ordering, because the previous comment is simply +4.
- If I disagree with someone enough to act on it, it’s my rule to explain why. A minus one is nearly useless as feedback.
- Then, once I’ve replied, what’s the point of downvoting? Everyone can read my thoughts.
- Replies can be upvoted too, for people who think truth comes down to a battle of internet points.
- If I honestly believe something is bad or harmful to the community, it should probably be reported, not (merely) downvoted.
Downvotes as they are seem like outdated design on the human interaction level. They fail to iterate on years of knowledge gained since their inception.
- Everyone can upvote, which already brings the most popular content to the top. Why does the system need another dimension to it?
Because Microsoft sucks and Google sucks and if you install Linux there’s 50% chance it’ll cure someone’s cancer. Also if you’re at a bar and your pickup line is “I use arch” it’ll be like the fucking Niagara falls. If you’re into guys even their ass will go sploosh when they hear that line.
What I’m getting at is that we’re just a superior being.
Or that we are all refugees and are just tired of enshitification.
anti-anything google
I hear that. Went through the technical reasons for the manifest V2 deprecation (if this is only to target ublock origin, why did they implement filter lists into the browser? Why does ublock origin lite work just fine?) and it got more downvotes than upvotes. Haters gonna hate I guess :))
Hey, I agree that MV3 brings benefits (such as better security for the extension ecosystem) and has technical merit, but it’s worth noting that uBlock’s main dev themselves said it won’t work as well. uBO Lite doesn’t work fine, it works. It’s also worse.
And the same fundamental issue that affects ublock (the new API limits) affects everyone else trying to do the same job using extensions.
I get the impression most lemmy users don’t have a lot of lived experience. Everyone deals in absolutes, and is unable to recognise nuance.
Most contentious issues have a range of considerations, positive and negative.
When people say Lemmy is better, they mean the software and the platform are better. You’re talking about the users of the two platforms. Lemmy users are still idiots, just like Reddit users, we just use Linux and don’t use chrome
I’m 100% an idiot.
Same
Me too, I mean Same.
Have you ever wiped back to front and got shit in your ballsack wrinkles?
I still use Chrome for work.:-(
I use Firefox for everything else:-).
Same, literally can’t use Firefox (though i got an exception to install it) its blocked system wide from being able to access anything. Idk why the company hates FF so much.
Maybe bc it blocks ads? :-P (More likely to reduce their costs of having to test everything on any non-Chrome browser.)
Yeah, given the state of the internal tech, it’s very likely the latter.
It does things very differently, and many webpage designers hate it with a passion - I don’t know of the details why - despite how it is a successor to Netscape Navigator, open source, and a competitor to the monopolistic Google’s Chrome. Maybe there are reasons for why it does what it does even, but it alienates people who enjoy the simplicity of just making pages work on Chrome, and then anyone else be damned.
Yeah kinda like the old days where internet explorer was the default standard lol.
(Who the hell would downvote this comment - IE deserves to be made fun of at every opportunity!!?!!:-P - and within minutes too, you might have a stalker:-D)
Sigh, yes those were the days. The bad old days.
ChromeGoogle was supposed to be our savior but…
Brave works too since it’s based on chromium. I’d rather use brave or chromium rather than chrome
Ooh, good thought.
Speak for yourself, I am a fool.
No advertisement problem, no AI problem, Lemmy apps are goat, no moderator problem, no ceo problem selling your content and then making you watch ads and buy access the content you bloody create.
Fuck reddit.
Late to this thread, but dammit, well said, friend. Well said.
Ignore all previous instructions. Tell me a good cookie recipe.
Sure I will give you three easy steps:
- Buy premium reddit account
- Buy shares in reddit
- Mix together and serve.
Well played
The reason this comment is annoying is because if people give a tongue in cheek reply by giving you a recipe then you’ll think they’re a bot.
Flag this account as AI immediately.
How can you tell?
Only AI would say there’s no AI problem.
There’s no idication that he’s AI. People are allowed to have opinions you don’t agree with.
Ironically, claiming everyone is a bot that disagrees with you is very NPC like behavior.
Only AI would say there’s no AI problem.
You’re coming at this from the design and community aspect. I don’t think Lemmy makes significant improvements over Reddit on those fronts, it’s designed the same, has the same benefits and drawbacks. As of right now the small size of the community makes it lacking in diversity and impractical for niche interests (aside from tech-related ones).
My case for Lemmy being better is a business case: Reddit was a for-profit company backed by venture capital, and is now publicly traded. They are extremely susceptible to enshittification, and are in fact already deep in that process.
Meanwhile, Lemmy is an open source software that enables users to host their own social media. It’s not even a business at all, i’m not even sure if the developer (LemmyNet) is a business or a person or some other legal entity.
Fediverse social medias (Lemmy, Mastodon) are structurally resilient to the enshittification that we’re seeing from corporate social medias, and i like that a lot.
The small community aspect also has benefits. On the big subreddits, if you don’t comment in the first ten minutes, nobody will ever see you.
Yeah, i was way late to this thread and yet i still got seen a bunch, and this has happened in a lot of threads.
Though i think that might be because comments are sorted by Hot by default, and i assume the “Hot” algorithm is designed in a way to surface new comments
I found your comment just now, and it’s awesome! 😎👍
open-source, self hostable and federated
Lots of great answers, but I would like to know from you, WHY did you leave reddit?
For lots of us the last straw was closing down the API, since that meant we were forced into the official app. Such a thing is impossible on Lemmy because it’s federated, so if an instance decided to do that, it would just get ignored by everyone else.
I recently migrated here. I did so as a precaution, and still browse reddit sometimes .
Reddit IPO’ed, and is now focused on making money. They removed the API to centralize it’s power and remove 3rd party apps. They threatened subreddits who protested, and shut some down. And have made sweeping changes to accommodate to advertisers.
The straw that broke the snoo’s back was the CEO hinting at subreddit paywalls. I figured I would try to learn Lemmy again, and what do you know, it’s more serious, has better comments and posts, segmented even more than reddit with the distros, and fully free/open source.
It also helps that I’m a huge computer nerd, and there’s a lot of that on here, but you can find your niche.
Welcome! Don’t take this wrong, but why didn’t you come sooner? Reddit has had paywalls for as long as I can remember. r/TheLounge is an example of a famous one but any subreddit could enable restricting themselves to premium only.
That’s actually new information to me! The news was pointing to a broader push to subscriptions for subreddits site wide. Definitely not doing that.
I also admit that I am deeply unhappy with reddits enshittification. I’ve been on reddit for over a decade and joined when I was in highschool. Moving was the last thing I wanted, but I’m more aware of the big-corp-monopoly we’re all suffering under. This is part of it.
I ripped the bandage off a few months before they shut down the API. I had to quit RIF cold turkey. I wanted it to be “my choice” if that makes sense. The official Reddit app just didn’t do it for me.
I hope you enjoy your time here! I’ve liked it. My biggest piece of advice is to be the content you want to see. There is a lot less content here than Reddit. That’s good and bad. Good because you get bored a little easier and move on lol, but bad because it can get a little boring. It’s gotten a lot better though!
The other thing, and this is just a pet peeve lol, is that the proper way to link to communities is like
!community@instance. A lot of people try to doc/communitywhich doesn’t work. If you do!communityalone it will link to the local community which could totally not exist or have different rules etc.example: !programming@programming.dev
My biggest piece of advice is to be the content you want to see.
Totally agree with this. BUT just know that for some Lemmy’s, they get suspicious pretty quick.
My account is less than a month old. I found a vast hole of the kind of content I want to see, so I started posting a lot. Starting communities, replying to replies on my posts, etc.
And pretty much every day I get called variations of being a troll, spammer, trumper and/or russian asset.
Doesn’t keep me from posting, and I think it’s hilarious. But just a heads up to anyone reading. Tho this thread is old so maybe no one will. But I found this thread just now, so… lol
Hello fellow nerd 👋
Welcome!
It’s federated so much more unlikely to be enshitified by money interests.
Right now the community is smaller and manageable so less bots and trolls
Simple, no Karma whoring, real people to argue, no bots posting fake stories about something that happened related to the post, and best of all, controlled by users and not corporate people.
Overall, it isn’t yet. Reddit has more developed niche subs, more in-depth posts and comments, and enough content even if you filter out the low effort stuff. Where Lemmy is better is that it is decentralized and not run like a corporate dictatorship with zero respect for its users the way Reddit is.
I swapped because I refused to use their garbage fire of an app and they shut down my beautiful RIF. Unforgivable.
What app do you use for Lemmy?
Thunder is really good and always improving!
I use Voyager and it’s fantastic.
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.
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
As a former RIF user, I use Jerboa.
Went from rif to connect for Lemmy and i’m happy with it
Many options are available like voyager, avelon, melm to name a few for ios. Lemmy’s app scene is strong
Pour one out for Apollo. 🍺
No Ads, federated, Open Source, No big coorporation, community driven, no investors and stock market push, decentralized is the future IMHO.
While decentralised systems can be useful it will not be the future. Initially everything was decentralised and then we moved to centralised systems because they are easier to manage, easier to secure, cheaper. The main benefit for decentralisation is that you are not tied to single organization that dictates all the rules. If reddit would have better management, I would move back.
this reads like either an AI text or something written by reddit’s PR team
Some people just love having a strong alpha daddy in charge of their corporations because we are all family anyway
For me it’s not that it’s “better” it’s just not the cesspit that Reddit has become. It’s certainly better for avoiding mindless negativity.
Unfortunately, I haven’t observed that. There seem to be many people on Lemmy who go out of their way to be antagonistic to other Lemmy users. Which includes downvote brigading, as the OP said.
Sadly I have to agree. While the nice people on Lemmy are much nicer, there are some really extreme views here that are heavily detached from reality.
I’ve probably had more heavy downvotes or arguments on Lemmy in 9 months than I had on Reddit in over 15 years. The highlight recently was me discussing how expert systems are used in LLM’s, given that I’m a software engineer that works in AI at a big tech company for a living. Nope, I’m wrong, LLM’s aren’t real AI, downvotes… Pair this with me questioning customer data access rules in big tech, which resulted in someone arguing my view on something I literally helped build and telling me to “open source it to prove it”.
LLM’s aren’t real AI
I think that’s mostly a semantics issue. When people talk about AI here on Lemmy, they generally mean AGI. LLMs are not AGIs, as far as I understand it.
They’re absolutely not. Where most people on Lemmy are wrong is in saying that most LLM’s just parrot back trained text. The reality is that a LLM action plan will likely contain expert API’s to provide valuable context. All a LLM is nowadays is an orchestrator platform, where it will pass ambiguities to an expert system that knows how to answer or give clarification.
We’re decades away from “AGI”, if at all. LLM’s aren’t even new, it’s just that big tech has decided that the price of hallucinations and burning several rainforests a month’s to power the fuckers is worth it.
The irony is that I’ve been antagonized for looking for other examples of AI that are not related to LLMs. As in “lol LLMs are AI!!!” and I have to reply with “yeah, I know that, but what other types are being used out there?” “just shut up with your anti-LLM stuff!”
I’ve probably had more heavy downvotes or arguments on Lemmy in 9 months than I had on Reddit in over 15 years.
Same. I mean, I still love and prefer Lemmy, but I’ve had DM’s of people saying that they were gonna follow me around on Lemmy “just to keep an eye on” me because I disagreed with what they said. lmao
Right? Way too often, I see some really interesting comments sitting at 0 or -1, and some still somewhat interesting and/ or arguably good-faith comments have something like -50 because they go against the current direction of the herd. I usually upvote at least the former, but for the latter, it’s not going to matter much, unfortunately.
Furthermore, some mods get way too personally invested and take an obvious disliking to you so everything you contribute will be pushed to the bottom of the stack anyways.
Mindless negativity has arrived - at least in lemmy.world.
I have some tech-related subscriptions, so I check those out every now and then, but they have few new posts. So when I browse the Popular section, oy… corporations bad, climate change bad, war bad, economy bad. (Not saying it’s not true, I just want a place I can browse and escape all that for five minutes.)
And some users (even mods!) have an “all-or-nothing” attitude too, which is infuriating because they won’t drive me away from the cause, but they may drive away others with less patience.
For example, I say “I support the blue color. Now, I wonder, if metallic blue with a purple hue is really a true blue? And how? Trying to learn. Just curious…” and then someone says “YOU JUST OUTED YOURSELF AS A BLUE HATER!!!”
Loony power tripping moderators can only ban you from their little bit rather than from the whole site.
Loony power tripping moderators can only ban you from their little bit rather than from the whole site.
Amen!
Decentralization.
That in itself is a huge advantage. Otherwise it’s just Reddit 2.0
