Lemmy is significantly smaller. Because of this:
+Trolls are easier to spot
+Interactions tend to be friendlier and more wholesome/respectful
+Far more originality shining through
-less engaged communities
-fewer niche communities
-no rich history to comb through
The modlog transparency is honestly my favorite part. I get so much enjoyment out of the “zomg the mods are just as bad here as Reddit” posts because you can immediately highlight their bad behavior, or alternatively see when the mods actually are power tripping.
Trolls are easier to spot, except for the fact that lemmy.ml is the default instance for many users and communities eventhough the entire setup of that instance is very politically influenced. You could be in for a bad experience when you try to post a fairly reasonable comment on any slightly political post there.
-Fads aren't as easily called out/quashed, there isn't much push back on the meme of the minute, wait I just described social media in general...
First of all, welcome.
Depends what you're after, really. I find that lemmy has less of an echo chamber, but the average political stance is a lot more left-ish than reddit.
If your opinion is considered garbage, you'll probably be downvoted for it, but banned is another thing; You can find an instance more to your liking, for example if you post tankie stuff on lemmygrad, you'll probably only get praise from there.
It mostly comes down to how a platform with many people tend to naturally operate - garbage people get treated at such by the rest. So whatever your leanings might be, I suggest you find an instance that is somewhat reasonably close to share your values.
Other than that, one of the main differences from reddit is the content quantity - Smaller user base means less content. And I'm perfectly fine with that, as I can keep up with the feed without scrolling for hours.
Also, here I can say that I don't give two shits about neither Zelda nor Link, without fear of backlash. At least yhe contemporary games - Everything since Link II for NES has been kinda meh in my book.
And if you want to filter out politics, blocking lemmygrad takes away most of the tankie-spam.
I find that lemmy has less of an echo chamber, but the average political stance is a lot more left-ish than reddit.
This is true once you've blocked Lemmygrad and Hexbear, which are as much echo chambers as r/The_Donald ever was.
The thing I find most perplexing about those communities is that although they themselves support marginalized communities, they also defend highly authoritarian regimes (Russia, China) that actively persecute said groups. It's very strange to see that horseshoe wrap-around effect where at times they have the same things in common with the right wing but for entirely different reasons.
I haven't blocked hexbear (yet). As annoying as I find their views, they do produce some funny shit now and then.
You're fine as long as you don't decide to jump in and offer a contrary opinion.
Yup. They claim to not have downvotes in an attempt at forming a diversity of opinion, but as soon as there's an attempt at voicing a hint of such diversity, the ad hominim is engaged by a swarm. They started creeping through my comment and post history to find something damning, but only came up with a meh of a nothingburger, so they started to claim my opinion as invalid because I was on feddit.nl (lol?) instead, never refuting my original claim. I honestly don't remember what the topic was about at this point. I probably called out something verifiably false or misleading.
I made 1 "controversial" comment and I got perma-banned... this sucks. ... Is Lemmy the answer?
That's really going to depend on you. What sort of "controversial" comment?
If you engage in ableist, racist, or LGBTQ-phobic commenting, you're going to have a bad time. Other than that sort of thing, you'll probably be fine, with some exceptions:
If you're good with that stuff and can find out start a comm for Beetles discussions, there's a good chance that you'll have a good time.
Thanks, all really good feedback. I've managed to find a few 'somewhat' active communities to join like for my local city which has about 1000~ subscribers. Not as bad as I was expecting to be honest... that's enough user base for me to give Lemmy a shot I think.
I guess every social media platform has its politics
Try some of the kbin/mbin instances. I find the interface much more similar to old reddit. But welcome to the fediverse! kbin.social and kbin.run (mbin) are pretty good.
Idea: Try exclusively using Lemmy for a week.
If you love it, switch. If you hate it, don't. If you miss Reddit, use both.
I use both. I like both. But I also want Lemmy to become the norm.
I like using reddit is fun app. So I'm hoping for a Lemmy is fun app.
For general browsing, news, technology, mainstream topics etc.. it's much better than reddit, less toxic, better vibe.
It's very small though, so I've found two areas where it is just not a replacement:
Specific, smaller niche interests, they might have a community here but it is often empty and quiet or just non existent.
Sports, specifically a place to chat during live events. There's not enough people to support that.
So it depends what you are looking for and how niche your interests are.
I've mostly stopped using reddit and am in here now. But I still end up there occasionally. Not much these days though.
I found I had to block a large number of communities from my feed that were very narrow minded. Once I did some diligent editing, however, Lemmy has become my daily browse and I'm happy with the change. I still use reddit for some of the niche communities that don't have a counterpart here, but the larger topics (news, memes, technology) are well covered and open to discourse.
I think it's the same echo chamber here, but it's smaller. People block instances they don't like, and are in favor of moderators removing controversial things, specially around communism and tankies.
I just like that it's not run by big tech. Just discussions, no companies or ads. I think most users are tech people.
I moved over to it after the initial Reddit exodus and haven’t really looked elsewhere. It’s not quite a full replacement in terms of content and engagement obviously. It’s good for broader stuff like memes, politics/games/movies/etc in general, but not so much for the specific. There are quite a few games I used to spend a lot of time discussing on their subreddits, but they’re basically ghost towns here for a lot of them.
There are also some more specific community leanings. You’re gonna see a LOT of Star Trek and Linux related stuff.
But overall, I’m happy enough with it knowing it’s a non-privatized space to talk.
Lemmy needs to figure out a way to "group" similar communities from different instances. That is the biggest flaw by far.
It's the best I've found, but I wouldn't call it a "good" alternative myself no.
Many others have commented on the small communities/lack of niche communities so I'll simply say I agree with the takes in this thread there.
Personally though, I generally find Lemmy to be far less tolerant of any dissenting opinions across most communities. And man do I mean any. There's a plethora of topics that aren't even worth trying to discuss here because if you introduce the slightest bit of nuance to a hardline take you'll be downvoted, insulted, and ignored.
A quick example that comes to mind are services such as Spotify/Youtube. To make a long story short, I find that I use Youtube often enough that I don't mind paying for Youtube premium. They need to make money somehow to continue providing that service and I can't fucking stand ads so hey sure it's worth the monthly payment to me. I'm a pretty satisfied customer all things considered.
Try offering that perspective in any related thread and you'll be called bootlicker and made to feel like you're propping up Satan himself for daring to pay for Youtube and be happy to do so.
There's other, similar topics. Some are easier to avoid, like the FuckCars community. I was a pretty big fan of that community on reddit but on Lemmy most threads seem to truly believe we need to go 100% no cars at all and there is no middleground damnit. Other topics manage to work their way into damn near any thread. Biden could literally pull a child and puppy from a burning building and there will always be comments about how he's still a genocidal maniac and basically evil. That entire war is basically just not worth talking about here imo.
And then there's little stuff. For example, don't ever say you use Windows here lest a whole horde of people jump in to call you an idiot for not having switched to Linux I mean really what's wrong with you using the most popular OS in the world by a large margin. Stuff like that.
So I guess to summarize my feelings here, I personally believe the echo-chamber is far worse on Lemmy than reddit and that's primarily due to the smaller community. A lot of likeminded people came to Lemmy and we're missing a lot of middleground opinions that come naturally with a larger, more diverse population. Too many people view everything as black and white and if you sit in grey both extremes are against you.
There are absolutely exceptions; I have seen respectful discourse on the site. But the general trend I perceive here is that the echo-chamber is far worse.
I really like it. Tech comminities & some others are very bouyant & interesting but niche communities really struggle. Even direct replacements of big subreddits struggle. Hopefully this improves.
One tip from my own experience. I use Voyager & blocked a load of US politics keywords.
And another, I subscribed to as many interesting Lemmy communities as i could then browse Home feed in the main & occasionally All to see if any other interesting communities crop up that could be worth joining.
Welcome & enjoy.
Unfortunately it's not quite there in terms of numbers. Many niche communities that exist on reddit simply don't here or have very low activity. The ones that do are typically better than on reddit though.
First welcome a lot of the users here are ex reddit
Lemmy is young it doesn't quite have the traffic reddit does BUT it also has less of the crap.
There are instances or subs here that will delete your comment or ban you simply for posting something that disagrees with the predetermined consensus they are going for. And no, I'm not talking about racist or abusive comments, just generic shit that may not perfectly align with their narrow personal Overton window. I'm not going back to Reddit, but I wouldn't say there is a robust and diverse discussion here either. A lot of groupthink, or perceived groupthink...because dissenting opinions get straight up deleted.
Welcome. Its been great for me so far. Whatever instance you are currently on the amount of politics and echo chamber does matter. So feel free to comment and enjoy. If you have a complaint try another instance (or even Kbin) to see if this helps. Also to note that there is much more control about what communities and people you can interact with
Lemmy is good but very, very small in comparison to Reddit.
For example, /r/mildyinteresting has 286k subscribers. Lemmy has around 51k active users across the entire platform and all of it's communities. And /r/mildyinteresting is a misspelling of the even more popular /r/mildlyinteresting (23.4 million subscribers).
Even some of the niche gaming communities are larger on Reddit (/r/Kenshi, 145k; /r/factorio, 370k).
However, the small community feel is much more pronounced here on the federated Lemmy servers. You'll see the same names pop up so everyone isn't a complete stranger. Third party app support is miles ahead of Reddit's crappy app. And if you don't like your instance for any reason you can hop to another one easily.
You'll see certain trends on trending communities here. There's a lot more posts on Linux, Star Trek, and Tech news that isn't as pronounced on Reddit unless you subscribe specifically to them. The meme community is top notch though and doesn't have the incel and misogyny issues that plague Reddit.
Despite how small Lemmy is, I think it's worth spending time here. After the huge spike in users last June, there was a bit of a decline, but now it's slowly but surely growing again.
In strict technical terms, yeah it's okay, albeit with the shortcomings to be expected of a smaller development team. In terms of population and activity with this format, I think it may be at the top compared to alternatives as well.
There's still others and other software options though for this format that people could try, which honestly may even be technically better, but lacking population/activity means they're in an odd spot.
The first of these you'll read about on here are likely Kbin/Mbin, possibly followed by PieFed or still-in-development Sublinks. Kbin/Mbin is definitely the runner-up in terms of federated Reddit-alternatives, as it was one of the few options available at the time people were leaving Reddit.
PieFed and Sublinks have emerged more recently with different priorities and approaches compared to Lemmy, but with the same desire to offer a federated option for people to deploy.
The last you may read about around here would be of stuff like Discuit, Lobste.rs, Raddle (and any other sites built with Postmill), Tildes, and the like, which are all most like Reddit in terms of their being stand-alone sites, unconnected to any others running the same underlying server software. However each of these, I think, may have lower population than the cumulative population of the Lemmy network of sites.
All that said, cutting to your last question: ultimately it heavily depends on the instance/site you settle into.
Lemmy isn't a monolith, which is both its greatest strength and weakness compared to Reddit. You may be able to find a Lemmy instance/site that heavily blocks out politics and moderates lightly, but the irony of this is that it means it may have to be overly-policed to achieve that, and might appear less active in the process from heavy disconnection/defederation from any instances/sites that permit political posts/discussion.
Right now though, much of Lemmy is heavily political, and it's arguably because of lax moderation to keep political posts/discussions to relevant communities, which is itself probably in part because of lacking moderation tools to enable lighter touches to redirect posts/discussions.
Nevertheless, it's possibly the best option fitting the format available at the moment given the rest, but if Lemmy and federation doesn't suit you you might check out Tildes or Discuit. Although be advised: Tildes remains invite only for now.
Links to all options/alternatives mentioned:
One last point, I swear, but if you do stick around and just want to chat about tv shows, movies, and music, I'd recommend visiting:
!moviesandtv@lemm.ee
!movies@lemm.ee
!music@lemmy.world
!casualconversation@lemm.ee
Honestly I think any general/casual discussion community would welcome posts about those subjects as well, which there are a number of across Lemmy sites to check out.
Lemmy is smaller and more... particular. Users here are more respectful, and more sensitive. Politics seem to bleed into everything more than at reddit. Lemmy is absolutely an echo chamber, but of a different flavor. More "kill the rich" and less " the narwhal bacon's at midnight"
You can still get nuked arbitrarily for annoying a mod.
I say try it out, but use the ban tool liberally the first few weeks. Block instances like hexbear, lemmygrad and possibly ml if you aren't interested in leftist discussion, and in for former instance's cases, trolling and dogpilling. (Or keep em, if you like that 😁)
After a few weeks of banning users and instances I have a generally palatable but still pretty left leaning time-dump / memefeed.
Yeah blocking users is pretty useful. Whenever I see a user post something horrible or massively annoying I look at their last few comments. Usually those are equally bad so then I block them and go back to whatever I was looking at.
I too have recently been perma-banned from reddit for nonsense. I still browse it with my banned account, I just don't comment. They're going to chase away heaps of people. I made a new account under a vpn to help someone and the account got shadowbanned. I think reddit is trying to become some corporate-safe-space where business can fake market directly to reddit users.
Lemmy is basically an parallel universe of Reddit. There's less people here, which means smaller but also less toxic communities. Since this is a segment of the fediverse, people also tend to talk about Linux and free open source software, while also trashing on Windows, Google, and any other product by what I like to call "Big Tech". People are much more liberal here, there's more tolerance for the LGBT community, there's basically lots of hatred for cars, people praise the European Union. Ok some of these are bad examples of liberalism, but still, it's all found here. Enjoy your stay. If you don't like it, you're free to bid us farewell.
Feels like early internet here, enjoy it while it lasts. Good chance this place will blow up and the normies will come in.
Welcome!
I also moved over from Reddit, some time ago now, Lemmy is great if you don't mind it being quieter and you're not into super niche things.
If you are into super niche things, definitely make those communities and begin fostering growth by posting, it's what I'm doing for my home country of Wales, slow but steady and all that.
Hope you enjoy Lemmy!
It's similar in a lot of ways and this is still an echo chamber and the echo chamber we have here has a lot of overlap with reddit... but, while reddit mostly just leaned left... Lemmy... just leans anti-west. As mentioned, there's a lot of overlap there, we've got a lot that is shared, but the parts where those two groups differ can cause some serious wtf moments if you're used to the reddit community. As far as over policing, moderation logs are mostly public and there have been some controversies, but mostly people just stopped caring or left. If you stick around long enough, you will notice policies being applied unfairly if you're on the 'wrong' side and it's a lot easier to be in that category here.
All that to say, you'll likely have some moments where you think... Maybe that old echo chamber wasn't so bad.
I've always hoped somebody would create basically a clone of Reddit, but without the politics and without being overly-policed. Where people aren't pushed away for respectfully voicing their opinion. Is Lemmy the answer?
If you block sufficient leftist/marxist instances and communities, you might not notice that this is essentially a socialist fanboy wannabe utopia.
I'd suggest to browse Lemmy by new, block a lot, refresh a couple times, and then eventually arrive at a curated, sanitized feed.
But Lemmy is far from unpolitical, merely a different color.
Personally I still use other websites to get news about niche topics sinse Lemmy is small, but I genuinely much prefer Lemmy for general memes news and whatever else pops up! I genuinely think the funny post are much better than on Reddit.
but without the politics and without being overly-policed
Lemmy doesn't really do anything to address either of these.
Small but great!!! Once I've blocked Hexbear (the proud boys pretending to be far-left), everything is pretty fun and respectful.
It's a bit 'terminally online' at times, but only a bit more than Reddit
I really did always hate that Reddit felt like a massive echo chamber.
Lemmy is a collection of independent echo chambers that believe different things. You can make an account on some instance you never heard of before and get people assuming you have certain beliefs just because of your instance because apparently a lot of people stick primary to their home instance? In one instance, you have an echo chamber of "bOtH SiDeS aRe tHe sAmE" and other echo chambers that say things like "I won't vote for someone who aids in genocide".
Some instances block more instances than others (the one you are on has blocked 172 instances, for example). And some instances are blocked by a lot of instances (lemmygrad is blocked by 89 instances). Also some instances disable downvoting, if that's something you're interested in.
I don't think overpolicing is an issue in most places? Like, there's that one person who openly is pro-genocide in all of the palestine-related threads (like, they explicitly call for killing of even infants and that anything less is antisemitism) and I guess they're tolerated (just probably one of the most heavily downvoted people on lemmy). But if they're on an instance without downvotes, they wouldn't even see them.
Its the same small group vibe reddit lost when they got big and greedy. You will actually learn names outside of the top reposter.
The only thing I miss is the really neiche communities. There's some but they struggle to take off due to the smaller user base.
You do have to look though a few different servers till you find one that fits what you want. Mods are still clowns depending on the server. Avoid the top few instances to avoid power trippers. Some things never change.
I basically found a cozy server and settled in after nukeing my reddit account. I don't miss reddit.
It’s not perfect, but lemmy is good enough for us
Lemmy is fickle but it's ok. Works the same but smaller, so you might be stuck on "all".
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