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.
AKSHUALLY, only a few of us assholes fit this description, and as a whole we are in the vast minority.
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!
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
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 :))
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.
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.
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🎵
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.
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.
deleted by creator
Speak for yourself, I am a fool.
Ads look better in the official ad delivery app - download the app
“Oh, you already have a third party app that you love? Too bad, we’re killing it.”
Download the official app to view the rest of this comment
We control it. It’s libre software.
There’s a lot less commercial interest.
Not just no ads, but also no users trying to push products or gain karma for account selling and all that crap.
The idea of someone trying to sell a Lemmy account is pretty funny though.
Same with a Reddit account tbh.
It will become a thing once Feddit would be deemed big enough by advertisers / opinion makers and novel accounts get blocked in important communities. Like it happened on Reddit.
Open mobile app support
Ad free (depending on the app and instance, but its pretty easy to get Lemmy without ads)
No CEO to make whacky, unpopular decisions without clear purpose or recourse
No shareholders whose priorities will always take precedence over the users
There’s also something to be said for being part of a smaller community
Of course any and all problems can occur in microcosm within a particular instance or community, but it’s trivial to just block that instance/community. As for brigading, bullying, and harassment, Lemmy offers no solutions to human nature, unfortunately.
Lemmy offers no solutions to human nature
This is an excellent way to phrase it lol
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.
Everyone’s talking about the tech, but I’ll talk about the user base. When you make a post or comment on Reddit, it often feels like you get lost in some black hole of other posts or comments. No one sees your comment because there are 1000 other comments on the same post.
At Lemmy, there are fewer users and fewer comments, but your comments actually get seen. People upvote. I weirdly get way more upvotes at Lemmy than I did at Reddit, in spite of the smaller user base here. Because of that, I’m way more active here than I was on Reddit.
In terms of variety of communities it isn’t better, but the hope is over time people will continue to come over here as reddit decays and eventually it’ll catch up.
I left reddit when they killed the 3rd party app I used. I didn’t want to switch and I ended up here. in my opinion Lemmy still has a long way to go to be as good as what I left, but I don’t want to support reddit anymore and I find it to be good enough here to still be enjoyable. I can still look at memes, and there’s still some good discussion to be had.
The biggest thing Lemmy is missing is niche communities and a broader and less techy audience. I think both of those will happen overtime if the platform keeps growing. Crossing my fingers we get there.
It’s pretty pretty hard to have this achieved with how the platform is today. Content is one (communities and posts) but lack of WTF is going on even for tech savvy people is another thing. Try asking a non user to go to the main entrance place for Lemmy (like googling it). Then ask them to find something of interest. Then ask them to create an account so they can comment. Those pretty fundamental things are non-existent.
Pretending that they exist or are easy to use is like saying Arch Linux is easy or even driving is easy. It is not. You need tons of preparation. The above take 1 minute in all common social media. Unless those three things are clear for people 20 to 40 yo, Lemmy will never gain traction.
Lemmy’s barriers to entry are a problem, there’s no getting around that. Personally I don’t think they are that bad and requiring a bit of effort / research is, oddly, in some ways, kind of a good thing…? The people who want to be here have put in at least a little work. But you make a very valid point. It needs to be easier and more intuitive. I would also point out that reddit sucks for new users, too. People are constantly complaining on there about how hard it is to get a new account going because of prerequisite karma, wildly varying sub rules, etc.
I realize I’m a bit late to the conversation, just wanted to say i agree with your sentiments.
I kinda felt that the whole tech world was a little better when it had a certain gatekeeping element, in that you had to know how to operate a computer to at least some degree to do anything with the Internet. While that does reduce the amount of potential users dramatically in its own right, it also cuts down on the signal-to-noise ratio similarly. Giving everyone phones didn’t necessarily make the Internet a better place, imo. But it also has given a voice to many who never would have had one (for better or worse, as well)…
Not every place needs an enormous user base to make it worthwhile or enjoyable. Too many comments def leaves you feeling like you don’t have a voice, but i guess too few and you wonder if anyone’s listening…
I mostly agree. I don’t want a “highly exclusive, only for elites” type of vibe (and I’m not saying that you do). But yes, there’s probably a sweet spot of “obstacle course” to get here somewhere. Not that I claim to know what that is in precise terms.
I think you’re spot on with those hurdles. I’m somewhat techy (not nearly as much as many on here), and even I found it to be a major turn off for a long time before I finally decided to figure it out.
The way I would approach this if I was trying to improve it would be to create a way for people to essentially skip the instance selection process. Perhaps instance owners could opt in to this pool of “open servers” let’s call them. The user would create an account on a neutral website created for this onboarding purpose, and by default there would be a checked box for “automatically select server”. It would sign them up for an instance based on their IP address and the size of the instance to try and spread out population a bit.
If you want more control, you uncheck the box and it gives you more things to select from like region, population size, and anything else relevant, and then gives you a list of servers fitting your criteria and you pick the one you want.
Nice comment
We have plenty of 3rd party clients baby!
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.
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.
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.
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?
Listen, I won’t dig into all the tech and philosophy of decentralization and anti-corporate ownershipa. There are other people here for that. But let me tell you why I am enjoying it: it’s small, it ends, and it feels like early internet.
I load up Lemmy, and see a series of disjointed memes, or a current ongoing meme (like pondering the orb) and absorb that for a short while. I see a couple world news articles, a couple about Trump and a couple about places that aren’t the US. I read an article about Ryzen’s new chips not performing well on Windows and see someone’s retro-gaming setup. Then, after about 10-15 minutes of scrolling, I go “oh hey, I remember this post from yesterday”, and then I close Lemmy because, and this is the important part, I’ve hit the end of new content in my feed.
I still get the news, I still take in a couple memes about the current state of politics, or a celebrity flying her plane altogether too much, but I am never stuck here. There’s no one trying to rage bait me for the sake of user engagement, and any argument I find myself in wraps up and moves on. I don’t feel disconnected, but I am also never completely absorbed, and my life is better for it. Sure, sometimes while I am waiting in a line I load Lemmy only to discover there’s nothing new for me in the hour since I’ve closed it. Sometimes I do the age old, “looking to busy myself”, close Lemmy because there’s nothing to see, immediately open Lemmy because I am looking for something to occupy my Internet poisoned brain. But being bored for a minute here and there is worth it, if it means a lot more free time because I am no longer absorbed in the rat race of infinite scrolling social media.
I think Lemmy is better in a series of ways, but the one that really matters is that it helps me put down my phone, and do things that I enjoy.
Why did you, personally, leave Reddit?
