I was just reading this post https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1gmv76n/is_reddit_going_to_remain_the_primary_space_for/ and many barely see the fediverse as an alternative and they seem to have a negative bias towards it. Super ironic when it comes to the self-hosting community. Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views. But it doesn’t really matter when it’s federated and FOSS. I think it’s clear-cut that the selfhosting community on Lemmy is a perfect alternative to reddit. Why is there such a negative bias?
I mean that’s basically the crux of it. That, and some moderation drama, and the software being very buggy a year ago giving people a bad first impression, and Lemmy still being susceptible to spam.
It’ll take some time before Lemmy (and the Threadiverse as a whole) improves its reputation and moves on from the “it’s a tankie website” take. That said, a lot of people in that thread are making the case for Lemmy, so it’s mostly just people worried it’s not as popular.
I definitely avoided Lemmy the first go-round with the API fuckery because it seemed from the outside like basically just a tankie protest Reddit in a similar way to how Voat was just a neo-Nazi protest Reddit. To the Lemmy devs’ absolute credit, they don’t push new users toward any of those, though.
I thought one day after having had a Mastodon for some time that I might not have given Lemmy a fair shake, so I went back and ended up finding that most instances are basically normal Reddit fare but honestly less shitty than Reddit proper (there’s a trade-off that posts are less frequent and that small, niche communities can attract unwanted attention by having their posts almost immediately show up in ‘all’).
Yup, things have definitely improved, especially with more extremist instances like lemmygrad being defederated and phased out. I do also want to give a shoutout to the devs for not pushing their stance and letting the platform grow naturally.
The last 2 reddit userbase diasporas were wildly more different than all of the previous ones combined.
When voat became a thing everyone already knew ahead of time that it’s ranks would be filled with facists; but it took a while for lemmy to earn its tankie stereotype and I’m also glad that lemmy’s design helps ensure that it’ll have more stamina that voat or any of the other reddit user digital refugee camp platforms that came before it.
The instance I first chose straight up disappeared, so yeah. It wasn’t an easy migration.
Even if it’s not as popular, I’d say the community might still be more solid in some cases. And that people are more responsive, especially with quality answers. I’ve noticed you’re chastised way more on reddit if you ask a “stupid” question.
In contrast to reddit, whos leadership never made any controversial decisions. /s
Fediverse
Threadiverse refers specifically to the subset of the Fediverse with threaded conversations, like Lemmy and Mbin.
Sounds too much like Threads, the invasive corporate thing which can get fucked. Never going to market for them.
don’t let them change the meaning of our words then
that is a personal problem, not a general protocol based one.
Likewise the heroic nerds of the Threadiverse coined the term months before Threads was even announced, and they would be hard pressed to give it up to some scumbag billionaire.
It’s an epic culture war being fought between two largerly agreeing parties.