Was originally thinking of posting Lenmy content on Reddit to less directly advertise Lemmy, but in the communities I follow, its almost exclusively content or already posted to, or directly originating from Reddit. This got me wondering if there were any niches that Lemmy serves better than other, larger platforms.
I don’t know about content, but the Linux and self-hosting communities on Lemmy are infinitely more helpful than the ones on Reddit.
In general, advice on tech related things is much better
Reasons may include
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your question is more likely to be seen and answered
- there is less content overall
- your question isn’t competing with as much engagement-bait
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lots of older, experienced, and helpful people on the site who want to help
Also there’s far less trolls on help posts and people looking for a disagreement or a joke.
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Communism and open source software. Queer spaces are also much nicer
I think one of the few things Lemmy is better at is that I can go into 8hr old thread with 120 replies and write a comment and then have people actually read that comment too and react to it.
With 99% of AskReddit threads for example, posting a reply was complete waste of time unless you were among the first ones in. Almost all of the top comments were always also among the first comments.
Unpopular opinions get super-duper downvoted here but don’t “disappear” as often as on Reddit (not including rule-breaking submissions).
I enjoy talking with the local and Lemmyverse regulars and also with most users. Reddit is so big you get lost in the 10000 comments, however many bots are copying top comments from a past repost you wouldn’t know. Lemmy is a good size now, if anything it should grow out instead of up (revitalizing more niche communities).
Topic niches served well by Lemmy: Linux, being upset at capitalism, Startrek, LBGTQ-friendly crowds on blahaj and beehaw, pcgaming, buying local and quality products (there are fewer suggestions but your average reply is better in quality than Reddit), Woodworking, DIY offgrid living (solarpunk), and a bunch more.
Piracy, Linux, Self-Hosting, Anarchism
Oh, hell yeah.
The big three would be, first, technology, with a focus on Linux and home networking/self hosting being way better.
The second is the depth and breadth of the LGBTQ community. You get way better info, better discussions, with less dross or interference.
Third, I gotta say that the meme presence is vastly superior across the board. Less stale bullshit, less reposting, more funny. However, there’s also a good degree of niche memeing that won’t make sense to outsiders of the community, and a lot political memeing that’s just rants in picture format, with no real wit or creativity. Still miles better than reddit.
Those are the ones where, even when I switched fully in 2023, I was like , damn, this is great here.
I’d also say that lemmy is better at being open minded inside niche communities. We don’t have the numbers of reddit, which is part of it; more people, more assholes. But when it comes to hobby/interest based communities, there’s less parroting of whatever the established answer is, and more real, friendly discussion. Like, the flashlight, knife, and general edc communities on reddit were insular as hell. You couldn’t offer up an alternative opinion on a frequent subject without getting screeched at. Here, you may get disagreement, but it’ll be nice way more often than not.
That last one is why I spend so much time on lemmy. You still get assholes (and I’ve been known to put my asshole hat on sometimes), but they’re somewhat nicer assholes, if that makes sense? But the majority of the time, people outside of political topics are mostly just nice. They’ll express support and compassion easier, you’ll see more thanking each other for discussions. Even when it isn’t like that, the good stuff makes it seem less important. So what I ran into a jerk? I’ll be having a pleasant exchange in twenty minutes, so it just doesn’t matter.
My OC shitposts
and mine
There’s a much higher ratio of real humans to bots in most Lemmy communities.
For technology, sexuality, and socio-politico-economic discussion it’s as if Lemmy “stole” the users with the most developed perspectives.
However, all the problems are still present. Users still perpetually struggle to discern their right from left. And, there’s certainly at least a few mainstream mods that’ve their self-worth entirely contingent upon others agreeing with them.
Trek memes
Lemmy has more me than Reddit does. Reddit has zero me. Lemmy has 1 me. Automatically making Lemmy superior to Reddit. 😤
Some communities have a lot of homegrown posts that you could share over there, especially text heavy posts, though they can be interspersed between links to elsewhere as well.
as an example, @Blair@slrpnk.net made a ton of really well done informative posts in various communities on my instance, such as this one.
Based takes
For me, more real users.
I mean, I don’t think lemmy has 0% bots, but its probably much harder with manual application approvals.
Also, Federation makes censorship harder, but also allows defederation to stop bigotry.
I second that. in reddit you can find in any other post people (and other bots) claiming it is a bot karma farming and whatnot.
In addition to what people have said here, try local content. I’ve seen some of that crossposted back
Also content tagged with “OC”
I for one, unsubscribe from communities that copy and dump content from someplace else. I found they’re low engagement anyways. But there are plenty good ones. Idk what to recommend because I don’t know other people’s interests and spoken languages.
(It might be a different story for meme pictures, since they’re usually circulated and regurgitated. That happens on other platforms as well.)
!newcommunities@lemmy.world can help
And the Lemmy Explorer. Though, I recommend brushing up the knowledge which instances are nice. I skip lemmygrad, hexbear and even lemmy.ml these days. Also lemmit.online since that’s just reddit bots.
