So I’ve switched to lemmy since the reddit meltdown started, experienced quite some withdrawal symptoms, occasionally turned back to reddit, more often logged out than logged in. Now I am merely using Lemmy occasionally and by far not as often as I used reddit before. No more doom scrolling.
So far so good.
Today I went on reddit for the first time in like 3 weeks straight (I couldn’t do that for the last years… yeah, I was very addicted in hindsight). I just… I don’t know what it is.
Reddit just isn’t fun anymore.
I turned away after maybe 5 minutes. There were maybe 2-3 repost-worthy pics, one interesting video and a few small niche discussions that all went straight tits up within a few replies.
If I ask a question on lemmy, it usually is a straightforward, honest discussion. Almost no blaming of the posters or answerers misunderstandings or senseless answers. It goes a bit back and forth usually and people tend to thank each other for corrections. I can’t remember when that happened on a reddit discussion. Maybe years back? Anyway, I’m not going back there anymore, not because I hate the CEO, but because reddit is not fun anymore. Lost all interest in it.
Did anyone of you have a similar experience?
Idk I don’t exactly find Lemmy a bastion of my interests. It’s very clear the community is far smaller. The niche communities of topics im interested are mostly nonexistent and it’s largely a sea of memes and references I don’t remotely understand or care to. Something about communists or some shit? What? Pass.
What interests do you have that aren’t found here? Some tiny niche interest communities are being built, you sometimes just gotta find em
They’re typically so small there is a post a week and few if any comments.
Also I find it’s difficult to find communities in the first place.
Speaking as someone actively building niche focused communities (literature.cafe for books and writing & lemmyloves.art for art) this kind of defeatist attitude saddens me. Community’s don’t explode over night. I fully get that community discovery is hard as hell right now though with lemmy, and attempts are being made to fix it. But with the communities that do exist, it’s a matter of participating and starting conversations if you don’t see one you want to participate in. On a new and emerging platform like this, you really can’t be a lurker. Posting, commenting, engagement, and likes is the only currency here.
The thing with lemmy is that it does feel like screaming into the void sometimes, but you also have the benefit of a smaller community to have more focused discussions. Quality over quantity is the focus here rather than the mess that reddit had. Reddit has tons of content but a large portion of that is just noise and spam, it is much more preferable to have a high quality post once a day with an engaging and thoughtful discussion than a community filled with low quality spam most of the time and only one high quality post a day that’s nearly impossible to find.
It’s wild that art and books are niche in your words. Niche for me would be like a specific author or artist, but books and art I think of as incredibly vast topics, far from niche.
I have specific art medium focuses and book series communities within it that I’m building as well
The issue is mostly having [email protected] , [email protected] , and then every saga/genre opening their new community, while there are probably a dozen posters interested in books.
I usually try to stick to [email protected] and [email protected]
What interests do you have that aren’t found here?
Active communities for specific video games that I play. There are general gaming communities that are active, but I’d rather be able to discuss specific games without having to start my own thread every time.
Tech communities that aren’t just “Windows bad, Linux good”. I get Lemmy is more likely to attract technical-minded, FOSS fans, and that’s fine, but the amount of Linux zealotry is annoying. I’ve dual booted for 20 years now, but people here act like Windows is actively murdering your pets while Linux “just works” and it’s… Just not true.
Communities for my area. I could make them, but I have exactly zero interest in running a community, let alone one for people I could know irl. I don’t have the time to manage or grow a community, and completely lack the desire even if I had the time. My city, county, state, job, and school all have active communities on Reddit.
Acting like Lemmy has it all when it’s total active user base is a fraction of some major subreddits active subscriber count is… Delusional at best. I want Lemmy to work and be a replacement for reddit. I miss early, smaller reddit even. But Lemmy just isn’t it yet.
The “windows bad linux good” is a great frame for most communities ive found here. Like often wrapped in some delusional joke-meme that it’s an extremely small parody of itself.
I would give my eye teeth for a Persona 5 community on lemmy.
A good one, ideally, which certainly would be a step up from reddit.
You could probably post to PlayStation communities and see if other people would be interested in creating that community with you.
Active communities for specific video games that I play. There are general gaming communities that are active, but I’d rather be able to discuss specific games without having to start my own thread every time.
[email protected] seems to be doing okay.
I guess games being released now (such as Starfield) might get more traction than established titles.
Fitness! /r/fitness is in the top 20 or so and has millions of subscribers, but no active lemmy community seems to exist.
And also food and icecream. Haven’t found active communities about those topics.
- there’s half a dozen sewing communities, but no one posts in them
- fashion communities are also barren
- pretty sure I’m the only person posting in [email protected] out of 200 subscribers. I’m not a mod there (the og mod is an empty account with no comments/posts) and it’s not a community I want to recreate on my instance.
same with food, apparently there’s no foodies here, as there is a serious lack of burgers/pizza/ramen/pho communities, people shared their photos, recipes etc on reddit
Did you have a look at [email protected] ? I see it popping in my feed every day
yeah, i’m subscribed, but it’s a minor fraction of what it was on reddit, people discussed there their pizza/burgers recipes/techniques, fought over burger/pizza/ramen/pho definitions etc
Indeed, Lemmy is a minor fraction of Reddit population wise, there’s not much that can be done around it unfortunately
You should ask an admin to be a mod.
What fashion communities exist? Just curious, that’s a topic I’m really not familiar with
Yeah, lots of niche communities are dead compared to their subreddit counterparts. Examples: OnePiece, AvatarTLA, VentureBros, Plex, and the subreddit for my town. I’m hoping this changes over time, but I still find myself going back to Reddit periodically.
[email protected] has been quite active following the release of the new seasons.
I guess that completed franchises can only have so much activity
Fitness, /r/fitness is in the top 20 or so.
Food and icecream.
It seems mainly tech talk here, and anti Windows everywhere.
But based on my posts, someone decided to replace his petrol car with a Leaf. Someone else got into Home Assistant because of me. So it has its goods sides as well.
Boats, fibre arts in general - sailing, sewing in particular. Also small city communities. Reddit had town subs, lemmy has nothing under the provincial level for me.
I miss my American Dad! community
I love Lemmy, but I really struggle with the content here. Of course things are a little bare, but I have been able to find some really good stuff. My engagement is a lot higher here than on Reddit. However I find the litany of anti-work and political/left/right posts insufferable. They’re everywhere here. At least on Reddit I felt like I could insulate myself reasonably well from political stuff. c/mildlyinfuriating is an example of this. At least half of the posts I come across are blatantly political or are anti-work. I get it, work sucks and you don’t want to work and rich people/landlords bad. R/mildlyinfurating is a much better sub than ours is a community, imo. But I can’t surround myself with this kind of Lemmy content every day because it just angers me and I didn’t go to reddit to be angry every day. I have found myself drifting back to reddit for 60% of my usage. I hope this changes. I’ve tried to sub to different communities as well to limit how much I have to read about the latest communists and nazis and racists/fascists and tankies and all that Lemmy bullshit. Clearly I need to do a better job.
If you’re looking for a community that doesn’t exist, you gotta create it. People will come.
Not OP but the issue isn’t creating the space, but creating content in that space. Growing a community is a lot of work. Unless you already have some strong engagement and or a few people creating content it’s really just up to you to keep making post until the community gets more traction. Most people like the idea of starting the new community but not the work it requires as it often just feels like yelling into the void.
Community building is more about moderation and evangelism than it is about clicking a button. Its a ton of work. People think a lot of the time you just kinda declare a forum and then it happens. I moderated a community of like 5 people for a while and even just THAT was exhausting and time consuming
I don’t think you will need much evangelism unless you are a christian based sub. Agree with all the other points though it’s not a if you build it they will come situation.
Evangelism wasn’t necessary the right word, but its not a strictly religious word. I wrote it as “recruitment” at first but I hated that more since it made the process of letting people know about your community more mechanical and less personal. I wanted to emphasize letting people know about the community in a relationship building way, and couldnt think of a better word
Just an fyi Webster definition of evangelism: the winning or reawakening of personal commitments to Jesus. The google definition: the spreading of the Christian gospel by public preaching or personal witness.
You might not have meant it like that, but I assume most people will take it at face value of those definitions.
Huh. When I asked for a definition online I got “fervent advocacy of a cause”
I mean the organic growth of my book and writing focused instance has been pretty solid. It’s not giant, but the people are there. When community discovery is better in lemmy it’ll improve as well.
How are you not going to give a shout out to your community?!
Dunno if you’re being serious or sarcastic but I have in this thread already, it’s literature.cafe for books and writing and lemmyloves.art for more art focused stuff. Both communities have a “411” community that lists communities to federate into other instances. Honestly I am hopeful such a list will become redundant as community navigation improves. We thankfully have a leg on lemmy compared to mastodon as you only need to federate in communities, not users.
I was being serious! I was only responding to messages in the inbox and made the original post before yours so I didn’t see it. Sorry to make you repeat yourself.
Oh no it’s all good! :) I also have an art focused community that’s newer, its lemmyloves.art The growth is steady in each community, but it’s definitely there.
The reason is because people aren’t creating those communities on here. If you want a community, the best step is to do it yourself, unfortunately.
You can try to talk to subreddit admin or mod team about it, but I think it’s just that Lemmy needs more people to “do” than “want” if you understand what I’m saying.
Did you ever get into a huge fight with a partner, then patched things up, except your feelings had changed as a result of the fight?
That’s how I feel about Reddit. It’s the same place, but the magic is gone for me.
I don’t think Lemmy fills that void entirely, but it does a good enough job. I miss some communities, but I like that the big communities are small enough here that I can reply to any one I choose and get meaningful discussions out of it. It’s tiring to always come too late into interesting topics on Reddit and just throw my comments into the void.
Still plenty of space for Lemmy to grow, but I’m already content with what’s here. I don’t really go back to Reddit unless I want to discuss a niche topic in a sub that hasn’t migrated to the Fediverse.
Completely agree. I used to scroll reddit for hours a day, for the last 10-15 years. I had many accounts and thousands of comments. I deleted everything in July but continued to use libreddit and teddit daily for a few weeks, until both of those were also killed.
Reddit is dead for me now. I still check in to old every few days, but as it’s shit on mobile I only view the front page for 10 mins and go back to hacker news or here. The 3rd party clients were really the only reason I got hooked and used it for so long. When spez kills old my usage will stop completely… I suspect that’ll happen before the years end.
I’ve noticed Reddit is full of people who just don’t understand how Reddit is supposed to work. Comments stopped being fun and it just feels like Facebook now
It’s funny, I was noticing that. A little bit eternal-september-ish, fewer people willing to gently nudge people to the way it worked, more people not learning.
F
The irony of someone down voting your comment
Nope. Their app and their CEO are both garbage, I’m not supporting either
Reddit isn’t fun anymore, I agree with that. I checked /r/all for this first time today in months. I haven’t logged in or browsed since the blackout, but there are a few communities I miss and was thinking about going back over for those, so I checked r/all out of curiosity to see how things have been. The content was just so much trash, and I don’t even think it’s that much worse. It’s just that I’ve been away for so long that I’m looking at it now like “how did I spend my days scrolling through this garbage for hours?” It’s just boring, it’s like just interesting enough to keep you scrolling hoping to find something actually interesting.
Here on lemmy there is far fewer users and far less content. But I’m starting to see that as a good thing. I pop by and scroll, but I don’t spend hours here like I did on reddit. The discussions are smaller, but more engaging and thoughtful. I remember before I left there were certain threads I’d see and just skip because I already knew exactly what all the comments would be. Also, I’m actively engaging more here, so there is actually some “social” in my social media use, instead of just passively consuming like I mostly did on reddit.
Overall I think ithe switch to Lemmy has been good, for me at least. It’s like I’ve broken the reddit addiction, and looking at it now I can’t understand why I got so caught up with it in the first place. To me, reddit just isn’t fun anymore.
Did you scroll through r/all previously too though?
It’s always been a hot mess to me, without my curated subs reddit isn’t much better to me than Facebook or Twitter.
Too much rage bait, also after a time in here it’s quite apparent how much the algorithm tries to push you to addiction.
I miss the niche communities tho.
I’ve occasionally ended up on Reddit accidentally when following a search link. Which immediately blasts me with notifications and pushy requests to browse in some other way than I want to. After using Lemmy for this long, which lets me peacefully do my thing my way, it comes off as really rude even before I get to the comments.
At this point, I’ve actually started actively avoiding Reddit links in my searches. I can generally find the info I need somewhere else without getting yelled at by the website.
I went over for an article I found. Scrolled out of morbid curiosity. It’s just awful. Ended up commenting about it and was down voted back to hell, apparently where I’m told o belong.
The mood has shifted drastically! I can’t believe how much negativity I receive nowadays. It’s like all the friendly and helpful people left.
Because they did leave. It’s like when Facebook was good for info, then the masses showed up and just went apeshit. Over population both digitally and physically is never a good thing.
Yeah you can post fairly mundane shit on Reddit now and you’ll attract a down vote and extremely hostile response. Even in niche game communities where it used to be friendly.
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Yeah, I still exist on reddit for news or a few niche communities. I see a lot of the recycled memes and point gaming. The few discussions get no traction or an overwhelming response. You can’t really argue with anyone. It becomes ad-hominem and hurt feelings.
My wife mocked me for leaving Reddit in a huff for nerd reasons. A month later she started asking me what I used instead, since she could see that Reddit declined just in that amount of time.
I hope you mocked her for asking, then slept on the couch
I see a lot of the recycled memes
I think the % of OPs that are just straight up reposting bots has increased considerably. Front page is even more unusable than during TheDonald times…
Its just low quality trash.
TBH that’s Lemmy too… the front page is kinda boring and most of it is reposts from reddit
I blocked all memes communities, makes the experience better
The most fucking pointless thing is the bots sharing people’s personal question posts about relationships and shit en masse. No one is commenting, no one wants to read it, it’s just pure spam.
It’s because the bots that we relied on to catch repost bots no longer work thanks to the API changes.
/R/gaming has become far more difficult to mod without those tools
Depending on which subs you see, the assholes have won. Holy shit the amount of right wing bullshit that got into the place. Like wallstreet silver. I didn’t much give a shit before it started looking like the front page of diet stormfront.
The remaining mods are at large, S class window lickers and ableist who have been applying to get a position for years and just now get their chance to goatse the corpse of what was once a great website. Started seeing tons of people getting banned for the most petty of shit. Buddy of mine got a 30 day ban for linking another sub reddit in his comment.
Of course, I got banned too. on my 12th cake day no less, for saying a kids attitude was going to get him beat up in high school or worse.
But if anything, there are so many folks out there that can say they were there before they got spez’d and the assholes took over. It was nice for a while, but in the end, fuck reddit.
I just got a warning for “threatening violence” for telling off a guy who said we should use mob beatings as criminal justice.
Admittedly, I said something like “I agree, we should all be able to beat and murder anyone we like for our own personal gratification”, but it was on /r/uk and I thought we understood sarcasm.
I always assumed WSS was FUD from the finance industry trying to persuade apes to buy silver instead of GME.
(Like, seriously, who tries to get people who buy and hold to change to silver, notoriously a cyclical metal?)
It used to be that banning was reserved for some extreme people. Now, you can get banned for stating an opinion that others think is offensive.
Things have changed a lot in the last decades. People get offended by anything now.
You guys are leaving out part of their system. It’s never just a ban. It’s always a ban and an immediate mute so you can’t even ask them why they banned you.
Because admins don’t think it’s anything wrong. They never stop and think if it’s OK to ban someone just like that. They don’t see users as people and don’t give them a chance to even explain. Who has time for that right…
If anything, the last month+ has shown just how factual it is that users are nothing more than numbers to them.
Right wing bullshit? Reddit is still dnc propaganda, unless you’re just calling that right wing too.
Reddit definitely has been infiltrated by the worst of the worst conservatives. You either don’t notice, or it agrees with you. Though to your last sentence, yes, the DNC is definitely on the right, they wouldn’t even recognize progress.
I think you’re just far-left and your overton window has shifted.
How can one tell? From my perspective: I am pretty left, but only because the majority are so far right.
I’m back to Reddit, I kinda gave up here, but I’ll look a couple of times a week.
Too much politics. Linux. Privacy. Bidet talk. ADHD. Bad memes. Techbabble. Snore
No matter the filters I just can’t get an interesting feed, I just blocked about 6 political subs just today - it’s kinda shitty content imo (for me anyway)
I’m happy this exists but the rage honeymoons over for me. Old habits die hard I guess ……now………back to arguing with bots!!
Pretty much. I really struggle here to limit how much I have to read about politics, “tankies,” fascists/communists, nazis, defederation, etc. It’s everywhere. For fuck’s sake at least I felt insulated from political shit on Reddit for the most part. Yes, I know everyone thinks the USA sucks, landlords are bad, the rich should be shaken down, etc. Maybe that’s true! But I can’t listen to this shit anymore and it’s pushing me away from this site.
I share a bit of the same feeling. Too much memes, tech, politics, news.
What other interests do you have?
Me too is not that interested in most communities here. All you have to change is the default setting in your profile to “subscribed” instead of “local”. That’s the same mechanism as reddit had.
But yes, the amount of discussion here is limited. But not in a bad way. More like, concentrated rather than spread out. If you want to give it a try, go here:
Just look up the most active community for your specific interest and hope for the best. Worked for my few interests.
Do you consider anything that mentions politics boring? Do you have no interest in international relations? I understand if you’re not from the US, but there’s a lot of good information in those posts.
Yep! I don’t care about trump, elon musk and what lame alternative to discord there is. Slowly blocking stuff will be the way I guess
Fair enough. Then I imagine c/Everything would be a drag.
Is that really so strange? Personally I don’t care about any level of politics or news outside of a couple of fields in general, certainly don’t care for it being on social media. Generally it seems that if it is actually important I will find out about it one way or another anyway.
I think for the way I personally used Reddit, Lemmy still feels lacking, and I’m excited for it to grow. The good news is it’s getting bigger every day and niche communities are being created all the time, so we’ll get there. But there’s no doubt a treasure trove of question and answer posts on Reddit that I still need to access at times, so it’s still useful to me in that regard, but I’m not actively checking it at all anymore.
Honestly, the main reason is no fun anymore is the lack of a decent app (I loved BaconReader - YMMV). Since the UX has been downgraded severely (most have lost their preferred app), the user base, community and content have suffered.
I’d have been content to pay a reasonable subscription fee to keep using BaconReader. I’d even pay for ad removal - I’m not after a free ride. However, an enjoyable ride is now unavailable be it free or paid.
So, here’s Lemmy. I hope it works out long term, but the growing pains associated with scaling are not to be underestimated. I suspect the challenges will be less technical in nature than in user wrangling and moderation. (though running the tech ops mustn’t be underestimated).
TLDR - Yes.
Red Reader is pretty good. I moved to it from Bacon Reader years ago.
Exactly. Joey stopped working for Reddit, so I started trying out lemmy clients. Sync and Eternity (previously Infinity) are close enough, I’m trying to decide which one to stick with. But one thing is for sure: Friendship ended with reddit, now lemmy is my best friend
Baconreader was so good and so beautiful to look at. It still kind of works, mind, you just can’t log in.
There are a few subreddits that don’t have a counterpart on lemmy, or the counterpart isn’t as active yet. But when I go on Reddit, I’m spammed with posts I’m not subscribed to, nor really have a want to be subscribed to. As more communities become more active on lemmy, the less I will need Reddit.
