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 what it does — it’s how it does it.
Lemmy is a form of social media that truly belongs to its users, including you, not a soulless commercial entity. You want to change the code? You can do that. Run your own instance? Host your own community? Make your own moderation rules? There are instances at all corners of the political compass each with the freedom to use Lemmy how they so desire.
Lemmy is yours, to use however you see fit, and with the mutual consent of other server operators and their users. It’s radically different from a business.
NO SPEZ. That’s enough
The “fuck /u/spez” wave is one of my last, and favorite, Reddit memories haha
It still falls into some of the same pitfalls that Reddit had (groupthink, reflexive commenting, power-tripping mods), but some of those problems I don’t know that there’s a way to get around them in this format, they’re just a human nature sort of issue. I appreciate that Lemmy doesn’t appear to be owned by a giant mega-corp trying to harvest our “intellectual”, but we’ll see how that pans out in the future. I’ve just gotten used to every online service I’ve used eventually going to shit.
I like that there’s no advertising at the moment, I don’t know that I would mind it so much if there was advertising, as long as it was kept minimal. I know these things don’t just happen for free and if money is needed to help keep the lights on and such.
A very obvious solution to groupthink is to do away with the silly voting system. I don’t know why they kept it. A very simple solution would have been to just assign votes to a topic based on how much attention it’s getting. In simple terms, If opposed has 10,000 people that have viewed it, 1,000 people have left a comment, compared to a post that has 100,000 views and 15 comments, you can tell which one should have more attention score. The upvote and downvote system is too easily used as a dislike or like system. Many of us have the maturity to upvote something because we think it’s a good discussion point even if we don’t agree with what the person is saying. But a lot of people don’t think that way mentally. They see something, they read it, immediately go into toxic hater mode and just downvote it for no reason
The problem is that you then end up with sites based on attention, leading you into the (imo even bigger) pitfall of every other social media site, where things like attention-grabbing, clickbait, and sensationalist content has a massive advantage. Look at what gets sorted to the top on platforms where that is the main metric, things like Mr. Beast’s low-brow, cacophonus videos, children’s content, scantily clad women and softcore porn, and gambling or otherwise particularly addictive content. Even focusing on comment count alone means a focus on topics that are both broad-appeal and controversial, more like what you get out of Twitter’s trending topics: mostly politics and flamewars rather than experts sharing their research, or artists sharing their (non-pornographic) art.
Don’t get me wrong, voting isn’t a perfect system at all, but it correlates with quality far better than engagement does.
I swapped because I refused to use their garbage fire of an app and they shut down my beautiful RIF. Unforgivable.
What app do you use for Lemmy?
Many options are available like voyager, avelon, melm to name a few for ios. Lemmy’s app scene is strong
I used Boost on reddit, and I use Boost on lemmy. I’m not a huge fan of it not being FOSS, but every other app was always missing something
I’m sure they have caught up now, but I already paid for it and it does everything I need
I’ve never used Boost. What sorts of things does it have that FOSS apps are lacking?
I wouldn’t be able to tell you at this point friend. I can’t remember what I wasn’t liking about the other apps in the first place, and I have no idea the progress they have made. I’d be willing to bet at least a few are on par now
I use Voyager and it’s fantastic.
Went from rif to connect for Lemmy and i’m happy with it
I’d recommend Eternity for Lemmy, same developer as Infinity for Reddit, and FOSS. I too tried a bunch of Lemmy apps and I settled on Eternity because it’s pretty much a complete app. I don’t miss any features.
Thunder is really good and always improving!
As a former RIF user, I use Jerboa.
Pour one out for Apollo. 🍺
We need someone to write a fediverse manifesto that explains it for the uninitiated like the GNU Manifesto did for free software.
This video does an ok job of it.
No ads disguised as posts.
To echo, it’s not really better, just different & smaller. Just slightly less toxic. It’s not owned by Spez, the greedy little pigboy. 3rd party apps aren’t killed for no good reason over here.
Moving to a substantially smaller community of people does have its drawbacks; there is brain drain & stagnation in small hobby communities. Be it roasting coffee, brewing beer, or weed…not nearly as many brains, let alone good brains, and less content generation. There’s less knowledge, making it objectively less useful.
I use Sync for Lemmy & idk I find it hard to navigate to, find new communities. Half of the time I stumble upon one by sheer accident.
But the memes can be really good, it’s still a news/info source, and for me being a conservative it gives me some insight into how “the other side” thinks, possibly even why.
The audience is mostly the same so you’re not going to find many differences there. It’s mostly the platform and its philosophy you’ll find a difference in.
Less locked down than Reddit. No CEO bent on taking your user created content and charging for it. No CEO trying to polish a turd for advertisers to make $$ while simultaneously completely taking for granted and disregarding the mods and users that actually make Reddit exist. No communities captured by shills and groupthink. Well…except for places like hexbear or some .ml, but there’s no pretenses there. You know what you’re getting into. Lemmy is more egalitarian, plenty of apps for mobile devices, people generally have a discussion and not just be the retread cheap quip for upvotes.
Also, Reddit IMO has gotten “colder” for lack of a better word. People don’t upvote. You’re more likely to be criticized for a position than engaged with. Opinions that disagree with the hive mind are often quickly downvoted regardless of whether or not the position has validity.
Lemmy is just more chill.
People don’t upvote. You’re more likely to be criticized for a position than engaged with. Opinions that disagree with the hive mind are often quickly downvoted regardless of whether or not the position has validity.
i experience this constantly on lemmy.
i experience this constantly on lemmy.
Me too!
There were multiple actions described. You’re saying that you experience one of them. Or maybe you experience more than one. Or maybe we don’t know, because you didn’t make it clear, which might make us want to downvote you, which suggests that you often experience being downvoted. :-)
Much more diverse opinions mainly because there are more non-Americans percentage wise.
I am a new Lemmy user (and new to this fediverse, although I have more fediverse experience from other decentralized platforms such as Matrix). I’ve been liking Lemmy, for the pupose it’s thought for, a thread-focused platform (while Mastodon, for example, is post-focused, microblogging). For starters, no advertisements nor sponsorship nor tracking (yet my adblock is active everytime anyways). Possibility of integrating multiple kinds of platforms through ActivityPub (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc). Open and accessible API. Definitely, not only Lemmy is way better than Reddit, but the fediverse is way better than any mainstream social network.
Welcome!
I feel like actual humans read my comments here most of the time. It’s pretty small still, but it’s growing!
Plus 1!
it’s not. still have power hungry mods that ban and block your messages on the slightest disagreement. it’s still a cesspool, but mostly because of the public.
Welcome, it’s not better.
No spez?
