No Stupid Questions

Mobile apps, no ads, and no widespread astroturfing. I still use Reddit for product recommendations, but even that has become mostly advertising (oftentimes the link will redirect several times so they get their money).

I don’t like contributing ad revenue or engagement to a company I dislike. I find Reddit leadership morally reprehensible, and for the free market to work, I must avoid giving them money. Searching up products on ad-free RDX Reddit viewer contributes a view, but no engagement or ad revenue while coming at a very small cost to the company which I’ll accept.

And honestly, as a person who finds some of Lemmy’s community to be a bit much, it’s still way better than the bottom of the barrel half AI trash Reddit is now. Lemmy reminds me of old Reddit, occasional insufferable behavior and all, and that’s way better than new Reddit. You miss a lot of the personal stories, but in turn you also read less made up or AI generated garbage.

It’s not better, yet. It’s not owned by anyone, except the server owner, you can block any instance you want, join any instance you want and still access the same data. It will be better once it is the knowledge repository that Reddit became before all the “line must go up” entered into it. It’s mainly memes and news, but there are a ton of growing communities that are accruing a wealth of information every day, so I don’t think it will take much longer for it to be better.

So when people say "better" in this context, most likely they mean the general feel tha objective reasons inpacting day to day user experience.

The objectively better features are open source nature and the decentralization - but this may actually make user experience worse (meaning more complicated to understandandget into).

As for the "better feeling" aspect, it just feels more like Reddit used to be once upon a time. Everything is more natural. Reddit is a very mainstream and corporate place and you can feel it for at least few years now.

i would say its sufficiently less toxic then reddit (i think bcs lemmy is a small website)

In terms of how it's structured, it has the potential to be better, but also the potential to be not much better. in terms of the community and getting downvoted for petty reasons - it's the same as Reddit. Welcome to Lemmy!

The biggest upside to my Lemmy experience, so far, has been that you can stay within you communities, and actually have a decent conversation about the topics being posted. On reddit, it's consistently been the exact opposite of that.

I get that not everyone is this way, but there are a lot of really, really frustrated people. Every comment ends up being either ragebait, an argument, or is neither, but still gets downvoted into fuck all, because people cannot differentiate a different opinion, from an incorrect one

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.

Federation