I found out about Lemmy when the api thing happened but since Infinity was still working, I stayed. But because I like open source stuff and I wanna be part of the fediverse and support it, I joined Lemmy.
Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
Reddits idiotic moderation
I installed Lemmy, hoping it'll be a good alternative
So what made you install Lemmy
If you interact with a website through an app, you are ceding both functionality and power. Angry Birds is an app, Signal is an app, Reddit and Lemmy are websites with URLs and you are duplicating the function of a browser if you use anything else.
I'd heard of Lemmy (and Raddle) since the late 2010s, and put them in the "things I'd like to pivot to at some point" category. The main subreddit that I posted on (a transgressive mix of edgy, caring, partisan, and weird) was quarantined and then finally banned in 2020. As a result I quit using reddit altogether, but after a few months I poked around and realized people from that sub had started a forked instance of Lemmy as a refuge.
The one thing that's lackluster is the search function. Everything else is superior.
I got banned for inciting violence for saying Monty Williams should invest all the money he stole from Detroit back into the city and then promptly be killed with hammers as a sort of ritual sacrifice to cleanse Little Caesars Arena of his bad juju. It was just a joke and had lots of upvotes but guess it hurt a mods feeling.
My first admin finger-wag in fifteen years on reddit was after a long conversation with some antivax loon. I understand how "Okay, enjoy your dead kids, I guess" could sound like I'm the bad guy, in a vacuum. But we don't live in a vacuum. Any site unwilling to acknowledge that 'hey uh your mistakes might end a human life' can be expressed glibly is not being moderated sensibly.
I got temp banned for saying antizionist things, while I was banned I began to look for an open source alternative which lead me here. Early on I used .world but after finding out about Blahaj Lemmy I switched :3
I installed it alongside mastadon, and Lemmy was mode usable than mastadon
Joined about a year or two before the reddit API fiasco.
- I really don't like ads+tracking and didn't want my posts supporting a company like reddit
- I'm an advocate of FOSS
- reddit has inherent pressures to censor content based on mass media pressure and profit, and to permit anti-social far right trolls
- reddit punishes proxy users, where many instances here allow me to protect myself while posting here
- didn't like the new reddit layout - even before I came here, I was lurking for a year or two on alternate frontends
- I believed federation was a good strategy at building a better reddit alternative
But also, it actually had some communities at the time. If it were more dead, or unfederated, I'm not sure if I would have put as much effort in building communities.
It was a new technology that had released and I was keeping up with its progress. I didnβt use it super religiously until Reddit banned a bunch of leftist subreddits around 2020 though because the user base was still pretty small.
I finally lost patience with almost every interaction on Reddit becoming a knife fight. No other platform I use(d) is like that. I'd post something, reply to something, or whatever and invariably someone would be needlessly aggressive and hostile. Any attempts to engage on anything beyond a surface level were either mocked or misunderstood ("it's not that deep bro" - get out of here with that attitude). In general it was socially exhausting and I was tired of it.
I've not found that's the case here, so this is what I use instead.
Left reddit for /kbin.
/kbin slowly decomposed.
Landed on Voyager as it was similar to RiF.
I wanted to keep using Sync for Reddit and or Boost for Reddit, both clients were built for Lemmy now (as of this message Sync is quite broken though).
Even when I can keep using Sync for Reddit patched with Revanced I truly enjoy using clients such as Voyager (I missed Apollo a lot when I went from iOS to Android) and Summit, Eternity is a good alternative too.
IMHO Summit stands the best because it is the smoothest and behaves almost as good as Sync for Reddit did in its prime.
I guessed Reddit's trajectory would only go (mostly) downhill. I say mostly, because a few new features are useful, like comment searching. Awards are also back. Stayed in Lemmy because the community is more focused
First came over with the API Reddit thing but realized Reddit is way better and Lemmy had zero content so I just went back as many did.
Then I got super into selfhosting and read a comment or post on that sub that asked why is the selfhosting sub not self hosted but thedonald is? That made me realize I thought Reddit was dumb and lemmy was my future. Now I try to invest in all selfhosted things
Happy new year and welcome to Lemmy!
TL:DR; Reddit sucked, I got bored when it was offline. Lemmy has similar moderation BUT a transparent modlog. Post grouping, more niche communities I'd like to see.
I had first heard about Mastodon in early 2022, but since I wasn't into Twitter-style posting I kind of forgot about it and moved on.
The quality of discussions I was having on Reddit had noticeably declined over the years, and top posts were bots posting reposts, and the top comments under those posts started to become straight up copied from past top comments.
Compact mode got turned off, and later the apps had an outage in March 2023, so it was actually out of boredom when I had stumbled across Lemmy for the first time. It was a tiny thing of around a few hundred active users across all sites then.
API pricing scandal happened a few months later, my distaste for Reddit increased and simultaneously Lemmy's popularity exploded. So for June I made it my transition period to convince others to join, and in July I made my farewell post, swearing never to post or comment on Reddit ever again. I peek into Reddit on occasion but Lemmy had fully replaced my Reddit habit by September.
Conversations here have been far more lively, nuanced, mature. It doesn't always happen, as there are immature clowns and trolls here like anywhere, but we have reasonable people who are able to have a productive conversation while having positions at odds with each other. This virtually never happened on Reddit.
Tip for you, there are some types of comments allowed on some communities but banned or frowned upon on others. If you get a comment removed, check the modlog, filtering for your username as to why it may be. It may feel like censorship or power tripping, but at least it is more open and transparent. You can make an account on another server or post on different communities, if it's simply a matter of differing philosophies with the controlling admins.
I'd want to see grouping features of communities, and also there are a number of bounties on features that would be great to see. Development isn't fast so I just have to be patient. More niche topics would be cool to have.
Early last year I decided I wanted to join social media so I'd periodically look up lists of different social media websites and I joined the ones I vibed with. Lemmy was on one of those lists. I've been having such a great time so far! π
Reddit is heavily American-centric.
At least on Lemmy, there can be multiple communities with the same name with different rules, focus, region, and culture.
iβm in the US and am becoming increasingly worried about privacy online (as if i needed more reasons). as a leftist, i believe it will become even more difficult to organize in the near future and want to protect myself as much as possible. i know nothing can truly assure me my information wonβt be compromised but iβm going to try and do what i can to limit the possibility. also, dealing with reddit, twitter, and bluesky have convinced me to abandon popular social media. i donβt even like using YouTube.
i want to belong to a community of likeminded people who understand the seriousness of privacy and the reality of potential revolution in the US.
When reddit started it's dive down the enshitification hole. As for things I wish it had, a lemmy version of multireddits would be nice, especially since we can end up with multiple communities for the exact same thing here.
The reddit exodus during the API policy changes and 3rd party app shutdowns
I think I did try out Lemmy even before that. I remember making an account in Mander to try it out. Didn't use it much and forgot about it, even the username.
I didn't know about the Fediverse or Lemmy then. Didn't know about the progressive political background of Lemmy and the development too.
Then made this account. It's nice.
I still use reddit with Infinity for Reddit, since communities on my state, country and mother tongue are more active there(I'm from Kerala/India).
- Multi-communities would be very good to have.
- A feature to save draft comments/posts on the Jerboa app would be cool too. Not directly related to Lemmy tho
I think both have been brought to attention of the developers and they have plans to add that. Cool people.
Reddit being ass