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Is Lemmy a good alternative?

New here. Migrated from Reddit. Still trying to figure out Lemmy - what's everyone's experiences like coming from Reddit and does Lemmy serve as a good alternative? Pros and cons/differences?

I was a fairly active member at Reddit with a good social standing, I made 1 "controversial" comment and I got perma-banned... this sucks. I mostly followed music pages like r/TheBeatles and loved to just rant about Beatles albums, Paul McCartney's latest tour, discuss new releases from other artists and also movies/TV shows. I can't think of any other website that offers that kind of forum-like discussion other than Lemmy?

I really did always hate that Reddit felt like a massive echo chamber. The way the system works with upvotes and downvotes, if I said anything people don't agree with, I'd get massively downvoted. I once got temporary ban for saying I preferred Zelda Breath of the Wild over Tears of the Kingdom... it really felt like I was treading on egg shells. My perma-ban happened in a discussion within the r/EveryoneKnowsThat search for a lost wave song. Really petty.

I've always hoped somebody would create basically a clone of Reddit, but without the politics and without being overly-policed. Where people aren't pushed away for respectfully voicing their opinion. Is Lemmy the answer?

115 comments
  • I think it's the same echo chamber here, but it's smaller. People block instances they don't like, and are in favor of moderators removing controversial things, specially around communism and tankies.

    I just like that it's not run by big tech. Just discussions, no companies or ads. I think most users are tech people.

  • It's the best I've found, but I wouldn't call it a "good" alternative myself no.

    Many others have commented on the small communities/lack of niche communities so I'll simply say I agree with the takes in this thread there.

    Personally though, I generally find Lemmy to be far less tolerant of any dissenting opinions across most communities. And man do I mean any. There's a plethora of topics that aren't even worth trying to discuss here because if you introduce the slightest bit of nuance to a hardline take you'll be downvoted, insulted, and ignored.

    A quick example that comes to mind are services such as Spotify/Youtube. To make a long story short, I find that I use Youtube often enough that I don't mind paying for Youtube premium. They need to make money somehow to continue providing that service and I can't fucking stand ads so hey sure it's worth the monthly payment to me. I'm a pretty satisfied customer all things considered.

    Try offering that perspective in any related thread and you'll be called bootlicker and made to feel like you're propping up Satan himself for daring to pay for Youtube and be happy to do so.

    There's other, similar topics. Some are easier to avoid, like the FuckCars community. I was a pretty big fan of that community on reddit but on Lemmy most threads seem to truly believe we need to go 100% no cars at all and there is no middleground damnit. Other topics manage to work their way into damn near any thread. Biden could literally pull a child and puppy from a burning building and there will always be comments about how he's still a genocidal maniac and basically evil. That entire war is basically just not worth talking about here imo.

    And then there's little stuff. For example, don't ever say you use Windows here lest a whole horde of people jump in to call you an idiot for not having switched to Linux I mean really what's wrong with you using the most popular OS in the world by a large margin. Stuff like that.

    So I guess to summarize my feelings here, I personally believe the echo-chamber is far worse on Lemmy than reddit and that's primarily due to the smaller community. A lot of likeminded people came to Lemmy and we're missing a lot of middleground opinions that come naturally with a larger, more diverse population. Too many people view everything as black and white and if you sit in grey both extremes are against you.

    There are absolutely exceptions; I have seen respectful discourse on the site. But the general trend I perceive here is that the echo-chamber is far worse.

    • Interesting points. I feel a bit let down then and not sure I've found what I'm looking for.

      One question... Say a new season of your favourite TV show just dropped, where do you go online to discuss it? I'm surprised that in 2024 it's difficult to find somewhere online to just talk about topics. I do love Instagram but that's more picture based, X/Threads are just random shouts into a void, Facebook is Facebook... I struggle to think of any options other than Reddit, sadly. But I'm open to suggestions and just curious to know where people would immediately turn - to see what other people are saying about the show.

      • I think the poster above is right in most ways, but it's also pretty easy to see around the negatives.

        Give it a try for a month and see what your experience is like. Block a couple servers/communities and you might find it's rather nice here.

      • Just to start off: I would recommend experiencing it for yourself first. A lot of people hold a very different perspective from me, even just in this thread. Maybe it's the specific communities I frequent that are like this, I dunno. But it certainly is worth giving a chance if nothing else. Costs you nothing more than however much time you decide is worth investing into seeing if the site is a good fit for you. And also, I truly believe Lemmy has the potential to grow into something greater than it is currently. Which is why I'm still here checking it daily. I don't find it's a good replacement right now, but I have hope that it has the best shot at becoming a good replacement.

        I hate to say it, but generally if I want to see discussion around a new game/TV show/book/whatever I find Reddit to still be the best place to do that. IMO, Reddit's overall quality has dipped quite a bit (browsing /r/all) but the smaller communities are often still good. Of course, all it takes is one shithead mod to ruin that, but I suppose I've gotten lucky.

        I took steps to distance myself from reddit with the 3rd party app fiasco. I never bother browsing /r/all anymore, I don't use reddit on mobile anymore, stuff like that. But I hopped into Old School Runescape recently and, well, just look at the OSRS community on Lemmy. The top posts are 9/10 months old. So I browse r/2007scape in order to discuss the game.

        There's a great silver lining to Lemmy being so small though: one person can make a large difference. I believe with enough effort it's possible for one person to grow communities on here and that's pretty cool. I don't have the time/energy to do that, so I go to where others are already gathered to discuss things But, if you've got the mind for it, there's opportunity to be the change you want to see. It's just not going to be easy and it's going to be slow.

    • yeah. extremism seems to be the norm here. and you will be harassed and insulted and told your a POS if you even mildly disagree with the extremist narrative. most of the content seems to be angry leftism idealism that reads 'young idealist' who thinks ideological purity is the solution to problems and is incapable of acknowledging a complex and pragmatic approach to any issue at all. and generally people who are totally detached from the average person's perspective/experience, as per your windows comment.

      it's just people being people. people don't like anyone who disagrees with them. it hurts their feelings. so they act out.

      i will say at least the mods don't ban you for disagreement or injecting a dose of reality into a simplistic ideological narrative about the world... which is why i gave up on reddit.

    • For example, don't ever say you use Windows here lest a whole horde of people jump in to call you an idiot for not having switched to Linux

      Just copy Linux Mint onto an USB stick. No need to boot it, you hang it around your neck like a cross, and display it to raging pinguinoids to pacify them.

      I am using Debian, in case you were wondering.

  • Welcome. Its been great for me so far. Whatever instance you are currently on the amount of politics and echo chamber does matter. So feel free to comment and enjoy. If you have a complaint try another instance (or even Kbin) to see if this helps. Also to note that there is much more control about what communities and people you can interact with

  • Feels like early internet here, enjoy it while it lasts. Good chance this place will blow up and the normies will come in.

  • Lemmy is basically an parallel universe of Reddit. There's less people here, which means smaller but also less toxic communities. Since this is a segment of the fediverse, people also tend to talk about Linux and free open source software, while also trashing on Windows, Google, and any other product by what I like to call "Big Tech". People are much more liberal here, there's more tolerance for the LGBT community, there's basically lots of hatred for cars, people praise the European Union. Ok some of these are bad examples of liberalism, but still, it's all found here. Enjoy your stay. If you don't like it, you're free to bid us farewell.

  • Welcome!

    I also moved over from Reddit, some time ago now, Lemmy is great if you don't mind it being quieter and you're not into super niche things.

    If you are into super niche things, definitely make those communities and begin fostering growth by posting, it's what I'm doing for my home country of Wales, slow but steady and all that.

    Hope you enjoy Lemmy!

  • I've always hoped somebody would create basically a clone of Reddit, but without the politics and without being overly-policed. Where people aren't pushed away for respectfully voicing their opinion. Is Lemmy the answer?

    If you block sufficient leftist/marxist instances and communities, you might not notice that this is essentially a socialist fanboy wannabe utopia.

    I'd suggest to browse Lemmy by new, block a lot, refresh a couple times, and then eventually arrive at a curated, sanitized feed.

    But Lemmy is far from unpolitical, merely a different color.

  • Its the same small group vibe reddit lost when they got big and greedy. You will actually learn names outside of the top reposter.

    The only thing I miss is the really neiche communities. There's some but they struggle to take off due to the smaller user base.

    You do have to look though a few different servers till you find one that fits what you want. Mods are still clowns depending on the server. Avoid the top few instances to avoid power trippers. Some things never change.

    I basically found a cozy server and settled in after nukeing my reddit account. I don't miss reddit.

  • but without the politics and without being overly-policed

    Lemmy doesn't really do anything to address either of these.

    • You just have to choose the right instance. Federation does address those problems.

      Right now our options remain limited because its still early days and the platform isn’t large enough yet. But in the long run, whichever servers do a good job of limiting extremism without being overly authoritarian in moderation will continue to thrive and grow, and servers where the admins are petty and/or politically biased will slowly die.

      • How is that functionally different from finding or creating a different subreddit? On reddit if you got banned from a subreddit, you could just join a different subreddit about the same topic.

  • I've been discussing this on Mastodon too, but more focused on features and limitations related to federation rather than people being dumber in one place or the other. But I also want more open conversations, which is one of the things I believe ActivityPub helps with.
    So instead of voting for Lemmy I'll go ahead and say I prefer Kbin since I've found it easier here to interact with posts from other fediverse platforms.
    Just read carefully the rules of each group/magazine/community as everyone is free to tidy up their spaces as they wish, reasonably or not.

  • I made 1 “controversial” comment and I got perma-banned

    From a subreddit or from reddit as a whole?

    My perma-ban happened in a discussion within the r/EveryoneKnowsThat search for a lost wave song

    If from Reddit as a whole, unless the admins have changed a LOT in the last year, that sounds weird. They usually only banned accounts over calls to violence and promoting piracy blatantly.

    I once got temporary ban for saying I preferred Zelda Breath of the Wild over Tears of the Kingdom

    wat. was a small personal sub? That's just a random suspension.

    • Got banned site wide for using the R word. Got banned in different subreddits for one reason or another, some were deserved, others not at all. My friend got banned sitewide for calling her mail carrier a moron in the mailcarrier subreddit. In my last few months on reddit I saw a bunch of accounts I was interacting with get banned mid conversation.

  • Honestly? No

    The good news is that we have a lot less of the dumbfuckery where people think the pinnacle of their life is a chain of meme posts.

    But I think the decentralized and duplicated nature of lemmy prevents any meaningful conversations. People who just want an echo chamber stay in their version of a board and rely on moderators to scorched earth anything that doesn't fit a narrative. But it also means that people who DO want a conversation might never even see each other or not want to repeat themselves. Interesting point made in the world version of a thread but you tend to hang out in the zip? Yeah...

    Which... is kind of message boards. Reddit was "successful" because it was effectively a single vbulletin site that EVERYONE was on so you basically only had one or two gaming forums and so forth. Whereas this is back to the days of usenet and everyone having a phpbb. You might recognize some folk from the Beyond Unreal forums at TTLG but those are different forums with different "cultures" and so forth.

    That said: I can't help but gush over Mastodon. That is increasingly my favorite social media... ever? Because lemmy very much feels like a bunch of people who can't get over their ex and keep bringing them up in ever increasingly weird ways. Whereas Mastodon feels like everyone collectively said "Fuck twitter. I always hated it. Let's actually make a good town hall site" and... we kind of did. Yeah, you still have brigading dumbasses and a lot of the decentralization issues. But you also have people who actually respond to comments and have discussions. And while you still have the inherent flaws of trying to convey a point in a microblog, you also have a lot more "Wait, what are you trying to say?" kind of comments.

    And... I am not sure what "lemmy" can really do. I think we have all collectively agreed to block certain instances (whether at the instance level or accounts blocking them ourselves) which helps with the... terrorist threats. But unless "lemmy" can decide to stop talking about reddit and stop trying to reinvent reddit... it is never going to be a place worth developing a community at. Shitposting and one off questions? Sure. But it won't be somewhere that you actually go to interact with other human beings.

  • It's a good alternative to what I used to do with my free time, worm charming. It's not the same without a cobra.

  • It's great - scratches the itch, overall. I sometimes pine for places where major debates on a specific topic constantly rage - ideally, I'd be able to discuss religion whenever I wanted, skipping threads I felt I didn't want to wade into....

    But it is a good enough replacement overall and I feel like we are proceeding to having such a size. I am also open to the idea that I have not curated enough to find a place where this si consistently happening in the Fediverse yet...

    I was a fairly active member at Reddit with a good social standing, I made 1 “controversial” comment and I got perma-banned… this sucks.

    There have been some controversies that have led to banning and banning of entire instances. Usually, this involves Lemmy instances that were tolerating a lot of blatant transphobic memes that cut deep and were very mean...

    I get why people isolated them.

    I am still worried, though, that there are people who would still react this way to good faith discussion where there are disagreements. While there are some places where that is for sure OK, I think there are some instances that might react so negatively as to want to ban a specific user or their instance over it. I may be overreacting but IDK.

  • In your particular case: yes, lemmy is absolutely the answer.

    It isnt for a lot of other folks. Lemmy has a lot less moderators/moderation and a lot more alternative communities and multiple instances.

    This has a ton of implications. You can still get banned for petty reasons but usually not from the instance but just from a community. In that case you join or make another one which doesnt ban people for {particular_reason}.

    It also means that you dont get the tons of posts and comments. Imo as a reddit refugee, people from reddit are going cold turkey on drinking from a firehose or more accurately, being showered in content. There is a million dollar business and many years of experience, social circles and code behind that. Lemmy is like reddit in the early days, just much later.

    So if you ever feel there is a lack of content, consider hunting for it on lemmyverse.net for example. You can add non-banned instances to your instance by searching for a community‘s handle.

    There will still be people here you dont agree with and the people here are a little different but all in all I‘d say its a pretty good thing. :)

    Have fun.

  • @007KeyLimePie welcome!

    Discoverability takes a bit longer here. If you're looking to add content, then alongside the usual directories it's worth checking out the lists at https://kbin.social/magazines/collections

    Moderation is transparent here.

    Also, protip: if you're in a thread where everyone is raging about "libs" or "the liberals," on reddit that would indicate a conservative sub, but here there's a 99% chance they are communists or anarchists.

  • I like Lemmy as a substitute for a general non-specific social forum to engage with others. It's not as popular so it's more intimate here.

    What's missing is the general popularity and existence of robust communities. I think this is a good thing because it drives me to find other more specific websites and forums related to my interests. Some of those communities are harder to find and have less content though.

    There's a middle ground between Lemmy and Reddit that doesn't yet exist. The hope (I think) is that the infrastructure will mimic the best of Reddit while rejecting the worst of Reddit.

    I was complaining about the Reddit echo chamber for probably close to ten years. The arrows have not been used as designed for a long time. They're supposed to mark an item as relevant or not relevant, not as a like or dislike. Had they been used properly... well, let's put it this way, AI is now being trained based on what people like, not based on what information is relevant or correct.

    Incidentally, I was brought to Lemmy for a reason similar to you. I posted one innocuous question on one sub that got me banned from a totally unrelated sub where I wasn't even a member (evidently, engaging with one sub, regardless of your reasons or opinions, is enough for another sub to ban you, even if you fully support the other sub).

115 comments