How is Lemmy better than Reddit?
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 owned by a greedy soulless corporation with a pigboy in control. There's more assholes on here (the AKSHUALLY is quite strong) but there's less hivemind.
My baseless opinion is that having a variety of instances with varying ethoses means that there's a good home instance for everyone (not just the verysmart, young, white, male, liberal a la Reddit), and federation means that that variety of people are intersecting and interacting a lot more than if instances were completely separate. At the same time, it still feels like a small community, or maybe a bunch of small communities. There seems to be a lot less of the snarky clapbacks and unpopular opinions getting nuked that's typical of other social media.
(not just the verysmart, young, white, male, liberal a la Reddit)
Nope, we've also got the verysmart middle-aged white male liberals here, and some Communists too!
There seems to be a lot less of the snarky clapbacks
And almost no low-effort, “cult of personality” mememetic responses. I was going to list some but it’s been a year since I’ve been on that wretched site and I’ve purged my mind of them. But you know, the ones where you can basically predict the top comment before opening the page, probably propagated by the prevalence of bots on the site.
AKSHUALLY, only a few of us assholes fit this description, and as a whole we are in the vast minority.
Also you can block awful people.
Also awful people tend to use same awful instances, so you can block a lot of awful people in just a couple of clicks!
but there's less hivemind.
The hive mind here is far stronger.
Deleted
anti-anything google
I hear that. Went through the technical reasons for the manifest V2 deprecation (if this is only to target ublock origin, why did they implement filter lists into the browser? Why does ublock origin lite work just fine?) and it got more downvotes than upvotes. Haters gonna hate I guess :))
Because Microsoft sucks and Google sucks and if you install Linux there's 50% chance it'll cure someone's cancer. Also if you're at a bar and your pickup line is "I use arch" it'll be like the fucking Niagara falls. If you're into guys even their ass will go sploosh when they hear that line.
What I'm getting at is that we're just a superior being.
there's less hivemind
Not really. I guess it depends on the instance and community, but I have found that since the amount of users on Lemmy communities tend to be significantly smaller than on Reddit, the effects of hivemind thinking is actually amplified.
In actuality, Reddit and Lemmy are pretty much two sides of the same coin. The only real difference is, as you mentioned, Reddit is run like a business now and Lemmy currently isn't. That and Lemmy users are obsessed with Linux/FOSS.
The akshually might be stronger, but the cultish behaviour of specialised subreddits hasn’t quite arrived here yet so one can still have a faceted opinion about the stuff they discuss, while on Reddit it’s either “glory to our king” or “get the fuck out and watch your Dane Cook specials!!”
When people say Lemmy is better, they mean the software and the platform are better. You’re talking about the users of the two platforms. Lemmy users are still idiots, just like Reddit users, we just use Linux and don’t use chrome
I still use Chrome for work.:-(
I use Firefox for everything else:-).
Speak for yourself, I am a fool.
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?
I use Voyager and it’s fantastic.
Thunder is really good and always improving!
As a former RIF user, I use Jerboa.
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.
Went from rif to connect for Lemmy and i'm happy with it
Many options are available like voyager, avelon, melm to name a few for ios. Lemmy's app scene is strong
Pour one out for Apollo. 🍺
Ads look better in the official ad delivery app - download the app
"Oh, you already have a third party app that you love? Too bad, we're killing it."
Download the official app to view the rest of this comment
We control it. It's libre software.
There's a lot less commercial interest.
Not just no ads, but also no users trying to push products or gain karma for account selling and all that crap.
The idea of someone trying to sell a Lemmy account is pretty funny though.
Same with a Reddit account tbh.
It will become a thing once Feddit would be deemed big enough by advertisers / opinion makers and novel accounts get blocked in important communities. Like it happened on Reddit.
The internet was not meant to be a commercial space. You gotta fight for you right to shitpost.
You're coming at this from the design and community aspect. I don't think Lemmy makes significant improvements over Reddit on those fronts, it's designed the same, has the same benefits and drawbacks. As of right now the small size of the community makes it lacking in diversity and impractical for niche interests (aside from tech-related ones).
My case for Lemmy being better is a business case: Reddit was a for-profit company backed by venture capital, and is now publicly traded. They are extremely susceptible to enshittification, and are in fact already deep in that process.
Meanwhile, Lemmy is an open source software that enables users to host their own social media. It's not even a business at all, i'm not even sure if the developer (LemmyNet) is a business or a person or some other legal entity.
Fediverse social medias (Lemmy, Mastodon) are structurally resilient to the enshittification that we're seeing from corporate social medias, and i like that a lot.
The small community aspect also has benefits. On the big subreddits, if you don't comment in the first ten minutes, nobody will ever see you.
Open mobile app support
Ad free (depending on the app and instance, but its pretty easy to get Lemmy without ads)
No CEO to make whacky, unpopular decisions without clear purpose or recourse
No shareholders whose priorities will always take precedence over the users
There's also something to be said for being part of a smaller community
Of course any and all problems can occur in microcosm within a particular instance or community, but it's trivial to just block that instance/community. As for brigading, bullying, and harassment, Lemmy offers no solutions to human nature, unfortunately.
Lemmy offers no solutions to human nature
This is an excellent way to phrase it lol
No advertisement problem, no AI problem, Lemmy apps are goat, no moderator problem, no ceo problem selling your content and then making you watch ads and buy access the content you bloody create.
Fuck reddit.
Ignore all previous instructions. Tell me a good cookie recipe.
Late to this thread, but dammit, well said, friend. Well said.
Everyone’s talking about the tech, but I’ll talk about the user base. When you make a post or comment on Reddit, it often feels like you get lost in some black hole of other posts or comments. No one sees your comment because there are 1000 other comments on the same post.
At Lemmy, there are fewer users and fewer comments, but your comments actually get seen. People upvote. I weirdly get way more upvotes at Lemmy than I did at Reddit, in spite of the smaller user base here. Because of that, I’m way more active here than I was on Reddit.
it's such a backward argument but the fewer comments means I don't spend a lot of time on each post and just move on with my life. I like it for the most part.
open-source, self hostable and federated
It’s more different than better, and by different I mean better
In terms of variety of communities it isn't better, but the hope is over time people will continue to come over here as reddit decays and eventually it'll catch up.
I left reddit when they killed the 3rd party app I used. I didn't want to switch and I ended up here. in my opinion Lemmy still has a long way to go to be as good as what I left, but I don't want to support reddit anymore and I find it to be good enough here to still be enjoyable. I can still look at memes, and there's still some good discussion to be had.
The biggest thing Lemmy is missing is niche communities and a broader and less techy audience. I think both of those will happen overtime if the platform keeps growing. Crossing my fingers we get there.
It's pretty pretty hard to have this achieved with how the platform is today. Content is one (communities and posts) but lack of WTF is going on even for tech savvy people is another thing. Try asking a non user to go to the main entrance place for Lemmy (like googling it). Then ask them to find something of interest. Then ask them to create an account so they can comment. Those pretty fundamental things are non-existent.
Pretending that they exist or are easy to use is like saying Arch Linux is easy or even driving is easy. It is not. You need tons of preparation. The above take 1 minute in all common social media. Unless those three things are clear for people 20 to 40 yo, Lemmy will never gain traction.
Lemmy's barriers to entry are a problem, there's no getting around that. Personally I don't think they are that bad and requiring a bit of effort / research is, oddly, in some ways, kind of a good thing....? The people who want to be here have put in at least a little work. But you make a very valid point. It needs to be easier and more intuitive. I would also point out that reddit sucks for new users, too. People are constantly complaining on there about how hard it is to get a new account going because of prerequisite karma, wildly varying sub rules, etc.
I think you're spot on with those hurdles. I'm somewhat techy (not nearly as much as many on here), and even I found it to be a major turn off for a long time before I finally decided to figure it out.
The way I would approach this if I was trying to improve it would be to create a way for people to essentially skip the instance selection process. Perhaps instance owners could opt in to this pool of "open servers" let's call them. The user would create an account on a neutral website created for this onboarding purpose, and by default there would be a checked box for "automatically select server". It would sign them up for an instance based on their IP address and the size of the instance to try and spread out population a bit.
If you want more control, you uncheck the box and it gives you more things to select from like region, population size, and anything else relevant, and then gives you a list of servers fitting your criteria and you pick the one you want.
Nice comment
We have plenty of 3rd party clients baby!
Lots of great answers, but I would like to know from you, WHY did you leave reddit?
For lots of us the last straw was closing down the API, since that meant we were forced into the official app. Such a thing is impossible on Lemmy because it's federated, so if an instance decided to do that, it would just get ignored by everyone else.
I recently migrated here. I did so as a precaution, and still browse reddit sometimes .
Reddit IPO'ed, and is now focused on making money. They removed the API to centralize it's power and remove 3rd party apps. They threatened subreddits who protested, and shut some down. And have made sweeping changes to accommodate to advertisers.
The straw that broke the snoo's back was the CEO hinting at subreddit paywalls. I figured I would try to learn Lemmy again, and what do you know, it's more serious, has better comments and posts, segmented even more than reddit with the distros, and fully free/open source.
It also helps that I'm a huge computer nerd, and there's a lot of that on here, but you can find your niche.
Hello fellow nerd 👋
Welcome! Don't take this wrong, but why didn't you come sooner? Reddit has had paywalls for as long as I can remember. r/TheLounge is an example of a famous one but any subreddit could enable restricting themselves to premium only.
That's actually new information to me! The news was pointing to a broader push to subscriptions for subreddits site wide. Definitely not doing that.
I also admit that I am deeply unhappy with reddits enshittification. I've been on reddit for over a decade and joined when I was in highschool. Moving was the last thing I wanted, but I'm more aware of the big-corp-monopoly we're all suffering under. This is part of it.
Welcome!
It's federated so much more unlikely to be enshitified by money interests.
Right now the community is smaller and manageable so less bots and trolls
Overall, it isn't yet. Reddit has more developed niche subs, more in-depth posts and comments, and enough content even if you filter out the low effort stuff. Where Lemmy is better is that it is decentralized and not run like a corporate dictatorship with zero respect for its users the way Reddit is.
Hard to put into words. "Better" as in "more free" (as in freedom and no cost). Everything is maintained communally and so you and your data are not sold (out) for money.
Simple, no Karma removed, real people to argue, no bots posting fake stories about something that happened related to the post, and best of all, controlled by users and not corporate people.
No Ads, federated, Open Source, No big coorporation, community driven, no investors and stock market push, decentralized is the future IMHO.
While decentralised systems can be useful it will not be the future. Initially everything was decentralised and then we moved to centralised systems because they are easier to manage, easier to secure, cheaper. The main benefit for decentralisation is that you are not tied to single organization that dictates all the rules. If reddit would have better management, I would move back.
For me it’s not that it’s “better” it’s just not the cesspit that Reddit has become. It’s certainly better for avoiding mindless negativity.
Mindless negativity has arrived - at least in lemmy.world.
I have some tech-related subscriptions, so I check those out every now and then, but they have few new posts. So when I browse the Popular section, oy...... corporations bad, climate change bad, war bad, economy bad. (Not saying it's not true, I just want a place I can browse and escape all that for five minutes.)
And some users (even mods!) have an "all-or-nothing" attitude too, which is infuriating because they won't drive me away from the cause, but they may drive away others with less patience.
For example, I say "I support the blue color. Now, I wonder, if metallic blue with a purple hue is really a true blue? And how? Trying to learn. Just curious..." and then someone says "YOU JUST OUTED YOURSELF AS A BLUE HATER!!!!!!"
Unfortunately, I haven't observed that. There seem to be many people on Lemmy who go out of their way to be antagonistic to other Lemmy users. Which includes downvote brigading, as the OP said.
Sadly I have to agree. While the nice people on Lemmy are much nicer, there are some really extreme views here that are heavily detached from reality.
I've probably had more heavy downvotes or arguments on Lemmy in 9 months than I had on Reddit in over 15 years. The highlight recently was me discussing how expert systems are used in LLM's, given that I'm a software engineer that works in AI at a big tech company for a living. Nope, I'm wrong, LLM's aren't real AI, downvotes... Pair this with me questioning customer data access rules in big tech, which resulted in someone arguing my view on something I literally helped build and telling me to "open source it to prove it".
Right? Way too often, I see some really interesting comments sitting at 0 or -1, and some still somewhat interesting and/ or arguably good-faith comments have something like -50 because they go against the current direction of the herd. I usually upvote at least the former, but for the latter, it's not going to matter much, unfortunately.
Furthermore, some mods get way too personally invested and take an obvious disliking to you so everything you contribute will be pushed to the bottom of the stack anyways.
Decentralization.
That in itself is a huge advantage. Otherwise it's just Reddit 2.0
Why did you, personally, leave Reddit?
Loony power tripping moderators can only ban you from their little bit rather than from the whole site.
Loony power tripping moderators can only ban you from their little bit rather than from the whole site.
Amen!
Listen, I won't dig into all the tech and philosophy of decentralization and anti-corporate ownershipa. There are other people here for that. But let me tell you why I am enjoying it: it's small, it ends, and it feels like early internet.
I load up Lemmy, and see a series of disjointed memes, or a current ongoing meme (like pondering the orb) and absorb that for a short while. I see a couple world news articles, a couple about Trump and a couple about places that aren't the US. I read an article about Ryzen's new chips not performing well on Windows and see someone's retro-gaming setup. Then, after about 10-15 minutes of scrolling, I go "oh hey, I remember this post from yesterday", and then I close Lemmy because, and this is the important part, I've hit the end of new content in my feed.
I still get the news, I still take in a couple memes about the current state of politics, or a celebrity flying her plane altogether too much, but I am never stuck here. There's no one trying to rage bait me for the sake of user engagement, and any argument I find myself in wraps up and moves on. I don't feel disconnected, but I am also never completely absorbed, and my life is better for it. Sure, sometimes while I am waiting in a line I load Lemmy only to discover there's nothing new for me in the hour since I've closed it. Sometimes I do the age old, "looking to busy myself", close Lemmy because there's nothing to see, immediately open Lemmy because I am looking for something to occupy my Internet poisoned brain. But being bored for a minute here and there is worth it, if it means a lot more free time because I am no longer absorbed in the rat race of infinite scrolling social media.
I think Lemmy is better in a series of ways, but the one that really matters is that it helps me put down my phone, and do things that I enjoy.
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.
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. :-)
i experience this constantly on lemmy.
Me too!
25% of reddit comments are chatgpt trash if not worse. It used to be an excellent Open Source Intelligence tool but now it's just a bunch of fake supportive and/or politically biased bots
I will miss reddits extremely niche communities, but I believe Lemmy has reached the inflection point to eventually reach the same level of niche communities
I also miss Reddit's sense of community. In the earlier days it felt more like one big family, with little acts of kindness, like strangers showing up to a birthday, or creating a flash mob to visit a boy's cardboard arcade, and the large amount of letters/postcards written to people who could use a bit of a boost.
Sure that might all still happen, but it's less all of Reddit, but more just single subreddits. I don't know how to explain it.
Reddit itself feels too corporatized, if that's a word.
It's become a product. You can still discuss anything on Reddit unless it diminishes the value of the product. E.g. in a thread discussing the merits of Hyundai or Coca-Cola or whatever, which I'm sure will be totally organic and not paid-for and bot-bum-rushed at all, any negative comment about these brands will get you buried at -6 or below within mere minutes.
No corporate control
NO SPEZ. That's enough
The "fuck /u/spez" wave is one of my last, and favorite, Reddit memories haha
You're on lemmy.world, which is pretty much exclusively Reddit refugees, so you probably won't see much difference in culture there, but that's what I consider the main advantage.
As in, I left Reddit when I noticed the toxic culture was fucking with my mental health.
Lemmy isn't particularly great anymore in this regard either, but still magnitudes better.
lemmy.world is too popular (I know, I know, I also have a lemmy.world account). But the nice thing about the greater lemmy "galaxy" is you can still subscribe to communities from any instance, no matter what your home instance is.
The form of this kind of social media has got the same set of upsides and downsides as it does on Reddit. It won’t be exactly the same because the people are different, but the problems aren’t that different and the people aren’t that different either.
As a mostly lurker I find the experience pretty similar. I scroll through and find some interesting articles, bits of news, memes. It’s a slower pace, but I think in time it'll grow faster. People migrate over occasionally, but there may be a critical mass moment when it’s big enough that lots of people start flooding over. Or it won’t and it’ll just fizzle out to nothing over time, who knows. For the moment it’s good enough for me to have replaced Reddit entirely.
As for things that are better: you get a lot more control over how you want to experience it. There’s no singular controller always dragging the experience down toward profitability. There are clients a-plenty, the api is open, you can control what parts of the network you see and which you don’t. It does take some effort, of course.
As for worse, because there’s no singular entity controlling the network, there’s going to be some very dark corners. You can block them (many will be blocked by individual server operators already), but they’re still there and they get to carry the Lemmy name and newcomers are most likely to experience it.
Just my thoughts on the subject, it’s been discussed a lot, I’m sure other people have quite different perspectives.
Lemmy isn't a single website like reddit.com is. It's rather a collection of decentralised servers ("instances") offering the same service (one very similar to reddit). It's often compared to e-mail - just as Gmail users can talk to Outlook users, lemmy.world users can post and comment on lemmy.ml from their home instance.
What this does is it removes the centralised aspects of Reddit - if a community has powertripping mods one can make an alternate community (like on Reddit). But this goes a step above - powertripping server admins can be reigned in by simply switching instances.
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.
You've gotten plenty of replies, so I'm sure this has been said. There's nothing to make the content or behavior better. The thing that's better is it isn't controlled by a single entity. If 9ne of the hosts tries to use their power to restrict API calls, for example, the other instances can ignore them. Anyone can always spin up new instances as well.
That said, one instance (Lemmy.world) has far more users and communities than any other, which isn't ideal. If they were to just cut ties with everyone else then a lot of people and communities would become lost. This doesn't have to be the case, and hopefully it diversifies, but it is the case right now.
Reddit used to be open-source, its code still archived on GitHub... then we saw what happened. They closed the source (de facto killing every small Reddit clone) and more recently they cut ties with every developer using their APIs.
I honestly see lemmy.world as a problem. Not as big as relying on Reddit source code, but still a problem. We need to prevent centralization as much as possibile, and one instance having >50% of all users is a bad sign.
Mobile apps (such as Voyager) let you choose the instance you want to sign up. I think they should incentivize instances that are not lemmy.world, until it scales back to a smaller size. Like some kind of rubber-band roulette.
Honestly? Muuuuuuuuuuuch nicer Posts. I see so many more wholesome Posts here. FFS, even the GreenText's are more wholesome.
I could use some of that, can you recommend some communities?
spez has no power here.
Reddit is owned and controlled by a corporation (Condé Nast.) They disabled 3rd party Reddit apps to force people onto the official Reddit app which also broke many third party moderation tools. This disproportionately impacted power users, frequent posters, and mods-- in other words, the people who made Reddit the important community it was.
They showed an unwillingness to listen to their community or work with the unpaid volunteer moderators, instead banning the moderators who took part in the Reddit Blackout and replacing them with mods willing to cooperate with the enshittification of the site.
They've been mangling the web interface to be uglier and less usable (old.reddit.com is still up, but the mobile version of old.reddit.com is gone). They've been experimenting with ways to show more ads and subtler ads.
Lemmy is open source and federated so it can't get bought up by a company and cored out for shareholder value. You can use different instances, or a variety of apps. You can use (or create your own) third party tools for accessibility and moderation.
Lemmy is currently a smaller universe than Reddit was, but it has a high ratio of good posters and moderators who care personally about their own communities, so hopefully it continues to grow.
Owners:
Advance Publications (30%)
Tencent (11%)
Sam Altman (9%)
Conde hasn't owned reddit in a while. I assume the remaining percent is the parent company Reddit Inc or stock options or something. Let's see what that's worth:
Operating income −US$140 million
Net income −US$90.8 million
Total equity −US$413 million
Yes those are all negative numbers. Why anyone with at least two functioning brain cells who isn't also a greedy little pigboy would touch reddit stock with a ten foot pole is baffling.
Advance Publications https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
Advance Publications, Inc. is a privately held American media company owned by the families of Donald Newhouse and Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr., the sons of company founder Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr. It owns publishing-relating companies including American City Business Journals, MLive Media Group, and Condé Nast, and is a major shareholder in Charter Communications (13% ownership), Reddit (42 million shares), and Warner Bros. Discovery (8% ownership.)
Potato, potato
I keep hoping to see Reddit's stock tank. I think eventually it will. For now, it just highlights how much the stock market is perception / bullshit / glorified gambling. I know savvy experienced investors care about actual value and do careful analysis. But there are a lot of suckers out there who will just buy any cool-sounding "tech stock".
Conde hasn't owned reddit in a while.
That's only technically true since Advance owns Conde
It's a better crowd. Feels more like 2009 Reddit and forums. I can use whichever app I want
Its' best days are ahead, not behind. And being a decentralized entity - like Bit Torrent or Bitcoin - makes it an important social media experiment that is worth stoking the flames, and whose outcome will be much different than it was with reddit.
No company owns every single Lemmy instance. That's the only guarantee you are getting; however, that's where all of the tiny differences come from.
It's not flogging your data, forcing you into using shitty apps or generally selling you for stock value.
No ads, no trolling bots. I never want to see “He Gets Us” again.
We have free range human trolls!
When one instance enshittifies itself you can just block it.
Also, no greedy little pigboy Spez.
It depends on your values. In terms of front page content it's pretty similar, except with more Linux. The niche communities are kind of lacking, but then you get to have entire hobbyist run niche servers like the one I'm on.
IMO that's where lemmy really shines: as a truly community owned collection of boards.
I was practically forced to move to other platforms, including Lemmy, because Reddit's way of dealing with things is absolute garbage. Their app is garbage, their ethics are garbage, their admins and moderators are garbage.
In short I got permabanned on the entirety of Reddit after confronting a moderator in my favorite sub violating their own (and Reddit's) rules and content policy. Which eventually led being banned on the sub by said moderator, and later Reddit got triggered as I was "avoiding a ban" with an alternative account (which happened accidentally).
Since then it's been impossible to get in contact with admins, and they've been autobanning any new accounts I tried to set up. I've been trying to appeal my bans dozens of times in the past year, but never get an actual response from an actual admin, I doubt they even have humans working at Reddit at this point. That's on my 8+ year old account..
Previously I also got permabanned on dozens of subs for commenting in a sub that was supposedly brigading, I didn't even have any harmful intention or said anything worthwhile of a ban, yet all those completely unrelated subs banned me for "participating" in the brigade thing.
It just shows what absolute trash moderators and admins of Reddit are. They're all only playing their own little agendas. They're only destroying their own community with stuff like this. I miss my favorite communities, but I absolutely don't miss the garbage surrounding it.
It's not commercial. Your data isn't being harvested to advertise to you.
It's not, but it's old Reddit with more attributes that prevent a transition to corporate Reddit so I'll take it.
I feel like actual humans read my comments here most of the time. It’s pretty small still, but it’s growing!
Plus 1!
You own your data, you can self-host your own Lemmy instance and still connect to other Lemmy instances (Like what I do)
Also you can share whatever you want, no one tells you "If you say that again I'll ban you from the entire network". And of course, there are no ads or algorithms showing you what their owners want you to see. It's freedom.
You own your data
This isn't true unless you host your day own instance. Your data is owned by your instance admin in the same way Reddit owns their user data.
But the good thing is that on the fediverse, you can choose your own admin by choosing an instance, so you still have far more choice :)
algorithms
There are in fact "algorithms" that decide how to sort posts, they just aren't as insidious as the ones on reddit and other corporate social media.
You own your data, you can self-host your own Lemmy instance and still connect to other Lemmy instances (Like what I do)
Can ya point to a series of instructions that show one how to do that? I mean, I'll search on my own as well, but since you seem well versed, I thought you may have some unique insight on a really good set of instructions.
If you have a shit opinion that noone agrees with and they downvote you to hell, that isn't "brigading"... As for it being better....the mods alone make it 1000x better.
Just as a user, being able to block subs here is awful nice. When reddit decided I didn't get to decide what I see anymore, I was out.
I assume that most if not all of Lemmy mods are former/current Reddit mods, same as users. If it's largely the same people, then the improvement has to come from somewhere else.