2d ago

Why Lemmy, Who Lemmy, How Lemmy

I recently stumbled upon Lemmy from SimpleX github. This is my first interaction.

Why Lemmy? It seems to be an alternative to Reddit, but what sets it apart? I've explored, participated and built nodes in Nostr, which positions itself as a Twitter alternative, so I’m curious about what makes Lemmy unique and what it needs to succeed?

Who Lemmy? Like Nostr, the community here seems to define the platform. Without algorithms to shape the narrative, the vibe is driven by its users—radicals, dreamers, and wayfarers. Is that a fair read? Who else calls Lemmy home?

How Lemmy? What’s the vision here? How does Lemmy aim to change the social media landscape? Decentralization is intriguing, but what’s the endgame? Escape from algorithms is exciting but from what I see raw and unfilters humans have chaotic thoughts.

Where Lemmy? Where's the Lemmy Lobby? When folks onboard where do they go to connect? The communities Ive checked seem to have a variation of really old posts and infrequent posts. Are we that early or is this platform suffering from slow growth?

What's your perspective on the success of decentralized social media?

32 comments

Lemmy, and the Fediverse in general, is an open source social media made by people that have evolved past the corporate overlords.
The user base might be smaller than big social media sites, but the users tend to be more intelligent, far fewer bots, and no advertisements.
That's my take on it so far, I've been here over a year now.
- I’d love to add something original to this post, but you’ve pretty much covered it.
  To your point about corporate overlords: many of us loved Reddit until we realized it was a cesspool (for any number of reasons) and moved on, and it’s almost a shameful thing to admit we ever liked Reddit at this point.
  To put it more simply: we just love federation and we love the format. We could always jump ship to Mastodon or any other federated platform, but long form discussion is what I believe drives adoption of Lemmy in particular the most.
  
  Oh a lot of us knew it was a cesspool, at least, it has corners that are in it, it’s no 4chan. What brought the majority here was the CEO lying multiple times about why they were closing public APIs off to third party app makers instead of just telling the truth (we need money to stay in business or make money and we want to control what you see). And obligatory, fuck spez.
  
  What is shameful about loving Reddit? Honestly asking.
  Biggest red flags I saw was non-FOSS, beginning of enshitification, overall cringe and mean user base.
- Also it's a lot less likely to enshitify since there's no corporate overloads nor investors to please
- Importantly (at least to me) the Lemmy source code is licenced under the AGPL which means any modified server code must be provided by the server owner. Also I'm not sure if this was clear but anybody can spin up an instance and there is nobody who controls all of them.

you seem to be under the impression that lemmy wants to be big. i can't speak for the creators, but the vibe among users (except on .world) seems to be that not growing is preferable. changing the social media landscape? why? let people use what they want. why would there need to be an endgame?
like slashdot, digg, and reddit, lemmy is a link aggregator. the community is not the point, it is an emergent feature.
- like slashdot, digg, and reddit, lemmy is a link aggregator. the community is not the point, it is an emergent feature.
  Not sure I agree with this bit. I'm absolutely on board with everything before this...but if community wasn't the point, why have comments, profiles, direct messaging? Pretty sure community is the point.
  
  With you on this. Lemmy isn't a link aggregator to me, it's a ranked-threaded discussion forum, or set of fora.
  
  ...lemmy has profiles and dms? didn't actually know that.
  reddit grew those after a huge influx of users demanded them, and i've still never understood why.

This is freedom. Stuff here is scraped like everywhere on the public internet, but no one is watching your dwell times and farming your every move, or experimenting on you to achieve targeted viewer retention statistics. The demographic here seems in flux at the moment. Reddit was like that too though. This is usually good book reading season for most social media and here is no exception. Lots of closed minded people and negativity pop up in my feed, but you can't fix stupid and that is everywhere.

Who: Linux nerds and Trekkies

id just like to add that lemmy is a single platform in the threadiverse half of the fediverse, the reddit-clone side.
there are platforms like mbin that can access all sides of the fediverse. shoutout https://moist.catsweat.com/
- Could you explain why use mbin
  
  a. it allows access to the 'microblog' side of the fediverse.. the 'twitter-like' stuff. such as mastodon and universodon.. so you can follow people and they can follow you. this is not possible using lemmy
  b. it doesnt look like someone forgot the css
  c. doesnt need an app on mobile. works great from mobile browsers.
- I will check it out. Thanks.

Why Lemmy? I like the memes :3
Who Lemmy? Me! And all of you!
How Lemmy? On my mobile phone ☝️🤓
Where Lemmy? See "How Lemmy" for more details

I can has memes?

LEMMY!!!!!!!!!

It's a decentralised FOSS reddit alternative built by and for communists. Your "lobby" is lemm.ee, because that's the instance you joined. If you want to see different communities you'll need to join a different instance with different federation.

It seems that there are no search filters. That's making me stay away. In Reddit you can search and specify results to be from specific subreddits.
Here, where multiple instances can have similar topic groups i cannot search within them. That's keeping me from engaging.
Search is key.

32 comments