Is Lemmy an effective alternative to Reddit?
What are your thoughts on the Lemmy ecosystem?
I've been trying it out for the last week. I have my own opinions, but I'd like to hear others and see if we have common ideas on what is good/bad/indifferent about the Lemmy ecosystem.
You are viewing a single comment
Short answer is No. It suffers from many of the same issues of echo chamber, bias, and bullying. Just on a somewhat smaller scale due to fewer users. And never forget - Winter is coming. There will be a time in the future the bots will notice lemmee and come for it also.
But I suspect this is all a human thing. We are a contentious bunch at best and down right hateful at worst. We build communities only to poison and kill them in the end.
I think it has potential to be better in a way Reddit can never be, but the two biggest instances do so little moderation their userbase might as well be "people banned from too many subredits".
I assumed the killer feature of Lemmy would be "zero reply guys" but instance owners seem willing to tolerate them in the interests of faux-engagement. But the irony is this sort of "engagement" actually scares new users away.
Forgive my ignorance, but what's a zero-reply guy?
i think corgana meant zero people who reply with meaningless comments just for the sake of replying, like those tiresome one-line joke threads that choke up every big subteddit.
A "reply guy" (wikipedia) is someone who responds to posts/comments in an annoying (usually smug/condescending) way, like what you think of when you think of a "redditor". Big platforms like Reddit like reply-guys because they generate engagement (often someone telling the reply-guy to f-off) it's also not a behavior that an algorithm can recognize, so human mods/admins are needed to curb it.
Over time, if Reply-guys are not banned they tend to make the overall ecosystem too exhausting to participate in, and (authentic, desireable) engagement declines.