Lemmy is slowly getting better

Crass Spektakel@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 1860 points –

Just a little rant. When I first visited Lemmy Sites a couple of months ago it felt empty. Besides the really mainstream community pretty much everything else just felt empty.

Meanwhile though traffic has increased a lot and I feel well entertained by the traffic in c/hfy c/noncredibledefence c/keepwriting c/worldbuilding and so on. It is certainly less than Reddit but often quality is substancially higher and is "enough" to keep me entertained.

Also I like that you can actually post something without running into a bazillion deletes, bans and moderator shitshat because your post was two words to short, not NCD enough and so on.

Sure, the C64 community on Lemmy is laughable. So is the ARMA community. I still use REddit for that. Also I often check up stuff on r/hfy and r/NCD but since one week I have been prefering Lemmy for that.

Also my longer posts don't get eaten up any more. God, three weeks ago most posts with 3k an more just got lost without feed back. Nowadays I have even manges posts around 20k without breaking them up. Though the editor is still lacking for longer posts. On Reddit I can copy-paste pretty much anything from Libreoffice into Reddits Editor (which is also pretty lacking but differently lacking). On Lemmy I have to run most text through a little perl script to get them even using correct line breaks perl -pe 's/\n/\n\n/' and different sizes for Headlines are much to few to select from.

Not perfect, not even very good but definitely promising.

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Slowly? Lemmy is easily as entertaining as Reddit and it is just getting going.

I don't think people really understand that reddit is an 18 year old product. Their original site was iterated on for 10 years before they stopped building on it.

Lemmy will get there and beyond. As the fediverse attracts more users, it will also attract more contributors. I'm starting to learn Rust myself in hopes I can contribute to the project at some point down the line.

Yeah Reddit 10 years ago was very different than Reddit now. Too many people demand* a 1 for 1 replacement right now.

*You don't even need all those people. It was plenty good 10 years ago.

I was on reddit before the digg exodus, and the current state of lemmy feels somewhat reminiscent of those times. When communities are smaller there is just a completely different feel than the 1 million+ subscriber goliaths some subreddits became.

That's exactly what it feels like. It's so refreshing and I like the fact I can scroll for about 30 mins, exhaust my feed and step away. I don't get sucked in for most of the day like Reddit.

I completely agree. I’ve been hopping on in the morning and in the evening and I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything and I still feel like I’m contributing. The total opposite of how it was with Reddit.

If there's one place where I think the wrong Reddit attitude is starting to crop up is the anti/pro sync discourse that's going on.

People are even outright lying about apps. Such as claiming other apps have toms of bugs, meanwhile, I'm trying out sync and there's a comment sorting bug if you switch to top, some comments show up isolated when they're a reply to something else, and even have several lines coming off from nowhere if you turn on colored indentations. Never seen this anywhere else, not even on Jerboa which is the oldest and generally least stable. Another bug, although this one I've seen, is that Sync doesn't properly list all self-posts on the profile pages. Meanwhile, sync IS the most feature rich, and others are denying it. One example, Sync not just has an actual toggle for in-comment media preloading (they called them emotes for some reason), they even let you toggle specific services on generic link handling.

What I did here, is what those people don't. Give specifics. This tribalism is peak upvote downvote fighting style characteristic of big /r/all communities on reddit and I hate it. Garbage threads.

Honestly, this is exactly how I feel too. I remember browsing Reddit when Digg was my primary source and Reddit felt so small and unpolished at the time! I don't know if Lemmy will grow in the same way as Reddit did, but it is certainly on the right path.

I was on reddit before the digg exodus

Man, I remember when that shitshow happened. It was like reddit's version of Eternal September.

That was the best era. The source code was open sourced, subreddits members know each other pretty well, the most prolific reditors are not reposters or super-mods. Actually fun AMAs and community-initiated events (meetups, secret santa, etc). Now it's all gone, replaced by a TikTok clone.

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Frankly, I really miss the Reddit of ten years ago, so this is great. Outside of fruitlessly pursuing infinite growth, none of the additions or changes to the site since then have improved it.

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The flip side is there are some people who have been here a long time tho...

But they're almost exclusively rightwingers who were ip banned from reddit. Like the exploding heads instance is/was over a year old, and those people were insanely annoying before everyone defederated.

The more time goes by, the more regular people join and water down that extremism

Yeah I mean looking at the stats of new users, that watering down has already happened to the point where any extremeist shit is statistically insignificant by now. 99%+ of people here are just looking for a replacement reddit and that's all, rather than some censorship haven where they can chat their extreme views.

Yes it was interesting finding communities banned from Reddit who seemed like they had been here awhile.

I also think you’re going to see Lemmy continue to grow overtime because it does not need to be a Comercial success. It doesn’t need to go through the new owners, whims or financial needs. It’ll just continue to slowly grow until someday it overtakes Reddit. The mere fact that it can’t be taken down is in itself a huge advantage/defense.

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I have way more fun on Lemmy. I do need some of the more esoteric an vast archived content from reddit from time to time. For that I just google reddit and no longer sign in. Fedi will get there soon enough though.

I’ve been spending a majority of my time on here when I do my “Redditing”. I only visit the old site for niche topics. I spend as little time as possible there, I don’t upvote or downvote anything, and I don’t comment either. It’s read-only for me out of principle. I save all interactions for the fediverse.

I doubt all the communities will rebuild elsewhere, but I’m okay with that. Some fragmentation is necessary. Smaller communities make individual voices louder, and you have less ugly “sidedness”. When humans get into a critical mass IRL they can start to do strange things, I think we see this in social media as well.

Its getting there, and there is some entertaining content on here (comments and posts). But I think we are still missing the super high end responses. No matter what the topic, one or two people would jump on and have deep specialised knowledge of the field - be it naming an insect from a blurry image or commenting on a geopolitical situation. I still see lots of posts that generate nothing more than “huh” or “wow” type comments.

When that starts appearing more broadly, I think the quality here is going to take another leap.

I think that'll only really start to happen once you start getting more of the general population on here.

Reddit always had a reputation for being dominated by techy people, that is significantly more so the case here.

Signing up for Lemmy, even knowing where to start is a bigger leap than it is over there. Personally I'm hoping third party apps will be able to help with that by offering some kind of setup wizard with easy options of suggested instances to join.

I certainly hate the people here a lot less. I like how it isn't the same garbage comments on every post where they hyper analyze videos frame by frame just to call things fake.

On the opposite end it seemed like there was an inflooding of low quality "FB-type" posts. Non-interesting wedding and new baby in /r/pics followed by hundreds of "congrats!" and a sprinkle of "who gives a shit go back to FB" response posts. Predictable dichotomies once reddit got too mainstream.

I love how people have different opinions and value different things. Personally I so far find Lemmy very very very much not as entertaining as Reddit. The lack of comments in particular makes it way less enjoyable imho. But hopefully it'll grow.

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Please for anyone reading, just be patient. Keep posting and commenting and it WILL grow. There are only like 1.2 million Lemmy users versus hundreds of millions of redditors.

If you follow the 90-9-1 rule, that leaves very few actual contributors and still Lemmy has a lot of good content daily. Just be patient and it will come.

What’s 90-9-1?

I think its 90% of users lurk, 9% comment, and only 1% create new posts. Or at least something like that

Ah, that makes sense. In my case though, I used to never post on Reddit but on Lemmy I feel good contributing to this community. I hope a lot of the other Reddit refugees who lurked feel the same way

Congrats on your promotion to a 1! You earned it (by posting).

Congrats on your promotion to a 9! You earned it (by commenting).

Thanks! It's nice to get a little recognition for putting in the work 😎

Definitely. I am not power user by any means but probably have about as many posts here in the last month as I made in 10 years on Reddit. Maybe more.

Yeah I lurked on Reddit because most responses were either pedantic or laced with sarcasm. I feel like the assholes haven't ingratiated themselves yet.

Where are you seeing 1.2m users? This site says that it tracks all instances and only shows 0.96m users total and 62k users in the past month.

I usually look at FediDB and they show about half that in total users but twice that in active users.

Wow, that’s quite the spread between the two.

I can't find it now. The number that I saw was 1.09 million, but I can't find the site I saw it on now. I think a bunch of them must be purged spam accounts maybe.

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Yeah I'm waiting it out and trying to build up my favorite community. I don't really see reddit ever being replaced but that's only because people won't be part of the solution. There are too many people in this world that just don't care.

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I stopped posting to Reddit because frankly it felt like throwing a pebble into the ocean.

I love the smaller approach here

My posts will get no engagement, negative engagement, and very rarely do I get upvotes. Here in lemmy, there's lots of quality posts and nice people who engage with my posts.

I can insult you, down vote your post, then say something confidently stupid before refusing to engage with this thread ever again if it makes you more at home.

Actually, that sounds like a lot of effort; best to leave that on Reddit.

I bet you won't do it!

I agree somewhat, I think Lemmy has a way to go though because there are some real big headlines that seem to be missing from Lemmy on certain communities, and often a lot of posts with 0 comments or very few. I know it's early days but until Lemmy is a reliable source of news for my various hobbies I'll still be using Reddit alongside. At least on Reddit for all it's flaws, if there is something big happening in a certain scene, it'll be there. It's a one stop shop for all my information.

And clearly that's what is so dangerous about reddit. Being a one stop shop. Their algorithm totally controls what people see, specially people whose only browsing All.

Who browses r/all?

well definitely not me, But think for a second, why did reddit hate the blackout, partly because it affected the r/all feed. where , im guessing, that they have figures that states that r/all browsing users have significant numbers.

Maybe someone here already said this but if you find a community with not a lot of traffic here, make sure to post in it. Others might go looking for it and find nothing, just like you did. Perpetual cycle of I see nothing, I leave. If someone's active, maybe someone else will be active with you. And then two turns to four to 8 and so on. Even if it feels like you're screaming into the void, keep screaming. The void is infinite and someone's bound to hear you eventually.

To add on that, I'm trying to figure out how people can easily find those small volume niche communities, and it seems like it's a hassle.

So I set up a community on my server : https://lemmy.mindoki.com/c/sharingiscaring@lemmy.mindoki.com

Post your small community there, and I'll have a user sub to it.

Why?

Because if at least 1 user on a server subs to a community (on another server) then that community will show up when filtering with All (All + new should show even small posts, at least sometimes).

If this is a good idea, maybe everyone running a small (read: low volume) server could do this to really get Federation going!

Cheers

Loulou / Valmond @ lemmy.mindoki.com

I think community consolidation/aggregation is something that might want to be looked at. It's possible to have a gardening community on multiple servers with different content. This will confuse people. So having a way to merge posts from two communities into a bigger community per server may be a good idea. So if you set up gardening communities on two servers you can choose to have posts show for each of them in your community. And making this a server or community setting still gives the ability to either have this or not have this if the communities are truly supposed to be separate. This would also give some kind of redundancy where the original community server can go offline but multiple different servers can still exchange messages that eventually make it back to the main community. Truly decentralized.

I have to disagree. Consolidation seems almost never to improved anything. Take Reddit, for example. I once found a sub called HikingAndCamping. Since I'm a hiker, I looked it over. The top mod only allowed discussions of hiking and camping on Mt Everest (or some equally nonsensical narrow topic). Since I actually wanted to discuss hiking and camping generally, I tried to create CampingAndHiking as a more accessible community. But that same top mod had already claimed that name as well under an alt. Reddit refused to do anything, but when they notified him that I had requested the dead sub (no posts and the alt hadn't logged in for years), he jumped in and created a single "Go away" post. Then he sent me a private message to the effect of "I'm squatting to keep traffic flowing to my other sub. You want to talk about hiking and camping in general? Sucks to be you."

Here, I'd just go to another instance and create the c/ that we wanted and move along. That's part of the beauty of federation. Users can then join the one(s) that appeal to them and everyone gets to have their community.

The way I was thinking you could still go to the original community and skip the aggregated one. So you could have c/gardening and c/flowers, but also c/backyard which could combine the two. You could still go to either one, but for easier discoverability you could create aggregators or include an aggregator in your community, and do this cross server. So if you have two very popular and overlapping communities you could combine them easier. Could also be a client feature I suppose. But right now you'd have to manually hunt for the possibly dispersed communities yourself. Alternatively I guess there is an argument for smaller communities being better which I do agree with. It was just a not very thought through idea :) Or you could have community redirects. So c/technology on lemmy.world could decide to seamlessly redirect to c/technology on Lemmy.ml if wanted. Edit: although the more I think about this the more it sounds like more trouble than it's worth.

Now I get the idea. It's not a bad one, but it may very well be a lot of trouble to implement. Maybe the cross-instance community lists could help. It seems like, most of the time, related communities pop up fairly quickly or show up in the initial search.

My new shiny missis sharer has been created, it's me!

Give me your smallest subs and I'll federate them!

I don't understand the "slowly" part at all. I joined Lemmy about a month ago when Reddit third party apps went dark. Lemmy was largely a ghost town then, with most of the relatively mainstream communities I sought out having newest posts that were days or even weeks old. That desolation was gone after the first few days, with a ton more engagement from others who migrated over and a steady stream of new content. The communities I frequent have grown by leaps and bounds since then. "Slow" isn't a word I'd use to describe Lemmy's growth.

Yep, Lemmy is more active than tildes at this point.

Tildes is staying the same. And I like it that way. Lemmy is getting busy and I also like it that way. I go to tildes or lemmy depending on my mood. Haha

I totally forgot about squabbles. I haven't gone there for weeks now. I don't know the reason why, I'm just being pulled to lemmy and tildes much more.

Tildes was nice if you wanted to just circle jerk each other on a topic...but if you had any disagreements, the users there would just tag your post as malicious and then the single admin would delete it...then if you got to many people who disagreed with you, he will just ban you. It's his platform and all but fuck that authoritarian shit. I left reddit because of the level of mod abuse and admin abuse there.

Hmm. Thanks for the info, though I haven't experienced that in tildes but I'll keep that in mind.

Since the spike in content that came with the Reddit migration, I feel like things have slowed down. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't have any stats to back that up.

Maybe "plateau'd" is a better phrase. There has been growth since the Reddit migration, but it has decreased since the spike. Not that that's a bad thing

I wouldn't say plateaued. Decreased. A number of the communities that I subscribe to seem to have fewer daily posts than they did a few weeks ago.

It started to slow down, or at least in my instance. People still post and people from another instance visit frequently, but the hype seems to already slow down. I don't mind though, i don't think any instance can take the heavy load, it will kill lemmy faster if the instance constantly facing down time.

It was bound to happen eventually; these migrations happen in waves, after all. Not to mention, a solid chunk of former Reddit users just stopped using social media entirely.

Just joined after sync for lemmy has been released to the public. As a sync user since it started a decade ago lemmy already feels more familiar to me than reddit. I don't quite understand exactly how it all works just yet but I can definitely see myself using this over reddit.

Lemmy is much friendlier most of the time, and one of my favorite features is that it's run by individuals.

People have forgotten these days what it means to chat somewhere without a corporation in the middle.

It's such a different and better feeling.

IMO, sync for lemmy should be automatically pushed to all sync for reddit devices.

I still use Sync for reddit. (with the revanced mod where you can import your own API key)

Do you know if there is a setting to load the picture in full size when opening a post? I always have to tap on the picture to see it in full size, otherwise it's cropped. Jerboa did that automatically so is there a setting for this?

yes, is in the settings. there are quite a few personalizations.

It kinda did via a push notification, but IIRC Google Play ToS won't allow a developer to suddenly change an app's functionality significantly

Feel free to make an account on another instance like lemm.ee (a general sensible instance) or lemmy.cafe (run by a guy, new) or a country-based instance where people of that country congregate. You might do this to keep your interests or purposes for the accounts separate or in case the lemmy.world server is down (even for a short while), or to potentially access defederated instances and their communities.

Does your username automatically carry over to different instances? Or do you need to create a new account for each?

For now if you want another account, you just make another (with any username you want, I have an account with the same username on lemm.ee). It's possible to port subscriptions and blocked users and communities to a new account using some software. While that is useful, it's not a proper account migration.

However keep in mind you can mostly access most other instances from your home instance. In that case your username (and instance) 'carry over'.

On the off chance lemmy.world has defederated from an instance, and you can't access it, you can join another general, neutral instance like lemm.ee

Not to sound like a jerk but I don't understand what most people expected. All new sites start slow. Facebook was slow at the beginning. Reddit too. It's not like they had millions of users and subs day one. We have the responsibility to build up this community. We want a site like Reddit but without the u/spez crap. So we better start building it up and complain less. Criticism is ok but saying "it's slower than Reddit" is kinda useless and obvious.

Reddit got a burst of users when digg did stupid shit. Now Reddit's doing stupid shit and...

Reddit's burst of users from digg though was on top of an established site with a reasonable userbase. How many people were using lemmy before spez decided that Twitter was a role model instead of a cautionary tale?

I don't think so. I remember there were hundreds of upvotes when I first moved. It was a big thread if it had 1k upvotes. In seeing that on lemmy now.

Those numbers didn't dramatically change after the Digg migration though. The internet archive has copies of reddit's front page both before and after Digg's explosion and they don't show dramatically different numbers of votes on the top posts. Please don't mistake me for saying that no one actually moved from Digg to reddit, I'm just saying that reddit had an established and significant userbase even before Digg fucked around and found out. I don't think the same is quite true for lemmy.

Ya and I'd say lemmy has a significant user base too prior to Reddit. Either way I see more on lemmy now than I ever have. I've used it in the past for a while and it's night and day better now, and I attribute that to Reddit imploding

Also it's definitely not slower than Reddit. Reddit was tiny for a couple of years. I'm not certain, but I wouldn't be surprised if we already have more users than Reddit did before the Digg/Slashdot migrations, and those took a few years.

Woah now hold on there mate, this is the internet, you can't go making sense, it's just not the done thing!

I fucking love Lemmy.

Time to reolaxe ny Reddit addiction with a Lemmy addiction. Let's goo

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Lemmy just needs to stop talking about itself so much. The only reason I still use Reddit is because I find fresher and more varied content there. Lemmy users need to provide more content than just the fact that they are on Lemmy.

Lol it's a new community. I actually find it interesting to see other people's opinions about it. I don't mind seeing every 15th post being about Lemmy itself. That won't last for more than a few months at most...

I hope so. I find some excellent content here but I still need to sift through tons of Lemmy circlejerk to find it.

The best thing people who want Lemmy to succeed can do is post original, non-meta content to communities.

Of course !fediverse@lemmy.world is inherently meta.

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Lemmy feels a lot like hackernews

With a bit less bigotry, but otherwise yes.

hackernews is bigoted? Well that's news. I had no idea.

Yeah, but it's a really weird libertarian thing where everybody feels like they're an expert in their field and also everyone else's. It's a lot more fun to have in my RSS feeds since I realized that.

HN is to other forums what mathematicians are too the rest of science

I reckon after all is said and done, the biggest issue I had with Reddit is that people felt they had to be heard. Like, we just needed to know that you also thought that certain thing (“came here to say this”) or that you are morally superior to everyone else (“oh but I don’t do it that way OP”). It’s 90% of the reason the content on Reddit had deteriorated, because people crave the attention, and thus the imaginary number going up.

Now I’m not saying Lemmy is different. In fact, I fully expect it to go the same way. But right now, there are far fewer people here who just have to give their opinion (I see the irony), and therefore less shit to wade through to get to actually good content.

As an example, look at the top comment on any default sub post on Reddit. It will have heaps and heaps of replies that are just valueless crap. This is what makes Reddit seem “faster” than Lemmy. The reality is that most of it is fluff, most of it is irrelevant to you.

This is what I wanted to say which is why I came here! Plz upvote me?

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Lot of empty communities still. Thinking about posting in writingprompts to try to get something rolling there.

If you like nosleep, check out !lemmyscareyou@lemmy.world that I made a while back.

I just didn't have much energy to write recently, but I'm planning on getting back to it, so any contribution there is welcome.

Omg its Margot Robbie from Oppenheimer

That's Academy Award nominated esteemed character actress Margot Robbie (also occasional spooky story writer) to you!

Here here, was a RIF user but after the blip, I haven't looked back. More and more ppl are migrating over, and I really enjoy no ads!

I would suggest starting a community if one doesn't appear.

Just migrated over from RIF as well, first post! Like the UI so far

omgee lemmy gold. Lets bring back the thumbs up /s

Converted it to B&W to make it look like silver:

::: spoiler Lemmy World silver :::

I was an RIF user for a long time, I honestly haven't looked back since the API thing. I've found connect to be easy to use and it scratches the itch for sure. Love to see it getting more traffic now, my only sense of loss would be the Google search with "_____ ,reddiit" to find someone who has spoken about what I'm looking for. Lemmy will get there, just happy to be along for the ride

I'm regularly seeing hundreds of comments on posts now and only a month ago it was rare to see a dozen comments on a post. I really don't need more engagement on a post, that's plenty. Lemmy still needs more users to sustain more niche communities, but in the places that people are it's already great.

As of this last month, Lemmy is my new “go to” for scrolling social media. My Reddit usage is probably 20% or less of what it used to be.

A part of this was Voyager’s Progressive Web App (https://vger.app), it made me feel right at home after Apollo shut down.

Is anyone else having trouble with the "show context" button? When someone replies to you, it only shows what they said. When you click "show context", it.... only shows what they said. The only way to see what you said is to copy their reply and "show rest of comments" and then search for it - that is if it isn't on an instance that hides replies after the second level.

Yeeeeeeah. I feel like it used to work, and then something changed lately and it's super unreliable. Or rather it never works anymore

I'm on jerboa and linking to the parent of a reply shows me the context, but the thread indenting is reversed - instead of replies being indented to the right, all the parents are successively indented to the left instead.

Little bugs here and there, but I'm an optimist so I think it will get ironed out in time.

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Slowly? Bro for years reddit was mostly pictures of delicious sandwiches.

Lemmy is orders of magnitude better than old reddit.

Reddits deaddit, it just doesn't know it yet.

anyone remember the "melts vs grilled cheese" drama lol

I got banned from the food subreddit for 3 days for making a JOKE about it in the comments!

I'm still getting my footing, but it does feel like what it was circa 2012 to me. I stopped engaging on Reddit years ago because even in the smaller subs it seemed like not as many people were there to talk anymore.

haha it's funny i felt the opposite - when i got here at the beginning of the 'exodus' i already felt like Lemmy was a small but thriving little community that i enjoyed much more than reddit.

not sure why some want it to be just like reddit but the fediverse. i don't and i'm glad it's a smaller bunch of people and hope it stays that way.

I have other accounts on Lemmy but lemmy.world feels the most like Reddit imho. Check out some of the other, smaller instances, many have a different vibe and are more relaxed in pace owing from the smaller userbase.

@ruud@lemmy.world mentioned starting lemmy.world on a mastodon instance. I made a few communities to post some pics. reddit hords piled in 2 days later complaining it needed to be more like reddit. meh

Best thing is, lemmy is open source. You can submit your feedback and code to the devs.

I'm hating all the Reddit spillover commenters that take the internet way too fucking seriously. They were easily the worst part of Reddit.

When I first seeked asylum here, people were being sarcastic in the comments and everyone knew, dark humour was being pushed, and there were no Well Actually Guys around. Now there's a big uptick in petty "discussions", know-it-alls, and those losers that break your comment up gaslit straw man style, to just put words in your mouth to try make you look like an asshole.

I'm hating all the Reddit spillover commenters that take the internet way too fucking seriously.

Says the person ranting about Reddit users destroying Lemmy. Maybe you're part of your own problem.

They were easily the worst part of Reddit.

That would be /u/spez, but okay, bro.

When I first seeked asylum here, people were being sarcastic in the comments and everyone knew, dark humour was being pushed, and there were no Well Actually Guys around.

First of all, it's not your internet. Not everyone is as "intelligent" as you think you are and sarcasm is actually hard to detect in text.

Second of all, not everyone appreciates dark humour because it can be very.offensive, just like using derogatory terms like "Well Actually Guy". If you want people on Lemmy, you need to make it a safe space for all.

Also, your account is only 5 weeks old.

Now there's a big uptick in petty "discussions"

So, now you're just anti-discourse? How is Lemmy meant to grow if comment section are empty, you bigot?

know-it-alls

Again, derogatory.

and those losers that break your comment up gaslit straw man style, to just put words in your mouth to try make you look like an asshole.

Oh, shit.

There definitely are types of posts where breaking it down like you did is necessary. But those are usually the exception of mostly absolutely fine posts that may just have been worded weird or not mirror the majority's opinion.

I'm yet to see too many comments like in your example, but I've had a couple of rundowns with people about veganism as I had on reddit. Though I assume the subject itself is just polarising enough that the platform of discussion is irrelevant.

I haven't went back to reddit since july 3rd... Not even once! I like Lemmy the way it is because I don't scroll for hours anymore and I like that.

Although I wish the comment section was a little more active in general.

I had an account from 2011 with several hundred thousand karma and I backup up my content and deleted my content from Reddit using power delete suite. The only time I go to Reddit is signed out from google search

I do go back to Reddit once in a while to use the communities that either aren't here or are dead here. But yeah, way lower Reddit usage is a win in my books

Enough of the subreddits I enjoyed are here in some variation, enough so I haven't been to Reddit in weeks. I'm fine with that.

old.lemmy.world is a God send, haven't been back to reddit since!

I have to disagree about Lemmy not being very good. It is, IMHO, already very good indeed. It will only improve with time.

I've only seen one thread which felt completely like Reddit. The community was for the alien comics, and the comics were taking a dig at imperial units vs metric units. Nothing wrong with that, it was all in good fun and jest.

The comments though were toxic frankly. If you said you liked both systems and provided reasons, you were buried in downvotes. If you discussed some upsides of the imperial system, you were ridiculed to be a child. Even if you were an engineer and you provided a lengthy explanation, it was met with derision. And then there were all the logically inconsistent arguments and the notion that Americans were simultaneously idiots but also apparently complete geniuses with how complex they made the imperial system out to be.

I'm thankful it was just the one thread. All of the politics threads I've viewed have been more civil and open to discussion (and I consume a fair bit of political news). Lemmy, until that thread, felt like a place where nuanced opinions and discussions were encouraged and upvoted. I hope it's just a one off.

I can imagine people who would get mad about imperial units are mad because that system already has had many people arguing for it. That's how it still persists, despite causing problems. The fact is that metric is definitely more logical but that isn't even its true strength. Its strength is in universal adoption, like all standards.

I'm guessing from experience that most people on lemmy are more collectivist in nature. Most people here seem to be anti-apple, against big business, and pro Linux and other systems meant to empower the common person, the underdog.

I have noticed repeatedly that people who seem hellbent on being "objective" rub me the wrong way. Not because I am against objectivity, but because they come across as condescending and in support of an argument I've heard a million times and I fully reject. So yeah, I'm guessing people might have thought you were in favor of the imperial system and just wanted to "seem" like you were being fair. /shrug

Of course the rebuttal you have could include something like "I'm just trying to provide information and encourage people to think for themselves". Sure, you might totally be doing that. But for people who already know what you're talking about, they might think you're being disingenuous. On reddit I felt like that constantly. So far I luckily don't feel that much here. I hope that sort of feeling stays on reddit as it really sucks.

I think the metric argument can be a logical discussion, but it can also devolve into a cultural argument, which is what I think has happened here. I'm obviously biased towards the imperial system since I grew up with it, but not so much to call it superior by any means. I think there's places where it adds value is all.

I guess I could've said something about still liking the metric system and thinking it was perfect for science, but it honestly didn't cross my mind to be that explicit. Since Lemmy is generally more intellectual and not as simplistic, I didn't think I needed to be.

Perhaps my real mistake here wasn't recognizing just how passionate some people get about this haha

See this is what I like about Lemmy. People actually seem open to dialogue. I appreciate your response.

I grew up with the imperial system, I just hate that it feels uselessly different to most of the world. I care more about interoperability. "What is that in Celsius?" Is a question I hate asking myself. "What's the next larger size wrench to a 3/8 inch?" Is another. It's not a huge deal, if I had to work with wrenches every day I'd get used to it.. it's the idea that standards have one job imo: making shit easier. Reducing cognitive load and communication issues. So since imperial is globally unpopular, I wish we'd just kill it. I am fine with people using it in niche cases they feel it makes sense, I just don't enjoy it being everywhere in the US, it often feels like a barrier.

See this is what I like about Lemmy. People actually seem open to dialogue. I appreciate your response.

Yes exactly!

And I see what you mean, and it is a good point. I don't see it as an important distinction in my field, so long as people label their units. But I can imagine in just common communication worldwide, it must be a pain point.

If the US were going to change, I think we'd have to first accept that it's going to be a long process. We'd need a generation or two to be fluent in both, and we make it a norm for everyone to provide both units in communication. That'll get us enough people where for everyday use at least, we can just do metric. Industry would be more challenging to change, especially since so much equipment is designed for imperial.

Edit: Oh and I just wanted to say, I really appreciate your open mind and politeness when it comes to discussing difference of opinion.

Well, a couple months ago there were nice reddit apps. If it weren't for that, lemmy would probably still be a ghost town. Now that being said, I'm happy I'm here and will continue to contribute and I'm so happy that I was able to get the username I did!

Thanks for making me aware of c/worldbuilding! It's nice to see more niche communities growing.

c/Worldbuilding finally getting traction is enough to seal the deal for me, I've stayed in Reddit mostly because of that community and r/eurovision

I for one am planning to singlehandedly post so much Eurovision crap here next season. If the action on Mastodon this year was anything to go by, we'll be fine!

Remember when all the discussions were happening in just a couple top posts, mostly meta posts? We've come a long way for sure and I'm proud of everyone.

To me it feels like reddit 10/12 years ago when still was pretty niche and a meme could take the entire plataform for a week, the Atheist memes are also a blast to the past.

What's the worldbuilding community? How do you like to it?

It's for building fantasy world's. I recommend it even if you aren't building your own world for a game or story - it's just really cool to see the things people make

Mystery Flesh Pit National Park anyone?

Sorry I wasn't clear. I am asking for a direct link because idk how to search them (especially on mobile). I am a GM and I would love to move away from the reddit TTRPG communities.

c/worldbuilding

Worldbuilding@lemmy.world

https://lemmy.world/c/worldbuilding

Use SYNC for Lemmy is you are having trouble on mobile. There's a community search bar on the home page

Those links should get ya there.

OP should possibly check out lemmy.ml's worldbuilding community which is slow but has had more posts in total.

I miss the sheer amount of cute and stupid cats I used to see on Reddit. That and country specific communities.

Sort by "TOP - 6H on All" and you will have plenty of cats (and memes). Hot sorting is broken right now.

It's been impressive how good lemmy has gotten in such a short time.

At this rate, Lemmy will be good as Reddit in less than 5 years.

New to lemmy, after leaving reddit last month. I am fairly happy, but the learning curve is higher. I don't love the frequency of downtimes. But I've been very thankful for the content. Thx.

Downtime depends on your instance. I switched from lemmy.world to lemm.ee a little while back and haven't had any issues. Seems a lot more reliable.

Appreciate the comment. I will give that a try. Thx.

I've heard good things about sh.itjust.works too

Wait there's a C64 community? Well let's get that party started!

Who knew there were so many Commodore 64 enthusiasts in this day and age...

Edit: holy shit, it really is about the Commodore 64, I was just kidding... thought for sure it was some new game using that abbreviation 😅

c/worldbuilding

Thanks for the shoutout! It's going to be a slow climb up, but I'm looking forwards to growing this place as well.

I posted there already :-) because r/worldbuilding had his "thursday don't post day" or something like that. I didn't even consider Lemmy an alternative before.

Yeah, Lemmy can in some part fill that void reddit left for me, but It's going to be tough for it to be mainstream. The thing that makes Lemmy in my opinion still niche is that subreddits centered and endorsed by popular franchises haven't migrated and I doubt they do it anytime soon. Maybe some day, but I'm not holding my breath.

You know what will be even better. One instance for all communities. So everyone knows and subscribes to the same community.

Or if someone can come up with a better idea so that everyone doesn't depend on one instance.

2 more...

I find that I can fill in the gap for a lot of dead Lemmy communities by following hashtags on mastodon but it doesn’t have the same level of engagement as niche Reddit communities

It genuinely is getting better. I like the kind of garage rebel feel of it, pretty fun- really reminds me of reddit's early days, but all good things must come to an end, and even if Lemmy does take off, it will meet the same fate inevitably.

When you say C64 do you mean the old commadore? Me, I was always an Amiga / Sinclair spectrum guy. But I live with someone who has a working c64 and uses it for music so they are still around.

Yeah, the C64 is so much fun because it is so different. Really something else. It feels so... raw and full of surprises. I did program a lot on it. I also own an Amiga (two actually, a 1000 and a 3000) but they are so far ahead of the C64 that you can not compare them. I have Web, Mail, a ton of Unix stuff and more on my 3000. It pretty much feels like a modern system just a really slow one. Loading a JPEG with 1024x768 in 24bits - the highest resolution my Amiga can display - takes like 30 seconds ;-)

Yeah, that's about what my mate says, I'm no musician but he loves the C64 for making electronic music. He lives in a big truck which is also his studio, old computers and amps and synths all running off solar-fed batteries. I understand the C64 had its own compiler too? Yeah there was such diversity of machines back in the day. My first machine was a Tandy TRS-80. And an old ZX81, IIRC that little thing had 1k ram so you had to write tight code. My real love was the BBC B, though, you could do so much with it, learned assembly on it.

Haven't done any coding now in years. Which is a shame, but mostly these days I don't really need to. I kinda feel like maybe we've lost something though since back then when you really needed to learn to program to get a device to do anything cool. Even though the devices today seem like an exponential improvement. Comparing the phone I'm writing this on to that old ZX81, or even a C64 - just wow. I'm excited to see what comes next!