If I can resist Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok (of which I have never had an account, don't have, and probably won't have on any of those 3), I can resist Lemmy.
Thats the biggest issue I DON'T like about Lemmy. I want everyone in the world on the fediverse.
I like a large userbase myself, would prefer it to be larger than it is, but if everyone showed up tomorrow, it'd collapse. We'd see scaling problems that hadn't been anticipated, anti-spam/anti-abuse systems wouldn't have had time to adapt, etc.
Takes time with problems gradually appearing and becoming more serious and solutions showing up to deal with them.
Same
A distinct lack of Monetization/ads
Lemmy is also not tracking the sites you visit. Everytime you click on a link on reddit, you're redirected through out.reddit.com.
Worry not, ads still appear, tho we ban them relatively quickly.
You can actually participate in discussions. On the popular Reddit subs, you click a thread and there are 9000+ replies already. No matter how insightful your post, no one's gone see it.
The A.I will see it when it's trained on it
What's keeping AI from training on Lemmy?
Hint:
I, for one, welcome our overlords to train their AIs on one of the most left-leaning, anti-corporate and LGBT+ friendly spaces on the internet.
If the revolution the communists talk about ever comes, it'll be with the help of our AI comrades /hj
(I don't want them using us as training data but it's going to happen whether we like it or not)
Can't wait for the showdown of Facebook/Twitter LLM vs Lemmy LLM
LLeMmy be like:
[Prompt] Please give me a recipe using leeks.
[Output] Season some rich people with salt, pepper, wilted onions and leeks. Eat the rich with some creamy polenta.
that it's (currently) much less popular than reddit.
Reddit is new facebook at this point. A friend's mom made a reddit account to upvote cat pictures a couple of weeks ago.
I doubt her joining reddit will make it worse.
Doesn't matter they've already ran out most quality content they could find and Reddit has limited who can train AI on their website.
Maybe she will join Lemmy.
Nothing exactly. But that's okay, because the fediverse data is available to all, which makes it worthless, monetarily speaking. Nobody will sell your data to anyone. Any AI company could use the data to train their models, but they wouldn't be able to sell those models since they wouldn't be any better than an open source model. The fediverse levels the playing field and doesn't allow the situation where Google pays reddit for AI training data.
They can still sell their services, not every company want to launch their own LLM model
Then they earn stuff on their services, not the model. Why should they harvest fediverse data? And so what if they do? Anyone can do that.
I'm just refuting your point that the data is worthless because anyone can train AI on it. It's not worthless because although anyone can train their model on it, most companies would rather purchase the services from specialists, so all training data has value.
All the more reason not to post it in the first place.
Also less circlejerking and "that's what she said"/"I also choose this guy's dead wife".
This
This
(Making a point of something I hated on Reddit)
Exactly!
You gotta know how to optimize visability. I'd regularly have comments that had thousands of upvotes.
Timing is everything. I once had "most upvoted post of the day" and like 20K karma from a stupid joke that was a reply to the first top-level comment on a default sub. The only reason that happened was because it got into "rising" exactly as the US users started waking up and opening the site.
I could've posted the exact same comment on any other post in that thread or even the same one but at a different time, and no one would've seen it.
That's very true. Timing IS everything. Its probably the most important part of getting high voted comments.
I was using my phone to access Reddit through an app called RIF. It stopped working.
I can access Lemmy on my phone through an app called Boost. When I revisit a thread, it displays the new comments in a different color. Very very very convenient for active threads.
I used Boost for Reddit, and now Boost for Lemmy.
It's incredible how much the app is part of the experience. Same experience, completely different data source, it mostly just feels like early Reddit again, with niche subs of mere hundreds of people.
People are on average nicer here. Few loud nutjobs but overall I have mostly pleasant discussions.
Am the same, Boost fan.
I still lurk too much, but really enjoy the conversations.
Okay, back to lurking for me, run out of things to say.
I recognise usernames, so it feels like conversations between people are happening rather than just throwing stuff out there for it to be ignored.
Other thing is there are small communities with 1-2 mods so you know them and they aren't usually "the superuser" that mods 10 different communities.
I don't say there are none of them, just that it is usually small and you recognize the mod that just steer his small community.
When I joined reddit, it was at least a year—probably 3 years—before I was banned from a subreddit—r/AskReddit. I've been here little more than a year and I've not only been banned from a notable community here, but when I asked to be unbanned—once, then letting perhaps a few weeks pass, then twice—I got no reply.
(and I'm not going to ask a 3rd time, but will simply create a [community-I-was-banned-from]2.)
Commenting on a post doesn't feel like yelling into a void, comments are more than a number here. Also people are always trying to be helpful, which is so nice compared to reddit.
mods can suck, admins can suck, but you can go off and start your own instance, with blackjack and hookers.
I also like that I can see that someone is posting from hexbear, and I can disregard their comment. It saves time.
Same reason I joined here, plus most users on Reddit are just bots at least in here you can tell who's a bot and who's real and you can tell which comments to agree or disagree with and which to ignore based on the instance lol, it's way easier and friendlier here tbh I was banned for violent comments on Reddit mainly because the hive mind there are mostly removed but in here I can say Fuck Reddit, it was good once before the coronavirus now it's just a piece of shit.
It would not surprise me to find out 50%+ of Reddit activity is bots at this point
I was banned for violent comments on Reddit
punches Chaos
Yeah! Violence rules!
Yeah the instancing makes malicious users much harder to come by, and easy to hide for sure.
By the users, for the users. Almost all they instance admins are just like everyone else. We just know some it infrastructure.
Lemmy allows 3rd party apps and is not run by a company that would disallow them
I love the whole premise, brought by the ActivityPub protocol, that no individual or group has full control of the whole.
It isn't like nobody wants to become Lemmy's Spez. Plenty people do; they simply can't.
One thing I love here is how I can disagree with someone and still have a civil discussion. It feels weirldy amazing to reach a consensus instead of just getting stuck in a cycle of unrelated personal insults. Sure, shitheads like that do still exist here, but I don't remember ever having a civil disagreement/argument on Reddit.
I also feel that I've embraced the practice of blocking & moving on a lot more after I moved here, and tried my best to be more constructive.
In general, people are more willing to call out misinformation and present nuanced takes. I much prefer that. Reddit has recently become a cesspit of ragebait and misinformation.
I know it's arguably part of why it's intimidating to your average newcomer but I adore that it's mostly nerdy techies lol. I'm so used to dropping something vaguely technical and being met with the online equivalent of blank stares so people being willing and able to engage with that sort of thing is super nice!
I don't think it is only techy nerds, I am a granny and much prefer Lemmy.
I no longer feel nervous when posting here at all as people are polite
and are actually interested in discussion rather than simply arguing.
And the premise that there can never be only one person in control
is refreshing.
Oh I don't think it's all techies, but they definitely make up a good chunk of the userbase. Hard agree on it feeling more chill too, I'd been kinda afraid to comment anything on reddit before I left.
Early Reddit -- I was on when it was one page and a large amount of the content was directly posted by spez and company, was mostly talking about stuff that they cared about, like Lisp and Linux and startups -- was somewhat similar. More of a university focus and didn't have the economically-far-left, furry, or LGBT crowds prominent, so not the same, but some decided similarities.
Good point, I didn't get into reddit that early but it definitely rings familiar
Lack of spez
It has a smaller community, which makes it easier to recognize people.
The percentage of linux users is also great.
The percentage of linux users is also great.
Yes! I don't feel like a weirdo here for using Linux exclusively on my computers. It's nice to interact with a community that shares the values which lead each of us to use Linux. But even within that, the users here are not only respectful, but celebrate novice users that use distros like Mint. In my experience, some Linux users can be rude by presenting a sense of superiority for using distros that take lots of technical expertise. Not only does that not seem to be the case on Lemmy, but it's actually made fun of (I use Arch, btw 😉).
i still scroll through both but i engage with way more posts on Lemmy now almost everyday
so i actually find the content on Lemmy more interesting which is slightly unexpected. i thought it would end up the same
the reason you interact more here could be because people here are more nice and welcoming because it's definitely the reason I love to interact here :D
No algorithm.
Came here to say this.
It’s jarring when I stumble into conventional social media and have Joe Rogan and Hawk Tuah Girl on every other video. Money shouldn’t decide which content appears most often.
I'd actually like to have an effective recommendations algorithm. Originally, Reddit was intended to use voting as a way to predict what you wanted to see and show a personalized recommendations set. That...basically didn't work. What happened instead was that subreddits were introduced, and I used those to filter instead, just subscribed to some and only look at content from those. I do the same thing here.
I do think that there's a problem where recommendations algorithms either need to store a lot of data about you -- which I don't want to hand to one entity along with everyone else doing so, too much potential for data-mining -- or need to recommend to the preferences of some "aggregate user" that reflects what the typical user wants, which usually isn't what I want. Google News did the latter. I really liked their recommendations early-on. But over time, what they recommended shifted, got a lot more sensationalist and lowbrow. I suspect that this reflected their changing userbase. Maybe they could do better recommendations if I created an account and let them profile me, but I'm not willing to do that. Google has too much data, in my view, on everyone already.
In theory, my home instance of lemmy.today -- a small Lemmy instance -- could profile me, but because the Threadiverse is decentralized, it's harder for any one party to get a large dataset to do that for everyone. Any instance operator can see what I comment on (as with Reddit) and vote on (unike Reddit), but not what I view. They can't directly link that to my IP address either, which helps in profile-building, though as I've pointed out in the past, as things stand, the Threadiverse doesn't do a great job of isolating one's IP address, and a dedicated person could probably do a reasonable job of harvesting IP addresses.
Feels like I'm talking to normal people again,
I went on a bit of a rant during a recent low point personally, but still hold the opinion.
Reddit is full of people who want to be right and don't understand when a discussion is over. Constant misreading of comments to fit their narrative or enable them to try to correct, even if it doesn't make any sense, but they have to have the last word.
People actually make comments rather than the same 10 jokes reused over and over.
I don't feel like I can hold a decent conversation where my mind can be broadened or changed like here or traditional forums, it's just an opportunity to hyperfocus on one thing for upvotes.
You do find this sort of person in Lemmy too, but it's easy enough to block them out.
Things just don’t get buried the way they do on Reddit. On Reddit I often didn’t comment on something if it was slightly older because nobody would see my comment anyway. Here it’s a completely different story. Sometimes I still get replies after like a week.
Shitters often self segregate. The Donald or FatPeopleHate would get run out of existing instances, start their own, then go to defed hell. Contrast with reddit where they were allowed to fester in the name of "valuable conversation"
Less assholes for the most part.
I like decentralized approach and modlog feature. Really nice to be able to monitor moderation and see reasons for certain actions. This helps a lot to understand what to expect from certain instances, make the best choices for yourself and avoid frustration in future.
The intelligence level on reddit has hit rock bottom. That's not to say lemmy instances are the opposite. It's just that reddit has reached what must be some kind of end stage. Someone else posted already about being met with blank stares about technical topics. It applies to pretty much any topic.
Not being very informed about a certain topic is not a problem in itself. Reddit seems to have internalized some sort of personality. One where the social milieu is about petty squabbles. They don't care about the topic itself but coming away from the replies feeling like they're the bigger dog who barked louder. More often than not I find myself just letting them have their victory. There's no real discussion happening anyways.
In the first half of reddits existence it was ridiculed for being the site full of neckbeards who think too highly of themselves on account of nerds being smart-aleck nerds. What I've seen the past several years goes to show that it isn't a nerd thing. As reddit has become more a sample of any given part of the population, this trait of reddit has not changed. People go to reddit thinking they're engaged in some kind of high intellectual discourse simply because reddit is supposed to be that.
I can't tell if these things are a trait of reddit which bled over from the other social media like Facebook and Twitter. I never used those. Just about any other platform is better compared to reddit. Whether that be lemmy instances or small forums. Could be some kind of social media mind rot or something. I don't know but that's what I attribute it to.
Yeah this is pretty much spot on. People go to reddit to win, not to talk.
When you post a comment it shows up whether it is a new or old account instead of having to meet some karma requirement. Also third party apps are very nice over being pushed to use some bloated ad filled official app.
It isn't reddit.
The UI.
More app options. With Thunder I can filter by keyword.
There isn't as much traffic here but what is here is more interesting.
Less privacy invasion, less corporate, less fash, less incoherent fury, less trolling, less need to doomscroll.
I'm either much nicer here, or people are far less confrontational. I've said it a hundred times, but every time I receive a notification on Lemmy I brace myself for another senseless asshole. But it's almost always positive on here.
This so much. I feel like the founding values of Lemmy lead to creating a community in which users want this to be a respectful place. There's nearly no tolerance for hate. It's awesome.
Senseless asshole here. FUCK YOU!
nah jk
why reddit is better:
reddit has polls (even if it's only up to 6 choices, and <8 days)
reddit currently has more users, and thus more people to interact with
I kinda like karma pints.
my pro-Green Party/Jill Stein posts aren't visible to most redittors, and thus aren't as much downvoted, if at all
I can embed YouTube videos, but not only YT but also Vimeo
why Lemmy is better:
no ads, not run by a corporation
It's federated.
as one respondent already said ITT: more cozy
my Vimeo, niconico, Archive, Wikicommons, and the very rare PeerTube posts look no worse than my YouTube posts—though with most posts, one can't see as many thumbnails.
why Miraheze is better:
no ads, not run by a corporation
I can embed YouTube videos, but not only YT but also Vimeo, Archive, niconico, Wikicommons, and Miraheze Commons (on a few of the wikis at least)
Files in Wikicommons can be transcluded.
I like the wiki format (at least their and WMF wiki formats) best.
why WMF projects are better:
no ads, not run by a corporation
Wikipedia is one of the most visited website on the internet; I enjoy categorizing files on Wikicommons; I like the structures of Wikiversity's wikidebates.
I'm also thinking of posting in RationalWiki next year.
Fewer bots. That and fewer users are literally the only (social) differences, sorry if you're all trying to cope that lemmy is somehow superior in every way
Posts not being taken down without an explanation. The pics place has more people taking pictures themselves.
Reddit is just karma-based ego battles with no room for actual discourse. Lemmy is small and highly community-oriented so no one cares about that stuff.
There are a lot of areas in which I do prefer Reddit, but there are two critical ones where the Threadiverse -- and it's not just Lemmy, got mbin and company -- win:
Open source. I'd rather be contributing to a project. Well, in theory, someone could make closed software, but you can use an entirely open-source stack if you want.
Third party client use is permitted. I don't want to be required to run someone's software on my computer. Too many privacy issues, kills room for improvement. This change is what sent me off Reddit.
There are some minor benefits as well:
Currently small enough that it's not a big target for spammers and such.
The federated structure has some substantial benefits.
It tends to force more competition, I think, rather than just having the first person who sits on a community name owning it.
It makes the system highly resistant to full failure -- I've seen instances go down, but not once since I've joined has the whole Threadiverse gone down. Early Reddit in particular had days where it was unavailable.
There is no one Reddit company with total control over content -- individual instances may defederate or choose what content to permit directly on themselves, but there's no one person whose whim chooses what everyone can see. Ironically, a number of peole seem to have showed up here because they wanted heavier content moderation, but what they wanted it on was on their instance so that they didn't see stuff -- the Threadiverse as a whole is less moderated, which I prefer; I can choose an instance that doesn't defederate and make my own content calls.
A selection of server software and Web interfaces to choose from. I disliked the new Reddit Web UI, but old.reddit.com, while usable, was simply dead, receiving no further work. I have about five Web UI options on my own home instance alone, none of which are dead.
Dark mode out-of-box. I've always preferred light-on-dark interfaces. Dark-on-light was only popularized when Apple pointed out -- reasonably, for the time, early 1980s -- that most data people were working with reflected paper documents, which for reasons of ink use, were almost always dark-on-light, and it'd be nice to have onscreen stuff reflect the actual documents. But in a mostly-paperless world, nothing was keeping us on dark-on-light except inertia from an earlier period.
It looks like the auto-renumbering feature for numbered lists in Markdown, which I always felt was a major misfeature, was disabled.
Lemmy is have way less meaningless hate than reddit.
In Lemmy you do actually have control (like changing instances if you want)
Lemmy seems a more safe place for LGBT+ people
Lemmy seems a more safe place for LGBT+ people
In my opinion, Lemmy is a trans party 🥳🎉 There are so many memes about being trans almost daily. I can't tell if there is a large portion of Pemmy users that are trans, we just like celebrating the idea, or I happened to subscribe to trans-heavy communities like !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone. Either way, even though I'm cis-af, I love it. You go, girl/boy!
because there’s less conspiracy here compared to Reddit
I find there to be a more honest discussion here. Also, I really like that it's not run by some giant VC fueled company that is driven to make as much money as possible. It's more like a public utility where the cost is distributed among multiple instance owners. However, I am concerned about their rise in costs over time and I hope there is a plan for revenue. I'd be willing to pay.
While I'm here, I hope you all still use reddit a bit and mention Lemmy on there occasionally. I think the community can still grow.
Being able to live without the stigma I created on Reddit by posting about anime and other topics.
Obviously, I posted about anime and people didn’t like it except for one user who was nice enough to sympathize with me before I left.
People on Reddit generally treat me like SpongeBob SquarePants for all I care.
People still treat me the same way on Lemmy sometimes, but I’m more able to deal with it by blocking users who threaten my livelihood.
No censorship
I've been banned from one community here already.
What did you do?
Technically you can create your own instance and post whatever you like, but if all the major instances defederate from you, it's still a form of censorship.
That's subjective, mods are censors. You can host your own though.
We are Lemmy, we were on Reddit.
We are Lemmy, resistance is futile.
You will be elemmynated
If I can resist Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok (of which I have never had an account, don't have, and probably won't have on any of those 3), I can resist Lemmy.
Took me a second to understand, but yeah that's a great way to put it
Eh, I'd rather say we are on the fediverse. Lemmy is just the app that some of us use to access the fediverse, but there are many others.
Feels smaller and more cozy to me.
Thats the biggest issue I DON'T like about Lemmy. I want everyone in the world on the fediverse.
I like a large userbase myself, would prefer it to be larger than it is, but if everyone showed up tomorrow, it'd collapse. We'd see scaling problems that hadn't been anticipated, anti-spam/anti-abuse systems wouldn't have had time to adapt, etc.
Takes time with problems gradually appearing and becoming more serious and solutions showing up to deal with them.
Same
A distinct lack of Monetization/ads
Lemmy is also not tracking the sites you visit. Everytime you click on a link on reddit, you're redirected through out.reddit.com.
Worry not, ads still appear, tho we ban them relatively quickly.
You can actually participate in discussions. On the popular Reddit subs, you click a thread and there are 9000+ replies already. No matter how insightful your post, no one's gone see it.
The A.I will see it when it's trained on it
What's keeping AI from training on Lemmy?
Hint:
I, for one, welcome our overlords to train their AIs on one of the most left-leaning, anti-corporate and LGBT+ friendly spaces on the internet.
If the revolution the communists talk about ever comes, it'll be with the help of our AI comrades /hj
(I don't want them using us as training data but it's going to happen whether we like it or not)
Can't wait for the showdown of Facebook/Twitter LLM vs Lemmy LLM
LLeMmy be like:
that it's (currently) much less popular than reddit.
Reddit is new facebook at this point. A friend's mom made a reddit account to upvote cat pictures a couple of weeks ago.
I doubt her joining reddit will make it worse.
Doesn't matter they've already ran out most quality content they could find and Reddit has limited who can train AI on their website.
Maybe she will join Lemmy.
Nothing exactly. But that's okay, because the fediverse data is available to all, which makes it worthless, monetarily speaking. Nobody will sell your data to anyone. Any AI company could use the data to train their models, but they wouldn't be able to sell those models since they wouldn't be any better than an open source model. The fediverse levels the playing field and doesn't allow the situation where Google pays reddit for AI training data.
They can still sell their services, not every company want to launch their own LLM model
Then they earn stuff on their services, not the model. Why should they harvest fediverse data? And so what if they do? Anyone can do that.
I'm just refuting your point that the data is worthless because anyone can train AI on it. It's not worthless because although anyone can train their model on it, most companies would rather purchase the services from specialists, so all training data has value.
All the more reason not to post it in the first place.
Also less circlejerking and "that's what she said"/"I also choose this guy's dead wife".
This
This (Making a point of something I hated on Reddit)
Exactly!
You gotta know how to optimize visability. I'd regularly have comments that had thousands of upvotes.
Timing is everything. I once had "most upvoted post of the day" and like 20K karma from a stupid joke that was a reply to the first top-level comment on a default sub. The only reason that happened was because it got into "rising" exactly as the US users started waking up and opening the site.
I could've posted the exact same comment on any other post in that thread or even the same one but at a different time, and no one would've seen it.
That's very true. Timing IS everything. Its probably the most important part of getting high voted comments.
I was using my phone to access Reddit through an app called RIF. It stopped working.
I can access Lemmy on my phone through an app called Boost. When I revisit a thread, it displays the new comments in a different color. Very very very convenient for active threads.
I used Boost for Reddit, and now Boost for Lemmy.
It's incredible how much the app is part of the experience. Same experience, completely different data source, it mostly just feels like early Reddit again, with niche subs of mere hundreds of people.
People are on average nicer here. Few loud nutjobs but overall I have mostly pleasant discussions.
Am the same, Boost fan. I still lurk too much, but really enjoy the conversations.
Okay, back to lurking for me, run out of things to say.
I recognise usernames, so it feels like conversations between people are happening rather than just throwing stuff out there for it to be ignored.
Other thing is there are small communities with 1-2 mods so you know them and they aren't usually "the superuser" that mods 10 different communities.
I don't say there are none of them, just that it is usually small and you recognize the mod that just steer his small community.
When I joined reddit, it was at least a year—probably 3 years—before I was banned from a subreddit—r/AskReddit. I've been here little more than a year and I've not only been banned from a notable community here, but when I asked to be unbanned—once, then letting perhaps a few weeks pass, then twice—I got no reply.
(and I'm not going to ask a 3rd time, but will simply create a [community-I-was-banned-from]2.)
Was it hexbear/.ml?
https://lemmy.world/c/politicalmemes
What post/comment did you get banned for?
Commenting on a post doesn't feel like yelling into a void, comments are more than a number here. Also people are always trying to be helpful, which is so nice compared to reddit.
mods can suck, admins can suck, but you can go off and start your own instance, with blackjack and hookers.
I also like that I can see that someone is posting from hexbear, and I can disregard their comment. It saves time.
Same reason I joined here, plus most users on Reddit are just bots at least in here you can tell who's a bot and who's real and you can tell which comments to agree or disagree with and which to ignore based on the instance lol, it's way easier and friendlier here tbh I was banned for violent comments on Reddit mainly because the hive mind there are mostly removed but in here I can say Fuck Reddit, it was good once before the coronavirus now it's just a piece of shit.
It would not surprise me to find out 50%+ of Reddit activity is bots at this point
punches Chaos
Yeah! Violence rules!
Yeah the instancing makes malicious users much harder to come by, and easy to hide for sure.
By the users, for the users. Almost all they instance admins are just like everyone else. We just know some it infrastructure.
Lemmy allows 3rd party apps and is not run by a company that would disallow them
I love the whole premise, brought by the ActivityPub protocol, that no individual or group has full control of the whole.
It isn't like nobody wants to become Lemmy's Spez. Plenty people do; they simply can't.
One thing I love here is how I can disagree with someone and still have a civil discussion. It feels weirldy amazing to reach a consensus instead of just getting stuck in a cycle of unrelated personal insults. Sure, shitheads like that do still exist here, but I don't remember ever having a civil disagreement/argument on Reddit.
I also feel that I've embraced the practice of blocking & moving on a lot more after I moved here, and tried my best to be more constructive.
In general, people are more willing to call out misinformation and present nuanced takes. I much prefer that. Reddit has recently become a cesspit of ragebait and misinformation.
I know it's arguably part of why it's intimidating to your average newcomer but I adore that it's mostly nerdy techies lol. I'm so used to dropping something vaguely technical and being met with the online equivalent of blank stares so people being willing and able to engage with that sort of thing is super nice!
I don't think it is only techy nerds, I am a granny and much prefer Lemmy. I no longer feel nervous when posting here at all as people are polite and are actually interested in discussion rather than simply arguing. And the premise that there can never be only one person in control is refreshing.
Oh I don't think it's all techies, but they definitely make up a good chunk of the userbase. Hard agree on it feeling more chill too, I'd been kinda afraid to comment anything on reddit before I left.
Early Reddit -- I was on when it was one page and a large amount of the content was directly posted by spez and company, was mostly talking about stuff that they cared about, like Lisp and Linux and startups -- was somewhat similar. More of a university focus and didn't have the economically-far-left, furry, or LGBT crowds prominent, so not the same, but some decided similarities.
Good point, I didn't get into reddit that early but it definitely rings familiar
Lack of spez
It has a smaller community, which makes it easier to recognize people.
The percentage of linux users is also great.
Yes! I don't feel like a weirdo here for using Linux exclusively on my computers. It's nice to interact with a community that shares the values which lead each of us to use Linux. But even within that, the users here are not only respectful, but celebrate novice users that use distros like Mint. In my experience, some Linux users can be rude by presenting a sense of superiority for using distros that take lots of technical expertise. Not only does that not seem to be the case on Lemmy, but it's actually made fun of (I use Arch, btw 😉).
i still scroll through both but i engage with way more posts on Lemmy now almost everyday
so i actually find the content on Lemmy more interesting which is slightly unexpected. i thought it would end up the same
the reason you interact more here could be because people here are more nice and welcoming because it's definitely the reason I love to interact here :D
No algorithm.
Came here to say this.
It’s jarring when I stumble into conventional social media and have Joe Rogan and Hawk Tuah Girl on every other video. Money shouldn’t decide which content appears most often.
I'd actually like to have an effective recommendations algorithm. Originally, Reddit was intended to use voting as a way to predict what you wanted to see and show a personalized recommendations set. That...basically didn't work. What happened instead was that subreddits were introduced, and I used those to filter instead, just subscribed to some and only look at content from those. I do the same thing here.
I do think that there's a problem where recommendations algorithms either need to store a lot of data about you -- which I don't want to hand to one entity along with everyone else doing so, too much potential for data-mining -- or need to recommend to the preferences of some "aggregate user" that reflects what the typical user wants, which usually isn't what I want. Google News did the latter. I really liked their recommendations early-on. But over time, what they recommended shifted, got a lot more sensationalist and lowbrow. I suspect that this reflected their changing userbase. Maybe they could do better recommendations if I created an account and let them profile me, but I'm not willing to do that. Google has too much data, in my view, on everyone already.
In theory, my home instance of lemmy.today -- a small Lemmy instance -- could profile me, but because the Threadiverse is decentralized, it's harder for any one party to get a large dataset to do that for everyone. Any instance operator can see what I comment on (as with Reddit) and vote on (unike Reddit), but not what I view. They can't directly link that to my IP address either, which helps in profile-building, though as I've pointed out in the past, as things stand, the Threadiverse doesn't do a great job of isolating one's IP address, and a dedicated person could probably do a reasonable job of harvesting IP addresses.
Feels like I'm talking to normal people again,
I went on a bit of a rant during a recent low point personally, but still hold the opinion.
Reddit is full of people who want to be right and don't understand when a discussion is over. Constant misreading of comments to fit their narrative or enable them to try to correct, even if it doesn't make any sense, but they have to have the last word.
People actually make comments rather than the same 10 jokes reused over and over.
I don't feel like I can hold a decent conversation where my mind can be broadened or changed like here or traditional forums, it's just an opportunity to hyperfocus on one thing for upvotes.
You do find this sort of person in Lemmy too, but it's easy enough to block them out.
Things just don’t get buried the way they do on Reddit. On Reddit I often didn’t comment on something if it was slightly older because nobody would see my comment anyway. Here it’s a completely different story. Sometimes I still get replies after like a week.
Shitters often self segregate. The Donald or FatPeopleHate would get run out of existing instances, start their own, then go to defed hell. Contrast with reddit where they were allowed to fester in the name of "valuable conversation"
Less assholes for the most part.
I like decentralized approach and modlog feature. Really nice to be able to monitor moderation and see reasons for certain actions. This helps a lot to understand what to expect from certain instances, make the best choices for yourself and avoid frustration in future.
The intelligence level on reddit has hit rock bottom. That's not to say lemmy instances are the opposite. It's just that reddit has reached what must be some kind of end stage. Someone else posted already about being met with blank stares about technical topics. It applies to pretty much any topic.
Not being very informed about a certain topic is not a problem in itself. Reddit seems to have internalized some sort of personality. One where the social milieu is about petty squabbles. They don't care about the topic itself but coming away from the replies feeling like they're the bigger dog who barked louder. More often than not I find myself just letting them have their victory. There's no real discussion happening anyways.
In the first half of reddits existence it was ridiculed for being the site full of neckbeards who think too highly of themselves on account of nerds being smart-aleck nerds. What I've seen the past several years goes to show that it isn't a nerd thing. As reddit has become more a sample of any given part of the population, this trait of reddit has not changed. People go to reddit thinking they're engaged in some kind of high intellectual discourse simply because reddit is supposed to be that.
I can't tell if these things are a trait of reddit which bled over from the other social media like Facebook and Twitter. I never used those. Just about any other platform is better compared to reddit. Whether that be lemmy instances or small forums. Could be some kind of social media mind rot or something. I don't know but that's what I attribute it to.
Yeah this is pretty much spot on. People go to reddit to win, not to talk.
When you post a comment it shows up whether it is a new or old account instead of having to meet some karma requirement. Also third party apps are very nice over being pushed to use some bloated ad filled official app.
It isn't reddit.
The UI.
More app options. With Thunder I can filter by keyword.
There isn't as much traffic here but what is here is more interesting.
Less privacy invasion, less corporate, less fash, less incoherent fury, less trolling, less need to doomscroll.
I'm either much nicer here, or people are far less confrontational. I've said it a hundred times, but every time I receive a notification on Lemmy I brace myself for another senseless asshole. But it's almost always positive on here.
This so much. I feel like the founding values of Lemmy lead to creating a community in which users want this to be a respectful place. There's nearly no tolerance for hate. It's awesome.
Senseless asshole here. FUCK YOU!
nah jk
why reddit is better:
reddit has polls (even if it's only up to 6 choices, and <8 days)
reddit currently has more users, and thus more people to interact with
I kinda like karma pints.
my pro-Green Party/Jill Stein posts aren't visible to most redittors, and thus aren't as much downvoted, if at all
I can embed YouTube videos, but not only YT but also Vimeo
why Lemmy is better:
no ads, not run by a corporation
It's federated.
as one respondent already said ITT: more cozy
my Vimeo, niconico, Archive, Wikicommons, and the very rare PeerTube posts look no worse than my YouTube posts—though with most posts, one can't see as many thumbnails.
why Miraheze is better:
no ads, not run by a corporation
I can embed YouTube videos, but not only YT but also Vimeo, Archive, niconico, Wikicommons, and Miraheze Commons (on a few of the wikis at least)
Files in Wikicommons can be transcluded.
I like the wiki format (at least their and WMF wiki formats) best.
why WMF projects are better:
no ads, not run by a corporation
Wikipedia is one of the most visited website on the internet; I enjoy categorizing files on Wikicommons; I like the structures of Wikiversity's wikidebates.
I'm also thinking of posting in RationalWiki next year.
Fewer bots. That and fewer users are literally the only (social) differences, sorry if you're all trying to cope that lemmy is somehow superior in every way
Posts not being taken down without an explanation. The pics place has more people taking pictures themselves.
Reddit is just karma-based ego battles with no room for actual discourse. Lemmy is small and highly community-oriented so no one cares about that stuff.
There are a lot of areas in which I do prefer Reddit, but there are two critical ones where the Threadiverse -- and it's not just Lemmy, got mbin and company -- win:
Open source. I'd rather be contributing to a project. Well, in theory, someone could make closed software, but you can use an entirely open-source stack if you want.
Third party client use is permitted. I don't want to be required to run someone's software on my computer. Too many privacy issues, kills room for improvement. This change is what sent me off Reddit.
There are some minor benefits as well:
Currently small enough that it's not a big target for spammers and such.
The federated structure has some substantial benefits.
It tends to force more competition, I think, rather than just having the first person who sits on a community name owning it.
It makes the system highly resistant to full failure -- I've seen instances go down, but not once since I've joined has the whole Threadiverse gone down. Early Reddit in particular had days where it was unavailable.
There is no one Reddit company with total control over content -- individual instances may defederate or choose what content to permit directly on themselves, but there's no one person whose whim chooses what everyone can see. Ironically, a number of peole seem to have showed up here because they wanted heavier content moderation, but what they wanted it on was on their instance so that they didn't see stuff -- the Threadiverse as a whole is less moderated, which I prefer; I can choose an instance that doesn't defederate and make my own content calls.
A selection of server software and Web interfaces to choose from. I disliked the new Reddit Web UI, but old.reddit.com, while usable, was simply dead, receiving no further work. I have about five Web UI options on my own home instance alone, none of which are dead.
Dark mode out-of-box. I've always preferred light-on-dark interfaces. Dark-on-light was only popularized when Apple pointed out -- reasonably, for the time, early 1980s -- that most data people were working with reflected paper documents, which for reasons of ink use, were almost always dark-on-light, and it'd be nice to have onscreen stuff reflect the actual documents. But in a mostly-paperless world, nothing was keeping us on dark-on-light except inertia from an earlier period.
It looks like the auto-renumbering feature for numbered lists in Markdown, which I always felt was a major misfeature, was disabled.
Lemmy is have way less meaningless hate than reddit.
In Lemmy you do actually have control (like changing instances if you want)
Lemmy seems a more safe place for LGBT+ people
In my opinion, Lemmy is a trans party 🥳🎉 There are so many memes about being trans almost daily. I can't tell if there is a large portion of Pemmy users that are trans, we just like celebrating the idea, or I happened to subscribe to trans-heavy communities like !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone. Either way, even though I'm cis-af, I love it. You go, girl/boy!
because there’s less conspiracy here compared to Reddit
I find there to be a more honest discussion here. Also, I really like that it's not run by some giant VC fueled company that is driven to make as much money as possible. It's more like a public utility where the cost is distributed among multiple instance owners. However, I am concerned about their rise in costs over time and I hope there is a plan for revenue. I'd be willing to pay.
While I'm here, I hope you all still use reddit a bit and mention Lemmy on there occasionally. I think the community can still grow.
Being able to live without the stigma I created on Reddit by posting about anime and other topics.
Obviously, I posted about anime and people didn’t like it except for one user who was nice enough to sympathize with me before I left.
People on Reddit generally treat me like SpongeBob SquarePants for all I care.
People still treat me the same way on Lemmy sometimes, but I’m more able to deal with it by blocking users who threaten my livelihood.
No censorship
I've been banned from one community here already.
What did you do?
Technically you can create your own instance and post whatever you like, but if all the major instances defederate from you, it's still a form of censorship.
That's subjective, mods are censors. You can host your own though.
This isn’t true at all.