Anyone else feel that Lemmy just *isn't* addictive?

It's not supposed to be. It doesn't jam endless recommendations in your feed once you've gotten at the end of the new, fresh content. I feel like it's a feature, not a bug, to have platforms that don't optimise for time spent on them, because they don't need our attention to show us ads.

Agree'd, people aren't contributing enough so it seems dead after a 30min check per day (might not be a bad thing).

If lemmy is to thrive and survive, post, comment and start discussions. That's what is addictive and provides value.

For me at least, there’s just not enough content. Not enough communities, with not enough posts with not enough comments. Lemmy still hasn’t reached that tipping point where it can replace sites like Reddit. It fluctuates, but I think it is on the way.

Social media addiction comes from algorithms designed to psychologically manipulate you into scrolling endlessly to maximize ad impressions. It's not a good thing.

For me I think it’s the niche communities aren’t built up yet. If I’m looking for a conversation about a specific football team or game, etc there isn’t as much content here that I can find on Reddit.

Because it’s kinda dead… I won’t go back to Reddit but Lemmy doesn’t scratch the same itch Reddit did. This is my first comment on Lemmy by the way.

I feel that I am wasting more time on Lemmy than on Reddit because here the community is more to my liking (foss and linux)

Only because I can read the whole thing significantly faster than Reddit.

I see no videos or gifs on here, which is a huge addiction factor

Be patient.

Lemmy is still establishing itself as the goto replacement for Reddit. New communities are popping up all the time and more users will come.

Lemmy has zero monetary gain from you being addicted to the platform unlike Reddit.

Lemmy's smaller community means that there's not an endless stream of content to keep you hooked.

Even with millions of active users though I don't see Lemmy being nowhere near as addicive as Reddit

I feel like that's the point? Lemmy doesn't profit from wasting our time, so it has no interest doing so. This means more time for me to do productive things.

Too much repeated content on my feed. I like it, but I need to be able to auto hide previously viewed posts for this platform to be the kind of doomscroller reddit was.

I check it 2-3 times a day, feel happy. I don't feel the need to check it 30 times a day. I'm happy.

I think reddit applies an algorithm to put content in your feed that they know you want or like or interact with. That will make it more addictive. Lemmy is just grabbing stuff for you, period, with no personalized algorithm as far as I know. I could be wrong but I think thats why it feels different.

reddit manipulates their users just like Facebook and tiktok etc.

On Reddit when i browse r/all I I keep getting surprised on the different communities that exists. On lemmy so far I mostly see tech related stuff. I've ended up browsing both reddit and lemmy.

I feel like it's visiting a friendly village I love rather than getting lost in a city that's interesting because it's awful. Honestly, I come here as much as I did reddit at this point. Less flashy. More endearing.

I have actually been using Lemmy a lot more the past few days. I haven't had discussions this good on the internet in years. There's no karma so people don't spam the same jokes over and over again, It's actually really good, well constructed discussion most of the time.

There's way less content, and most of it is pretty nerdy due to the userbase.

There will never be a poop knife, or chili soap, or any of that here

I mean, yea, there isn't nearly as much interesting content. And with the way the "Everything" sort works you end up seeing the same thing 100 times across the 100 different similar subreddits each instance has. Honestly lemmy kind of sucks as a reddit replacement. Trying to find the next option.

Yes and no, I feels like it absolutely could be as addictive as Reddit but there just isn't enough content being generated for me to powerscroll for hours only to do the same thing the next day

I thought that, then I put Sync on my phone, and now I can lost an hour or more unintentionally, just... scrolling...

But that's the app. When I'm desktop or web app, I find it much easier to check out without getting totally sucked it.

Which reminds me. Should probably get back to work now.

It feels the same to me, but with less jackasses. So it's better.

Yeh I agree. But also, this is good, no?

I'm not saying I want an algorithm, but "hot" or "active" needs to be better at showing things other than memes

Yes, but I consider that a good thing

It's a mix of not neverending content (yet) and it's not designed to keep you in. I'm sure Reddit has had people who only work on increasing the doom scrolling.

Actually, I've found just the opposite - I've been more likely to spend more time on lemmy/kbin over the last couple of months than I spent on Reddit in years.

It got to the point that I'd just pop onto Reddit, look around, see the same basic variety of botspam, astroturfing and concern trolling, and go do something else. It wasn't even worth posting anything, since any response I got was almost certainly going to be from a bot or a human-who-might-as-well-be-a-bot, and it was going to be the same thing either way - just some shallow bit of stock rhetoric that at best might be sort of tangentially related to what I actually said.

But then I came here and rediscovered the pleasure of reading posts written by actual people who actually think about what they're saying, who will actually read and think about what I actually say in response, then write a response that they've actually thought about.

And that was it - I was hooked in a way I hadn't been for years on Reddit.

That said, it's nowhere near as good now as it was a few months ago, and I have been less active recently. The last big migration in particular, after the API changes went into place, led to both more bots and more humans-who-might-as-well-be-bots, and the quality here went sharply downhill.

It's still better than Reddit though. And it's been improving again of late.

I think it's a combination of less presence/engagement in niche content, sorting methods not quite being there, and not enough discovery without going out of band to find things

One thing I really miss is the science groups, askscience always had great debate that I haven't yet found here

There is less content to scroll. That's all.

Less niche communities. Don't worry. Doom scrolling is ready to pounce.

It definitely would be to me if there was more diverse content, I usually stop scrolling after seeing the same news articles reposted over and over again, posts that have been in my feed since yesterday, and one too many posts about Linux/FOSS or whatever.

I still love it for what it is, but it can't keep me interested for as long as Reddit did yet.

I took July off from any of this stuff. After Sync released (my preferred app before), I've come to lemmy to try to see how it's going, but honestly, I've lost most of the desire to blindly browse random stuff like I did.

Reddit uses algorithms to drive engagement. I mean, not old.reddit, but regular reddit. Lemmy doesn't.

Basically, modern Reddit, like other big name social media, is specifically designed to be addictive because it's evil. Lemmy isn't.

Endless content can definitely lead to a more addictive platform. Because it's trying to encourage more users to generate their own content, there's certainly less of it, bit definitely less garbage to wade through.

That said, I feel that I'm learning more, sharing more, and interacting with others more.

It's also much nicer than R×ddit, because I've seen so much less: ragebait, fake stories, sensationalism, intentional factual inaccuracies/disinformation, shilling, shitty bots, etc.

I find it just addictive enough. There are definitely lulls in activity, but they're short-lived and I have things I should be doing besides shitposting so it's actually helped me.

The quality, however, is much higher. This can be very subjective, but I do have some real world evidence. The number of times I'd show someone a meme and have them say "Please send that to me" has definitely gone up since I switched to the fediverse.

For me a big thing is that because Lemmy is so small, it's not diverse. It's mostly liberal-to-leftist nerds from America and Western Europe. I roll my eyes and scroll past whenever there's a post about any Asian country because you know it's just gonna be a bunch of foreigners (whose exposure to the country is limited to news headlines) pretending they know anything. And unlike Reddit there are seldom any locals available to set people straight.

And that’s a good thing.

It's just a lack of posts and comments. It's not busy enough here to allow for endless scrolling.

I felt the same and it's good. I guess that's the upside of no algorithm.

I don't know why but personally lemmy is much more addictive than reddit. The content makes me discover more relevant things and with reddit I felt like been in a loop with always the same content or not relevant content maybe the threads I subscribed to were not the bests.

I find it very addictive actually, at least the endless scrolling lasts a bit longer than in Reddit, tho there is still more top stuff on Reddit (bcs there is more content that gets distilled into good content, whereas I feel like on average I see better content on Lemmy).

Tho if I need some technical review of some obscure product, Reddit is still where I look it up.

I am kinda glad, and it reminds me of early Digg. When I first used Digg, it didn't tailor the order or content of anything to you, it didn't use an algorithm to keep throwing content at you, changing the order of what you see, and Lemmy reminds me of this.

I'm not here up be addicted or scroll endlessly, if anything, Lemmy feels healthier, like I can walk away and do something else.

Eeeh, nope. It's 6:25AM and I already spent 2 hours on Lemmy.

Yes, i feel the same and I love it.

It wasn't until I started using sync, and my scrolling time skyrocketed.

I can't meet ya on that brother, I don't comment very often, but I feel like I'm terminally on here. I do wish more non-tech related stuff popped up in my feed, but that's the flavor of Lemmy for now I guess. All in all, I like it here

With Connect app it's exactly like Reddit. Maybe you need to subscribe to more sublemmy or scroll on global and not local. It's literally the same as Reddit minus the amount of reposts, astroturfing and a little less negative. Maybe you miss that?

the fediverse definitely is not as addicting as reddit and i stopped doing reddit so now it feels like my mental state is improving because of it.

Cut out Reddit completely if you haven’t already, that helps a lot.

Reddit is so much bigger, but if you remove that competition to cure the same “itch”… you’ll be here more.

Nah, Lemmy is just a tighter experience.

Are you interpreting that as bad or good? It was clear there was some fuckery going on at reddit for the past many years, increasing rage/anger, bots everywhere, engagement focused bullshit.

Is "doom scrolling" a thing you want to be doing? I'm not implying "you could be doing something better with your time" because it's your time to spend. But at the same time, change is good, right? Maybe instead of having one active platform, mix lemmy up with mastodon? Or start watching every Crash Course and Sci Show video that exists. Look up ZeFrank and dash down that rabbit hole for a couple years.

Just enjoy the detox.

There are a lot of channels that are missing from what i did back in Reddit. Many i have no interest in modding so they most likely wont show up for a long time.

What I find sad is that on Reddit I was on lots of tech stuff, but also just talking with random tran drivers, firemen, cyclists, and meme people.

On Lemmy its mostly just tech.

Right now the biggest barrier for me is the interface. Too many instances favor this very spread out, low information density, optimized for mobile (but not really) look, and group information in ways that are irksome. A certain amount can be fixed by user styles, but some functionality can't, like on kbin when I click on reply notifications and am not actually taken to the context of my reply because the comments have split across multiple pages even though I've set my preferences to infinite scroll. If I'm on another instance, clicking context gives me... well, not the context of my comments, just the damn comment and a series of "load parent comment" links to click. It's, well, irksome.

Most of my gripes aren't insurmountable, but that doesn't change the fact that right now every instance is a little janky to use.

The big difference for me it's the overall lack of comment interaction on posts here. I was addicted to reddit not because of the content but because of the community interaction below the content.

Side note: Just now my phone keyboard did NOT autocorrect to reddit. It appears I have finally doesn't enough fine away from their for my phone to recognize it.

Most of my time on Reddit was because of the constant flow of actually new content and "new to me" content (binging subreddits that I had just found out about).

Lemmy only has a constant flow of actually new content and it's slower.

There are so many automated bots posting links every couple of minutes. I feel like I sometimes have to wade through tons of garbage to get to interesting posts. I've been blocking tons of bots and communities but it still feels like it takes effort to find content which isn't what I want. I want somewhere that I can find interesting content when I'm taking a shit. Lemmy isn't quite there yet.

It's really good in small doses, like early Reddit used to be. You can quickly exhaust the best posts of the morning/afternoon/evening before you're basically browsing by "new".

It reminds me of the times when reddit would get notably slower and weirder during certain times of the day. Before it became an endless 24/7 stream of content.

I like it but yeah there's a lot less users so less content. Hopefully it keeps growing and the communities get more active.

For me it's a little bit more addictive than Reddit since I get more comment replies. This is probably just because I stay away from any big subs on Reddit though.

Lemmy is definitively less addicting than Reddit, but it is still addicting, because it uses the up-/downvote mechanism.

I think it's primarily because Lemmy doesn't recommend content, whereas Reddit does. (Reddit isn't as blatant as other social media, but I feel like they do recommend content.) I find that I actually have to go out of my way to search for new communities to subscribe to or more content to consume. It's a bit hard and takes time. But I think it's overall healthier to have control over what you see and can't see.

In any case, if/when Lemmy picks up in activity, I don't expect that we'll need recommendations as much to find new content

I guess this would be just as addictive once gifs and video work as expected, and we start seeing tons of short videos.

Lemmy is down too often to be addictive

There a few things that we just haven't crossed the threshold for yet that I found engaging (if not "addictive") at Reddit, several of which were live threads about an event (NFL/NBA/Soccer/F1/etc). We're not big enough here for that yet, where Mastodon is (you can get awesome interaction on hashtags about topics while they're happening). The other thing was when a post got popular you could scroll through hundreds of comments with at least some thought behind them, and here it's more like 10-25. The content is often better here, there is just less of it. Which is fine for me, it's just a slightly different experience than I was having at Reddit, but I think some of those things will come with time.

There is less content here than Reddit because there are less users here—less users creating content each day. Each of our comments and posts have far more weight and impact on the Fediverse because of this. The more we push ourselves to engage, create posts, or moderate communities when we normally wouldn’t before, the faster we will see Lemmy grow!

Less content, and the sorting seems to favor posts that are getting comments rather than new and rising posts. So you frequently have posts over a day old that stay at the top slots of your feed

Lemmy has pretty much replaced my other social media scrolling. I probably spend about the same amount of time here as I used to spend flicking between fb and reddit, but I spend more time reading and interacting here.

Weird that I'm actually more engaged with a platform that doesn't really have an aggressive engagement algorithm.

Doom scrolling wasn't there in the early days of reddit. Lemmy is still new. I think people just had high hopes and expectations that lemmy would be a 1 to 1 replacement for reddit, but that was never going to happen. Reddit has had years to grow and optimize while lemmy is just a fledgling with a niche user base.

Also I think lemmy is missing that hook or gimmick to get, for lack of better words, the attention seekers here that will make posts and content just for upvotes or to show up on everyone's front page. Not saying lemmy needs to be reddit, but I do think it needs a little extra something than just being a decentralized reddit alternative.

That's the best part!

I have a habit of scrolling during downtime during the day but I don't have an attachment to lemmy specifically. One thing I like about this app is how mundane a lot of the posts seem, it's not overly exciting and doesn't cause tiktok-style dopamine addiction.

All forms of social media could be argued as being addictive to some degree but lemmy IMO is relatively harmless. Though there is something to be said about rage farming, many of the posts seem to be negative or anger-inducing in some way, but it's not bad compared to many other platforms. And of course there is the ability to filter your feed by blocking certain communities but the personalization in that regard isn't as good as reddit was.

it hasn't attracted grifters who could "addictify" content to post yet perhaps?

Like you know it's like health food, before people add extra sugar and salt and whatever to have people eat too much

Have you tried snorting it?

Reddit is crack ... because it took years of cocaine use before users converted it into crack

Lemmy right now is just cocaine .... just keep using it for a few years and you'll eventually start turning the cocaine into crack ... it's still an addiction but right now we believe that we can manage the addiction and use it and not use it at will .. give it time and we will eventually get to the point of doom scrolling endless content like a helpless crack addict. Enjoy Lemmy while you can, we are building a tolerance and we will eventually want to ramp up our usage in a few years and whore ourselves out for the next hit.

It seems good enough to pass the time to me. But the niche communities on here just aren't as active, or the discussions not as rich. For example the stable diffusion sub I visit hardly gets traffic, and it's mostly people posting pictures. Whereas on Reddit, the was more news and discussions about workflow and resources.

It's gotten addicting to me. But not the same way reddit was. I'm glad there's not much politics here.

Although hexbear being federated is like having an angry toddler in the house crying over spilled milk. I've yet to see a post from them that doesn't sound like it's coming from a basement dungeon computer room.

You say this like it's a bad thing.

Lemmy isn't giving you that dopamine hit you want? That's likely due to the smaller nature of the Fediverse. Enjoyable content without the feeling your missing something.

Nah mate I'm refreshing the Top Hour sort every 30 minutes

I got stuck in a scroll-loop while trying to go to bed last night... granted, I broke out of it faster than I usually would on Reddit.

That's because there's no drama here. On reddit there's non stop controversy and sub drama and that kind of shit is addicting whether you realize it or not.

Do any apps provide native notifications yet? I'd love to get alerts in my notifications bar rather than having to open the app and go through each account.

I never thought Reddit was addictive. I actually spend more time on Lemmy in a day than I did on Reddit. My browsing habits changed though. Reddit is so big I only looked at a few niche subreddits. Lemmy being much smaller I view a much wider range of topics. It's a different and better experience for me.

I think it's just less well curated content due to fewer users because after some amount of time you get to the posts with a low number of upvotes. Just a scale thing.

That said I kinda prefer it.

if u havent realized:
lemmy tends to be significantly more appealing/valuable to some niches that have strongly established,enthusiastic, talented userbase (such as tech ppl).
it's a minor satisfaction boost but beneficial. if maybe u dont fullheartedly believe in the lemmy mission(free nonprofit decentralized platform), then it seems, additionaly, less satisfying

to build up other unique /c/'s requires: initiative, light work/time, [and usually..] motivation to post.

i personally [tend to..] only post or comment on things im interested in. sometimes thats only linux and android.

when a site like reddit is ranked top site on the inrernet. everyone can be lazy and contribute once a year and thats still more than enough(when u consider scale). there are also a shitton of negatives to that. but they are ignored and swept under the rug.

I spent more time here than on Reddit ಠ_ಠ

The load is spread in different apps though.

No bots or people posting the same videos/posts that get 1k+ karma trying to make money by selling accounts.

I never actually had a Reddit account so there wasn't an opportunity for them to customise a feed to me. That being the case after getting a bumch of random communities subscribed via bot the 'all' feed here seems to largely resemble Reddit for the non-logged in. The only part that's a bit oboxious is the multi-comminity posting where one user sends the same thing to a similar community on mutiple hosts. Hopefully at some point there's a way to create some kind of multi-homed community so they're not so independent of each other.

reddit is driven by primitive monkey brain attraction as shown through popularity.
perhaps subs make the addiction more finely tuned to similarly minded peeps.

lemmy has less than infinite content and a less mainstream non-[purely]hedonistic culture.

Just wait. I'll check with you and find out if you're still "sober" in '25

!Remindme 2 years... (I think they have something like that. Can't remember the exact tag).

I probably spend just as much time on lemmy/kbin as I did on Reddit. The biggest difference is most of my time then was based on consuming content and fishing for any kind of interaction and approval I could. Here I feel like I spend most of my time creating, and interacting with other users who are invested in helping the fediverse grow.

There are definitely less active moments here, but those are the times I usually try to fill in the void with my own content, give someone's community or post a boost so that they see more interaction, and engage in one of the discussions being had in the threads of more active posts.

Plus whenever I'm starved for content, I go over to new, upvote posts as I go, and I usually find something interesting.

For me it's the ridiculous amount of alt left/communist comments in EVERY thread. Even blocking the worst offending instances I still get a frankly insane amount of comments from delusional people thinking we should all give up our personal possessions and everyone just magically have access to everything at no cost to anyone.

this is some really good awareness, i think.. and that other thing is getting worser and worser for some reason..

No. https://tenor.com/view/its-me-im-the-problem-taylor-swift-problem-taylor-im-the-problem-gif-26994473

Perhaps you require more ragebait?

If so, you're stupid, your thought is stupid and your choice in underwear is stupid.

I get addicted by farming downvotes now. Because imaginary internet points are so useless. Why get karma when you can get negative karma?

Psst. You see that ⬇️ arrow? Give it a press, please.