Why does Lemmy feel so fresh compared to Reddit?

I feel like people who moved to Lemmy from reddit are really incentivized to help it grow, so I am constantly seeing encouragements for people to interact / upvote / post content, which is great. I think that the community here is very motivated, and so even though there are less people, you get more engagement.

It's called the honeymoon effect. The sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can acknowledge that lemmy is vulnerable to all the same failings as reddit, and the sooner we can take steps to safeguard against those failings.

If we instead say "no no, lemmy is different, look at how much better things inherently are over here", then we're doomed to go down the same path.

There was a time where the internet was a place for fun. Purely fun! No profit-based platforms, no mass abuse of users, no privacy violating practices, no forced ID verification, and no political correctness censorship enmass.

This age was known as The Golden Age of the Internet. It was something I saw gradually disappear like a frog being slowly boiled in water.

I'd like the hope we can one day come back to this era. The Golden Age was an escape from reality, while this corporate ran bullshit has been nothing but profit focused greed with a constant reminder of reality.

I cannot express in words how amazing the Golden Age was. We never knew we were in it until it was one day gone. Decentralization and freedom from centralized entities may allow the Internet the perhaps return to the Golden Age. An age where the Internet purely exists for everyone to have fun in and be able to express themselves freely without censorship.

Ok so let me throw out some old timer wisdom. This is what the social media/forums/the Internet are like when the cream is skimmed off and the 90% of users who only browse, and the 8% who only vote are gone. Enjoy it while you can. The summer always ends.

This is how Reddit felt 15 years ago. This too can slide in the wrong direction, so we’ll have to be cautious

No repost bots, karma farming, or idiots (mostly). The learning curve to joining the fediverse filters out your average facebook/twitter type that Reddit is filled with today. Lemmy right now is how Reddit was a decade ago

One key difference I found is the lack of user karma. You have no incentive to post something "just to get karma" because there is no global karma on your profile.

This encourages to post what you want to post instead of posting something that someone posted years ago because it's easy free karma

It is still full of geekery: the sociopaths are not yet here. See:

http://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-sociopaths

I noticed two things, along with all the good answers in this thread:

1. There is no such thing as Karma, and I hope it will never be implemented into the fediverse. The reason is that on Reddit Karma was handled like a currency, an in order to obtain Karma, the general quality of the content declined, as a result of Karma-farming. Also it was used as a threshold for posting comments in certain communities. Imagine you could join an instance only when you have a certain ammount of a Karma equivalent. That is something I don't want to see.

2. At this moment there are mostly tech savvy users (former heavy Reddit users) here, who are interested in creating content and participation. Also these folks are helping each other. It feels like a little community. I think, the threshold to join the fediverse is still too high for the average mainstream user. Maybe it will be easier to get started when there are mobile apps.

I think the biggest impact is that the early adopters that have left reddit are the heavy users that respected the flow and community of Reddit. So the good of Reddit has come here, but the general populace and the keyboard warriors haven't figured it out yet, fortunately.

It does feel fresh though, like Reddit did when Digg first ate shit and everyone left for Reddit

It's not run to maximize shareholder value

The type of people to leave reddit over the shenanigans going on are certain demographic. The crowd is different, here, bc we're more likely to deal with a new website that's not run by narcissistic sociopaths even if there's less content.

Because I’m here (see username)

I find it a lot more like old forums, and there is a loooooot less ragebait (post about Matt Walsh and his piss fetish, Tim pool and his homoerotic fascism, etc).

It's very refreshing and I find myself spending less time on here (searching for interesting content) but more time engaging (instead of lurking)

It is indeed refreshing. But not sure how long it will last.

Likely you aren't seeing astroturfing on a massive scale by corporate fiddling and complicit mods. It's not curated to bait you.

As much as I'd love to think otherwise, i think a significant amount of the good feeling and comradery that we're seeing now is due to us being in a bit of a honeymoon phase. You saw the same thing on Mastadon after the Twitter migration, everyone was singing kumbaya and holding hands, but overtime it started to regress a bit (though not nearly as much) towards a more "twitter" feel.

I'm sure over time it'll stop being quite so feel-good and happy, but the fact that it's community run and less centralized will help a lot in the long run i think. A lot of the friction and tension on Reddit was due in one way or another to it's centralization - if you had a popular subreddit that was run by shitty mods, there wasn't much you could do about it. here, you can just create a new version of the same sub on a different instance, and it's a lot easier for people to "move" over to the new one.

I think the lower population helps a lot as well, right now the majority of the people on Lemmy are good faith users who care about the platform and want it to succeed. When you have 100's of millions of users like Reddit does, you're going to get a lot more bad faith users and people who just want generic content to scroll on

I have also noticed the absence of alt-right/populist right-wing people. But that could go under your point 2. It's refreshing nevertheless.

Also less guerilla marketing. Not missing that shit one bit.

Here, people still feel as guests whereas on reddit, people stayed long enough to feel the place is their's.

("old timers shouln't have to deal with this shit again")

Other people have made good points, but one I've noticed is that there's no advertising or profit motive (so far) and there's also no leadership that encourages dark patterns like increasing negative engagement through encouraging stuff like doomscrolling or starting or continuing arguments.

I'm on Kbin, and I like how by default all the notifications are turned off. So people aren't automatically told to respond to every little thing they participate in. If they really care, they have to manually go back on check on things they wrote about or were engaged in. Makes it less likely that people will argue endlessly, lowering the quality of posts and replies, and derailing them with long subthreads of off topic discussions or arguments.

It seems like the people who actually cared about Reddit and the community left for Lemmy (and others). It definitely shows.

Reddit will learn very quickly that there is nothing particularly special about it. It's a forum. With the people who posted and moderated on there being chased away or even banned, there isn't going to be much of value left on Reddit going forward.

Aside of people probably being a few years older. Less bots and astroturfing and I bet most people who moved to Lemmy are not your average mainstream user, usually more informed than average. It's easier to talk to calm people instead of the "whoosh I got you buddy" person. With fewer user the chance to get heard and not drowned by meme and joke replies is also much higher. But when more user join this likely changes.

Agree on all your points! Not trying to sound arrogant here but I think content gets a lot more "bland" with more users, or at least in communities without great passion. It's much more personal here and posts generally puts interesting thoughts in my head as opposed to reddit.

I agree. If lemmy continues to grow, inevitably some servers will be shit, but I imagine there will be other non-federated or less-federated instances. beehaw has already started down that path.

Trolls are generally looking for maximum carnage, so I imagine there's less incentive / reward posting somewhere like lemmy.

You don't have your post deleted for forgetting a minor rule and there's a chance that your post will be seen instead of hidden under countless new posts.

I think it has people with above average reading comprehension because amount of people I saw that said opening a Lemmy account is too hard and they couldn't manage to do it is way too high

There aren't any bots here promoting a narrative, or auto-downvoting people. From around 2015 until its final days, Reddit was manipulated by business and political entities to steer groupthink. Turning off reddit unplugs you from the Matrix, so to speak.

On Lemmy specifically: its a higher barrier to entry, there's less karma chasing here. Especially if you aren't on one of the larger Lemmy instances. It feels like a community and not like karma-whoring. In my preferences, I turned off viewing the number of votes a comment has, which is nice.

This is a group of like-minded, technology-affluent users that most likely have a higher average age than Reddit.

You kind of notice how annoying all that corporate fluff and UI optimized to serve you advertising is when it’s gone.

For me the vibe here resembles that of hacker news. So I’m inclined to think the population here is early adopters and technically inclined.

It's likely all this will change as the user base grows. However there are some distinct advantages.

1. Having instances focused purely on certain topics or ethics makes it so you can join the communities that align with your ideas. while all these communities federate having a home base that aligns with your ethics is important. Also if any particular instance becomes overly trollish there is the option that your instance can defederate from them. While this is not ideal having smaller instances with a more homogeneous community means that it will be easier to lobby for things like that than a monolithic service.
2. people at the moment are focused on building something that is community oriented and that people will want to use. Right now we have mods, power users, tech enthusiasts, and community leaders mostly. We don't have a ton of trolls yet. This will change but I think we can adapt to it.
3. There is a sense of comradery. People are dusting themselves off after the collapse of a former community of bolstering each other. This will wear off. however hopefully by then the service is robust enough that people will have found their new communities and groups that they jive with.

Passion. The people here care enough to have not only left Reddit, but to have made a new community here.

In addition to what everyone has said, Lemmy doesn't have an established culture compared to Reddit. No in-jokes like the poop knife for example

Because it's run by the people for the people! :)

Not to pat ourselves on the back too much but right now it’s mainly the Reddit power users that are here. The normies are wondering why interesting as fuck was flooded with porn as of last night.

I love how when I'm creating a post, it acts as a search box that finds similar already existing posts.

I think it's partially attributable to Lemmy phone apps haven't taken off yet. Phone posting is a different medium than desktop posting with regards to McLuhans "the medium is the message" principle. Phone usage appeals to the lowest common denominator. People use it as a time waste to mindlessly scroll. The cognitive load is much lower. Thus shitty content bubbles to the top because that's all the brain power people are giving it. Phone usage is not conducive to consuming depth of content nor contributing it.

Additionally I think the lower cognitive engagement tends to lead people into greater fuckwad behavior. You aren't on a board with human beings on the other side of a keyboard. It's just a stupid app on your phone.

I think if I'm right then in time Lemmy with death spiral not unlike reddit if phone apps mature and Lemmy apps become a mainstream daily use type of affair. I doubt that will happen without the capitalist engine driving it though.

I have been a user on Mastodon for quite some time but wasn't that active and felt it lacked some content for me. Now that I joined lemmy I learned that mastodon is federated and I learned about kbin! That's what makes it refreshing for me. A lot of new stuff and small communities emerging :)

On reddit, half of the users are bots controlled by various corporations and state departments.

The fediverse is a great system for moderation. I've been on Mastodon for years now and it's stayed pretty pleasant.

I think because everyone has their own corners, the common spaces don't need to be as toxic. Also, Lemmy's population is self selected because of the still high bar to entry. Lemmy basically feels like early Reddit. The hostile influence of moderators and the backlash anger everyone feels from being mistreated by them into silence is not yet here.

I've had more traction on my posts and comments in the month or so I've been on lemmy than the entire 14 years I was on reddit. I'm glad I've moved, couldn't give two shits how it does from here out, I'm away.

I think the lack of a karma equivalent, and thus karma farming, results in much more thought out and unique posts/comments.

Fediverse denizens are really active.

This is absolutely true, and this is how the internet was back in the old days before Big tech and megaplatforms. People would set up little servers on their cable modems using spare laptops. It was experimental, it was imperfect, but it was ours. One side effect of this, was that you had to be at least a little bit smart to get yourself connected to it. Even if that just meant knowing that connecting to it was something that you wanted to do. That weeded out a lot of idiots who contribute low quality discussion. Also, because there is no giant company with a financial incentive to get everybody to use it as much as possible, things were built for raw functionality rather than trying to make them easy for people to get addicted to in 30 seconds. That naturally makes them more usable for anybody with an IQ over 90.

Also, no advertisements. No sponsored posts.

I think there's many contributing factors. I actually was thinking about the same thing before I found your post, and the answer that came to mind outside of some of the ones people posted here was:

It feels like a breath of fresh air because we're outside the Walled Garden. We're not trapped on a platform who's soul has been crushed and wrung for every penny's worth like Reddit or Twitter. And we can see that there is a world on the Internet besides the Walled Garden and that fact is very liberating. It makes you feel like you don't have to go back.

The people aren't assholes. The place is not that big to be totally ruined.

I noticed the same, probably because reddit has become really bad in the last years but I didn't realize it until I joined here a couple of weeks ago.

It's indeed refreshing being able to have honest discussions on a platform that's not infested by bots, propaganda, disguised ads, mass shitposting, hidden agendas, etc.

If lemmy becomes wildly popular to the masses, it's possible things will change for the worse, who knows, but I'll enjoy it a lot in the meantime.

I think it all boils down to an older and more geeky user base.

There are less reposts bc its newer and bc there is a lot less bots

A lot of us have been nofapping reddit for a while so it's it a bit of a release to interact in this familiar way.

I'm a recent reddit semi-convert (haven't left Reddit entirely just yet) and I'm loving it so far

Definitely people here are much more polite, the contrast is just striking.

Because it is?

The negativity is definitely less. Sure, out of say fifty comments to a post there's maybe two disgruntled souls. Overall it's conducive to discussion.

Over on reddit I kept to just hobby subreddits for the most part to make comments. Only way to not come across the trolls.

Yes, the clean UI is wonderful. It's good to have something simple. It's also fun to watch something grow.

Less repost bots. Seriously, I'm pretty sure 1/3 of posts I would see on Reddit were repost bots.

I have noticed similar things, just like you. Here are mine:

1. More respectful, thought-provoking commenters
2. Being early on a fundamentally different site is cool (federated vs centralized)
3. In really small sublemmies (Less than 10 posters I guess) I kinda get the small village feeling, where eventually everyone will know eachother, which is kinda wholesome.

Of course it feels new, because it is new to many people. :-)

I felt like people were seeing my Reddit posts and comments, and I feel like people are here, as well. As with any commenting website or service, as the numbers of commenters grow large you need to be relatively quick to reply if you want many people to see what you write. On Reddit, obviously that means it depended what subreddit you were commenting on. And surely it will be the same or already is the same here.

The UI all depends on what client you're using. In my mind it doesn't feel like the early Internet, but that probably depends on our relative ages.

People are more respectful of each other

Less trolls

I think you mean fewer 😜

Because everything is small and manageable for mods right now, and everyone is talking to everyone else.

Lemmy also has the advantage that the default "hot" sort favors recency instead of upvotes so that you can get into a thread pretty late and still have your comments be seen.

I think right now, there are a lot of passionate old school reddit users on lemmy who are exited about it and eager to participate and who are finding a lot of things they were missing from reddit.

The community is a lot smaller and made up largely of enthusiasts.

I was on Mastodon and Lemmy roughly a year before the Twitter and Reddit fiascos. I never was active on Twitter, never even had an account, but I’ll admit Reddit was my jam. I didn’t even use any of the 3rd party apps, I actually did use their main app and had no issues with it (except for the occasional annoying ad on my mobile device…). But when the needless greed of Spez started to show at the seams and the communities there started to divide, I took an afternoon to delete everything from nearly 4 years of posts/comments.

Both Mastodon and Lemmy were FAR less active prior to these migrations, and so I honestly checked in once every couple months. But then Mastodon started showing up in my main news feeds due to Musk’s idiocy, and I knew it was time…

Similarly, when Spez started to make the same decisions, I already knew where the party was likely to move.

I only started using Lemmy again yesterday when Memmy came out as I dislike using social media from my desktop (though I do occasionally).

It’s nice to see so much more activity here now. It’ll probably never get to the levels of Reddit, but hey that can be a good thing in its own right.

Because

i joined reddit in 2015 when the site was already heaving with content and users. good for killing time and consuming, but not for engaging in the community. right now lemmy/kbin is in the sweet spot where there's enough people to talk to but not so many that i can't be heard.

Yeah man. Lemmy definitely has that early internet feel. I love it. Hope you're having a good day.

Agree, agree, agree, agree!

silky smooth apps. not overwhelmingly populated and serious.

Love it so far! Just waiting for a few communities to make it..

The community size thing is going to be interesting as the space grows. The fact that there are functionally infinite name spaces means that "politics" doesn't just get to become the default politics discussion space for everyone wandering into the place. Lemmy.ca/c/politics can be a very different place than Lemmy.ml/c/politics, which will be very different from lemmy.world/c/politics, which will be very different again from beehaw.org/c/politics.

And you can suppose that everyone will just use the biggest one by default, but I don't think that's necessarily true. The biggest subreddit got that way predominantly because of their name, and there's a good chance that people'll see their local one first, not the biggest. Or that they'll see multiple of them, and end up engaging with multiple communities before they realize what's going on and settle on the one that suits them best.

There will always be a biggest, but there can be a larger number of smaller, lively communities because they don't need to take on names like "r/truepolitics" or "r/onguardforthee" (which is a so very discoverable and intuitive r/Canada alternative).

We'll have to see how the dynamics play out over time.

While sometimes mildly amusing, I don't miss the strings of puns that dominated ~50% of the "discussions" I clicked.

Did we leave the Golgafrincham B Ark behind?