The 4 best Reddit alternatives: Top picks to replace your subreddits - Lemmy is listed first!

Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 405 points –
androidpolice.com
112

Discord for large communities is dumb as shit. There's literally too many people that real communication becomes impossible unless you move to DMs or an empty room.

I spend a lot of time in the r/furry discord server

It's a wonderful place to just chat. Imo, discord is fine as a chatroom

yikes

What is yikes about hanging around with furries?

You know you're in the strange corner of the internet when this isn't getting disliked to hell lol

I mean, fuck all those other corners then

Fuck those corners while wearing a fur suit, you mean

Perhaps made even more so by having been highlighted by a username such as yours, /u/cum.

so. much. this.

Discord is just an AOL chat room. Great for short-term conversations among 20 or fewer people. It's not a good place to store your FAQ. It's not a good place for large teams. It's not a good place for anything searchable. It's transactional. And I don't know why people treat it otherwise.

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As for funding, the servers are supported on a donation basis, with no big corporations behind them. This leads to a problem concerning user data and privacy, as there isn't a single accountable entity behind the network.

Bit of a weird take now, isn't it?

I think both things are valid points, but it's worded in a weird way

A more explicit pro/con would have been better

No big corporation that controls everything

  • Pro:
  • Con:

It's actually not wrong if you look at it in another way.

  • Big tech will abuse your data, but it will do within legal constraints, and there is actuall (though weak) accountability of these companies due to the legal system.
  • On federated services like Lemmy, instances are hosted by anonymous individuals. Most social media laws don't apply to them, and their legal accountability is basically zero.
  • Lemmy, for example, does not comply with GDPR. There is no legal notice, no privacy contact person, no banner asking whether you are ok with the fact that your data is sent to unknown servers in random nations, no nothing. Private messages aren't even encrypted, so any admin can read them without issues.
  • There is no way to actually delete your data, as the GDPR requires. Deleted posts are only marked as deleted and you can see their plain text content by just pressing the "reply" button in any of the apps. There isn't any kind of guarantee, that your post will be deleted on other instances. If federation has problems, the post will remain on other instances and is now permanently undeletable by the user.
  • There are no moderation standards. Some instances will delete nazi content, some basically require nazi content. And some instance admin might even edit your posts to say something completely different. It's all possible and in the hands of random people on the internet.
  • Hobbyist-run services are much worse when it comes to availability and reliability. If something happens while the admin is on holiday, nothing will get fixed. If the admin runs out of money, doesn't care anymore or even dies, the instance with all it's content and users is just gone.

So there are very real risks attached to a hobbyist-run service with no legal accountability and no transparency at all.

We all know the downsides of Big Tech though, so it's everyone's personal choice to figure out which disadvantages hurt them personally more.

That's a bit misleading to say like that. Go to the website, scroll to the footer and click on "Legal". Your instance, feddit.de, has a legal notice, with a privacy contact person, mentioning you can request data erasure, and detailing where your data goes. Mine, lemmy.world, has a number of in depth legal documents attached there.

However, yes, other instances they are federated with might not take it as seriously though, and if all your data is going there too, then that's a hole in your data privacy.

But if I request it there, after its federated everywhere, what happens?

I imagine that this calls for a feature that can erase your data on every other federated server. If the activitypub protocol can send data from one server to another, it should be able to delete it or find a way to disable viewing said data.

Giving servers the ability to delete each others shit would be interesting to watch when an online war breaks out

That already exists. The person who created a post or comment can delete it. But it only works sometimes, since federation is constantly not working correctly.

Eh, that's a mixed bag. Absolutely, one could setup shared delete requests, to federate a delete request, but it would be a bit of a lie as anyone could simply.... update their instance to simply ignore delete requests.

For now, simply not having a delete feature is a more honest to the realities of the fediverse. There'll never be a "true" delete, even if they do eventually support one that's "good enough".

There are two issues with that:

  • The GDPR notice on feddit.de is not GDPR compliant, and the link isn't even visible on mobile.
  • If you request deletion, they can't guarantee that the data is deleted on federated servers. They can send deletion messages, but federation is constantly not working correctly, other instances can decide themselves whether they do delete stuff, and if an instance is unreachable for a while, the deletion message will be dropped.

Lemmy, or even ActivityPub are designed to be non-GDPR compliant. (Probably not on purpose, but the way it works makes it basically impossible to be GDPR compliant.)

Very much this. Plus, how easy will instance admin Joe Schmoe fold under external pressure to give access to certain groups, government bodies etc? And how well have Joe Schmoe implemented good security practices on the server and related things? Etc.

It's kind of fair, to be honest, and the "no big corporation" seems more like a pro than a con

Eh, it is a con when there are problems, service problems, bugs, etc...

My instance have had a few of them and for a while our 1 admin was unavailable.

It is difficult or impossible to get it resolve because there is no contact point, nobody hired to fix issues that need immediate triage, etc... which can result in longer outages or bugs on specific instances.

I'm not complaining. This is a fantastic service that is being offered completely free from actual altruistic incentives, unlike corporations. There are a few downsides though.

Definitely, that's why I always prefer instances with at least two admins, and a Matrix room for status updates

That's great and all.

But feddit.de just became usable again after more than two weeks of being basically unusable - because the 19.0 and 19.1 releases of Lemmy were buggy and there was no downgrade migration possible on the database. No big corporation would break their product for two weeks like this.

Yeah, true. It seems like that is a pro that greatly overshadows the cons. Like someone else pointed out, it's just worded weirdly in the article.

Kind of funny how the privacy crowd is big on Lemmy but it skips over the fact that all of its Lemmy data is hosted on the machines of people that have no accountability...

You're always free to spin up your own server and host it if you're concerned about the way your data is being handled. Not something you can do with the corporate alternatives

But as soon as you interact with literally anyone (or anyone interacts with you) your data is still replicated on other servers.

No personally identifiable information or private account information is transmitted between instances. The only thing that is synced is the content of your posts, reports and up- and downvotes. And all of that serves a purpose and is shared willingly.

And only post on your own instance and talk with users of your own instance... Might as well just send emails to your friends at that point...

Emails also go to other's servers.

But you could just host an IRC server.

I may be naive, but even though I don't personally know my admin, this is a person who has a stellar reputation, and who I'd trust far more than some massive corporation that has to abide(1) by some anemic laws

(1)if it finds it profitable to do so

I think it is a valid point, though. How do GDPRs even work on Lemmy? Do you need to submit one to every instance that your instance is federated with? What about transitively federated instances? Sometimes when you delete something, the delete action doesn't get federated. That's kind of terrifying. If you post something personally identifying without realizing it, then try to delete it, you might not be able to.

Imo, it's something to keep on mind when posting on Lemmy, but not a reason to not use it.

Someone recently reminded me of the privacy issues here on Lemmy. Not so much concerned about my admin, but the inability to delete content was a big concern for me when I was first deciding on a new platform after leaving reddit at the end of June 2023. Sometimes I forget.

It is a good point, and I somewhat regret making that comment. It just was worded oddly in the article.

I used to spend a lot more time on raddle, but my addiction to fresh content is real, and there's just a lot more here than there. Perhaps I should "be the change" and all that noise.

there isn’t a single accountable entity behind the network

Yeah, Instead of a single entity i know will never be held accountable for selling my data and storing my information in an unencrypted txt file, there are unknown entities! Like the Simpsons (d'oh) quote says, "It could even be a boat!"

The illogic reminds me a bit of Google's new targeted ad privacy settings where your "privacy" is google's pinky swear that they alone are profiting from you.

When you see takes this weird do you wonder as i do whether it is intentionally worded to push some kind of narrative (though i don't really know what that would even be in this case), or is it written by someone so deeply in the tech bubble world that they are wildly out of touch? I don't know.

Edit: Family Guy

Re "It could even a boat", that's Family Guy https://youtu.be/GKZJdaiJF84

But your point still stands.

Wow, i can even hear it in that Simpson's "female announcer voice" how many more of my memories are lies?

Thanks for the correction

I gotta look into this Lemmy thing. Sounds right up my alley.

Nah, foget about Lemmy. The name isn’t edgy enough. Just think about Discord, Squabble, Insultr, TauntTornado, FuryFurnace or FistFight.

In that list, only Lemmy has voting or comments in a tree, both key features that make reddit into reddit. If I was going to put together a list of reddit alternatives, those last 3 wouldn't be on it.

Oh, except hacker news. But it's just one topic, people can't make their own communities/groups/subreddits another key reddit feature.

Fuck Reddit, but shouldn't be so excited for external validation. We're doing a good thing building this community, we know that without them signing off.

Good publicity means more traffic, which means more people for community, which means more content, which means the network is more entertaining as a whole (hopefully)

I don't understand this sentiment. We know that, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't get excited over it.

I really like Lemmy's UI and general nicer community. I hope we see more people joining.

Lemmy is great if you love Linux and Star Trek. If you're really into cybersecurity and privacy Lemmy has it all.

I'm into Linux, but also into Factorio and motorcycles.

Lemmy genuinely is a replacement for r/Linux because the activity here is just as high as there.

But there is very few content about Factorio and motorcycles here. They are communities, but they don't really replace the reddit ones, especially r/factorio.

Edit: Almost forgot about incremental games. Basically no content exists on those here.

As a not really techy person but one who has been cruising online for a long long time I feel Lemmy is a lot like old old Reddit. Reddit was full of techies when I joined. It grew over the years into a bigger thing but it started with a bunch of nerds talking about shit I didn't understand.

Yes, I feel the same way. Reminds my of reddit circa '07 back when r/Conservative was an anti-Bush subreddit.

Key strengths of Lemmy

  1. Federation
  2. Tankies
  3. Star Trek memes
  4. Star Trek memes community civil war

Why are tankies a key strength? Or do you mean purely for entertainment value?

Computer, can you expand on the last point please

A prominent /c/Risa shitposter accused the mods of transphobia, loudly quit Risa and started their own meme community (and later deleted the comments after any evidence of transphobia failed to materialize).

Around the same time, a Risa mod removed some particularly low-effort posts despite Risa having "no rules", which upset some users and so they fled to the other guys' meme community.

Now there are two Star Trek themed meme communities.

I read this in Majel Barret's voice and you can't take that away from me

A prominent /c/Risa shitposter

This isn't reddit, you can name names.

Stamets. He actually banned me from the new place after posting a dumb meme he just didn't like (said I was "ban evading"). Did not know about him crying transphobia but it doesn't surprise me, the person has a serious temper issue.

EDIT I forgot he also retroactively removed two AI shitposts posts I made after writing a rule about it (yet didnt remove his own)

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I had been on reddit since 2008, I was looking for an alternative to the message boards I belonged to after the popularity of Facebook killed them off. I really enjoyed it, not the same level of community that you find in a message board but still good for conversation.

Then trump happened and it turned to shit. It's so fucking toxic and I ended up getting banned for defending myself. Apparently fascism is good and standing up for yourself goes against community standards.

I'm a disabled 49 year old just looking for conversation. Facebook is also a toxic wasteland now. To say I miss myspace is an understatement but there's hardly anyone there anymore.

I'm happy whenever I find a place that's put the social back into social media because antisocial media is just trash.

There are dozens of us, dozens!

Squabblr seems like a nest of 13 year-olds trolling each other for fake internet points. Pass.

Oh boy you should see all the drama on r/RedditAlternatives when this shit blew up

Mentioned the Apollo / Reddit saga but did not list Voyager as a client for Lemmy which at least for me has been the closest client in terms of Apollo experience. I know this is Android Police but it did talk about Android and IOS clients in the article.

Currently on voyager. It’s not perfect yet, but as a 7+ year Apollo user I honestly forget I’m not using Apollo/Reddit sometimes. I’d be interested to see if Christian gets involved in a Lemmy client. Apollo was the only app I’ve ever seen that never got worse and just worked in its entire life

Avelon was also showing some promise, at least visually, but I keep coming back to Voyager. I found Avelon had a few annoying little bugs like default theme settings not being remembered etc and Voyager whilst not perfect does the job reliably. It would be great to see Christian involved again especially with all the experience he would bring in like working around YouTube video playback etc.

I’m an Apollo refugee and have tried a number of apps but I keep coming back to voyager (the web app, not the app app). It’s far from perfect but it’s the closest to Apollo imo too.

I'm so glad I finally got into Lemmy. Reddit was destroyed on July 1st but I couldn't get into Lemmy until November because the instances were so fickle.

In the meantime I tried saidit but quickly discerned that most of the users there were just really bad Reddit rejects. like the worst of the worst Reddit rejects.

Glad Lemmy finally let me in.

i actually prefer to browse lemmy from a mastodon account but it probably isn't for everyone: iget every comment on a subscribed community in reverse chronological order in one feed.

Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit like MotherJones is an alternative to Fox News. It’s just more of the same from a different bias.