Finally deleted my reddit account after the AI news. What communities do you recommend on lemmy?

mesamune@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 700 points –

Ive been on reddit for more than a decade. Kinda bittersweet, but its not the first time I have moved on from an internet site. I just cant support reddit and sucking up all my posts for AI purposes. Feels terrible and spammy. Ive been a reddit premium holder for many many years.

Anyways, what communities do you recommend?

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Welcome to Lemmy!

I found that a large number of communities have been named after popular, and less popular, subreddits. So I found them easy to find. There was an old r/Redditalternatives post that has a decent range of communities to start out, which I've copied below. It is similar to the default subreddits.:

*Note:*The "World" hyperlink takes you to the Lemmy.World communitiy.

General

News/Politics

Pets and such

Gaming

TV and Music

Pics and Art

Technology and Science

Sports

Others

Oh, by the way: If you're a fan of the classic "Old.reddit.com" look, the Programming.Dev instance has an identical interface: https://old.programming.dev/?sort=Hot&listingType=All .

It's federated with Lemmy.World so all the same posts will appear. I'm partial to that on Desktop browser, and stick with https://p.lemmy.world for mobile.

It works on lemmy.world as well!

https://old.lemmy.world/

Yeah both lemmy.world and us have the same alternate frontends at the same subdomains (apart from voyager in which they went for m for mobile and we did v for voyager)

Links for all four of them

These front ends already added a lot of value for me than Reddit when using the desktop site.

The only thing that is unfortunate about the old.lemmy.world site is that the block feature is broken. I try to curate my All feed by blocking spammers and communities I am not interested in, but nothing happens when you click the Block button on any post.

Interesting, I tried a simple test with a user and it worked fine, blocked them on the first attempt. I actually had difficulty unblocking them later, though, I don't think it "stuck" and had to refresh and/or navigate to a different page, and then unblock them and it worked

/shrug

Sweet! I didn't know about Old.lemmy.world. Thanks so much!

I would actually recommend !anime@ani.social instead. The admins of lemmy.ml are weirdly hostile towards anime, but ani.social is an anime-specific instance.

Thanks for this! I've been here since the 3rd party app shutdown and this is great!

@AGD4 great list!

@mesamunefire once you get your head around how to use urls from your instance, another useful directory is the Kbin Collections - like multireddits.

These are basically multis that Kbin users curated and made public so that others from kbin can subscribe to them, but since it lists all the communities you can manually add what you want in your lemmy.world account.

I'm kind of new here too, why do all these communities have both a lemmy.ee and lemmy.world version? Is it just that someone happened to set them up on both instances so now there's two, or is there some kind of crosspost/mirroring going on?

Just switch between all and subscribed, and subscribe to communities you like. It won’t be long before you have a decently curated subscribed list.

Don’t be afraid to block communities so they don’t show up in All.

You should expect things to work more like the early Reddit days when there weren’t a lot of subreddits.

I want to stress that you are expected to block communities you're not interested in.

There's no content curation between instances (an instance is like a niche mini-reddit, but seamlessly connected to this one), so you will end up with US Politics next to Furry porn, next to Star Trek memes, next to NZ local news, next to sports statistics, next to AI Porn, unless you start blocking.

Upside is you can get great science content, AND local news, AND your favorite porn, AND your brand of shitpost/memes in your feed/subscriptions without any hassle.

So. Much. Furry. Porn.

I e basically gotten to a point where my subscriptions make up such a long list of things I’m even tangentially interested in that I don’t even browse all anymore. I locked so much of the furry porn, but maybe opening all of the communities to block them manually made my feed think I was into it?

Lemmy doesn’t cater the All feed to you like other social media platforms - it doesn’t take into account which posts you open, which posts you upvote, etc.

I'm new here. I never realized how much I've always hated the entire concept of an algorithm until now. This is amazing.

It's almost all on a couple instances. I don't remember if lemmy supports instance blocking yet, but several apps do, so it's a lot easier to block that way.

Lemmy supports instance blocking as of version 0.19. Some clients also support instance blocking for pre-0.19 instances.

My client is just set to not display nsfw posts. I never see it and I've blocked very few communities.

There's no algorithm feeding you content on Lemmy, which I think most of its denizens regard as a good thing. I certainly do. You've got to self-curate! Of course, some of the curation occurs at the instance level, with admins defederating other instances. But you're free to make accounts on any number of instances, or even host your own! I think Lemmy's really grown on me.

And yeah, there's lots of furry porn, if you're into that.

I started an alt account on here for the porn subs and went to a porn specific instance, and my god, that was a lot of blocking, almost not worth the effort compared to what I have on my Reddit porn account.

My biggest peeve is people who start many dozens of porn starlet comms with a handful of posts, or celebrity stalking comms with a handful of posts, or the myriad US sports teams fed by some bot.

I wish there was a way to just block whole categories of comms, now I've had to resort to blocking the user starting them, which seems like overkill.

My biggest pet peeve is when an up and coming thot takes one pic and spams it everywhere.

I end up blocking a ton of content creators as a result of that. I don't need to see your same exact pic in 20 different communities.

There are tons of moe-related anime communities that annoy the hell out of me. It’s insane and stupid af.

This is pretty good advice. Also, by “early Reddit days“ they mean 18 years ago, “early Reddit days,” not, “when you were new to Reddit.“

To add to this, block users too. The community is so small here that you start to recognise names of annoying people and trolls. I'm all for a robust discussion, but if I know someone is always going to argue in bad faith or they're literally here just to stir shit, it's just easier to block them. Didn't really work with Reddit, but here it's got a decent impact.

I've blocked so many users who ONLY post negative news stories. And porn.

I use different sites for those, tyvm.

I'm not gonna name names, but imo Lemmy already has a couple of its own Gallowboob-types who just mass repost any and every shitty meme they see to multiple communities, and have already gotten high off their minimal Lemmy-celebrity status. I get Lemmy needs content, but personally I have no interest in seeing Lemmy just become a place for Reddit hand-me-down memes. So yeah, there are definitely a few users that blocking them will significantly improve your Lemmy experience.

edit: typo

Unless yee be thee knights who shan’t let the filth slide 🫡 not without a fair comment back.

It’s not everybody’s job!

But if your mental health can take it, not blocking anybody should make this place more inviting to others, especially new users. (Quick example would be a news story about a politician where there are only a few top level comments which all miss the mark. If I see them, I can call them out, which means a newcomer perusing the comments Is more likely to think Lemmy a place for high-quality discourse.)

Like I said, it's repeat offenders that I block. I'm not blocking everyone I disagree with our anything like that. There's some edgelord Reddit behaviour occasionally and I'd prefer that stayed back there.

Haha oh yah.

Well, the very worst of the worst are the #1 folks I’ll try my best never to block. The more prolific the moron, the more impact I can have as a part of the chorus of sanity!

Cheers :)

I can block from all? .... thats great news!

That's how I did it. Many of the Reddit subs have counterparts here.

Just to piggy back you can also block entire instances, which becomes more useful when using discovery sorts like scaled. Like if the entire instance is in a language you don't speak, block that shit!

I'd use Lemmy Explorer to find communities that interest you. The link I just shared is sorted by subscriber count, so it should show the most active communities at the top.

It also auto searches "trees" FYI

That's kinda hilarious. I was looking for cannabis related communities too. Believe it or not, I haven't had any cannabis today, either. 😄

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I think that hobby communities here can all benefit from having more members. If you have interest in starting out in any of these communities I am always around, and I know there is a small but dedicated base here.

!battletech@lemmy.world

!warhammer40k@lemmy.world

!oldhammer@lemmy.world

!tabletopminis@lemmy.world

The Star Wars community is a place I have a personal interest in making somewhere positive to talk about the parts of Star Wars people really enjoy. I’m happy to see that it has started to take off more over time.

!star_wars@lemmy.world

Communities about history and oddities are also places where kids and core members have really done a lot to make the community a place with a foundation.

!forgottenweapons@lemmy.world

!historyporn@lemmy.world

Honestly, the communities right now are so small I can't really recommend them. I just browse all.

I miss reddit because you could have an extremely niche community with 10,000 people contributing. It's hard to get 10 people going here.

Hopefully reddit will keep fucking up and lemmy will grow. I really like it here with no ads but miss feeding my niche interests on the reddit subs. Most have subs here but they are just empty.

I was on reddit since 2006, and left a year ago.

Lemmy pretty much sucks because of a lack of content. The communities are there, but they're...sooooo quiet.

Join the communities you're interested in and ENGAGE!

Same.

Not just is there a lack of content here, but the echo chamber effect is so much worse here than it was on Reddit.

Just wanted to thank everyone recommending communities to subscribe to. I thought I had a good mixture already. Discovered a dozen new ones just based on the comments here!

It's honestly still small enough that anything with a few upvotes shows will appear in the main feed. I've just scrolled through and followed as I saw things I'm interested in, and blocked things I don't ever want to see.

If you want something to laugh at, check out the following.

General

Text Based

Video Based

Movie and TV Show

As someone who mostly left behind a 13 y/o reddit account with a ton karma when the api nonsense happened, the fuck is reddit premium?

You've never heard of Reddit Premium in 13 years? It's the paid account that got rid of the ads and used to give you a few hundred coins per month. It was like $60/year.

I thought reddit gold was the paid account. I haven't heard of these coins either.

Gold was the standard award up until those in charge saw that they could get more money from people by creating other awards. Coins were the virtual currency used to buy the awards.

I made the switch a few days ago too and I’m already loving it. The people saying sort by all and subscribe/block as needed are on the money, really easy to curate a selection of good stuff. Content and engagement is more organic here it seems.

I’m about to delete the rest of my social media and jump on mastodon/pixelfed/peer tube etc. good luck and welcome to the federation!

Lemmy is very small in comparison, although every time reddit manages to do another silly thing Lemmy grows leaps and bounds. It's a slow investment in a better internet, and it's going to take a long time to slowly show the world that corporations don't have to control everything on the internet.

That being said I'm partial to !cranetrainexcavators@lemmy.world , it's rockin' (...and climbin', and glidin')

Can we get a bit more info on your likes and interests? What subreddits did you subscribe to? I'm happy to recommend some but since I enjoy things like !metalmemes@lemmy.world that have dependencies such as being a metal fan, knowing a bit more about what you're looking for will help.

But regardless, welcome aboard and I hope you like Star Trek and Linux references!

  1. Sort by new
  2. Subscribe to stuff
  1. Block stuff you don't want to see. I block porn, sports & country specific ones that I do not speak the language.

I prefer to sort by either hot or active, then I sort by New once I’ve run through everything. But you do you.

Agree, I start my day on active, but once I've seen all those I do top six hours, then new.

I start with hot, then go backwards through those. I like to start general and then go granular.

Welcome fellow ex-pat

What subs did you like and maybe we can help find substitutions.

One thing to note is that anything you do on the fediverse is visible in the activitypub so be mindful of that if there’s aspects of your online identity you want to keep private.

Not that it’s less secure than putting everything on Reddit but what you “like”/“upvote” and dislike/downvote show in the activity log even if your client/site doesn’t necessarily show it.

For me it’s no big deal but thought I’d just add the caveat.

So what kind of stuff do you like/looking for?

If you like star trek you’re in luck as there’s

!tenforward@lemmy.world

!risa@startrek.website

!startrek@startrek.website

I like 3d printing so there’s

!functionalprint@kbin.social

!3dprinting@lemmy.world

Welcome!

See this post on !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca for a guide how to find communities / resources that help

https://lemmy.ca/post/11285664

I recommend subscribing to more things that you might have on Reddit, and hunting around on the pages linked above for stuff related to your interests

To be honest, I doubt that any kind of wiping posts from reddit at this stage will help with this AI deal, before the deal was made, Reddit probably took a snapshot of the database, and is selling that.

Why would they risk user's sabotaging their big payday? Also, doing it this way makes it much easier to quantify the data they are selling since they are working with a static database dump and not a live database that keeps changing.

The historical snapshot is not worth that much because it is already available for free, there are torrents etc. The deal is iirc an ongoing payment for access, which will be relevant because AI trained on old data is always going to be stuck in the past.

Ah, I missed it was an ongoing payment, I thought it was a single payment for a db export, then it makes sense to erase comments

I just want to say that creating a precedent of not allowing AI models to train on free content essentially means that when the models get cheap enough for average joes to train their own, average joes won’t be able to.

We’ll have to use the models owned by huge corporations with deep pockets, because those will be the only legal ones.

Also, if people think that Lemmy posts won't be trawled by content farmers looking to train their AI, I've got a bridge to sell them.

Reddit's deal is about locking content away from trawlers until they pay for it. Here, it's free for all of them. They can even set up their own servers and the fediverse will deliver it to them in real time.

Also, if people think that Lemmy posts won’t be trawled by content farmers looking to train their AI, I’ve got a bridge to sell them.

Yeah that's the thing, part of the reason why I'm so confused. Reddit can literally just crawl any posts on Lemmy, it's exactly the same in that sense. Public is public, after all.

That’s a sort of realpolitik view of the web, based on using tech and engineering convention to control information flow on the web.

But the web standards we’ve used to regulate things aren’t in agreement with the new legal framework people are trying to implement, and if we allow them to make their legal argument unopposed, they will add new layers to the tech to change web standard behavior into dystopian centrally controlled network behavior.

I agree the web is an open platform, and I agree that copyright law is clear. But these people are not operating on trying to follow existing rules. They’re trying to create new rules, and they have the power to do so.

And no, they do not RTFM . They think a greenfield rewrite is the best move for society, because they have zero respect for the engineering decisions of yesterday, not for the challenge or the value of maintaining existing systems.

Maybe I just haven’t had enough coffee yet, but I’m having a hard time determining which side you’re on. Are you saying it’s good that reddit is doing this?

I see myself as advocating for one set of ideas out of a sea of ideas and an ocean of such sets. Sides are for basketball games.

Generally speaking, I’m a libertarian but to me the word is about liberty not lack of responsibility.

I’ll take:

  • UBI
  • Free drugs
  • Corporations competing with one another to provide basic necessities
  • Personhood granted liberally. When it doubt, give it rights
  • AI being trained on copyrighted material
  • AI or its owner being taken to task when the AI publishes copyrighted material verbatim without attribution
  • A free market specifically because freedom allows the little guy to get ahead before the big guy builds the mechanism to keep him down
  • Simple government
  • Red commits

Your posts are public. Your lemmy data can be pulled to train AI too.

Of course, it's just less likely since Lemmy isn't owned by a (now) publicly traded company that is a shadow of its former self.

It’s likely less likely because the user base and SEO isn’t at Reddit’s level. That said, it’s ripe for the picking. Freely available data for Gen AI, and the admins don’t have a legal team like Reddit.

I think it's also a smidge less likely in the sense that the data would have to be accessed/scraped from many different instances, as opposed to the sort of bulk data reddit seems to be selling. So I'd say protection from AI is much the same as lock protection. Someone can almost always pick the lock, but if you deter folks they'll look for easier targets. If you want to ensure none of your words are used by AI, post nothing.

Wouldn't an AI company simply set up their own instance to have all content federated to it? I don't see any barriers to hoovering up the content here.

Bingo. No need to ask for permission, no rate limits, documentation/source accessible. I would have zero surprise to find out some engineer from an AI corp had made some pull requests to fix bugs or performance issues that would be mutually beneficial for us users and their collectors.

We need to save people from reddit. Ask other users to join Lemmy. People who create memes should flood Facebook, instagram etc with memes to move to Lemmy

Fediverse postings are probably also being used for AI training. Just so you won't be too shocked when it eventually comes out in the future.

Sure, but it hits different when there is a company of ill-repute specifically profiting off of your data acting as the broker.

It depends on how much content you're looking for. You can't get the "infinite scroll" like you could on reddit, the user base just isn't there. The closest you can get is browsing all, but it's still limited. Search for communities based on your interests and then follow the communities that seem most active, as there will likely be duplicates. I left reddit last year when they killed the apps. I will say two things about my transition to lemmy: One, the content I do get is more tailored and specific. Two, I spend less time attached to my phone because new content isn't pouring in by the second. I view these as positives.

Also, if you put "old." in front of your URL you get the old view of the site, which I liked a lot more personally, so it's probably worth a try for you too.

Welcome! It's difficult for me to suggest specific communities because my favorites to read are highly individual. I suggest sorting /all by Active, Scaled, and New to assist in discovery.

Finally, please participate and share content! Lemmy needs it to thrive.

Try the Lemmyverse community search and use whatever keywords you are interested in. Subscribe to a bunch of communities and see if that brings interesting stuff to your front page. If you notice you’re seeing uninteresting stuff from certain communities, unsubscribe to those and keep on refining.

Also, if you’re interested in unexpected factorials, here’s the community for you.

!unexpectedfactorial@sopuli.xyz

unexpectedfactorial

It’s still pretty small and quiet, but anyone is welcome to post their factorial observations there.

It's pretty easy to curate to what you like, ban communities you definitely don't like and subscribe to communities you really like while switching between all and subscribed based whether or not you want to discover new communities. You may also want to play around with what instance you use based on who they're federated with or if you want multiple accounts but that's not usually necessary.

If you're a pirate I'd recommend a lot of communities from lemmy.dbzer0.com if you're into Linux there is a fuck ton of Linux communities I'm sure you'll come across. Lemmy is full of techy and political topics mostly but there's some great memes too. I recommend the memes@lemmy.ml personally bc it matches my personal politics more closely. If you used r/196 you may feel more at him in lemmy.blahaj.zone

Mostly you'll find that Lemmy lacks the hyper niche and fandom communities you'd find on Reddit but everything else is generally here. You can always make a niche community your self but you'll likely end up being the one posting 90% of the time unless you find some people really interested beforehand. Good luck 👍

I bailed around 8 months ago, I felt the same way and that was only 3 years into it. I block a lot of news type communities in all You'll notice some communities are similar/same as it is the local vs all of lemmy instances

!memes@lemmy.ml !asklemmy@lemmy.world !privacy@lemmy.ml !retrogaming@lemmy.world !starwarsmemes@lemmy.world (prequelmemes is small here mostly not active) !bikinibottomtwitter@lemmy.world !lotrmemes@midwest.social !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world

I will say star trek is more popular here and its pretty good !risa@startrek.website

I'd recommend filtering by all instances (servers) and see which ones show up, which is kind of like r/all. Just a word of warning that everyone and their dog seems to have a NSFW community with three niche images that make you wonder how that's even a thing.

Did you remember to delete all you posts and comments before deleting your account? Because fuck Reddit!

Why? Unless you’re in a few location in the world, they won’t actually delete your valuable data.

Deleting your account only deletes your username from posts and comments. Why leave behind useful content?

Fuck Reddit!

But they would keep that information behind the scenes and only display [deleted] or whatever it said.

You're missing the point.

No you’re missing the point, unless you live in a location that has laws to force companies to actually delete your data, they won’t actually delete it and thus deleting your account will achieve nothing.

No one gives a shit if Reddit stores your posts in the background, hidden from the front-end, it's about removing useful content from the public.

Thus... Deleting all your posts and comments before deleting your account.

No, it's about removing content from being sold to AI or other companies.

No one gives a shit about the front-end.

I couldnt tell you, im starting to block most of the communities that im coming across. All they post about is trump or echo on about some political stance. Its like they are just trying to either piss people off to get reactions or whip eachother into a political coma frenzy. It feels just like reddit to me, im starting to think Lemmy has the same bot problems.

Ill probably just end up using lemmy for inane memes and or porn, as i have yet to come across anything informative. I haven't really done any serious looking tho, so.... shrug