Lemmings, why do you think Lemmy is better than Reddit?

VanHalbgott@lemmus.org to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 46 points –
84

It has support for 3rd party apps.

Here on principle for the 3rd party apps.

I realize the hardware and software cost money for a site. I'm ok with paying either by a friendly use of ads, or a decent subscription.

I was on the verge of starting to pay for Reddit to stop the ads when I used the website. I happily paid for my 3rd party app. But that was right when Reddit nerfed the subscriptions and went to their current version. And then stopped the API.

I happily paid for the Lemmy 3rd party app. I need to look into donating for the server.

Lemmy doesn't have u/spez, so it's already infinitely better

It actually does (don't know which instance), but I doubt it's the same person.

At least not as an expensive leech at the head of the whole thing. He probably earns more on his own as what every single instance collects in donations.

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A social network/online community can either be significantly profitable or healthy for its users. Pick one

I find the moderation is better here. My posts aren't being removed because they didn't match some forced title formatting or some other arbitrary reason.

People also aren't just redirecting people to decade old posts and megathreads which is nice.


Think about what AskReddit is like with the same kind of posts over and over again because they decided to limit posters to the title text.

I had a really positive interaction with a mod on a NSFW instance. I commented on how I thought the dude was working in an unsafe manner...

I wasn't banned! If this has been reddit I would have been banned and told to Fuck off.

It's nice to have a place to go that'll engage in conversation and education when needed.

If communities end up with hundreds of thousands or millions of users, you will start to see more rules here too.

I’m not saying any specific rule choices are good or bad. But they become increasingly necessary when the user count crosses a threshold.

That's part of the reason I am hoping Lemmy doesn't become the new Reddit with a total migration of users. I like the smaller userbase as selfish as that is. I feel like at least with the federated nature of Lemmy we would see less power mods that run a majority of communities preventing crosspromotion with other communities/instances and limiting feedback.


I get why rules need to be added as a community grows but with Reddit this seems to mean a lot of micromanagement over things that wouldn't effect enjoyment of subreddit members and adding hurdles for new or infrequent users

Here's a hypothetical example that kind of goes along with my previous comment:

I want to post in a Elder Scrolls game modding subreddit asking about quality of life mods for games before Skyrim. It gets removed because the subreddit requires you to tag a specific game using a format like [Oblivion] or [Morrowind] for easier searching and sorting. The issue is I am not just talking about one game and tagging every TES game since Arena would eat up a lot of title space.

In the grand scheme of things it makes sense but it's annoying to deal with especially if the subreddit doesn't clearly prompt users on why their post was removed and people who are just popping by to ask a quick question might be discouraged.

I am hoping we don't see things like that become the norm on Lemmy.

I think a lot of the annoyance that comes from rules similar to your example is the fact it is a system bolted on to whatever is available in Reddit. And the UI/UX is almost always TERRIBLE.

If it was easier to make clean and functional post/comment flows this would be less of a burden.

Your points still stand. But I do think a large proportion of the friction from many rules comes from Reddits architecture. And frankly, the fact that they support apps. If it had stayed just the website, we would have probally seen more movement on improving these flows. But it’s deemed too complicated to support in two formats. Also, Reddit probally just does not give a shit.

I would hope Lemmy could be a place where it’s easy to deploy systems for proper labeling and tagging in niche communities that gain a lot from better taxonomies and other systems.

Yeah most of my communities I don't even have much in terms of rules/haven't spelled things out. It's typically common sense.

As you get bigger... More order is needed to maintain common sense

  1. 3rd party apps.

  2. Fewer Nazis.

  3. Small enough to not have ridiculous rules that make it so only the mods and friends of mods can actually post something without it automatically being removed by an automod bot.

  4. Fewer dickhead mods.

  5. Either fewer dickheads in general, or at least fewer of them making multiple accounts so that blocking a dickhead actually works.

  6. Open source, not owned by a megacorp.

So first, these things are why Lemmy is better for me. Obviously, to each their own.

  • Lemmy supports different apps, like Reddit used to.
  • I’ve experienced less spam on Lemmy.
  • Lemmy is full of Linux nerds, like me.
  • Lemmy has fewer Nazis in my experience. I do understand that there are instances full of Nazis, but I don’t see their posts.
  • Lemmy is open source. I like open source.

Lemmy is so much more performant than reddit.. It is crazy! Try going to reddit's deskop site and then go to a Lemmy site..

Also, reddit is now blocking VPN users, unless you are logged in...

And finally, if I use reddit, I am contributing to a rich guy buying his nth car/house/yacht.. On Lemmy, I am not enriching the wallets of the already rich.

Well said! I also find that the community here is less toxic and more intelligent, but maybe that's just my biased perception

in a nutshell, it's made for people, not for money

Accessibility is a big plus. Reddit is opposed to 3rd party apps while their official app is appallingly stuttery and feature-incomplete.

Besides what everyone else has said, I find the conversations here to be smarter. People who left Reddit are probably just more attuned to what’s happening. There’s probably less diversity of opinion here but that’s a trade I’m willing to make.

Basically, quantity vs. quality. I chose quality. Even on Reddit, I was mostly into smaller subs where experts responded to questions (like AskHistorians or AskPhysics) than the bigger ones. (I was banned from r/relationships for asking why women always think you’re hitting on them when you’re actually recruiting a team of elite female assassins. The mods apparently didn’t think it was funny.)

(I was banned from r/relationships for asking why women always think you’re hitting on them when you’re actually recruiting a team of elite female assassins. > This is exactly the thing. The moderation and deleting/banning stuff that deserves to not be removed. Just censorship like this. Idc if posts actually are bad I just want to be able to see them and decide for myself.

(I was banned from r/relationships for asking why women always think you’re hitting on them when you’re actually recruiting a team of elite female assassins. The mods apparently didn’t think it was funny.)

Nah homie, that's fucking hilarious 😂

It's owned by people, not a person.

It's owned by money, not people. I left with apis and 3rd party apps. Glad I did, quality has taken a real noise dive. Now I just read from old. If there's a reason, without logging in.

  • Open-source; no one party has monopoly control over the codebase.

  • Federated; no one party has monopoly control over the existing network.

  • The operators have no problem with third-party clients.

Because I can just use it. Reddit doesn't even allow me to do that without using their shitty app.

It's not reddit. I'm all for choice and alternatives. Plus, I support the underdog.

I'm not permabanned here for being obscenely anti-russia.

I can use whichever method of access I want while not having to deal with 26263663 different types of data harvesters.
The few ads there are are easily recognizable spam posts, as opposed to sanctioned ads camouflaged as user content.
Fewer reposts.
Generally better quality members. Yes, that includes YOU

Just my impression but there seems to be a slightly older crowd here.

Probably related: seems to me like the people here are just ever so slightly more level headed than on Reddit. Have barely ever gotten into so much as a heated discussion over here compared to Reddit.

Then again, when I migrated, I kinda skipped trying to find equivalents of the more toxic subreddits/communities here on Lemmy. No publicfreakouts or shit like that. Just sound and wholesome stuff. Maybe more IT stuff as well.

Reddit feels like a weirdly dead place. Depending on the sub, there can be a lot of posts and comments but it's very hard to engage with. You need to comment early and what conversation there is decays very early. A lot of it is fake too, with bots stealing comments to repost.

It's a little bit better on smaller subs, but Reddit has a way of funneling everything into a larger subs if there is one for a topic, so outside of niche topics they tend to be ghost towns.

Lemmy is more like a small, weird forum. It's hardly perfect but at least it doesn't feel like a bunch of chat bots talking to each other.

Reddit -> corporation, greed driven, you are but a product fır the advertisers

Lemmy -> software, community run servers, service provided by people for people no money incentive

I stopped using Reddit around the great anime purge. Became an unfriendly place to hangout.

The only reason it is better right now is a combination of obscurity and people not grasping how federation works as a slight barrier to entry means it has fewer people who all want to be here instead of somewhere else.

Reddit went downhill when it because universally popular and enough people were there to attract jerks who just go where everyone else is and overwhelm moderation. So I don't want federation to become the standard, as other less popular options won't be there to attract the attention seeking jerks that are drawn to the popular sites.

Popularity ruins social media because the most popular place is where the worst tend to congregate and overwhelm moderation.

Federation has a built-in solution to address this. Once the garbage starts overtaking quality, you can just move to an instance with a stricter federation policy. Traditional services do not provide this option.

While it provides a level of mitigation, malicious actors can overwhelm the system as a whole by switching instances, creating new accounts, and other intentional actions. Moderation cannot scale indefinitely even with better tools.

If the vast majority of users moves to instances with stricter policies that will increase the moderation burden on those instances. Kind of like how on reddit the smaller subreddits were managed well and most of the trash were ruining the popular subs.

So the current solution works for now, and might scale better than a centralized system, but if it reaches a certain point it will either end up being fractured significantly or end up swinging back to centralization.

All of those are reasons I think lemmy's smaller population is a benefit right now and there is still plenty of room to grow.

I don't think the vast majority of users will ever be interested in the sort of atypical content that niche communities provide. They generally prefer the more mainstream stuff, it's kinda baked-in.

Also, I'm not talking about moderation, but federation. If you only federate with three instances, then only those three's users can interact with you. This does not increase any moderation burdens.

No ads masquerading as posts.

I don't need any other reasons, that's enough.

It's open source, has no ads by default, supports custom clients and is built with Rust which means it's very performant. Sure, it lacks some features that are very useful like flairs. And the moderation tools could be improved.

Reddit's website is literally shit and bloated as fuck. While Lemmy is pretty minimalistic. Some UI improvements to make it more pretty could be made but it's fine to be honest.

The discounts you get when you stay at a Holiday inn

  1. It's open source and grants me the opportunity to participate.

  2. It's distributed (federated) and not just one company making the choices for me and all of us.

  3. No ADs, gamification and nagging me to buy in-game currency.

Yeah, and it has an usable app.

I think the most important aspect to me is 1) the freedom it provides me with. I don't like all my communication being in the hand of big tech companies.

Parts are better, I like being able to block entire instances of troll users.

But I miss the constant barage of new content and a more active community.

I supose that I am still dealing with the aftermath of using Reddit for 8,5 years and suddenly dropping it even now after the better part of a year.

I am glad however that /u/spez isn't running things here, and I hope that he stubbs his toe hard once every 7-9 weeks for the forseeable future.

I have found that the Lemmy community as a whole seems to be quick with branding people fascist if they say anything even slightly less left than socialism in political discussions, though that has mostly been from Hexbear, so it is probably just a vocal minority.

I just signed up after lurking for a while. So far it’s very limited compared to Reddit and if not for the loss of Apollo I wouldn’t be here. But I’m using an app that looks and acts like Apollo (Voyager) so it feels like Reddit did for years.

3rd party app support is probably my #1. Community is no different here than my 15 year experience on reddit, at least here there's less spam comments. My posts asking for advice or help here are also usually met with more productive support here.

Oh and no ads or sponsored content. I haven't even back to reddit since the exodus but before I left the sponsored content was so annoying.

I mod the !cocktails@lemmy.world and in about 6 months of taking care of it, I've needed to take down exactly one comment. One. It's so, so much nicer here.

  1. Open source
  2. Federated
  3. Community driven and ran
  4. I hate supporting and being fucked in the ass by corporations

I think if the population was just slightly smarter and less submissive then more people would use and support open source software. I don't even mean lemmy, just OSS in general

No ads. Accessibility, server choice, no ads, no corporations to worry about stealing your data.

It's way less addictive. Seriously, the last time I opened my Lemmy client was 5 days ago. Back when I was active on Reddit, I spent 3 of my waking hours on it every day, that's 21 hours a week.

The top comment of this post would be some reposted for the 8000th time "inside joke" on reddit. For me, it didn't matter what the post was about, every comment section was the same. It was especially frustrating when the post itself encouraged conversation and the top comment would be completely off topic.

Reddit wouldn't always let me say what I wanted. They would block/shadowban/mute me. Which I realized is inherently wrong in a society that intends to be a democracy.

So I hope Lenny is better in that regard. If I say something I don't want it taken away. I want it to have a chance to be challenged for what it is.

Once I realized this, I considered how many other probably healthy opinions that never got seen because mods, rules, restrictions and probably also financial and political biases ruined their chances of being challenged and seen in the first place. If only specific opinions are allowed, the whole site is inherently biased. I don't like that. I bet that would explain the dumb stuff I've seen there. Because if nobody can challenge an opinion it will never grow.

No. I didn't much like Reddit but I have never had so many problems with a social media site as I have with Lemmy. Right now there's 17 comments in my notifications page, but no way to access them because it just says "404 - page not found." And there's no way to view or erase them.

Lemmy has tons of connectivity problems also. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd have to rate it minus 100. I've left Kbin and actually am no longer even using Lemmy but once in a grand while. I'm looking for other sites that will work better.

You're making complaints about Lemmy while posting from kbin and complaining about kbin bugs. Everything your pissing and moaning about is kbin. I also use kbin but I understand it's an alpha service that goes down for weeks on end.

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