Is Lemmy a good alternative?
New here. Migrated from Reddit. Still trying to figure out Lemmy - what's everyone's experiences like coming from Reddit and does Lemmy serve as a good alternative? Pros and cons/differences?
I was a fairly active member at Reddit with a good social standing, I made 1 "controversial" comment and I got perma-banned... this sucks. I mostly followed music pages like r/TheBeatles and loved to just rant about Beatles albums, Paul McCartney's latest tour, discuss new releases from other artists and also movies/TV shows. I can't think of any other website that offers that kind of forum-like discussion other than Lemmy?
I really did always hate that Reddit felt like a massive echo chamber. The way the system works with upvotes and downvotes, if I said anything people don't agree with, I'd get massively downvoted. I once got temporary ban for saying I preferred Zelda Breath of the Wild over Tears of the Kingdom... it really felt like I was treading on egg shells. My perma-ban happened in a discussion within the r/EveryoneKnowsThat search for a lost wave song. Really petty.
I've always hoped somebody would create basically a clone of Reddit, but without the politics and without being overly-policed. Where people aren't pushed away for respectfully voicing their opinion. Is Lemmy the answer?
Lemmy is significantly smaller. Because of this:
+Trolls are easier to spot
+Interactions tend to be friendlier and more wholesome/respectful
+Far more originality shining through
-less engaged communities
-fewer niche communities
-no rich history to comb through
The modlog transparency is honestly my favorite part. I get so much enjoyment out of the “zomg the mods are just as bad here as Reddit” posts because you can immediately highlight their bad behavior, or alternatively see when the mods actually are power tripping.
Trolls are easier to spot, except for the fact that lemmy.ml is the default instance for many users and communities eventhough the entire setup of that instance is very politically influenced. You could be in for a bad experience when you try to post a fairly reasonable comment on any slightly political post there.
-Fads aren't as easily called out/quashed, there isn't much push back on the meme of the minute, wait I just described social media in general...
Lol yeah that's true of reddit too
WDYM? We have
First of all, welcome.
Depends what you're after, really. I find that lemmy has less of an echo chamber, but the average political stance is a lot more left-ish than reddit.
If your opinion is considered garbage, you'll probably be downvoted for it, but banned is another thing; You can find an instance more to your liking, for example if you post tankie stuff on lemmygrad, you'll probably only get praise from there.
It mostly comes down to how a platform with many people tend to naturally operate - garbage people get treated at such by the rest. So whatever your leanings might be, I suggest you find an instance that is somewhat reasonably close to share your values.
Other than that, one of the main differences from reddit is the content quantity - Smaller user base means less content. And I'm perfectly fine with that, as I can keep up with the feed without scrolling for hours.
Also, here I can say that I don't give two shits about neither Zelda nor Link, without fear of backlash. At least yhe contemporary games - Everything since Link II for NES has been kinda meh in my book.
And if you want to filter out politics, blocking lemmygrad takes away most of the tankie-spam.
This is true once you've blocked Lemmygrad and Hexbear, which are as much echo chambers as r/The_Donald ever was.
The thing I find most perplexing about those communities is that although they themselves support marginalized communities, they also defend highly authoritarian regimes (Russia, China) that actively persecute said groups. It's very strange to see that horseshoe wrap-around effect where at times they have the same things in common with the right wing but for entirely different reasons.
I haven't blocked hexbear (yet). As annoying as I find their views, they do produce some funny shit now and then.
You're fine as long as you don't decide to jump in and offer a contrary opinion.
Yup. They claim to not have downvotes in an attempt at forming a diversity of opinion, but as soon as there's an attempt at voicing a hint of such diversity, the ad hominim is engaged by a swarm. They started creeping through my comment and post history to find something damning, but only came up with a meh of a nothingburger, so they started to claim my opinion as invalid because I was on feddit.nl (lol?) instead, never refuting my original claim. I honestly don't remember what the topic was about at this point. I probably called out something verifiably false or misleading.
That's really going to depend on you. What sort of "controversial" comment?
If you engage in ableist, racist, or LGBTQ-phobic commenting, you're going to have a bad time. Other than that sort of thing, you'll probably be fine, with some exceptions:
If you're good with that stuff and can find out start a comm for Beetles discussions, there's a good chance that you'll have a good time.
From what I gather, the "controversy" was about his preference for one Zelda game over another. I think he's going to be fine.
No, that was the temp ban. The perma ban had to do with a lost song thread
Oh my, that makes him literally Hitler
What? People are just curious how they got a ban by the site admins instead of a subreddit. It takes a bit more to pull that off than just posting an unpopular opinion.
Great exhibit of Godwin's law, though.
Greater exhibit of sarcasm
Looks like it was really just another rando-ban. A mod having a bad day.
Thanks, all really good feedback. I've managed to find a few 'somewhat' active communities to join like for my local city which has about 1000~ subscribers. Not as bad as I was expecting to be honest... that's enough user base for me to give Lemmy a shot I think.
I guess every social media platform has its politics
Try some of the kbin/mbin instances. I find the interface much more similar to old reddit. But welcome to the fediverse! kbin.social and kbin.run (mbin) are pretty good.
You should also check out the Lemmy third party apps like Mlem or Voyager as they’re gorgeous.
https://alexandrite.app is nice for the desktop.
Idea: Try exclusively using Lemmy for a week.
If you love it, switch. If you hate it, don't. If you miss Reddit, use both.
I use both. I like both. But I also want Lemmy to become the norm.
I like using reddit is fun app. So I'm hoping for a Lemmy is fun app.
I've heard Sync for Lemmy is a bit similar.
I've been using sync for Lemmy since the 3rd partocalypse of 23, and I haven't been back to reddit since. It's been enjoyable being on Lemmy, and the folks are usually pretty awesome here. I can second the niche interest thing though, but I've always used reddit in a curated general content fashion, so Lemmy is plenty sufficient in that regard.
I found I had to block a large number of communities from my feed that were very narrow minded. Once I did some diligent editing, however, Lemmy has become my daily browse and I'm happy with the change. I still use reddit for some of the niche communities that don't have a counterpart here, but the larger topics (news, memes, technology) are well covered and open to discourse.
You, I don't know you, but I like you.
Thanks for curating your feed instead of reporting everything you dislike, fighting or harassing people.
Peace
For general browsing, news, technology, mainstream topics etc.. it's much better than reddit, less toxic, better vibe.
It's very small though, so I've found two areas where it is just not a replacement:
Specific, smaller niche interests, they might have a community here but it is often empty and quiet or just non existent.
Sports, specifically a place to chat during live events. There's not enough people to support that.
So it depends what you are looking for and how niche your interests are.
I've mostly stopped using reddit and am in here now. But I still end up there occasionally. Not much these days though.
spot on
I think it's the same echo chamber here, but it's smaller. People block instances they don't like, and are in favor of moderators removing controversial things, specially around communism and tankies.
I just like that it's not run by big tech. Just discussions, no companies or ads. I think most users are tech people.
I moved over to it after the initial Reddit exodus and haven’t really looked elsewhere. It’s not quite a full replacement in terms of content and engagement obviously. It’s good for broader stuff like memes, politics/games/movies/etc in general, but not so much for the specific. There are quite a few games I used to spend a lot of time discussing on their subreddits, but they’re basically ghost towns here for a lot of them.
There are also some more specific community leanings. You’re gonna see a LOT of Star Trek and Linux related stuff.
But overall, I’m happy enough with it knowing it’s a non-privatized space to talk.
Lemmy needs to figure out a way to "group" similar communities from different instances. That is the biggest flaw by far.
And maybe it's just my app but I keep seeing the same posts over and over from different groups.
It's the best I've found, but I wouldn't call it a "good" alternative myself no.
Many others have commented on the small communities/lack of niche communities so I'll simply say I agree with the takes in this thread there.
Personally though, I generally find Lemmy to be far less tolerant of any dissenting opinions across most communities. And man do I mean any. There's a plethora of topics that aren't even worth trying to discuss here because if you introduce the slightest bit of nuance to a hardline take you'll be downvoted, insulted, and ignored.
A quick example that comes to mind are services such as Spotify/Youtube. To make a long story short, I find that I use Youtube often enough that I don't mind paying for Youtube premium. They need to make money somehow to continue providing that service and I can't fucking stand ads so hey sure it's worth the monthly payment to me. I'm a pretty satisfied customer all things considered.
Try offering that perspective in any related thread and you'll be called bootlicker and made to feel like you're propping up Satan himself for daring to pay for Youtube and be happy to do so.
There's other, similar topics. Some are easier to avoid, like the FuckCars community. I was a pretty big fan of that community on reddit but on Lemmy most threads seem to truly believe we need to go 100% no cars at all and there is no middleground damnit. Other topics manage to work their way into damn near any thread. Biden could literally pull a child and puppy from a burning building and there will always be comments about how he's still a genocidal maniac and basically evil. That entire war is basically just not worth talking about here imo.
And then there's little stuff. For example, don't ever say you use Windows here lest a whole horde of people jump in to call you an idiot for not having switched to Linux I mean really what's wrong with you using the most popular OS in the world by a large margin. Stuff like that.
So I guess to summarize my feelings here, I personally believe the echo-chamber is far worse on Lemmy than reddit and that's primarily due to the smaller community. A lot of likeminded people came to Lemmy and we're missing a lot of middleground opinions that come naturally with a larger, more diverse population. Too many people view everything as black and white and if you sit in grey both extremes are against you.
There are absolutely exceptions; I have seen respectful discourse on the site. But the general trend I perceive here is that the echo-chamber is far worse.
yeah. extremism seems to be the norm here. and you will be harassed and insulted and told your a POS if you even mildly disagree with the extremist narrative. most of the content seems to be angry leftism idealism that reads 'young idealist' who thinks ideological purity is the solution to problems and is incapable of acknowledging a complex and pragmatic approach to any issue at all. and generally people who are totally detached from the average person's perspective/experience, as per your windows comment.
it's just people being people. people don't like anyone who disagrees with them. it hurts their feelings. so they act out.
i will say at least the mods don't ban you for disagreement or injecting a dose of reality into a simplistic ideological narrative about the world... which is why i gave up on reddit.
Interesting points. I feel a bit let down then and not sure I've found what I'm looking for.
One question... Say a new season of your favourite TV show just dropped, where do you go online to discuss it? I'm surprised that in 2024 it's difficult to find somewhere online to just talk about topics. I do love Instagram but that's more picture based, X/Threads are just random shouts into a void, Facebook is Facebook... I struggle to think of any options other than Reddit, sadly. But I'm open to suggestions and just curious to know where people would immediately turn - to see what other people are saying about the show.
I think the poster above is right in most ways, but it's also pretty easy to see around the negatives.
Give it a try for a month and see what your experience is like. Block a couple servers/communities and you might find it's rather nice here.
My reply was a lot wordier, so I just wanted to say I 100% agree with pelotron here. They have the right of it IMO.
I focused pretty hard on the negatives because many other posters here have already hit a lot of the highlights and I felt they left out the negatives. It's certainly not all bad. Absolutely try it out.
Just to start off: I would recommend experiencing it for yourself first. A lot of people hold a very different perspective from me, even just in this thread. Maybe it's the specific communities I frequent that are like this, I dunno. But it certainly is worth giving a chance if nothing else. Costs you nothing more than however much time you decide is worth investing into seeing if the site is a good fit for you. And also, I truly believe Lemmy has the potential to grow into something greater than it is currently. Which is why I'm still here checking it daily. I don't find it's a good replacement right now, but I have hope that it has the best shot at becoming a good replacement.
I hate to say it, but generally if I want to see discussion around a new game/TV show/book/whatever I find Reddit to still be the best place to do that. IMO, Reddit's overall quality has dipped quite a bit (browsing /r/all) but the smaller communities are often still good. Of course, all it takes is one shithead mod to ruin that, but I suppose I've gotten lucky.
I took steps to distance myself from reddit with the 3rd party app fiasco. I never bother browsing /r/all anymore, I don't use reddit on mobile anymore, stuff like that. But I hopped into Old School Runescape recently and, well, just look at the OSRS community on Lemmy. The top posts are 9/10 months old. So I browse r/2007scape in order to discuss the game.
There's a great silver lining to Lemmy being so small though: one person can make a large difference. I believe with enough effort it's possible for one person to grow communities on here and that's pretty cool. I don't have the time/energy to do that, so I go to where others are already gathered to discuss things But, if you've got the mind for it, there's opportunity to be the change you want to see. It's just not going to be easy and it's going to be slow.
Just copy Linux Mint onto an USB stick. No need to boot it, you hang it around your neck like a cross, and display it to raging pinguinoids to pacify them.
I am using Debian, in case you were wondering.
I really like it. Tech comminities & some others are very bouyant & interesting but niche communities really struggle. Even direct replacements of big subreddits struggle. Hopefully this improves.
One tip from my own experience. I use Voyager & blocked a load of US politics keywords.
And another, I subscribed to as many interesting Lemmy communities as i could then browse Home feed in the main & occasionally All to see if any other interesting communities crop up that could be worth joining.
Welcome & enjoy.
Unfortunately it's not quite there in terms of numbers. Many niche communities that exist on reddit simply don't here or have very low activity. The ones that do are typically better than on reddit though.
First welcome a lot of the users here are ex reddit
Lemmy is young it doesn't quite have the traffic reddit does BUT it also has less of the crap.
There are instances or subs here that will delete your comment or ban you simply for posting something that disagrees with the predetermined consensus they are going for. And no, I'm not talking about racist or abusive comments, just generic shit that may not perfectly align with their narrow personal Overton window. I'm not going back to Reddit, but I wouldn't say there is a robust and diverse discussion here either. A lot of groupthink, or perceived groupthink...because dissenting opinions get straight up deleted.
Hello fellow Reddthat user!
You should call mods out when that happens as a public service. If I learn this happens a lot on certain subs I will stop using them even if it didn't happen to me.
Not like I havent seen that happen but I immediately block communities for doing this once so I‘m not seeing this much lately.
Welcome. Its been great for me so far. Whatever instance you are currently on the amount of politics and echo chamber does matter. So feel free to comment and enjoy. If you have a complaint try another instance (or even Kbin) to see if this helps. Also to note that there is much more control about what communities and people you can interact with
Lemmy is good but very, very small in comparison to Reddit.
For example, /r/mildyinteresting has 286k subscribers. Lemmy has around 51k active users across the entire platform and all of it's communities. And /r/mildyinteresting is a misspelling of the even more popular /r/mildlyinteresting (23.4 million subscribers).
Even some of the niche gaming communities are larger on Reddit (/r/Kenshi, 145k; /r/factorio, 370k).
However, the small community feel is much more pronounced here on the federated Lemmy servers. You'll see the same names pop up so everyone isn't a complete stranger. Third party app support is miles ahead of Reddit's crappy app. And if you don't like your instance for any reason you can hop to another one easily.
You'll see certain trends on trending communities here. There's a lot more posts on Linux, Star Trek, and Tech news that isn't as pronounced on Reddit unless you subscribe specifically to them. The meme community is top notch though and doesn't have the incel and misogyny issues that plague Reddit.
Despite how small Lemmy is, I think it's worth spending time here. After the huge spike in users last June, there was a bit of a decline, but now it's slowly but surely growing again.
I would take those numbers with a grain of salt. Reddit tends to artificially pump these numbers, for instance geodefaults have millions of subs but only a few hundreds actively participating
The real number of active users on average reddit subs is probably far less than 50% of reported numbers. I can imagine that every year the percentage of real vs reported subscriptions falls another 10% or so, as accounts are abandoned and rando-banned etc.
In strict technical terms, yeah it's okay, albeit with the shortcomings to be expected of a smaller development team. In terms of population and activity with this format, I think it may be at the top compared to alternatives as well.
There's still others and other software options though for this format that people could try, which honestly may even be technically better, but lacking population/activity means they're in an odd spot.
The first of these you'll read about on here are likely Kbin/Mbin, possibly followed by PieFed or still-in-development Sublinks. Kbin/Mbin is definitely the runner-up in terms of federated Reddit-alternatives, as it was one of the few options available at the time people were leaving Reddit.
PieFed and Sublinks have emerged more recently with different priorities and approaches compared to Lemmy, but with the same desire to offer a federated option for people to deploy.
The last you may read about around here would be of stuff like Discuit, Lobste.rs, Raddle (and any other sites built with Postmill), Tildes, and the like, which are all most like Reddit in terms of their being stand-alone sites, unconnected to any others running the same underlying server software. However each of these, I think, may have lower population than the cumulative population of the Lemmy network of sites.
All that said, cutting to your last question: ultimately it heavily depends on the instance/site you settle into.
Lemmy isn't a monolith, which is both its greatest strength and weakness compared to Reddit. You may be able to find a Lemmy instance/site that heavily blocks out politics and moderates lightly, but the irony of this is that it means it may have to be overly-policed to achieve that, and might appear less active in the process from heavy disconnection/defederation from any instances/sites that permit political posts/discussion.
Right now though, much of Lemmy is heavily political, and it's arguably because of lax moderation to keep political posts/discussions to relevant communities, which is itself probably in part because of lacking moderation tools to enable lighter touches to redirect posts/discussions.
Nevertheless, it's possibly the best option fitting the format available at the moment given the rest, but if Lemmy and federation doesn't suit you you might check out Tildes or Discuit. Although be advised: Tildes remains invite only for now.
Links to all options/alternatives mentioned:
One last point, I swear, but if you do stick around and just want to chat about tv shows, movies, and music, I'd recommend visiting:
!moviesandtv@lemm.ee
!movies@lemm.ee
!music@lemmy.world
!casualconversation@lemm.ee
Honestly I think any general/casual discussion community would welcome posts about those subjects as well, which there are a number of across Lemmy sites to check out.
Thank you for thé communities list!
And Squabbler.co
Lemmy is smaller and more... particular. Users here are more respectful, and more sensitive. Politics seem to bleed into everything more than at reddit. Lemmy is absolutely an echo chamber, but of a different flavor. More "kill the rich" and less " the narwhal bacon's at midnight"
You can still get nuked arbitrarily for annoying a mod.
I say try it out, but use the ban tool liberally the first few weeks. Block instances like hexbear, lemmygrad and possibly ml if you aren't interested in leftist discussion, and in for former instance's cases, trolling and dogpilling. (Or keep em, if you like that 😁)
After a few weeks of banning users and instances I have a generally palatable but still pretty left leaning time-dump / memefeed.
Yeah blocking users is pretty useful. Whenever I see a user post something horrible or massively annoying I look at their last few comments. Usually those are equally bad so then I block them and go back to whatever I was looking at.
So you created an echo chamber more familiar to what you know? I get lemmygrad and hexbear isn't for everyone but don't see a reason to ban. Lemmy.ml existed before the influx so has a mix and shouldn't be generalised.
I shared my opinion. I have not blocked ml. (But. many users from there)
Lemmy is already an echo chamber, those instances are just a joke though. No loss to me or many others who have blocked them too.
I too have recently been perma-banned from reddit for nonsense. I still browse it with my banned account, I just don't comment. They're going to chase away heaps of people. I made a new account under a vpn to help someone and the account got shadowbanned. I think reddit is trying to become some corporate-safe-space where business can fake market directly to reddit users.
They’ve been blocking VPNs now and it just makes me not use it even in the few cases it’s useful.
I call then rando-bans. e.g. You were banned for violating unwritten rules, poorly interpreted rules, rules made up on the spot, or because the mod is having a bad day. Basically stuff where a warning would have easily sufficed.
I told a bot to go fuck itself and a human mod got offended on its behalf.
Feels like early internet here, enjoy it while it lasts. Good chance this place will blow up and the normies will come in.
Lemmy is basically an parallel universe of Reddit. There's less people here, which means smaller but also less toxic communities. Since this is a segment of the fediverse, people also tend to talk about Linux and free open source software, while also trashing on Windows, Google, and any other product by what I like to call "Big Tech". People are much more liberal here, there's more tolerance for the LGBT community, there's basically lots of hatred for cars, people praise the European Union. Ok some of these are bad examples of liberalism, but still, it's all found here. Enjoy your stay. If you don't like it, you're free to bid us farewell.
Welcome!
I also moved over from Reddit, some time ago now, Lemmy is great if you don't mind it being quieter and you're not into super niche things.
If you are into super niche things, definitely make those communities and begin fostering growth by posting, it's what I'm doing for my home country of Wales, slow but steady and all that.
Hope you enjoy Lemmy!
It's similar in a lot of ways and this is still an echo chamber and the echo chamber we have here has a lot of overlap with reddit... but, while reddit mostly just leaned left... Lemmy... just leans anti-west. As mentioned, there's a lot of overlap there, we've got a lot that is shared, but the parts where those two groups differ can cause some serious wtf moments if you're used to the reddit community. As far as over policing, moderation logs are mostly public and there have been some controversies, but mostly people just stopped caring or left. If you stick around long enough, you will notice policies being applied unfairly if you're on the 'wrong' side and it's a lot easier to be in that category here.
All that to say, you'll likely have some moments where you think... Maybe that old echo chamber wasn't so bad.
It’s not perfect, but lemmy is good enough for us
Small but great!!! Once I've blocked Hexbear (the proud boys pretending to be far-left), everything is pretty fun and respectful.
It's a bit 'terminally online' at times, but only a bit more than Reddit
Personally I still use other websites to get news about niche topics sinse Lemmy is small, but I genuinely much prefer Lemmy for general memes news and whatever else pops up! I genuinely think the funny post are much better than on Reddit.
Lemmy is a collection of independent echo chambers that believe different things. You can make an account on some instance you never heard of before and get people assuming you have certain beliefs just because of your instance because apparently a lot of people stick primary to their home instance? In one instance, you have an echo chamber of "bOtH SiDeS aRe tHe sAmE" and other echo chambers that say things like "I won't vote for someone who aids in genocide".
Some instances block more instances than others (the one you are on has blocked 172 instances, for example). And some instances are blocked by a lot of instances (lemmygrad is blocked by 89 instances). Also some instances disable downvoting, if that's something you're interested in.
I don't think overpolicing is an issue in most places? Like, there's that one person who openly is pro-genocide in all of the palestine-related threads (like, they explicitly call for killing of even infants and that anything less is antisemitism) and I guess they're tolerated (just probably one of the most heavily downvoted people on lemmy). But if they're on an instance without downvotes, they wouldn't even see them.
Its the same small group vibe reddit lost when they got big and greedy. You will actually learn names outside of the top reposter.
The only thing I miss is the really neiche communities. There's some but they struggle to take off due to the smaller user base.
You do have to look though a few different servers till you find one that fits what you want. Mods are still clowns depending on the server. Avoid the top few instances to avoid power trippers. Some things never change.
I basically found a cozy server and settled in after nukeing my reddit account. I don't miss reddit.
If you block sufficient leftist/marxist instances and communities, you might not notice that this is essentially a socialist fanboy wannabe utopia.
I'd suggest to browse Lemmy by new, block a lot, refresh a couple times, and then eventually arrive at a curated, sanitized feed.
But Lemmy is far from unpolitical, merely a different color.
Lemmy doesn't really do anything to address either of these.
You just have to choose the right instance. Federation does address those problems.
Right now our options remain limited because its still early days and the platform isn’t large enough yet. But in the long run, whichever servers do a good job of limiting extremism without being overly authoritarian in moderation will continue to thrive and grow, and servers where the admins are petty and/or politically biased will slowly die.
How is that functionally different from finding or creating a different subreddit? On reddit if you got banned from a subreddit, you could just join a different subreddit about the same topic.
If you ran afoul of a moderator, sure, you could create another subreddit with a name like r/xyz_2 or r/xyzAnarchy. But it would only ever be an alternative, it could never replace the original community, partially because the name was already reserved.
More importantly, if you ran afoul if an admin, there was nowhere to go. The reddit admins exercise absolute control over the content that is allowed on that site. On Lemmy, people will just leave the server if the admins pull a spez.
Welcome to Lemmy.
One important thing to point out, your upvotes and downvotes are mostly public here, so if you want to maintain anonymity with your votes you'll want to setup a separate account for voting only and no commenting.
I tried a few apps for interacting with Lemmy and Voyager has been my favorite by far.
I still go back to Reddit for very niche communities that can't be found here, or just don't have the userbase to churn out content like they can. I use an app like "Stealth" to browse any of the subreddits I still frequent, but I've been able to replace a lot of the generic ones with Lemmy communities.
You will find a lot more users here that will take any chance they can get to blame capitalism for all of the worlds problems.
Some opinions are still heavily downvoted here, but you can always join up with an instance that ignores/doesn't display any downvotes.
You will need to be a lot more active in your own communities if you want to turn it into the kind of place you want to keep coming back to.
As far as moderation goes, there are some Lemmy instances that have stricter mods than others. Just do a little research and pick a main one where you won't get banned if you decide to voice your opinion about a dictator one way or another.
Just note, if you pick one that's too small there's a greater risk of them shutting down for one reason or another.
They are? Can I ask how? I can't even find my own votes like I could on reddit. I used to use that to show a friend of mine good posts and comments.
Instance admins can see your votes, not just local admins, but remote ones too.
I personally don't check those that often, but it's sometimes useful to investigate harassment, astroturfing, etc.
They are. It's not shown on Lemmy itself, but anyone who federates with another instance gets to know who voted on what, and sometimes that information is made public to their entire instance (this is the case with kbin).
So, for instance you can look at this particular post through kbin's eyes: https://kbin.social/m/reddit@lemmy.world/t/1031138/Is-Lemmy-a-good-alternative/votes/up
Go to any post/comment, then click on "more" -> "activity".
"Favorites" are upvotes, and "Reduces" are downvotes.
Edit: And if you want to view your own votes I would suggest an app like Voyager, since that is one of the features.
I see, thanks!
As for Voyager, I'm not finding that anywhere.
Lemmy is fickle but it's ok. Works the same but smaller, so you might be stuck on "all".
The echo-chamberiness of Lemmy is different from Reddit, but still a thing unfortunately. It'll really depend on the community you're in, but since the population of the Fediverse (and especially the Threadiverse) is very small compared to Reddit you tend to have the same people cropping up a lot. I haven't been banned from anywhere (that I know of - I don't actually know if I would get notified) but I find myself hammered with downvotes more frequently here than on Reddit when I say something unpopular.
I'd say, mess around a bit and see.
You do get notified. I got banned from worldnews@hexbear because I was too controversial in m comment. Basically they didn’t like the truth that I laid out with evidence and links.
How dare you contradict the Hexbear Truth-tellers!
😂😂
I had a 3-month ban from a community once and had no idea until I did a mod log search on my own username about 6 months later.
Thinking back to how I could possibly have failed to even notice, I think it's just that kbin still displays the comments of banned kbin users so I was probably still getting interactions through that.
I’m also super new here because I keep getting banned there. I’ve been told I was a bigot because I was against the Palestinian genocide. Like what?! And I was harassing the mods because I asked them a question 2 times in 3 months. There’s no discussing with them. They come down at you with a hammer and it’s just mean. But if people attack you? If people are cruel? Totally fine. I’m a huge rule follower but I’m human and make mistakes. I hope here there is discussion allowed with the powers that be in case i mess up. I try to be respectful and kind. I just want to all get along.
Sorry to hear that
Thank you
Yes, it is a good alternative IF you take part. Don't be a lurker, post stuff, cause friction, create interesting discussion even if you know you may get downvoted for bringing up things people don't want to talk about. Reddit is a censored pile of gatekept shit, don't ever waste your time commenting on there.
Don't say you weren't warned.
I've been discussing this on Mastodon too, but more focused on features and limitations related to federation rather than people being dumber in one place or the other. But I also want more open conversations, which is one of the things I believe ActivityPub helps with.
So instead of voting for Lemmy I'll go ahead and say I prefer Kbin since I've found it easier here to interact with posts from other fediverse platforms.
Just read carefully the rules of each group/magazine/community as everyone is free to tidy up their spaces as they wish, reasonably or not.
Honestly? No
The good news is that we have a lot less of the dumbfuckery where people think the pinnacle of their life is a chain of meme posts.
But I think the decentralized and duplicated nature of lemmy prevents any meaningful conversations. People who just want an echo chamber stay in their version of a board and rely on moderators to scorched earth anything that doesn't fit a narrative. But it also means that people who DO want a conversation might never even see each other or not want to repeat themselves. Interesting point made in the world version of a thread but you tend to hang out in the zip? Yeah...
Which... is kind of message boards. Reddit was "successful" because it was effectively a single vbulletin site that EVERYONE was on so you basically only had one or two gaming forums and so forth. Whereas this is back to the days of usenet and everyone having a phpbb. You might recognize some folk from the Beyond Unreal forums at TTLG but those are different forums with different "cultures" and so forth.
That said: I can't help but gush over Mastodon. That is increasingly my favorite social media... ever? Because lemmy very much feels like a bunch of people who can't get over their ex and keep bringing them up in ever increasingly weird ways. Whereas Mastodon feels like everyone collectively said "Fuck twitter. I always hated it. Let's actually make a good town hall site" and... we kind of did. Yeah, you still have brigading dumbasses and a lot of the decentralization issues. But you also have people who actually respond to comments and have discussions. And while you still have the inherent flaws of trying to convey a point in a microblog, you also have a lot more "Wait, what are you trying to say?" kind of comments.
And... I am not sure what "lemmy" can really do. I think we have all collectively agreed to block certain instances (whether at the instance level or accounts blocking them ourselves) which helps with the... terrorist threats. But unless "lemmy" can decide to stop talking about reddit and stop trying to reinvent reddit... it is never going to be a place worth developing a community at. Shitposting and one off questions? Sure. But it won't be somewhere that you actually go to interact with other human beings.
It's a good alternative to what I used to do with my free time, worm charming. It's not the same without a cobra.
In your particular case: yes, lemmy is absolutely the answer.
It isnt for a lot of other folks. Lemmy has a lot less moderators/moderation and a lot more alternative communities and multiple instances.
This has a ton of implications. You can still get banned for petty reasons but usually not from the instance but just from a community. In that case you join or make another one which doesnt ban people for {particular_reason}.
It also means that you dont get the tons of posts and comments. Imo as a reddit refugee, people from reddit are going cold turkey on drinking from a firehose or more accurately, being showered in content. There is a million dollar business and many years of experience, social circles and code behind that. Lemmy is like reddit in the early days, just much later.
So if you ever feel there is a lack of content, consider hunting for it on lemmyverse.net for example. You can add non-banned instances to your instance by searching for a community‘s handle.
There will still be people here you dont agree with and the people here are a little different but all in all I‘d say its a pretty good thing. :)
Have fun.
It's great - scratches the itch, overall. I sometimes pine for places where major debates on a specific topic constantly rage - ideally, I'd be able to discuss religion whenever I wanted, skipping threads I felt I didn't want to wade into....
But it is a good enough replacement overall and I feel like we are proceeding to having such a size. I am also open to the idea that I have not curated enough to find a place where this si consistently happening in the Fediverse yet...
There have been some controversies that have led to banning and banning of entire instances. Usually, this involves Lemmy instances that were tolerating a lot of blatant transphobic memes that cut deep and were very mean...
I get why people isolated them.
I am still worried, though, that there are people who would still react this way to good faith discussion where there are disagreements. While there are some places where that is for sure OK, I think there are some instances that might react so negatively as to want to ban a specific user or their instance over it. I may be overreacting but IDK.
From a subreddit or from reddit as a whole?
If from Reddit as a whole, unless the admins have changed a LOT in the last year, that sounds weird. They usually only banned accounts over calls to violence and promoting piracy blatantly.
wat. was a small personal sub? That's just a random suspension.
Mods are biased as fuck here as well. You won’t be escaping that here.
Got banned site wide for using the R word. Got banned in different subreddits for one reason or another, some were deserved, others not at all. My friend got banned sitewide for calling her mail carrier a moron in the mailcarrier subreddit. In my last few months on reddit I saw a bunch of accounts I was interacting with get banned mid conversation.
Same shit happens here if you defend yourself from false accusations from the socialists. You’ll get called every name in the book and accused of shit that’s blatantly untrue- but if you so much as call someone a liar, some communities will ban you.
Haven't received a ban yet but I have been piled on by leftists
I have. Many times. Look through the mod logs and you can see the leftist mods removing comment after comment. Some communities are worse than others.
Unless it is outright hate speech comments should never be banned. Call out mods when they do this. Maybe we need a group specifically about this.
I’m very surprised there isn’t a community specifically to call out abusive mods. But then again, as I said- the mod logs speak for themselves. Look at all the “Rule 1” violations on .ml. It essentially means they can ban you for whatever vague reason they can think of.
@007KeyLimePie welcome!
Discoverability takes a bit longer here. If you're looking to add content, then alongside the usual directories it's worth checking out the lists at https://kbin.social/magazines/collections
Moderation is transparent here.
Also, protip: if you're in a thread where everyone is raging about "libs" or "the liberals," on reddit that would indicate a conservative sub, but here there's a 99% chance they are communists or anarchists.
Sadly, it's a worse echo chamber. In my experience mods are far more likely to wield power like little dictators and ban for good faith dissent, as there's no governing body above them to prevent this. I've been banned for being pro-Israel by several such petty tyrants.
Upvotes and downvotes are generally per-server though. It's interesting to see how posts and submissions are regarded on other instances.
Can you give an example?
I like Lemmy as a substitute for a general non-specific social forum to engage with others. It's not as popular so it's more intimate here.
What's missing is the general popularity and existence of robust communities. I think this is a good thing because it drives me to find other more specific websites and forums related to my interests. Some of those communities are harder to find and have less content though.
There's a middle ground between Lemmy and Reddit that doesn't yet exist. The hope (I think) is that the infrastructure will mimic the best of Reddit while rejecting the worst of Reddit.
I was complaining about the Reddit echo chamber for probably close to ten years. The arrows have not been used as designed for a long time. They're supposed to mark an item as relevant or not relevant, not as a like or dislike. Had they been used properly... well, let's put it this way, AI is now being trained based on what people like, not based on what information is relevant or correct.
Incidentally, I was brought to Lemmy for a reason similar to you. I posted one innocuous question on one sub that got me banned from a totally unrelated sub where I wasn't even a member (evidently, engaging with one sub, regardless of your reasons or opinions, is enough for another sub to ban you, even if you fully support the other sub).
Lemmy is a way bigger echo chamber, it's as "no matter who vote blue" as it gets tbh (with very few exceptions).
Nope, it's the opposite if anything.
I'm constantly getting attacked with ad hominem (my favourite one - getting called a fascist) here despite voicing opinions as respectfully as it gets, as well as providing sources for my claims whenever people ask.
Gotta have really thick skin if you are not left-leaning, but if you are - you will feel right at home :)
I would agree with this.
Eh it's slightly like Reddit in the sense you have to walk on eggshells. If you look at the Modlogs, in my case for example, you'll see I had comments deleted because it appeared to be disrespectful? Someone who I was responding to decided to label my response as having an, "attitude".. I'm too old to be a d*ck to people online - unless of course I'm returning the favor but even then I mostly brush it off and I don't go crying to the mods or reporting comments. Sticks and stones and all that.
But so far while the community is much smaller, it's definitely a lot more open to discourse between people with different/opposing views, or so it seems so far except you will definitely get downvoted for opposing views.
ngl the only problem of using a alternative social media is that there are fewer official communities and people and a lower userbase