I'm finally moving over to Lemmy! What are your favorite active communities on the platform?

curveoftheuniverse@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 266 points –
92

It's small enough that just browsing all will actually show you all.

Also big enough for that to be a somewhat unhealthy amount of content to keep up with.

Keep up with? Just browse some posts on /all while popping, then go live a life.

Well yeah, but to say browsing all will actually let you see everything is a bit of an exaggeration if that's what you do.

Like I said. It's possible, but probably not something anyone should actually be doing.

My intended point is that browsing all is a viable way to find communities. You won't miss many communities if you browse everything. Then subscribe to what you like, block what you really dislike.

You're right that all can be overwhelming and distasteful, but at least it really is everything, as opposed to the r/all, which was heavily filtered.

/all, top of last 12 hours has been my go-to

I usually sort All by top 12 or 6, depending on how recently I last checked. That's how I keep up with the general chatter. And I refresh my subscriptions by new once in a while to take part in the topics I enjoy as they emerge.

Depends which instance you're on!

Ah yes.

I suppose if your instance isn't federated with everyone, that would be an issue.

I don't think it's just federation, I believe for posts to appear in your instance's All feed then at least someone on that instance needs to be subscribed to the associated community

Someone need to open it from your instance but no need for a follow.

It might end up showing all the communities but it won't show you every post. Like F1 posts rarely end up in all despite having an active community. You're more likely to see posts from formuladank than formula 1.

Browse /all, sort by new, you'll see every post your Lemmy instance is aware of.

Also, mods are petty and will delete or ban you if you make a comment that goes against their agenda. Even when the comment has nothing but up votes.

The other day I got banned from A Boring Dystopia@Lemmy.world for providing verifiable historical context to the bombing of the MOVE cult. Not for taking a stance on either side of the issue, but just for fighting misinformation in the comments. I had like a 40 to 13 upvote ratio on a comment as long as a page, but the mod wants to marginalize and radicalize people so they deleted everything I posted in the thread.

Ironically, quite a boring dystopia indeed.

Did they remove the comment first or just ban you so the comment isn’t on the mod log?

The latter is one of the biggest flaws on Lemmy I’ve seen so far.

Just banned. They did delete one other comment, first, further down in the thread.

When you ban someone if you check the box to remove content it doesn’t add it to the mod log and that drives me nuts.

My last comment was in "comics" and was 9-0. I didn't agree with the "message" if the comic. Guessing the mod was the artist, maybe. Lol

Lemmy is a lot smaller than reddit so its more acceptable to post niche content in more generic communities. That being said I really like

!funhole@lemmy.sdf.org

!gameart@sopuli.xyz

!vgmusic@lemmy.world

!wikipedia@lemmy.world

Welcome to Lemmy!

Happy to be here! I’ve had this account since the Great Migration of 2023, but I was slow to actually leave Reddit because the dumpster fire was too enticing. Thanks for the recommendations.

Fun fact: Even if Spez banned you from Reddit, you can still edit your old comments. I just recently discovered that.

Anyways, welcome to Lemmy!

Oh, hey, I started one of those!

So happy you like it!

For any fellow weebs, there's an instance, ani.social. It is host to a bunch of relevant communities.

Sadly, Lemmy is too small to have many active niche communities of its own, so as already said your best bet is just viewing all.

Alongside this, viewing specific instances can give you a slightly more curated experience than just all of Lemmy.

TBH I just stick to the feed and block the communities I don't want to see. Especially avoid anything on Hexbear or lemmy ml, those instances are CCP propoganda trying to convince the west to off each other and themselves.

Same here. Everything, sorted by scaled, and I block communities that annoy me. Or entire instances, but so far that's just been hexbear

I see so many comments like this across lemmy and so little offensive content from those instances that I'm really beginning to wonder who the actual propagandists are.

You should choose an instance that defederates from those instances if you don't like them (or try to convince your current admins to defederate).

I can't decide I don't like them if I haven't seen any of their things, plus the block feature works well enough.

The block feature only hides posts from those instances communities, not comments (unless you block individual users, but then you have to block a whole lot of users).

Also users from those instances will still have an influence on your feed via their voting. For example if you think an instance is a source of political propaganda, they can still promote that political agenda via voting.

Defederation is a more effective solution if you want to avoid an instance.

The feed on my instance is only posts. I don't browse comments unless I visit the post.

Most niche communities from R*ddit are pretty much dead here unless you are looking forward to being a regular poster yourself. This rather requires sticking to the lemmy.world open feed rather than creating a custom feed with your communities only, if you are looking to scroll a lot instead, of course. Just stick around a bit, see how often what communities and people reach the general feed, elect to block the ones that feel flooding your feed or not to your taste. Maybe give some regularly-posted communities that are previously not in your area of interest some chance before going on a mass block. This place does have a quality and rather genuine people, but in a limited scope.

Honestly, my "all" view is fine. There were a few bots I blocked months ago that just auto reposted everything from Reddit which led to a lot of spam but other than that it's been fine! Then again I did this back on Reddit too.

I had been using Reddit with my custom feed right from the very beginning. It was pretty good, I got more community recommendations from friends and people in the communities I had subscribed to, and I even started dropping some communities I no longer had much interest in, so my feed was pretty dynamic with popular and niche stuff alike.

I still miss my custom feed and having content in some niche communities, but it has been more than 6 months since my preferred 3rd party app has been deployed for Lemmy and I have been completely scrolling and commenting on Lemmy only, still. Never scrolled on Reddit since July 1, never succumbed to desktop-only alternatives like old.reddit, although it is still my default with RES settings applied if I'm to click on Reddit links for info, since the platform was going to be at its shittiest moments from then on, not just the interface.

Primary news communities are good enough to not avoid them like the plague they were in Reddit, riddled with propaganda bots. Big, general meme communities are the same, without many daily reposts in the same community. Movies/series fan communities are very much lacking, except a couple big fan communities. Tbh I prefer Star Trek communities here over any series/movies fan communities anywhere else, although I haven't watched even one episode of Star Trek so far in my life. Game communities are almost completely dead, but I have started getting my game updates from Steam "Home" screen blog feeds on the library. Big, all gaming and new gaming announcement related communities here are the same as they were in Reddit if I want digital entertainment poisoning anyway.

Overall, fewer content flood of Lemmy with also almost non-existent bot or discussion-disabled loud mouth count feels like a way healthier engagement procedure on this kind of a platform. Writing paragraphs-long comments never felt like a drop in the sea they were on Reddit, even if these comments get only a handful upvotes/downvotes here and maybe a couple replies at best.

When I moved over I searched for versions of all my reddit communities. Sadly, a lot of them are inactive, but I subbed anyway just in case. Then I went onto all and looked for the top handful that had stuff I liked. Now I mostly stick to my subscribed and flip over to all if I run out.

Rather than particular communities, I tend to just do all - last 12 hours.

Welcome!

I don't have specific recommendations on hand because I'm on mobile, but you can look through this guide from !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca for other ways to discover communities

https://lemmy.ca/post/11285664

Following the promo communities works great so you can passively learn about new things when they get promoted

In that case, there's some cat communities.

Btw, Welcome!

I think you responded to the wrong comment but I've saw others people recommandations for cats and beaver and I don't remember what else and I've note them down.

I think there is also some !pet somewhere but I can't find it again.

Welcome back! Depends on what you like, there's a good chunk of communities now. Just make sure to keep expectations in check, we're not Reddit, a good community here has a couple of posts a day and dozens, not thousands of comments. Your post here I'd say is doing pretty well.

We're still growing, slowly, but you're proof that people are growing tired of corporate social media.

Yeah, I couldn’t sleep last night, so I was looking around here for a while. I think browsing all might be good enough for now. I’m also really digging the smaller size; it seems to allow all posts made in good faith to get decent engagement. On Reddit, the early downvote I got on this post would have been a death sentence for responses, but now I’ve got lots to go off of here

Yeah we don't have the post counts to ignore one just because it got down voted once ! There are many posts that come back from the dead.

And I say this to everyone, you're already doing it'd be the change you want to see. If there's a niche community with no posts, start posting. People will gather to it.

Funny communities and news ones are usually found in generalist instances such as lemmy.world or lemmy.ml but the most interesting ones are on specialised instances.

The best way to discover them is to go directly to the instance and scroll a bit on the local thread or to go to the community page (ex: lemmy.ml/communities).
Then come back to your instance to visit again or follow the communities you liked.

There is geographically or language specialised instances such as :

  • feddit.uk
  • feddit.it and most probably
  • feddit.[your country code]

but a few geographically/language specialised instances were creative with there name such as

  • aussie.zone
  • jlai.lu
  • midwest.social

There is also subject oriented instances for example

  • mander.xyz. Science oriented
  • slrpnk.net. Solarpunk oriented
  • lemmy.dbzer0.com. Allow content about piracy

and !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com is probably the most follow community on the lemmyverse.

You can find community directly from your instance page or from a browser like :

  • browse.feddit.de
  • lemmyverse.net

The browser helps you find community's names that were never connected to your own instance or specialised instance you didn't knew about.
When connecting for the first time type the url lemmy.world/c/[community's name]@[community's instance], you'll get an error but after refreshing the page you will have access to the community. But that's not new-comers friendly as you'll need another maneuvers to access post published before you connect your instance to the remote community. Still, if you are interested, I can explain you how to do it.

There is also politically oriented instances but some may be blocked by the administrators of your instance. You can check that on lemmy.world/instances.

Finally, if you want to test your options on Lemmy without spamming your favorite communities, you can do that here !testfediverse@jlai.lu.

Welcome! There's a lot of actually good content on here if you avoid Hexbear and lemmy.ml.

I go back and anonymously browse Reddit sometimes and it feels plastic.

Feels plastic cause it's full of bots. I seriously hope the niche communities don't get chocked to death with bots. But I also see that many went to discord... which I'm not sure if it's an improvement TBH.

Yeah, I saw someone on Lemmy showing screenshots two posts that were copied exactly from like 8 months ago except for a single new legitimate comment. It's wild what LLMs are doing to online interaction and honestly.... this is just the beginning.

Conversely, if you want less cheap comments like this one you should not.

If you want to avoid specific instances, it's best to go to an instance that defederates from those instances. That's the power of the Fediverse - you get to choose an instance that aligns with your values and moderation style :)

Avoiding them myself is great, but long term I'd love do see the Fediverse succeed. We need to shut down propaganda if we want it to be viable. There's no corporation or organization running the show, it's us.

The way to shut down propaganda is defederation and diligent moderation. That takes some actions from admins and moderators, who as you note are mostly volunteers. So do your best to support your local mods and admins in doing that or volunteer yourself :)

Agreed, well said. I hope the fediverse can really become a good thing

linuxmemes and the worldnews communities on both .world and .ml

It's good to have both because they bias against each other.

My favorites are 196 and lemmyshitpost. Nostupidquestions can also be interesting sometimes. I'd recommend searching for the names of your favorite subreddits and checking if they have moved over here.

The first thing I recommend you do is get a feel for the vibe of other instances, with a more dedicated topic, and join those, rather than Lemmy.world or something.

Lemmy is at its best when your local feed has more topics along your personal interests, but you can search All for stuff outside your interests.

A nice thing you can do is to call an IA to draw you something from any community federated. Just like that:

!aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw me a welcome picture for someone new on a social media. Style: piratepunk

The non misogynistic ones. Good luck finding those. welcome to Reddit circa 2005 before hating women was considered not ok as it didn’t affect anyone’s bottom dollar. Freeze peaches and all that shit that goes with it.

Freeze peaches? Was that a voice to text typo of free speech or is it some meme I'm unaware of lmao.

It’s a take on how hate speech gets defended as ‘Muh free speech’. It became a meme on shitredditsays.

There are instances and communities that are well-moderated and care deeply about such problems. I think for instance lemmy.blahaj.zone and beehaw.org. But don't take my word for it, just try to look for an instance that aligns with your values. The more people choose such instances, the more people will gather around them by default :)