this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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Asklemmy

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[–] [email protected] 152 points 8 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 43 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I comment more again. Used to a lot on reddit 5-7 years ago, less and less the recent years. Now back on Lemmy.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

And we enjoy them!

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[–] [email protected] 115 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I’ve already moved on. Couldn’t care less about Reddit any more.

Before the APIcalypse, I was already playing with the thought of quitting Reddit. Spez just sped up that process.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I’ve already moved on. Couldn’t care less about Reddit any more.

This.

But not much has changed, functionally, for me: I still get downvoted when I point out where people can improve their English and surpass my nephew when he was in the third grade. And I still get to debate technical things based on what I know, so that's really no change. Different pile, is all.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Not here to fight you, but this line of thinking might be why people downvote you for being a language/grammar nazi.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Correcting someone's English also almost never adds anything to the conversation at hand, which is the literal purpose of the downvote.

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[–] [email protected] 92 points 8 months ago (6 children)

I'm a full-time Linux user now.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

I switched to Linux, got a new phone to install GrapheneOS on it, and started self-hosting a few things.

I haven't had this much fun with technology since I was a kid.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Hahaha yeah I'm so close to jumping in

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 62 points 8 months ago (1 children)
  1. I haven't gone back to Reddit since the rapture. The only time I use it is for Google results.

  2. I use Lemmy A LOT less than Reddit. This is a good thing imo.

  3. Since it's a smaller community I find that my posts and comments get a lot more traction.

  4. I miss the smaller niche subs. Yes I know that I should contribute and make it a thing on Lemmy. No I won't because I'm mostly a lurker and would rather just close the app than do any work.

  5. I like how the platform is full of socialist/communist but it can become a bit of an echo chamber.

Overall I am happy with the change. Fuck Spez.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I've noticed two things.

  1. I am a lot more active. On Reddit I was mostly just a lurker. On Lemmy I want to comment and post.
  2. Following on from 1. It feels more like a community here, on Reddit after a post had a certain number of comments/upvotes, I knew that mine would never be seen. I don't have that feeling on Lemmy.
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[–] [email protected] 43 points 8 months ago (5 children)

I want to like this place.

People seem too aggressive here though.

And apparently everyone's hobby is using Linux and neurodiverging.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (7 children)

I dunno - at first it was promising, but today I was actually thinking of leaving Lemmy and trying to find a larger site.

I'm not sure if the entire Internet has somehow become addicted to groupthink or if this is just a symptom of Lemmy's smaller size and a selection bias, but it's been getting worse and worse over the past nine months and it's definitely turning me off to the community here.

What I loved about Reddit was that on any given story you saw a number of well informed opinions debating the nuances of those opinions. You'd learn so much more by engaging with the comments than just reading the article itself.

But here it seems more and more to be turning into a confirmation bias machine, where discourse and nuance takes a back seat to conformity to locally populist narratives. I can't tell you the number of times I've been downvoted for linking to multiple recent research papers (from places like Harvard and MIT) because the implication of those papers was contrary to popularly held beliefs here.

While I've had a few good interactions, it's become less and less of a signal to noise ratio on those interactions.

It's possible this is a larger trend, but I haven't noticed it to nearly the same degree on other less generalized forums I spend my time, so I suspect it's just a Lemmy thing.

A shame, as I think the tech is outstanding. But as is often the case, good tech is only part of a product, and in the case of social media it's the community too, and I've been growing increasingly disappointed in Lemmy's community who likes to pat themselves on the back for a welcoming spirit with the apparent unmentioned footnote in small print that it's a welcoming spirit that only extends to people regurgitating their own opinions back to them.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Lost a lot of my hobby subs and spend more time posting political crap now.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago

Same. My reddit feed was well curated with small hobby and humor subs specific to my interests. Without the cesspool of "default" subs it was actually a nice place, and if the official mobile app wasnt a pile of shit I'd still be there despite all the other fuckery going on with it.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I want to actively build community and engage with people here; to make this place home. That's how it changed me. I'm not a lurker or passive. It has made positive improvements to my reading and cooking, along with bending my language more positively. I've also further grown in my appreciation of diversity.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 8 months ago

Lemmy is home.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

There are a lot of Linux talks, but I can't stand all the people who keep saying all this place talks about is Linux. They are the ones who are everywhere here.

By the way, I came back to reddit briefly for a very specific community and ever since the stock sale started getting this:

whoa there, pardner!

Your request has been blocked due to a network policy.

Try logging in or creating an account here to get back to browsing.

If you're running a script or application, please register or sign in with your developer credentials here. Additionally make sure your User-Agent is not empty and is something unique and descriptive and try again. if you're supplying an alternate User-Agent string, try changing back to default as that can sometimes result in a block.

You can read Reddit's Terms of Service here.

if you think that we've incorrectly blocked you or you would like to discuss easier ways to get the data you want, please file a ticket here.

when contacting us, please include your ip address which is: and reddit account

It could just be my VPN since I also see this on my tablet/phone but I gave reddit another chance and they didn't want it.>

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I kinda feel like I have more of a persona here? Lemmy is a smaller community than Reddit and I recognize people more than I used to. Read: I ever look at usernames. I've bothered with an avatar, for instance.

Something I still miss is the "brain trust" that was Reddit. You could ask "experimental exo-ornithologists of Reddit" and get at least ten of them. Reddit had a culture of tracking down mysteries, I don't think we have anything like The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet or Celebrity Number Six. I miss stuff like that.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Things like that come with a larger community. However, there are certainly message boards where exo-ornithologists gather where you could likely get a better answer than reddit, and if it's not actually enough of an interest to look for, then does the answer to your question actually matter? Knowledge is great, knowledge is power, but fleeting questions on a subject you won't think about for another decade is just mental masturbation.

https://academy.allaboutbirds.org/discussion/

https://ornithologyexchange.org/forums/

https://www.birdforum.net/

https://afonet.org/resources/

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I'd scroll for hours on reddit. And while I'd love to see more content here, I'm glad that I don't spend so much time on mobile as I used to. And when there is more content, I hope I'm already trained to stop if I'd start to be exessive.

Also, got educated on FOSS and privacy, ditched most of google products. Wins all around

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)
  • switched to a split ergonomic mechanical keyboard
  • working on a fork of Lemmy geared toward inventory called “Lemventory”
  • moderating multiple Lemmy communities that are basically ghost towns (and I don’t care)
  • got rid of my Instagram (and all centralized forms of social media except YouTube) and replaced it with Pixelfed and others
  • letting my NixOS flag fly much more regularly now
  • hexbear defederation only created a Streisand Effect and piqued my curiosity about Marxism. I’m now much better educated about it and have come to conclude that lemmy.world is basically filled with smug, tech-bro, hive-mind, blue maga, chuds that support censorship of simple ideas and subscribe to blind, disingenuous American exceptionalism that wouldn’t even stand up to the most generous critical analysis.
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[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

I browse Lemmy occasionally and it’s nice having real engagement on my comments and posts. But, many of my favorite hobbies have zero traction here. The board game communities are basically Ghost towns, and god forbid if I mention on here that I own an AVP and enjoy it. Much less expecting a whole community about it. So mainly Lemmy is just memes and bullshit scrolling. That and the absurd confirmation bias here, as well as the outright violence towards other political parties is nuts. I regularly see highly upvoted comments about “let’s just kill them, etc”. It’s fucking insane. Every time I mention this there’s a string of comments saying “they deserve to die” etc

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (4 children)

I have mixed feelings. On one hand, Lemmy seems to be finding its groove, and I genuinely feel like I'm part of a growing community. But there's definitely something missing, and it's difficult to put into words.

On Reddit, I tended to frequent specific subs, and rarely doomscrolled the front page. But that's all I find myself doing on Lemmy. Most of my feed is either politics or memes, and nuanced discussion seems rare. New communities apparently have a hard time getting off the ground, and I think it's mostly because decentralization makes discovery a hastle.

Reddit's whole purpose is to aggregate content from other websites, whilst providing a central access point. This is antithetical to the very concept of the Fediverse, which is all about decentralization. I find myself wishing for an easy way to aggregate Fediverse content, so that I could access Lemmy, Beehaw, Kbin, etc. all in one place, regardless of whether they're federated. Really, all the drama surrounding instances federating/defederating is obnoxious as an end user.

The apps are certainly better, though, and in general I'm enjoying myself.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago

i feel a little more comfortable commenting here.

being a smaller community, i feel like i'm actually contributing when i post something, instead of just adding to a sea of noise

it also helps that i've come up with this new "persona". i'm able to be more of the real me than i can with my main account.

it's like half way between anonimity and publicity. this account has very little connection to my meatspace existance, so i feel safe to say anything. but at the same time i'm not gonna act like some 4chan user. halfway_neko's a good girl lol

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago

I'm less stimulated, but also less angry.

I don't miss reddit at all.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

It’s nice to rarely deal with trolls. I say rarely, as I’ve seen a few users recently argue, just to be assholes.

Ironically, both appear to be very heavy Lemmy posters, and one seems to be downvoting me, still.

That said, I’ve actually met users I run into semi regularly in others posts, which is a nice change.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

I've written this before but I am comfortable here, it reminds me of the text chat groups in Usenet, the first 'social medium' I was part of. Not mainstream but enough people.

I keep a Lemmy-World cocktails community and in this nine months have had to moderate exactly one post and read exactly one report. Users grow in number, slowly, every day. It is So Nice here. Could there be more engagement? Sure. But high quality overall, a lot of what is missing is the crap.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I stopped using reddit, I'm on my phone a lot less. It makes me less angry and more present, and I really like that. I also comment more, as many of you have said here.

I really miss Ask Historians. It'd send me down some lovely rabbit holes, get me reading books about niche topics I never knew I wanted to learn more about.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (2 children)

It's great!

The single biggest problem i see is the lack of network effect.

We need more people to use Lemmy and create and participate in communities. I know part of that is actually using and participating ourselves. so I will try to be better about seeking out active communities already here and patronizing them regularly :)

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (10 children)

I CAN ACTUALLY POST ON c/asklemmy NOW!!

Back when I was like 13 and on reddit, I posted what I thought was a good open question to askreddit, and it immediately got deleted with no stated reason. Now, I can ask any interesting question I have, and receive tons of interesting responses from people!

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago

I still use Reddit, maybe more in recent times actually. I don't like the platform and the app is a massive pile of wank, but there's more "normal" people there who don't spend every waking moment hating America or going on about Linux. I still use Lemmy nearly every day but it's more morbid curiosity now.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago

I had been looking for an out from Reddit for years. I like commenting and responding to comments, or simply enjoying thoughtful comments. I'm there for the commenters rather than the posts, the social part of sharing news. especially the commenters providing context or a new way to think about things.

Trying to enjoy Reddit the way I like became a game whack-a-mole of removing communities that were too large and filled with copy paste jokes.

I dunno if I'm a weird kind of redditor but i know am a stubborn one, and as reddit changed i bounced harder and harder off of it.

Coincidentally i was a month into a sanity sabbatical from Reddit when my friends told me about the api fiasco. Somehow i stumbled in here, and while i thought it world be a tough transition and that i would struggle to ban reddit it wasnt.

Long story short, I wouldn't say i changed at all. Reddit changed, and i found a home better than it ever was.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago

Lemmy is great, it's active enough for me to really enjoy it now.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago

I use it less, which is better for my mental health. I still find there are similarly depressing posts and attitudes here. People are nicer, but the breadth of topics is far more limited. I won't go back to reddit, but lemmy definitely doesn't hold a candle to the number of communities they have. I've been using Tumblr as well and quite enjoying that.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

I'm still a bit confused about the instances and the political alignment of people on certain instances. I'm on Lemmy.ml but apparently people can be quite toxic on that instance.

Having to subscribe to the same subject on different instances feels a bit weird. I always wonder what I'm missing out on.

It also seems like we're missing some critical mass but I'm over Reddit, that's the bottom line.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

I deleted my Reddit account and have not gone back. That said, I’m not particularly fond of Lemmy either. I’ve found… maybe? two communities here of interest that may have migrated from Reddit and they aren’t even active; and even as a socialist, the politics are tiresome and pervasive.

Aside from fascists getting the smacking around that they deserve, the one thing that’s nice is that there are far fewer cringey “yay lemmy is the best isn’t it guys” circlejerk posts now than there were back then. I don’t spend nearly as much time on here as I did on Reddit, so that’s a plus.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (3 children)

It's refreshing to not have so many Trumpers. They're still around but not as prevalent. Overall this is just so much friendlier.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago

I have a lot less to say, and I'm more careful about what I do say.

I believe it's mostly because of the smaller community. It's easier to be an ass at a soccer game with 15,000 strangers than at your great-aunt's birthday. (Even if your third cousin is a neo-nazi.)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago

9 month already ?

Well, I was already active on mastodon, and had a pixelfed account (but not active there) for years. So the reddit fiasco was the right time to move.

Moving to lemmy wasn't such of a big change as I was familiar with the federation, and the fediverse in general, was already considering it for a while.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Jesus. I've left 1,124 comments already.

My wife's right; I am that guy.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Well, with the smaller communities, I'm trying to comment more. However, I still mostly lurk because I usually don't have anything to add to a convo.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago

Made me have a healthier relationship with social media, my smartphone usage, and overall thinking. I almost exclusively used RiF and curated it enough that I could readily get lost in it for hours in threads and/or following drama.

I knew what I liked about reddit was the mods, the 3rd party apps, and the communities, and the company behind the website was the least appealing ineffectual part of the experience. They were slow in every sense of the word and consistently made out-of-touch decisions.

Lemmy was a great transition point for me. At first I was trying to treat it as a clone. Instead, I found a place (and the fediverse in general) where there wasn't a mass amount of resources spent to keeping me engaged - it's just content of the day, no strings attached.

I found a space that was indifferent to the amount of time I spent on it, passionate communities that were more responsive and literate, and just felt more respected as a person.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

I've moved on, I only use reddit when I want to find already existing stuff.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

I miss the niche subs, but I comment more here on threads I normally wouldn't bother with because I know I'd get buried. Interactions here are slower, better thought out and generally more positive. I have actually witnessed someone back down from a position when presented with evidence a couple times and that was a breath of fresh air.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm mad much more often and I don't like it.

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