this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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I am a reddit refugee. Keep seeing that this is supposed to be somehow better than Reddit. As far as I can tell, it follows a similar format, less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose. But It looks like people still get down vote brigaded on some communities. So I'm curious, how it's better?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

When one instance enshittifies itself you can just block it.

Also, no greedy little pigboy Spez.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

spez has no power here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

No Ads, federated, Open Source, No big coorporation, community driven, no investors and stock market push, decentralized is the future IMHO.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

It's a better crowd. Feels more like 2009 Reddit and forums. I can use whichever app I want

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Its' best days are ahead, not behind. And being a decentralized entity - like Bit Torrent or Bitcoin - makes it an important social media experiment that is worth stoking the flames, and whose outcome will be much different than it was with reddit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

It's not commercial. Your data isn't being harvested to advertise to you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Listen, I won't dig into all the tech and philosophy of decentralization and anti-corporate ownershipa. There are other people here for that. But let me tell you why I am enjoying it: it's small, it ends, and it feels like early internet.

I load up Lemmy, and see a series of disjointed memes, or a current ongoing meme (like pondering the orb) and absorb that for a short while. I see a couple world news articles, a couple about Trump and a couple about places that aren't the US. I read an article about Ryzen's new chips not performing well on Windows and see someone's retro-gaming setup. Then, after about 10-15 minutes of scrolling, I go "oh hey, I remember this post from yesterday", and then I close Lemmy because, and this is the important part, I've hit the end of new content in my feed.

I still get the news, I still take in a couple memes about the current state of politics, or a celebrity flying her plane altogether too much, but I am never stuck here. There's no one trying to rage bait me for the sake of user engagement, and any argument I find myself in wraps up and moves on. I don't feel disconnected, but I am also never completely absorbed, and my life is better for it. Sure, sometimes while I am waiting in a line I load Lemmy only to discover there's nothing new for me in the hour since I've closed it. Sometimes I do the age old, "looking to busy myself", close Lemmy because there's nothing to see, immediately open Lemmy because I am looking for something to occupy my Internet poisoned brain. But being bored for a minute here and there is worth it, if it means a lot more free time because I am no longer absorbed in the rat race of infinite scrolling social media.

I think Lemmy is better in a series of ways, but the one that really matters is that it helps me put down my phone, and do things that I enjoy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Simple, no Karma whoring, real people to argue, no bots posting fake stories about something that happened related to the post, and best of all, controlled by users and not corporate people.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

For me it’s not that it’s “better” it’s just not the cesspit that Reddit has become. It’s certainly better for avoiding mindless negativity.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Unfortunately, I haven't observed that. There seem to be many people on Lemmy who go out of their way to be antagonistic to other Lemmy users. Which includes downvote brigading, as the OP said.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Sadly I have to agree. While the nice people on Lemmy are much nicer, there are some really extreme views here that are heavily detached from reality.

I've probably had more heavy downvotes or arguments on Lemmy in 9 months than I had on Reddit in over 15 years. The highlight recently was me discussing how expert systems are used in LLM's, given that I'm a software engineer that works in AI at a big tech company for a living. Nope, I'm wrong, LLM's aren't real AI, downvotes... Pair this with me questioning customer data access rules in big tech, which resulted in someone arguing my view on something I literally helped build and telling me to "open source it to prove it".

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Mindless negativity has arrived - at least in lemmy.world.

I have some tech-related subscriptions, so I check those out every now and then, but they have few new posts. So when I browse the Popular section, oy...... corporations bad, climate change bad, war bad, economy bad. (Not saying it's not true, I just want a place I can browse and escape all that for five minutes.)

And some users (even mods!) have an "all-or-nothing" attitude too, which is infuriating because they won't drive me away from the cause, but they may drive away others with less patience.

For example, I say "I support the blue color. Now, I wonder, if metallic blue with a purple hue is really a true blue? And how? Trying to learn. Just curious..." and then someone says "YOU JUST OUTED YOURSELF AS A BLUE HATER!!!!!!"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Open mobile app support

Ad free (depending on the app and instance, but its pretty easy to get Lemmy without ads)

No CEO to make whacky, unpopular decisions without clear purpose or recourse

No shareholders whose priorities will always take precedence over the users

There's also something to be said for being part of a smaller community

Of course any and all problems can occur in microcosm within a particular instance or community, but it's trivial to just block that instance/community. As for brigading, bullying, and harassment, Lemmy offers no solutions to human nature, unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Lemmy offers no solutions to human nature

This is an excellent way to phrase it lol

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

It's not owned by a greedy soulless corporation with a pigboy in control. There's more assholes on here (the AKSHUALLY is quite strong) but there's less hivemind.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

the AKSHUALLY is quite strong

lol, yeah true, same as the linux community here is pretty much Arch BTW, but it's good-natured

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

but there's less hivemind.

The hive mind here is far stronger.

  • anti-anything microsoft
  • anti-anything google
  • unwarranted "just install Linux" everywhere
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

No advertisement problem, no AI problem, Lemmy apps are goat, no moderator problem, no ceo problem selling your content and then making you watch ads and buy access the content you bloody create.

Fuck reddit.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

You're coming at this from the design and community aspect. I don't think Lemmy makes significant improvements over Reddit on those fronts, it's designed the same, has the same benefits and drawbacks. As of right now the small size of the community makes it lacking in diversity and impractical for niche interests (aside from tech-related ones).

My case for Lemmy being better is a business case: Reddit was a for-profit company backed by venture capital, and is now publicly traded. They are extremely susceptible to enshittification, and are in fact already deep in that process.

Meanwhile, Lemmy is an open source software that enables users to host their own social media. It's not even a business at all, i'm not even sure if the developer (LemmyNet) is a business or a person or some other legal entity.

Fediverse social medias (Lemmy, Mastodon) are structurally resilient to the enshittification that we're seeing from corporate social medias, and i like that a lot.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

The small community aspect also has benefits. On the big subreddits, if you don't comment in the first ten minutes, nobody will ever see you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Loony power tripping moderators can only ban you from their little bit rather than from the whole site.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

NO SPEZ. That's enough

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

No ads, no trolling bots. I never want to see “He Gets Us” again.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

It's not, but it's old Reddit with more attributes that prevent a transition to corporate Reddit so I'll take it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Lemmy isn't a single website like reddit.com is. It's rather a collection of decentralised servers ("instances") offering the same service (one very similar to reddit). It's often compared to e-mail - just as Gmail users can talk to Outlook users, lemmy.world users can post and comment on lemmy.ml from their home instance.

What this does is it removes the centralised aspects of Reddit - if a community has powertripping mods one can make an alternate community (like on Reddit). But this goes a step above - powertripping server admins can be reigned in by simply switching instances.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I was practically forced to move to other platforms, including Lemmy, because Reddit's way of dealing with things is absolute garbage. Their app is garbage, their ethics are garbage, their admins and moderators are garbage.

In short I got permabanned on the entirety of Reddit after confronting a moderator in my favorite sub violating their own (and Reddit's) rules and content policy. Which eventually led being banned on the sub by said moderator, and later Reddit got triggered as I was "avoiding a ban" with an alternative account (which happened accidentally).

Since then it's been impossible to get in contact with admins, and they've been autobanning any new accounts I tried to set up. I've been trying to appeal my bans dozens of times in the past year, but never get an actual response from an actual admin, I doubt they even have humans working at Reddit at this point. That's on my 8+ year old account..

Previously I also got permabanned on dozens of subs for commenting in a sub that was supposedly brigading, I didn't even have any harmful intention or said anything worthwhile of a ban, yet all those completely unrelated subs banned me for "participating" in the brigade thing.

It just shows what absolute trash moderators and admins of Reddit are. They're all only playing their own little agendas. They're only destroying their own community with stuff like this. I miss my favorite communities, but I absolutely don't miss the garbage surrounding it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I recently migrated here. I did so as a precaution, and still browse reddit sometimes .

Reddit IPO'ed, and is now focused on making money. They removed the API to centralize it's power and remove 3rd party apps. They threatened subreddits who protested, and shut some down. And have made sweeping changes to accommodate to advertisers.

The straw that broke the snoo's back was the CEO hinting at subreddit paywalls. I figured I would try to learn Lemmy again, and what do you know, it's more serious, has better comments and posts, segmented even more than reddit with the distros, and fully free/open source.

It also helps that I'm a huge computer nerd, and there's a lot of that on here, but you can find your niche.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Welcome! Don't take this wrong, but why didn't you come sooner? Reddit has had paywalls for as long as I can remember. r/TheLounge is an example of a famous one but any subreddit could enable restricting themselves to premium only.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That's actually new information to me! The news was pointing to a broader push to subscriptions for subreddits site wide. Definitely not doing that.

I also admit that I am deeply unhappy with reddits enshittification. I've been on reddit for over a decade and joined when I was in highschool. Moving was the last thing I wanted, but I'm more aware of the big-corp-monopoly we're all suffering under. This is part of it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I ripped the bandage off a few months before they shut down the API. I had to quit RIF cold turkey. I wanted it to be "my choice" if that makes sense. The official Reddit app just didn't do it for me.

I hope you enjoy your time here! I've liked it. My biggest piece of advice is to be the content you want to see. There is a lot less content here than Reddit. That's good and bad. Good because you get bored a little easier and move on lol, but bad because it can get a little boring. It's gotten a lot better though!

The other thing, and this is just a pet peeve lol, is that the proper way to link to communities is like !community@instance. A lot of people try to do c/community which doesn't work. If you do !community alone it will link to the local community which could totally not exist or have different rules etc.

example: [email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If you have a shit opinion that noone agrees with and they downvote you to hell, that isn't "brigading"... As for it being better....the mods alone make it 1000x better.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Just as a user, being able to block subs here is awful nice. When reddit decided I didn't get to decide what I see anymore, I was out.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You're on lemmy.world, which is pretty much exclusively Reddit refugees, so you probably won't see much difference in culture there, but that's what I consider the main advantage.

As in, I left Reddit when I noticed the toxic culture was fucking with my mental health.
Lemmy isn't particularly great anymore in this regard either, but still magnitudes better.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

lemmy.world is too popular (I know, I know, I also have a lemmy.world account). But the nice thing about the greater lemmy "galaxy" is you can still subscribe to communities from any instance, no matter what your home instance is.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Typical comment quality is off the chain. Leddit has been going downhill for years in this area.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

In terms of variety of communities it isn't better, but the hope is over time people will continue to come over here as reddit decays and eventually it'll catch up.

I left reddit when they killed the 3rd party app I used. I didn't want to switch and I ended up here. in my opinion Lemmy still has a long way to go to be as good as what I left, but I don't want to support reddit anymore and I find it to be good enough here to still be enjoyable. I can still look at memes, and there's still some good discussion to be had.

The biggest thing Lemmy is missing is niche communities and a broader and less techy audience. I think both of those will happen overtime if the platform keeps growing. Crossing my fingers we get there.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's pretty pretty hard to have this achieved with how the platform is today. Content is one (communities and posts) but lack of WTF is going on even for tech savvy people is another thing. Try asking a non user to go to the main entrance place for Lemmy (like googling it). Then ask them to find something of interest. Then ask them to create an account so they can comment. Those pretty fundamental things are non-existent.

Pretending that they exist or are easy to use is like saying Arch Linux is easy or even driving is easy. It is not. You need tons of preparation. The above take 1 minute in all common social media. Unless those three things are clear for people 20 to 40 yo, Lemmy will never gain traction.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Lemmy's barriers to entry are a problem, there's no getting around that. Personally I don't think they are that bad and requiring a bit of effort / research is, oddly, in some ways, kind of a good thing....? The people who want to be here have put in at least a little work. But you make a very valid point. It needs to be easier and more intuitive. I would also point out that reddit sucks for new users, too. People are constantly complaining on there about how hard it is to get a new account going because of prerequisite karma, wildly varying sub rules, etc.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It still falls into some of the same pitfalls that Reddit had (groupthink, reflexive commenting, power-tripping mods), but some of those problems I don't know that there's a way to get around them in this format, they're just a human nature sort of issue. I appreciate that Lemmy doesn't appear to be owned by a giant mega-corp trying to harvest our "intellectual", but we'll see how that pans out in the future. I've just gotten used to every online service I've used eventually going to shit.

I like that there's no advertising at the moment, I don't know that I would mind it so much if there was advertising, as long as it was kept minimal. I know these things don't just happen for free and if money is needed to help keep the lights on and such.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago

A very obvious solution to groupthink is to do away with the silly voting system. I don't know why they kept it. A very simple solution would have been to just assign votes to a topic based on how much attention it's getting. In simple terms, If opposed has 10,000 people that have viewed it, 1,000 people have left a comment, compared to a post that has 100,000 views and 15 comments, you can tell which one should have more attention score. The upvote and downvote system is too easily used as a dislike or like system. Many of us have the maturity to upvote something because we think it's a good discussion point even if we don't agree with what the person is saying. But a lot of people don't think that way mentally. They see something, they read it, immediately go into toxic hater mode and just downvote it for no reason

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Less locked down than Reddit. No CEO bent on taking your user created content and charging for it. No CEO trying to polish a turd for advertisers to make $$ while simultaneously completely taking for granted and disregarding the mods and users that actually make Reddit exist. No communities captured by shills and groupthink. Well…except for places like hexbear or some .ml, but there’s no pretenses there. You know what you’re getting into. Lemmy is more egalitarian, plenty of apps for mobile devices, people generally have a discussion and not just be the retread cheap quip for upvotes.

Also, Reddit IMO has gotten “colder” for lack of a better word. People don’t upvote. You’re more likely to be criticized for a position than engaged with. Opinions that disagree with the hive mind are often quickly downvoted regardless of whether or not the position has validity.

Lemmy is just more chill.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

People don’t upvote. You’re more likely to be criticized for a position than engaged with. Opinions that disagree with the hive mind are often quickly downvoted regardless of whether or not the position has validity.

i experience this constantly on lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

There were multiple actions described. You're saying that you experience one of them. Or maybe you experience more than one. Or maybe we don't know, because you didn't make it clear, which might make us want to downvote you, which suggests that you often experience being downvoted. :-)

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Life on Lemmy (and reddit/social media in general) becomes a lot better when you turn off vote displays

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

You own your data, you can self-host your own Lemmy instance and still connect to other Lemmy instances (Like what I do)

Also you can share whatever you want, no one tells you "If you say that again I'll ban you from the entire network". And of course, there are no ads or algorithms showing you what their owners want you to see. It's freedom.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I like the choose your own adventure element. If you want strong content moderation you can go to Beehaw; if you want something more catch all, Lemmy.world is good; if you're a Stalinist, you have at least three solid options.

The instances talk to each other, but many fulfill slightly different functions.

At Reddit, it seems the stupidest posts often get thousands of upvotes. Here, they're lucky if they get 50. So that makes me feel less crazy, I guess.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

No spez. The rest is kinda similar (except on a technical level that mostly matters to nerds)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

You ain't got to be a nerd to appreciate benefits of decantrelization. We need more of in in pretty much every aspect of our lives.

Mega corps and governments are colluding to fuck peasants over.

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