No Stupid Questions

spez has no power here.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

NO SPEZ. That's enough

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

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

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.

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.

When one instance enshittifies itself you can just block it.

Also, no greedy little pigboy Spez.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.