Just found this space, I’m trying to play around with this platform. Can anyone help to explain?
Reddit feels like a corporate advertising driven hellscape where fear and rage is encouraged.
Lemmy feels like 2010 when the internet world was a lot more simpler and you could actually talk to people.
Yeah Lemmy feels a lot like Reddit from 10-15 years ago. Mostly cordial conversation on a wide variety of topics, the biggest difference I see is the lack of activity in certain communities, which is a bit of a shame. But I guess that’s a trade-off.
Give it time. Better to grow organically.
That’s where we need to get back to is 2010.
Steve Huffman isn’t here, so that’s a huge plus.
Nah he’s here. It’s the guy downvoting all the anti reddit posts
No, that’s me. I don’t care to see Reddit, Twitter, Threads, etc posts.
Steve Huffman? Former moderator of r/jailbait and current CEO of Reddit? That guy?
Self-proclaimed future leader of an apocalyptic survival compound, and obvious Elon wannabe? That Steve Huffman?
Uj/ wait, what?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich
steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn’t usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. “If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me recently. “Without them, I’m fucked.”
…
Huffman has been a frequent attendee at Burning Man, the annual, clothing-optional festival in the Nevada desert, where artists mingle with moguls. He fell in love with one of its core principles, “radical self-reliance,” which he takes to mean “happy to help others, but not wanting to require others.” Huffman has calculated that, in the event of a disaster, he would seek out some form of community: “Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.”
There are some other funny bits in that article, like Spez having “large blue eyes” and once was a competitive ballroom dancer.
3rd party app support…
There are many other reasons, but let’s be real. A lot of us ditched reddit because they dropped support for third party apps. Having an interface that isn’t trying to constantly milk you for all sorts of monetization schemes matters a lot, as it so happens. Enough to say goodbye to a lot of familiar and large communities with otherwise good information.
There’s many communities I miss, but without third party apps that place became unbearable. The equivalent ones are not as active, but i can actually read and participate in discussions here.
Two things that come to mind:
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Lemmy’s protocol is open, so anybody can make 3rd party apps to work with it. Third party Reddit apps used to be popular when Reddit had an open API, but Reddit destroyed that on purpose.
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Because Lemmy isn’t run by a singular company, you don’t get the same restrictions. Reddit admins had a whole host of rules on what a sub could or could not contain. Many of which were heavy focused on making Reddit more advertiser friendly.
The funniest part of killing 3rd party apps is they cut off a widely used method if collecting more commenting data from the average user. I guess they figured audience style interaction on the official app is worth more.
The official app purportedly has a shit ton of interaction tracking. I can’t find the link anymore, but somebody on HN even claimed what they wanted to track was so invasive that he walked out of a job interview for Reddit.
What I can say for sure is that the new Reddit “shreddit” website is absolutely fucking full of tracking. I reverse engineered it for reasons, and every interaction with UI elements was reported back before the actual interaction was allowed to take place.
They definitely gain more value out of user data from interaction tracking than they do from their comments.
Tracking clicks on links with JS is pretty normal. I always implemented that with Google analytics for my e-commerce sites.
It helps you track things like downloads of files, email links, exit links, etc.
As a former web dev, I know it’s normal industry standard stuff, but it’s really hard to give Reddit the benefit of the doubt here.
Their tracking is completely ingrained in the webcomponent-based SPA itself, beyond what’s reasonable for anonymized analytics. Disabling cookies even broke loading content, despite being logged out.
What did you used to program in?
In a professional capacity, it was React with TypeScript for front-end, Node for backend with Nginx to serve static assets. At the end of the day, it wasn’t really for me. I enjoy web dev for hobby projects, but working with it day after day ruined my intrinsic desire to keep doing it.
Oooooh this is relevant to my interests!! After 20yrs doing web dev I crashed out of two jobs in 6 months completely hating coding. Can’t even bring myself to look at code nowadays.
What did you go into after quitting web dev?
And for point one, I use Voyager, which was heavily inspired by Apollo for Reddit, so Voyager makes this place feel more like home.
You can also use Voyager on Android! If you squint real hard, you can pretend Apollo finally released on a non-Apple device.
Interesting, for point 2, I thought having restriction in subreddit make it harder to advertise?
Oh, there were plenty of ads. You just didn’t recognize them as such.
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You can see the number of up votes and down votes.
The API is much more open to third party apps.
The people are generally nicer.
Features are not paywalled.
Code is open source, so anyone and everyone can contribute.
It’s kinda cool to go to pretty much any post and go “hey! I know almost everyone in the comment section!”, but that’s a bit of a double edged sword
Haha, yeah. Luckily it’s more “Oh, it’s you” and less “Oh, it’s you”. lol
Though I do tend to block trolls very quickly.
Oh, it’s you!
Oh it’s you
Oh. It is you.
Oh, it IS you.
R2D2 it is you it is you!
(insert random squeaks)
Oh. It’s you.
OH!! ‘tis ye!
Some apps (like Boost) even let you add tags to people’s names.
I always get so confused until I remember the context
Interesting, I use boost and didn’t know about that. Like client side flairs, neat!
Damn, I want that feature in Eternity
Lol that sounds cool
It can be. Once you get to hyper specific niches, you’ll start seeing communities where it’s more or less only a single person posting, if anyone’s around at all. In more general communities it depends what’s going on. There’s a few people in the memes and shit posting communities who I swear make just about every post that ends up high up on top/day, and are in half the comment sections too. In communities like ask Lemmy it’s usually different people posting, but the same few people replying
Only downside is when you DO finally have an, “Oh, it’s you” moment, you’d better hope they’re not one of the few people doing the posting.
Somewhere along the way, I learned that for a village to thrive, the creative people (the artisans, the musicians etc) must move in first, they form the roots, then the rest of the village follows them.
The creative people moved from Digg to Reddit. That’s what made Reddit Reddit, not the brand, or the UI, or some genius exec.
The creative people have mass migrated to Lemmy, & hence Lemmy will thrive. How do you know - see where og memes originate. Genius is not the domain of AI, & hence Reddit is Deaddit. We’re now just waiting for the rest to follow.
I’ve yet to see artists migrate here. The artists started on DA, Newgrounds, YT, Tumblr, etc. The professionals moved to Twitter.
Reddit started from geek & tech culture, not creatives. Its ability to foster discussion extended well to not just techies but to everyone. Most creatives I’ve seen shy away from Reddit.
Creative people in the Reddit/Lemmy village are the geeks & intellectuals
This makes sense. I wonder if it’s different now, since reddit has became such a big platform.
For starters, Lemmy – which uses open source ActivityPub protocols – is decentralized and comprised of thousands of independently-run servers, so it’s theoretically impossible to take down Lemmy completely. If lemmy.world goes down today and never comes back, the “Lemmy” network will still be online because of the other servers like lemmy.zip and sh.itjust.works that use Lemmy server software (which is currently at version .19 or around there).
Worth nothing: Lemmy is part of the Fediverse, which is an umbrella term to describe all ActivityPub software types. Yes, other software packages also use ActivityPub protocols to communicate… for example, Kbin (the “main” site is kbin.social, it’s sorta like their lemmy.world) is a news aggregator like Lemmy and interacts with Lemmy almost seamlessly. There’s also Mastodon, a Twitter-like service that currently Kbin users can interact with (but not Lemmy).
In short: it’s kinda complex at the moment, and many parts of the Fediverse (which Lemmy belongs to) don’t interact with each other directly because they provide different services, but it’s important to note that it’s really hard to take it down completely because the Fediverse is independently owned and run by different people in different parts of the world. Contrast with Reddit, a service that does have many servers but is owned and run by a single company in America.
Edit: I was wrong, Mastodon users can post on Lemmy instances, but Lemmy users can’t post on Mastodon instances. Thanks Baku@aussie.zone for the info!
There’s also Mastodon, a Twitter-like service that currently Kbin users can interact with (but not Lemmy).
They can interact with us though, and then we can interact back. We can’t really “post” there, but if a mastodonian makes a post in a Lemmy community, us lemmings can see it, and then we can reply to them. But we can’t do twitter style posts on their forum
The biggest telltale sign you’re talking to a mastodonian rather than a lemming is that you’ll see them @ everybody in the entire thread in every single reply, since that’s how replies start on twitter and mastodon. I’ve never actually received a notification for the @'s, I think it’s functionally closer to just linking to your user profile than an actual mention, but once you get deep in a thread you’ll see every comment starting with 60 different @'s.
It might actually be an idea to treat your own profile like a community, isn’t that something that reddit had too? Like you could post to r/importantcommunity or to u/goodusername
Yeah, my last post on Reddit was actually to my profile redirecting people here. Don’t think we have that here yet, although it could be useful.
I never really saw it used for anything useful though, it was primarily used for spam in my experience. But it would probably improve compatibility between us and mastodonians
Ah ok, I didn’t know they could post here, that’s really cool. Thanks for the correction!
No worries! Here’s an example of a post by a mastodon user on a Lemmy community (another telltale sign is that virtually no lemmings use hashtags):
https://aussie.zone/post/7464977
And one of those deep mention comment threads (though I’ve seen deeper):
the “Lemmy” network
There isn’t a Lemmy network, there’s just ActivityPub or more colloquially the Fediverse :)
By being federated and decentralized, Lemmy makes it impossible for one idiot billionaire to ruin an entire platform.
In order to “take over” Lemmy, they would have to take over more than 1,300 Instances, in many different countries, instead of one instance in one country.
Hey, hey… Millionaire. Don’t inflate him.
I think it’s mostly subjective or anecdotal, but what comes to mind:
- The community generally is more friendly. Absolutely, there are still jerks or trolls around, but the ratio of jerks or trolls feel way less than reddit.
- I feel more active here myself. This one I can’t explain. The community is smaller, so maybe I’m not subconsciously worrying about being drowned out by other comments? On Reddit, I’d average about 1 comment a month at best. On here I usually leave a few comments a week.
- This point might not mean much if you didn’t join reddit when it was younger: I joined reddit when it was still young. I think back in '08? Lemmy feels like a young reddit, back when I enjoyed it most. Again, I can’t really explain this since it’s just a feeling, but one example of what I mean by “young reddit” is community wide memes. Wayyyyyy back in the day, everyone on Reddit was ravaging about “The narwhal bacons at night” or something like that lol. There were also a bunch of dickbutt memes… if you know, you know. Well, my first week on Lemmy everyone was posting beans for a good couple of days. No reason. Just beans. A few weeks ago there were a bunch of “Taylor Swift going to Australia,” Taylor Swift taking a swim," “Taylor Swift spotted at the airport,” titled posts, but all those posts were pictures of airplanes. The rotating meme right now I think is Jeans??? Idk. This is just a symptom of a younger community, and why I like it more, but there’s more to enjoy about it than rotating memes. This place just feels more genuine as opposed to artificial if that makes any sense.
- I feel like I’m not missing out on anything on Reddit and I have a healthier relationship with social media on this site than with reddit. Every once and a while, I log back onto Reddit to see what’s going on. Most of the “Big news” that’s posted on there is also posted here, but the experience now feels more bloated compared to here so I don’t stick around as long. As for this site… Yes there is less content. Yes there is less to scroll through. At the same time though, you can scroll for a very long time if you really want to. This eventually led to me being on my phone less and being somewhat a little more productive as opposed to doom scrolling.
- Lemmy absolutely has better third party support for well, anything. Sure, it doesn’t have official apps, but go to the app store and count how many different Lemmy apps there are vs reddit. Nearly all of these apps are better than the reddit app IMO. Most of these apps are also FOSS; they’re free with no ads. Yes, there are still few paid apps as well if that tickles your fancy. I know Sync for Reddit came over to Lemmy as Sync for Lemmy as an example. This shouldn’t stop at apps though. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are browser plugins.
- You have more say in your experience here. Again, with the smaller community, your voice is louder. On top of that, is your server’s admin doing something you do not support? Your instance is doing something you don’t like? Create an account on other instances! Lemmy is federated, so most of what you see should be the same as in other instances, but you aren’t under the rule of one toxic CEO anymore. I myself have like 4 accounts on 4 different instances lol.
- Piggy-backing off of the previous point: if reddit is down, it is down. If your instance is down here? Sign into another instance!
- On the opposite end of the spectrum, does some instance have a bunch of members or just communities you don’t want to see? Lemmy might not have native tools out of the box, but some Lemmy apps will let you block entire communities.
- One fun thing I like about Lemmy is you can post pictures in comments!
If anything, the only reason why I still use reddit is for smaller, niche, communities. To that end, yeah Lemmy is smaller, thus the smaller reddit communities are even smaller here. If I find myself wanting to make a post on a given niche topic, I typically post on Reddit AND here. Sometimes, my post on Lemmy will somehow get more comments than reddit still though. Reddit posts seem to fall off after a day or so, that’s not typically the case for Lemmy if you do trend something.
At the end of the day though, this is just a social media platform, and the enjoyment you get out of it comes down to you. ☺️ One tip I do have though is to sort by “Top of 6h” or “12h”. I don’t like the “Hot” sorting on here that much.
I don’t think this is definitively “better” than reddit. The functionality of the site is more bare bones. No big hidden features or anything like that. What you see is what you get as far as interfaces go. But I am enjoying it. It reminds me of a much younger Internet and much simpler times. I am loving that Lemmy servers are run by your average joe who just wanted to start up a Lemmy community. No single CEO who only cares about how profitable a site is.
Last night I made a post on c/asklemmy and that post now has 200 upvotes and a bunch of engagement.
On Reddit, that post would’ve been removed for some stupid reason or no engagement whatsoever.
Reddit also has a stupid algorithm thing and I could never find the posts from communities I subscribed to on my feed leaving many posts lost.
Serioulsy, Reddit has a moderation problem. Posts gets removed all the time by powertripping mods.
Gotta third this. I had actually forgotten how bad it was till this was mentioned because it never happens on Lemmy. Love that. I had a few posts removed for accidentally missing an obscure rule on Reddit. Do not miss.
Oh lemmy does too
Rarely but modlog is 80% transparent, giving the users the chance to report instances of unfair treatment to respective admins.
Remember when .world admins banned users for saying i am gonna leave .world after they defederated with some db0 /c/'s and gave reason "let me help you " ? That is the one of the most power abusive thing i have ever seen.
Is there a problem with .world management?
Sometimes as i said mod issue is relevent here as well.
Unfortunately, it still happens even here on Lemmy. I don’t think we see it as much because most communities here have far fewer mods than adjacent Reddit subs on average, but occasionally you’ll find a mod here who thinks they know better than their community and does whatever they feel like.
The one about regret buying, right? I’ve seen it.
It would be worse: people would assume that you’re a Nazi because you’re criticising consumption.
By default? A nicer UI. It still pales compared to classic Reddit, but having things like keyboard shortcuts built in is nice, and it doesn’t bog down/fire up a bunch of pop-ups like neo-Reddit.
Reddit, especially the bigger subs - feels really, really stupid lately. And I hate to say that because it sounds so insulting, but it really does feel like the average “IQ” on the site has gone from being this kind of tech/nerd culture of reasonably well educated people to like… old ladies complaining about their ‘entitled’ DoorDash drivers. It often feels like Facebook.
Don’t get me wrong, Lemmy isn’t 100% geniuses or anything and there are some smart people on Reddit, but on Lemmy I’ll actually have back and forth conversations with people and it feels like more people are acting like human beings
It might be insulting, dunno, but I think that it’s completely true. In special, verbal intelligence and logic reasoning are extremely low there.
Ohhh. Logic reasoning is extremely low indeed! I see so many fallacies there, it’s crazy.
Eternal summer hasn’t hit here yet. Eternal August? Whatever the term is.
It’s funny, the “zoomers”/teen audience is not even a bother to me - I genuinely feel like it’s a lot of the more 40-50s demographic which makes any form of conversation a nightmare.
Being normal? Reddit has become such a toxic dump lately, Lemmy feels like a walk in the park compared to it.
I have quite the opposite experience.
I’ve seen both very passionate tone deaf communities and very inclusive friendly communities. Steer a course and you might find calmer waters.
These days my Lemmy experience is listing through main page which accumulates god knows what. Even though I do curate a list of desired communities. Perhaps I should start filtering content I interact with.
You can mute specific instances. For example, not saying you should, but if you would happen to find all people from Hexbear insuffurable, you could make that instance disapeaar. Again, I’m not saying this specific community is filled with cocky asshole, but I’m not saying it’s not either. I really can’t as I haven’t seen any of their content since a long time.
Yeah, I got nothing against other people having different political views but that was the first instance I blocked.
Thanks!
Its FOSS
You can see exactly how it works under the hood. Also, when a major issue is found, people would quickly contribute to fix it (reporting the issue, summiting patch, testing the fix, etc).
Yeah
