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?

  • Boozilla@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2477·
    4 months ago

    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.

    • Magister@lemmy.world
      633·
      4 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

      • Dave@lemmy.nz
        22·
        4 months ago

        I think the arch thing is just a meme. I asked a genuine question about which distro to use and got a range of suggestions but none of them were arch.

        • FutileRecipe@lemmy.world
          2·
          4 months ago

          about which distro to use and got a range of suggestions but none of them were arch.

          I think Debian is usually the strongest contender here.

    • pooberbee (they/she)@lemmy.ml
      241·
      4 months ago

      My baseless opinion is that having a variety of instances with varying ethoses means that there’s a good home instance for everyone (not just the verysmart, young, white, male, liberal a la Reddit), and federation means that that variety of people are intersecting and interacting a lot more than if instances were completely separate. At the same time, it still feels like a small community, or maybe a bunch of small communities. There seems to be a lot less of the snarky clapbacks and unpopular opinions getting nuked that’s typical of other social media.

      • wjrii@lemmy.worldEnglish
        191·
        4 months ago

        (not just the verysmart, young, white, male, liberal a la Reddit)

        Nope, we’ve also got the verysmart middle-aged white male liberals here, and some Communists too!

      • Pandantic [they/them]@midwest.socialEnglish
        6·
        4 months ago

        There seems to be a lot less of the snarky clapbacks

        And almost no low-effort, “cult of personality” mememetic responses. I was going to list some but it’s been a year since I’ve been on that wretched site and I’ve purged my mind of them. But you know, the ones where you can basically predict the top comment before opening the page, probably propagated by the prevalence of bots on the site.

    • neidu2@feddit.nl
      201·
      4 months ago

      AKSHUALLY, only a few of us assholes fit this description, and as a whole we are in the vast minority.

    • go $fsck yourself@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2012·
      4 months ago

      but there’s less hivemind.

      The hive mind here is far stronger.

      • anti-anything microsoft
      • anti-anything google
      • unwarranted “just install Linux” everywhere
      • NewNewAccount@lemmy.world
        125·
        4 months ago

        Agreed. Lots of reasonable opinions (not just my own) get downvoted here.

        I’ve never been a fan of using downvotes as a disagree button and the issue seems even worse here than Reddit.

        • mke@lemmy.world
          42·
          4 months ago

          The more I see how people use downvotes, the less I like them as a feature in general. I don’t downvote things anymore.

          • Everyone can upvote, which already brings the most popular content to the top. Why does the system need another dimension to it?
            • I often see unpopular comments at the bottom, with scores like +2 -9… The absence of downvotes wouldn’t make a difference in content ordering, because the previous comment is simply +4.
          • If I disagree with someone enough to act on it, it’s my rule to explain why. A minus one is nearly useless as feedback.
            • Then, once I’ve replied, what’s the point of downvoting? Everyone can read my thoughts.
            • Replies can be upvoted too, for people who think truth comes down to a battle of internet points.
          • If I honestly believe something is bad or harmful to the community, it should probably be reported, not (merely) downvoted.

          Downvotes as they are seem like outdated design on the human interaction level. They fail to iterate on years of knowledge gained since their inception.

          • aasatru@kbin.earth
            2·
            4 months ago

            I generally downvote in two scenarios. One is if someone is being a jerk, which is not necessarily enough for a report but always annoying. The other is if they are sharing misinformation, even if I believe they mean nothing bad with it.

            I think it has it’s place as a way to reduce visibility.

            And sometimes I enjoy getting downvotes - there are times I knowingly rub a group of people (generally authoritarians) the wrong way, and I’m happy to see the message is well received. ;)

            • mke@lemmy.world
              3·
              4 months ago

              I’ve taken to replying in both cases :^)

              When I have the time and energy, that is. A lot of my comments are just me adding what I hope is relevant context or correcting what I assume is accidental misinformation.

              I understand reducing visibility of “bad” content, I’m just not sure the tool is worth its negative side effects.

              • aasatru@kbin.earth
                2·
                4 months ago

                Yeah, time and energy is key. But I do notice quite a bit of these types of quality interactions here - it’s very much appreciated! :)

      • Barbarian@sh.itjust.works
        33·
        4 months ago

        anti-anything google

        I hear that. Went through the technical reasons for the manifest V2 deprecation (if this is only to target ublock origin, why did they implement filter lists into the browser? Why does ublock origin lite work just fine?) and it got more downvotes than upvotes. Haters gonna hate I guess :))

        • mke@lemmy.world
          5·
          4 months ago

          Hey, I agree that MV3 brings benefits (such as better security for the extension ecosystem) and has technical merit, but it’s worth noting that uBlock’s main dev themselves said it won’t work as well. uBO Lite doesn’t work fine, it works. It’s also worse.

          And the same fundamental issue that affects ublock (the new API limits) affects everyone else trying to do the same job using extensions.

        • fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc
          42·
          4 months ago

          I get the impression most lemmy users don’t have a lot of lived experience. Everyone deals in absolutes, and is unable to recognise nuance.

          Most contentious issues have a range of considerations, positive and negative.

          • aasatru@kbin.earth
            1·
            4 months ago

            I completely agree with this observation. Generally if people get upset about my posts here it’s people I’m close to agreeing with, who just cannot fathom that I don’t agree with them on the details.

            I keep thinking about the People’s Front of Judea.

      • GoodEye8@lemm.eeEnglish
        37·
        4 months ago

        Because Microsoft sucks and Google sucks and if you install Linux there’s 50% chance it’ll cure someone’s cancer. Also if you’re at a bar and your pickup line is “I use arch” it’ll be like the fucking Niagara falls. If you’re into guys even their ass will go sploosh when they hear that line.

        What I’m getting at is that we’re just a superior being.

    • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      4 months ago

      there’s less hivemind

      Not really. I guess it depends on the instance and community, but I have found that since the amount of users on Lemmy communities tend to be significantly smaller than on Reddit, the effects of hivemind thinking is actually amplified.

      In actuality, Reddit and Lemmy are pretty much two sides of the same coin. The only real difference is, as you mentioned, Reddit is run like a business now and Lemmy currently isn’t. That and Lemmy users are obsessed with Linux/FOSS.

    • hoss@lemmynsfw.com
      1·
      4 months ago

      Hi. I’m an asshole. Nice to meet you! Looking forward to upsetting you later on a shitpost thread! 😊 👋

    • suction@lemmy.world
      1·
      4 months ago

      The akshually might be stronger, but the cultish behaviour of specialised subreddits hasn’t quite arrived here yet so one can still have a faceted opinion about the stuff they discuss, while on Reddit it’s either “glory to our king” or “get the fuck out and watch your Dane Cook specials!!”

  • originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee
    1771·
    4 months ago

    When people say Lemmy is better, they mean the software and the platform are better. You’re talking about the users of the two platforms. Lemmy users are still idiots, just like Reddit users, we just use Linux and don’t use chrome

  • Origen@lemmy.world
    126·
    4 months ago

    I swapped because I refused to use their garbage fire of an app and they shut down my beautiful RIF. Unforgivable.

  • eezeebee@lemmy.caEnglish
    112·
    4 months ago

    Ads look better in the official ad delivery app - download the app

    “Oh, you already have a third party app that you love? Too bad, we’re killing it.”

    Download the official app to view the rest of this comment

  • bstix@feddit.dk
    73·
    4 months ago

    There’s a lot less commercial interest.

    Not just no ads, but also no users trying to push products or gain karma for account selling and all that crap.

  • thawed_caveman@lemmy.world
    65·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • orcrist@lemm.ee
      7·
      4 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.

      • thawed_caveman@lemmy.world
        5·
        4 months ago

        Yeah, i was way late to this thread and yet i still got seen a bunch, and this has happened in a lot of threads.

        Though i think that might be because comments are sorted by Hot by default, and i assume the “Hot” algorithm is designed in a way to surface new comments

  • doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    52·
    4 months ago

    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.

  • Wooki@lemmy.world
    502·
    4 months ago

    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.

  • The Dark Lord ☑️@lemmy.ca
    42·
    4 months ago

    Everyone’s talking about the tech, but I’ll talk about the user base. When you make a post or comment on Reddit, it often feels like you get lost in some black hole of other posts or comments. No one sees your comment because there are 1000 other comments on the same post.

    At Lemmy, there are fewer users and fewer comments, but your comments actually get seen. People upvote. I weirdly get way more upvotes at Lemmy than I did at Reddit, in spite of the smaller user base here. Because of that, I’m way more active here than I was on Reddit.

  • Paradachshund@lemmy.today
    38·
    4 months ago

    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.

    • f2sfljLhdtTZ@lemmy.world
      101·
      4 months ago

      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.

      • Boozilla@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        4 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.

        • frunch@lemmy.world
          3·
          4 months ago

          I realize I’m a bit late to the conversation, just wanted to say i agree with your sentiments.

          I kinda felt that the whole tech world was a little better when it had a certain gatekeeping element, in that you had to know how to operate a computer to at least some degree to do anything with the Internet. While that does reduce the amount of potential users dramatically in its own right, it also cuts down on the signal-to-noise ratio similarly. Giving everyone phones didn’t necessarily make the Internet a better place, imo. But it also has given a voice to many who never would have had one (for better or worse, as well)…

          Not every place needs an enormous user base to make it worthwhile or enjoyable. Too many comments def leaves you feeling like you don’t have a voice, but i guess too few and you wonder if anyone’s listening…

          • Boozilla@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            4 months ago

            I mostly agree. I don’t want a “highly exclusive, only for elites” type of vibe (and I’m not saying that you do). But yes, there’s probably a sweet spot of “obstacle course” to get here somewhere. Not that I claim to know what that is in precise terms.

      • Paradachshund@lemmy.today
        41·
        4 months ago

        I think you’re spot on with those hurdles. I’m somewhat techy (not nearly as much as many on here), and even I found it to be a major turn off for a long time before I finally decided to figure it out.

        The way I would approach this if I was trying to improve it would be to create a way for people to essentially skip the instance selection process. Perhaps instance owners could opt in to this pool of “open servers” let’s call them. The user would create an account on a neutral website created for this onboarding purpose, and by default there would be a checked box for “automatically select server”. It would sign them up for an instance based on their IP address and the size of the instance to try and spread out population a bit.

        If you want more control, you uncheck the box and it gives you more things to select from like region, population size, and anything else relevant, and then gives you a list of servers fitting your criteria and you pick the one you want.

  • inbeesee@lemmy.world
    36·
    4 months ago

    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.