this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy

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Now that a lot of the commotion has subsided I'm just curious to know how y'all are finding the Lemmy experience in general and whether you use it regularly like you did reddit?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 147 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So far so good. In a smaller community I feel more responsible for contributing to discussions. Others seem to be engaging too with thoughtful comments (not just karma-farming inside jokes).

This is helped by the fact that new interesting threads are not immediately buried in heaps of new content, so you actually have time to think of an answer that someone might actually read and reply to. I realize that this is mostly a function of the current scale of the Fediverse and that the more it grows, the more it might just turn into Reddit.

[โ€“] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

I find I tend to get more replies here.

[โ€“] [email protected] 108 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

It's the Fediverse that I have been searching for.

Somebody on Lemmy made this quote I really like:

Twitter is people you care about posting content you don't care about. Reddit is people you don't care about posting content that you do care about

Twitter-like Fedi never clicked for me. I made a bunch of accounts over the course of two, maybe three years, each starting with the intention of maybe making new friends and having a good time. I met a ton of cool people but we never became good friends because I never got really invested into it, simply because my feed was never something I hoped it would be, something exciting.

Lemmy gives me exactly what I was searching for. I didn't use it prior to thr Reddit migration because there were too few people but now I am very happy

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[โ€“] [email protected] 66 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm just still missing communities that are only on Reddit rn.

Other than that... I'd argue the Lemmy ux is already far superior, so that's great.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i moved to lemmy before the reddit api changes. in january 2023 i stopped using all proprietary software and was looking for alternetives. its way better than reddit, im never going back...

[โ€“] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

There's good reason to love Lemmy, and since joining I've also gone very Foss and privacy centric but I just feel like it's a bit quiet, maybe it's just me

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[โ€“] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago

Eh, it scratches the itch. I don't touch reddit anymore, outside of web searches. Still, I miss the niche communities that only a massive site like reddit can give life.

[โ€“] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd like to see more human posts than just meme posting and news.

[โ€“] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Yeah, I'd love to have my niche communities back as well

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[โ€“] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago

Lemmy is great and all. Love it more then I ever did reddit. But it seems like instances are more politically polarized than your average subreddit. It kinda harshes my mellow.

I do like that people feel more genuine as opposed to just broken records repeating overused talking points.

[โ€“] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (11 children)

I've only been active on Hexbear really since the cth sub got banned and we built that space, but I really like how federation has gone and the influx of new slop and occasional lost libs/chuds.

[โ€“] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I know what some of those words mean

[โ€“] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Hexbear: the 3rd or so biggest instance on lemmy and by far the most active. It's where all the people with pronouns next to their names come from. We're a left unity trans positive community that's been around for 3 years, mostly made up of Marxists and Anarchists. We were just recently federated with the rest of lemmy about a week ago.

slop: Food for the hogs. Content. Posts. Discussion. Drama. Romance. Danger! Hoggers

cth: a podcast no one really cares about. A community of leftists outgrew a forum that used to be about them. It got banned from reddit and the refugees turned into Hexbear.

libs: Liberals. From our perspective this includes about 65-75% of the American political landscape. This includes all democrats and about half republicans. These are people who support capitalism. Bernie Sanders is a lib. They are annoying and will betray you in the end but they're usually the people who can be reasoned with so it's extra frustrating.

chuds: Fascists. The other 25-35%. Confederate flag waving people who eat burgers as a protest against global warming. Kyle Rittenhouse stans. Coal rollers. The people who will kill you first if you have good politics. They believe above all else in natural hierarchies so the capitalists will turn to them when the left challenges theirs. That's how Hitler happened.

[โ€“] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

thanks for the detailed description. feels like my online vocabulary expanded significantly

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[โ€“] secret301 34 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I'm struggling to find niche communities but overall the comments are more human and not just saying what everyone wants to hear for Internet points. I still plan on hosting my own instance soon and I'm excited for that. I do find it annoying as well when I sort by new and it's just thousands of repost from reddit.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

its good, been enjoying it for ~3 years now

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[โ€“] defluo 32 points 1 year ago (5 children)

My problem is that most of the posts are about lemmy or reddit.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

I do use it regularly, but I miss some of the niche gaming communities. You can definitely tell there's a lot less activity on here, but hopefully it keeps growing with time.

[โ€“] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Pretty good, it's my Reddit replacement (except for Google searches where I still put site:reddit.com, searching Lemmy doesn't work that well..).

Choosing an instance sucked though.

I went like:

  1. sh.itjust.works: Found out they're Canadian, the latency was too much for Europe
  2. lemmy.ml: Overall pretty good, I liked that NSFW instances were defederated, so I could browse All without seeing porn. Till I realized there is a slur filter that censors your comments and others. So if someone calls you a 'bitch' on the Fediverse everyone can read it, except you. You see 'removed'
  3. lemmy.world: Largest instance, plenty of local content, good policies overall, but the stability was awful (due to DDOS)
  4. lemmy.zip: Smaller instance, full federation, super fast and in the EU, I'm staying there for now and moved all my subscriptions and blocked communities (mostly porn, again, I like to browse All) over
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[โ€“] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think its great

Overall a much more friendly bunch of people here.

Thanks you guys! Youre all awesome!

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[โ€“] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

Honestly I'm not having a great time. Most of the hobby communities are graveyards. I spend a lot less time here because I'm not interested in tech communities at all.

[โ€“] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

three years ago after /r/cth got banned I switched to chapo.chat as my primary forum. After the API stuff caused Apollo to get shut down, I cut myself loose entirely from the reddit ecosystem. Haven't looked back lenin-laugh

[โ€“] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's a lot less of a time sink for me now. I'm on maybe 15 minutes a day.

It's probably because most of my other most frequented forums aren't quite here yet.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Pretty good. Using it much more and noticed a pretty good uptick in other posting stuff since I created my account.. I'd say I have two feet in the door to a new home. . Edited to clean up as was typing initial response on the go.

[โ€“] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Most of the niche communities I followed aren't on here so my usage is drastically lower than before. I find Lemmy to be generally nice as a platform-especially now with infinity for Lemmy out, I've come to forget that I'm no longer on reddit!

Just wish that there was more to go on here. Memes and tech can only keep me scrolling for so long.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

I've fully replaced reddit/Twitter for scrolling a while ago- I don't even bother with other social media at this point.

I was worried it would be annoying having to deal with a bunch of liberals after federation, but it's been pretty funny on balance. Sorry about the enormous emojis though, I try to spoiler tag those now.

[โ€“] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Imo it feels like the reddit migration has died down, but a good chunk the users that have stuck around are actually engaged in their communities. I've been seeing more instances created too, which is cool because it means people are hosting their own.

More recently I've noticed that Sync actually plays embedded videos now, which is probably the best update since its release. It's feeling a lot more user-friendly and that should help it keep growing organically.

The only times I use reddit anymore is browsing with old.reddit a couple times a week. I don't even login to that site now because I don't engage with anything, I just check the news and stuff then come back to Lemmy.

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[โ€“] captain_aggravated 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Redditfugee here. Lemmy pros/cons:

Pros

  • I guess it serves as a bit of a nicotine patch for Reddit. I'm no longer active on Reddit, and I spend less time doom scrolling than I used to.
  • By and large the community seems alright.

Cons

  • Lemmy just isn't the reference omnibus that Reddit is, and I don't think it ever will be. Even down to r/whatisthisthing or r/tipofmytongue I don't think will work on Lemmy, partially because there's going to be eight of each, seven and a half have no traffic.
  • The communities I'm interested in have basically no traffic. No one posts anything. I see a lot of posts with no discussion, or one comment saying "I'm a bot."
  • There's a kind of stupid problem where, you're scrolling through, say, your All New feed. It's separated into pages instead of infinitely scrolling. Page 2, you find a post you'd like to read. Click it, read the post, back out to the feed, you're on Page 1 of the feed again. You've lost your place. One of the ingredients to that nicotine patch.
  • There are too many different forms of idea cancer here. I spent several minutes having to individually block several nearly identical communities for sports ball game results that each had nearly identical bots posting sports ball scores to them, because someone set up a nearly identical community for each team. This I think is a valid use case for the platform, but if you're not interested in sports ball it makes the All feed unusable. I'd also like someone to explain to me why posts from r/buildapc are being "archived" here?
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[โ€“] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

I love it very much. Meanwhile I almost forgot, that reddit once was important to me.

[โ€“] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

It doesn't really have all the communities I'm interested in ... but for most of my looking-at-memes and commenting-on-things needs, it works great. I use lemmy exclusively on mobile and haven't touched reddit on my phone since sync went away, but I still engage with reddit periodically on desktop.

[โ€“] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Its been fine, there been more comments from users of a lets say diferent vibe from hexbear common culture but there been positive interactions from instances like lemmygrad, lemmy.ml, midwestsocial, blahaj zone and some others.

Over all i say federation has been a positive change for Hexbear, it gives us more slop in many ways

[โ€“] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I use it daily.

Of the two different things I used Reddit for, Lemmy is a 100% replacement for one, but sadly lacking in the other.

  1. Current events (news, politics, etc...) the transition to Lemmy was seamless.

  2. Tech Support on specific niche software (kdenlive, Scribus, Gimp, etc...) is still lacking. there aren't a lot of communities dedicated to specific hobbies where a person can ask and answer questions from other users.

In regards to #1, there is actually one area where Lemmy has an advantage in my case. Because my local instance is my country instance, having that third "local" option means that I can, without any searching, keep up to date on national current events as well.

it's like being in a Canada only news site, and then if I want, I can hit "all" and see the rest of it. it's super easy in a way that Reddit couldn't be.

[โ€“] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Once I found Liftoff, I've used Lemmy exclusively. It's fantastic, I don't feel as intimated about commenting (even though this is my first on this account) I've found most of my interests again in different communities. There are still a few I don't have, but that will sort itself out in time.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I love that Lemmy has a small, but dedicated userbase and much less flamewars than Reddit. Seems like most people are actually here for good content and not just trolling everyone else.

I also like that the feed just ends eventually and I can close the app instead of doomscrolling through the whole night.

And I hope that toxic gamification features like global karma or awards will always stay out of here. The dopamine rushes from those are just bad for my brain and these features are really unneccessary.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (6 children)

For me it seems to have wained a bit, I feel like a lot of casual users have gone silent recently, the content I'm seeing is more specific to niche topics and communities

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[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Arguing with a smug and credulous Tesla consumer that posted a "oh no! Anyway" meme in response to his favorite treat being an accident-prone, regulation-dodging lithium fire of a bad purchase reminded me of being back on reddit-logo

[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

I haven't completely switched to Lemmy yet. I don't get as much of a diversity of views here.

But apart from Political stuff, I think the people here are wonderful and actually helpful.

This might not be an alternative to reddit and gain millions of followers, but nonetheless, It's good in it's own way. Edit: So many likes, did I mention I am somewhat conservative and don't support abortion after 5 months? Shocking, now downvote me I guess

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[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Comments on Lemmy tend to have a lot to say while offering a unique perspective. But most of the posts are boring and predictable, especially when it comes to politics.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Literally my entire wall is either:

  • extreme tech industry junk
  • asks
  • cats

I would love some diversity but everything I've subscribed to is either the above, or dead.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Switched to lemmy 100% after 17+ years of reddit, daily user. I think it's ok but increasingly getting annoyed with a couple things. The rampant extreme politics and phrasing as if it's fact, and people complain about cross posts but I literally see the same exact posts (same community) over and over as I scroll through the feed. Other than that it doesn't nearly have much content but that's to be expected.

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