Hey everyone, I’m new here and just testing the waters. I’ve been on Reddit for years, but lately it feels like a mix of heavy-handed moderation and echo chambers where any dissenting opinion gets buried.
For those of you who’ve spent real time on Lemmy: • What do you like better here than on Reddit? • What do you miss from Reddit? • Do you feel the culture here is genuinely different, or does it eventually drift the same way?
I’m curious how people see it — especially those who made the switch after the API drama.
Good day! I’m here for around ~2 months.
Something that I like better here, is the higher average level of thought put in the comments. Fewer dismissive one-liners, fever thoughts that seem to start and end within a single second. That does not go for all communities, but I’ve received some great help when I posted some questions, and posts where I shared info got valuable comments too. Reddit can also be good for this - but sometimes not exactly on par to the quality level.
Another plus, and that’s obvious, Lemmy is a free platform where you know you won’t be cut away, or have to tolerate a bad UI with animations and opening treasure chests because the for-profit core of the business thinks it’ll sell well. (The legal goal of any Reddit emloyee is to maximize company’s profits. Not satisfy user’s needs. Only in the places where these two coincide you get something.)
I miss certain specific communities.
Also the feel of it sometimes: 9x% of all communities here are unofficial of course. And migrating your community here might be scary, of course, because the total number of Redditors is magnitudes higher (these redditors are not all in YOUR community, but the lizard brain is nevertheless afraid of such commitments).
A bit of both, different and the same. I think the people and their motivations are a lil bit different, and you can feel it. But it’s still also people. Having their jobs, doing things for fun or out of boredom, etc etc. So also the same in a way.
Perhaps a wrapping thought. For my posts and comments personally, I’ve felt that communities here are larger than what I thought they would be based on numbers. You do get responses and help even in smaller communities. Maybe it’s a phenomena that for a smaller group, the noise levels are lower, so more people can survive the noise and continue reading besides “best of the month” filters. So they would go on and respond to something that would otherwise be filtered out as overwhelming.
Dunno.
Onboard and tell us how it feels later ;-)
Oh, I forgot one thing on the downsides. The onboarding captcha-like thingy on the lemmy.ml instance is quite elaborate where you have to quote some text from a Communism book. Instances like Memes are rich with upvotes and glorification of Stalin and of the Soviet Union. While I do agree on many of the downsides of for-profit culture (as you can see in my comment above for example), here it’s just extreme levels in my opinion. I personally feel somewhat uncomfortable with the strong political push in general-purpose channels, especially since lemmy.ml is supposed to be about free software.
That’s the other downside. I still use Lemmy as you see, but I felt it’s fair to share a negative point even if the overall conclusion is positive.
If you’re not happy with communists, there are other instances like Lemmy.world.
You’re kind of proving my point right now, this comment and the downvotes above.
There’s a non-political memes comm on Lemmy.ml if you so choose. The fact is, the devs are communists, and a ton of us on Lemmy are communists due to the nature of FOSS, so that’s sort of a natural sorting.
Other instances, such as Lemmy.world, are also politically biased, but towards liberalism. All instances have their own biases, you can’t escape politics for good.