I first joined Lemmy back during the big Reddit exodus of last year. I like many others wanted an alternative to Reddit, and I thought that this might’ve been the one. I made two accounts, one on lemmy.world and another on sh.itjust.works, in the June of last year that I used on and off for about 4 months.
At first Lemmy was exciting because it was so active. There were so many new users who were enthusiastic about turning this platform into a genuine alternative. There was a communal effort to create and interact with content, and for awhile it worked. Lemmy was truly interesting during the summer of last year. However, this stream of dedicated users started to slowly decline.
A lot of people hoped that if they were active, they would attract and retain more users to this place to the point where the community would foster interest specific communities like Reddit, but that never happened. After a few months, a lot of users lost interest and went back to Reddit where the userbase is so massive that there is an active community for just about anything.
With this reverse exodus back to Reddit, Lemmy ended up with the same groups that were active on it before hand: political extremists, tech nerds, privacy enthusiasts, and shitposters. To be fair, all these groups are larger now than they were a year ago, but that’s all this platform has to offer. If you’re into any of these things and primarly these things then Lemmy can be a good alternative to Reddit, but for the general masses? Lemmy is just not good.
For example, a NBA post on the NBA subreddit can get you thousands of interactions in a couple of hours. An NBA post on here will maybe get you a dozen over the course of a couple of days. The only content that will gain any traction here are tech news, political propaganda, and maybe some memes. I don’t see this changing any time soon. Even if Reddit implodes, I still think Lemmy will remain a niche platform. I think this evident by the fact that this platform hasn’t really progressed in a year.
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You are entitled to delete your Lemmy app of choice and return to the corporate-approved Reddit™ content-consumption experience.
I feel the exact opposite.
Lemmy is great because the sports guys and other normies aren’t here.
This sums up my love for the Fediverse.
I’ve been noticing a lot of Reddit’s undesirables making their way over here. Same whiny little shits whose only purpose in life is to be trolls.
Thankfully they’re super easy to spot and block.
Then getting mad when we call them out on their trolling
Lemmy is missing:
- Bots
- Karma farmers
- Ads
- Insane mods
- Fucking Spez
You know you’re right, we’re nothing like reddit!!
I do kind of miss the private clubs. I had worked my way up through 100K, 150K, 200K and 300K karma clubs before I bailed and came here.
Centennial Club was just the best. It was like Century Club, but way nicer!
Actually I have heard of some insane mods
There’s an ecosystem of entire instances with crazy rules.
The fact that Lemmy just doesn’t become unusable with all this brokerage tells a lot about the benefits of a distributed system.
Fucking gallowboob, is he still a thing?
There are some power tripping mods, thankfully there are only a few
I mean Lemmy shares a lot of the same issues as Reddit even if it’s decentralized. I think Lemmy as a technology is better than Reddit because it’s more privacy focused, but most people don’t care about any of this. People put up with Reddit’s shortcomings because it has a massive community that is always active and fills every niche. Reddit’s daily active userbase is over 73 million. That’s hard to replicate in general, but I don’t see Lemmy getting anywhere near that mainstream. I see it as a more stable and active version of Voat, but still a niche platform nonetheless.
It is probably best to think nothing on Lemmy is private. Any instance with at least one user subscribed to a community will receive updates (messages and votes) on the community. Instance admin can go into the database to see any private message between any user on that instance.
Lol dude got the exact things wrong about Lemmy - clear they haven’t spent much time here. Fediverse is NOT privacy focused, in fact it’s the opposite. You blast your content out to everyone. The only privacy is your username, and that aint much. It’s user owned, that’s the saving grace, that corporate doesn’t own it. We sacrifice fake corporate privacy for open standards.
Reddit didn’t get to 73 million overnight. It took them decades. Lemmy only gets 1 year?
Also, 73 million seems exaggerated, or that’s counting the bots
Niche <> bad.
It’s not bad, but niche is just that. For a platform to become a genuine alternative to Reddit, it needs to appeal to the mainstream.
You do realize that’s why Reddit went down the shitter right? Appealing to the mainstream is literally what got us to the point that everything is filled with ads and misinformation.
No it isnt. It’s become exactly as toxic as Reddit! If that isn’t a succes, I don’t know what is!
I’d not yet call it failed, but it’s not yet fully succeeded either. To my mind, one impediment is something that lemmy.world shares with today’s reddit: If you look at the front page it’s 99% memes and images. That’s the first impression people get, and it probably drives away a lot of people who might want anything else. We need those people to make more text-based communities come alive, if it’s to evolve into anything like the old reddit.
I mean obviously there are lots of people who do mostly want to see memes and that’s fine, but I think it’s getting to the point where it might be useful to have an option that filters out all posts that are just a title and an image.
I thought I liked it and that it had enough users, thank you for setting me straight.
This is a screenshot of the activity in this community. It looks ok to me…
I kinda wish they had posts/comments per day included. Users per day doesn’t mean much; feels like it just counts views that had no interaction as I can see with a couple communities I moderate that get ~100 users a day, but nothing is being voted on, posted or commented.
And we will still be here when Reddit finally does implode. Either from high interest rates and not being able to raise money or whatever we will still be here.
Meh, it works for me. I like it here more than reddit. Sorry that you haven’t found your groove. It toom me a while of finding the right things to subscribe and right folks to follow before my feed felt fun and interesting. I use Lemmy as a jumping off point for rabbit holes that are interesting to me
Could i ask how can you be one of the reddit exodus users if your account is 2 days old?
If you wanna leave lemmy do it on your main account to proof you are one of the over a year old accounts.
That we can salute and press F to the fallen user.
I’m pressing X to Doubt this post
What you should have posted was nothing.
Lemmy works for me, Reddit doesn’t. I only use reddit now for porn.
Lemmynsfw
Nah. As people like to point out, much more uh, special interest groups in Reddit. I don’t need the community aspects for that kinda stuff.
Unless you’re into that.
I’m actually glad I’m not that active on the platform (or any platform for that matter, federated or not), so I can give myself time to breathe in outside air and touch some grass.
And once I am active, it’s usually for a couple hours at most, then it’s back to being in my coma for a few days.
Studies find that the vast majority of users on a platform are passive participants, the vast majority only look, a smaller group looks and comments and finally an even smaller group looks, comment and post. The key to growing any community is to find or be an active poster. It’s also an investment, if you post and get only 1 to 2 reactions, that’s okay, it takes time. It also means that more people see it and didn’t react.
In your example the NBA sub, I am on it and comment from time to time, but don’t have the sources or time to post, but if someone took, at least, the links from reddit and posted them here, it’s a start. I know NBA reddit has a lot of good discussions which you can’t replicate here without more people, but the posting of articles and links is a start.
