No Stupid Questions

Yeah, but no, but yeah.

On Lemmy, individual communities aren't big enough to be communities but the community is big enough to be a community.

So any post that makes it to the front of the entire Fediverse has quite a few familiar faces and feels like old reddit would.

The issue I find with wanting Lemmy to be as big as Reddit is, you're pining for an era of Reddit that doesn't exist anymore. You can't go back to 2011-2020 Reddit. It isn't there to go back to. Bot posts aren't just indistinguishable on occasion, they're upvoted all the same, by other bots.

This is the best you've got. Pitch a tent and make the most of it, fam.

Short answer is No. It suffers from many of the same issues of echo chamber, bias, and bullying. Just on a somewhat smaller scale due to fewer users. And never forget - Winter is coming. There will be a time in the future the bots will notice lemmee and come for it also.

But I suspect this is all a human thing. We are a contentious bunch at best and down right hateful at worst. We build communities only to poison and kill them in the end.

for me, yeah. Honestly much better

14 year Reddit person and leaving was for the best. After the initial "what am I doing", it branched to me checking out Mastodon, then pixelfed, and then Fediverse is awesome. My only real beef is the sports situation is not it. Outside of that I haven't used reddit for a year and don't miss it honestly.

it's perfectly fine but there's not enough users

Lemmy is free and libre, but I sorely miss my world news and Ukraine updates.

Yes. It’s different, but good.

Well, I deleted my r account the day they fucked over the app developers. Been here since, so I guess it's a decent alternative. Not as much current content and it's 90% politics on the front page.... That can be filtered out though.

The militant Linux missionaries though, they get blocked. They show up in most tech threads and it got old a year ago.

Lemmy communities have the potential to be just as toxic.

That said, the broad majority of interactions I have are very positive.

It really depends on the community choice. I tend to choose Lemmy communities rather than "reddit refuge" communities.

I imagine that plays a big part in my personal experience.

Lemmy is a terrible place but after leaving Reddit after a dozen years, it sucks too. No going back. I kinda want to leave Lemmy - such miserable, hateful echo chamber - but, where would I go?

I was a 15 year Reddit veteran and modded a couple dozen communities over there. I've moved over here with no regrets. The only thing that takes me back to Reddit is search results, and that's getting less and less as more people have abandoned it and deleted comments.

The amount of bots there now is astounding. It's making me believe in the Dead Internet Theory.

I was a Reddit veteran for years, I hate Reddit now and don't use it mostly due to getting random permabans. Lemmy functions well - much better than that dog shit site Reddit, but it's not there yet in terms of communities and activity. There is very little local/regional activity that I miss most from Reddit. Overall, it's effective in the technical sense, but content-wise it is still a very small fraction of what Reddit is unfortunately. And I am not confident it ever will be a true replacement.

I'm honestly more afraid to offer an opinion or ask a question on Lemmy because there's always some high and mighty jackass that thinks they are the final authority on whatever topic and rather than have a discussion, people seem to just resort to name calling.

At least, that has been my experience.

Otherwise I've enjoyed it. It can be a cool place once you figure out how to block the malcontents.

Not for science fiction literature, guitar pedals, and synthesizers which was primarily what I went to Reddit for in the first place. There was some effort to get those communities going here back during the mass migration here from Reddit, but they've never really thrived. It sucks, but I'm not going back. I take a peek at r/synthesizers on occasion, and really it's just a gaggle of self-promoting synthtubers and umpteen iterations of "what should I buy?".

I think Lemmy has steadily been getting better. For having a good conversation, I think this is the best platform, everyone here seems like actual people I would run into irl.

What I think is still lacking is a way to search up anecdotal evidence on something, that I still heavily rely on reddit for. For instance if I type in google "french press coffee brew time" the only valuable results with the in-depth info I'm looking for are usually youtube videos, which are too long, or reddit threads. So I usually just end up adding site:reddit.com for all those type of search results.

But lemmy is getting good. I could see it replacing some info sources for the more tech-y niches I follow in the near future

It has been growing, but it depends on the community the people who are submitting posts of each community. It also depends on the engagement of the discussion and whether participation decays or is allowed to decay into toxicity.

I think Lemmy could be doing a lot more than Reddit, like showing who votes what, but people want the ability without the responsibility or transparency. It's ironic because not only is it perfectly visible to the admins, but there are ways you can get a pretty good idea of who's performing them as a normal . It would help not just in the sense of getting a better idea of why or where someone is coming from and prevent false suspicions, but it would also allow you to keep different groups of users whose recommendations might be something you would like to prioritize over other submissions or whose moderation you'd like to favor over the standard. Abusing the transparency would be easy to denounce and moderate, too.

In regards to the modlog, I don't think it's doing enough, the text in the reason field might as well be "word" and the transparency isn't compensating for the lack of a resolution process that many if not all social networks seem to want to skip. There are still things like no notification of mod actions that affected your comments or your user, and some decisions, like allowing mods to ban you, remove some of your comments while allowing others to remain, shaping or serving a narrative without giving you the ability to delete or edit your contributions while the ban is in place, give foreign instances and communities more power than they should have.

There's no way to contest modlog actions within the modlog, and the maturity of the people has been proven to be very, very questionable when they've been outed. It has also adopted reddit's policy of obfuscating the moderator performing an action even though creating an alt is easier than ever and many of them already have them, which works against the supposed commitment to transparency.

But it's very slightly better than reddit's, and there's nothing like shadow bans here. Parting observations, don't feed your carnivore pet vegetables if you aren't prepared to go all the way to seek and get an approved diet and dietary supplements for a bonafide veterinary, and it's funny seeing all the anarchy people not have a problem with the present power imbalance between the users and the leadership within the current system, but then again, they have a nice instance with the label.

Overall, fuck spez.

80% effective. The porn quality is weak.

Platform-wise, it's already proven that it's a viable alternative (with some advantages even - the federated nature for one), but content-wise, it has A LOT to catch up (because let's be honest - in addition to all the bullshit and toxic people, Reddit has tons of useful information and good people still).

not in the slightest. But the apps are free

I imagine we all have different use cases, my idea of Lemmy succeeding may not be your idea.

That being said, as a replacement for Reddit, where I can scroll through the top say 50 posts once or twice a day, it absolutely fits the bill.

Engagement is much better for me here, I imagine due to the smaller size of the community, that lends itself to their being much less useless garbage comments and much more constructive or informative discussion.

The above being said, I do wish there were more people here.

I last logged into Reddit in 2022.

There's a lot of things missing - especially niche communities - but there's enough people to get into silly debates with and enough memes for me to scroll each day.

I personally think it's a ton better. The platform is a bit less mature, but the people are much nicer and the filtering/blocking is lightyears ahead

What do we mean by effective?

One might say that the effectiveness of reddit is its niche communities that allow each and every user to find somewhere they feel like they belong. Not only this, the complexity of niches gives rise to interesting information that bubbles to the surface and front page of the platform where more users have exposure. One might contribute this to the quantity of users on reddit's platform, and also the discoverability of the platform itself.

Personally, I think Lemmy is decently effective now aside from the saturation in political and tech news and memes. I think things will get better as for-profit companies squeeze more and more people out of their platforms, and people look to alternatives rather than dropping their digital consumption habits.

I do think discoverability is still a downfall of Lemmy, from both internal and external views. I want to better find /communities from inside the platform and via a search engine should my use and value of Lemmy increase. Wonder how development has gone on this front.

Ultimately, the FOSS nature of Lemmy is one of its greatest strengths. It can improve over time, ripping features from the big players without the destiny of being killed eventually if not profitable. I think this characteristic alone gives rise to the potential of Lemmy to be very effective over time.