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How is Lemmy better than Reddit?

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?

CurlyWurlies4All ,
@CurlyWurlies4All@slrpnk.net avatar

No corporate control

paddirn ,

It still falls into some of the same pitfalls that Reddit had (groupthink, reflexive commenting, power-tripping mods), but some of those problems I don’t know that there’s a way to get around them in this format, they’re just a human nature sort of issue. I appreciate that Lemmy doesn’t appear to be owned by a giant mega-corp trying to harvest our “intellectual”, but we’ll see how that pans out in the future. I’ve just gotten used to every online service I’ve used eventually going to shit.

I like that there’s no advertising at the moment, I don’t know that I would mind it so much if there was advertising, as long as it was kept minimal. I know these things don’t just happen for free and if money is needed to help keep the lights on and such.

Buttflapper OP ,

A very obvious solution to groupthink is to do away with the silly voting system. I don’t know why they kept it. A very simple solution would have been to just assign votes to a topic based on how much attention it’s getting. In simple terms, If opposed has 10,000 people that have viewed it, 1,000 people have left a comment, compared to a post that has 100,000 views and 15 comments, you can tell which one should have more attention score. The upvote and downvote system is too easily used as a dislike or like system. Many of us have the maturity to upvote something because we think it’s a good discussion point even if we don’t agree with what the person is saying. But a lot of people don’t think that way mentally. They see something, they read it, immediately go into toxic hater mode and just downvote it for no reason

PlzGivHugs , (edited )

The problem is that you then end up with sites based on attention, leading you into the (imo even bigger) pitfall of every other social media site, where things like attention-grabbing, clickbait, and sensationalist content has a massive advantage. Look at what gets sorted to the top on platforms where that is the main metric, things like Mr. Beast’s low-brow, cacophonus videos, children’s content, scantily clad women and softcore porn, and gambling or otherwise particularly addictive content. Even focusing on comment count alone means a focus on topics that are both broad-appeal and controversial, more like what you get out of Twitter’s trending topics: mostly politics and flamewars rather than experts sharing their research, or artists sharing their (non-pornographic) art.

Don’t get me wrong, voting isn’t a perfect system at all, but it correlates with quality far better than engagement does.

VinesNFluff ,
@VinesNFluff@pawb.social avatar

Decentralization.

That in itself is a huge advantage. Otherwise it’s just Reddit 2.0

Angry_Autist ,

There are not quite as many trolls yet and at least some mods are rational.

The admins are about the same degree of terrible though, but without the fascist coddling.

Freefall ,

If you have a shit opinion that noone agrees with and they downvote you to hell, that isn’t “brigading”… As for it being better…the mods alone make it 1000x better.

John_McMurray ,

Just as a user, being able to block subs here is awful nice. When reddit decided I didn’t get to decide what I see anymore, I was out.

thawed_caveman ,

I assume that most if not all of Lemmy mods are former/current Reddit mods, same as users. If it’s largely the same people, then the improvement has to come from somewhere else.

Capricorn_Geriatric ,

Lemmy isn’t a single website like reddit.com is. It’s rather a collection of decentralised servers (“instances”) offering the same service (one very similar to reddit). It’s often compared to e-mail - just as Gmail users can talk to Outlook users, lemmy.world users can post and comment on lemmy.ml from their home instance.

What this does is it removes the centralised aspects of Reddit - if a community has powertripping mods one can make an alternate community (like on Reddit). But this goes a step above - powertripping server admins can be reigned in by simply switching instances.

thawed_caveman , (edited )

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 ,

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 ,

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

Wiz ,

I found your comment just now, and it’s awesome! 😎👍

Paradachshund ,

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.

Blaze ,

Nice comment

f2sfljLhdtTZ ,

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 ,
@Boozilla@lemmy.world avatar

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 ,

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 ,
@Boozilla@lemmy.world avatar

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 ,

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.

trk ,
@trk@aussie.zone avatar

It’s not, but it’s old Reddit with more attributes that prevent a transition to corporate Reddit so I’ll take it.

WhyJiffie ,

To me the way it’s better is that it’s more free in a sense. For one it does not even attempt to limit what software you use for browsing it, but also if you very dislike certain people/content, like-minded people can host their server without losing access to most of the other content, while being able to block the unwelcome instances and users.

Downvote brigading is not a technical problem though, but a people problem, isn’t it? So the solution against that would be stricter moderation, maybe banning a few more instances (but that’s not really a good solution unless it’s very extreme), and making people downvote less.
Hmm, thinking about it, maybe a daily per-user “downvote budget” would be an interesting experiment? To see if it would be effective. Or with an other interval, but still not too long, and maybe partly connected to account active days (not account age).

Crumbgrabber ,

LEMMY HAS THE CRUMBGRABBER. THAT IS WHY REDDIT HAS NO CHANCE.

madjo ,

All hail the CRUMBGRABBER!

Roflmasterbigpimp ,
@Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world avatar

Honestly? Muuuuuuuuuuuch nicer Posts. I see so many more wholesome Posts here. FFS, even the GreenText’s are more wholesome.

madjo ,

I could use some of that, can you recommend some communities?

Origen ,

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

gedaliyah ,
@gedaliyah@lemmy.world avatar

What app do you use for Lemmy?

teslasaur ,

Went from rif to connect for Lemmy and i’m happy with it

subtext ,

I use Voyager and it’s fantastic.

github.com/aeharding/voyager

Nemo ,

As a former RIF user, I use Jerboa.

Blaze ,

!lemmyapps

Cadeillac ,
@Cadeillac@lemmy.world avatar

I used Boost on reddit, and I use Boost on lemmy. I’m not a huge fan of it not being FOSS, but every other app was always missing something

I’m sure they have caught up now, but I already paid for it and it does everything I need

notfromhere ,

I’ve never used Boost. What sorts of things does it have that FOSS apps are lacking?

Cadeillac ,
@Cadeillac@lemmy.world avatar

I wouldn’t be able to tell you at this point friend. I can’t remember what I wasn’t liking about the other apps in the first place, and I have no idea the progress they have made. I’d be willing to bet at least a few are on par now

Pherenike ,
@Pherenike@lemmy.ml avatar

I’d recommend Eternity for Lemmy, same developer as Infinity for Reddit, and FOSS. I too tried a bunch of Lemmy apps and I settled on Eternity because it’s pretty much a complete app. I don’t miss any features.

machinaeZER0 ,

Thunder is really good and always improving!

Wooki ,

Many options are available like voyager, avelon, melm to name a few for ios. Lemmy’s app scene is strong

Pandantic ,
@Pandantic@midwest.social avatar

Pour one out for Apollo. 🍺

mojofrododojo ,

NO SPEZ. That’s enough

stock ,

The “fuck /u/spez” wave is one of my last, and favorite, Reddit memories haha

Cethin ,

You’ve gotten plenty of replies, so I’m sure this has been said. There’s nothing to make the content or behavior better. The thing that’s better is it isn’t controlled by a single entity. If 9ne of the hosts tries to use their power to restrict API calls, for example, the other instances can ignore them. Anyone can always spin up new instances as well.

That said, one instance (Lemmy.world) has far more users and communities than any other, which isn’t ideal. If they were to just cut ties with everyone else then a lot of people and communities would become lost. This doesn’t have to be the case, and hopefully it diversifies, but it is the case right now.

Scrollone ,

Reddit used to be open-source, its code still archived on GitHub… then we saw what happened. They closed the source (de facto killing every small Reddit clone) and more recently they cut ties with every developer using their APIs.

I honestly see lemmy.world as a problem. Not as big as relying on Reddit source code, but still a problem. We need to prevent centralization as much as possibile, and one instance having >50% of all users is a bad sign.

Mobile apps (such as Voyager) let you choose the instance you want to sign up. I think they should incentivize instances that are not lemmy.world, until it scales back to a smaller size. Like some kind of rubber-band roulette.

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