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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?

fprawn ,

The form of this kind of social media has got the same set of upsides and downsides as it does on Reddit. It won’t be exactly the same because the people are different, but the problems aren’t that different and the people aren’t that different either.

As a mostly lurker I find the experience pretty similar. I scroll through and find some interesting articles, bits of news, memes. It’s a slower pace, but I think in time it’ll grow faster. People migrate over occasionally, but there may be a critical mass moment when it’s big enough that lots of people start flooding over. Or it won’t and it’ll just fizzle out to nothing over time, who knows. For the moment it’s good enough for me to have replaced Reddit entirely.

As for things that are better: you get a lot more control over how you want to experience it. There’s no singular controller always dragging the experience down toward profitability. There are clients a-plenty, the api is open, you can control what parts of the network you see and which you don’t. It does take some effort, of course.

As for worse, because there’s no singular entity controlling the network, there’s going to be some very dark corners. You can block them (many will be blocked by individual server operators already), but they’re still there and they get to carry the Lemmy name and newcomers are most likely to experience it.

Just my thoughts on the subject, it’s been discussed a lot, I’m sure other people have quite different perspectives.

Ephera ,

You’re on lemmy.world, which is pretty much exclusively Reddit refugees, so you probably won’t see much difference in culture there, but that’s what I consider the main advantage.

As in, I left Reddit when I noticed the toxic culture was fucking with my mental health.
Lemmy isn’t particularly great anymore in this regard either, but still magnitudes better.

Boozilla ,
@Boozilla@lemmy.world avatar

lemmy.world is too popular (I know, I know, I also have a lemmy.world account). But the nice thing about the greater lemmy “galaxy” is you can still subscribe to communities from any instance, no matter what your home instance is.

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?

borf ,

Reddit is owned and controlled by a corporation (Condé Nast.) They disabled 3rd party Reddit apps to force people onto the official Reddit app which also broke many third party moderation tools. This disproportionately impacted power users, frequent posters, and mods-- in other words, the people who made Reddit the important community it was.

They showed an unwillingness to listen to their community or work with the unpaid volunteer moderators, instead banning the moderators who took part in the Reddit Blackout and replacing them with mods willing to cooperate with the enshittification of the site.

They’ve been mangling the web interface to be uglier and less usable (old.reddit.com is still up, but the mobile version of old.reddit.com is gone). They’ve been experimenting with ways to show more ads and subtler ads.

Lemmy is open source and federated so it can’t get bought up by a company and cored out for shareholder value. You can use different instances, or a variety of apps. You can use (or create your own) third party tools for accessibility and moderation.

Lemmy is currently a smaller universe than Reddit was, but it has a high ratio of good posters and moderators who care personally about their own communities, so hopefully it continues to grow.

db2 ,

Owners:

Advance Publications (30%)
Tencent (11%)
Sam Altman (9%)

Conde hasn’t owned reddit in a while. I assume the remaining percent is the parent company Reddit Inc or stock options or something. Let’s see what that’s worth:

Operating income −US$140 million
Net income −US$90.8 million
Total equity −US$413 million

Yes those are all negative numbers. Why anyone with at least two functioning brain cells who isn’t also a greedy little pigboy would touch reddit stock with a ten foot pole is baffling.

Boozilla ,
@Boozilla@lemmy.world avatar

I keep hoping to see Reddit’s stock tank. I think eventually it will. For now, it just highlights how much the stock market is perception / bullshit / glorified gambling. I know savvy experienced investors care about actual value and do careful analysis. But there are a lot of suckers out there who will just buy any cool-sounding “tech stock”.

borf ,

Advance Publications en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications

Advance Publications, Inc. is a privately held American media company owned by the families of Donald Newhouse and Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr., the sons of company founder Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr. It owns publishing-relating companies including American City Business Journals, MLive Media Group, and Condé Nast, and is a major shareholder in Charter Communications (13% ownership), Reddit (42 million shares), and Warner Bros. Discovery (8% ownership.)

Potato, potato

db2 ,

Not really because before Conde was the parent with the ability to control and direct, they’re more like a cousin with no input now.

borf ,

Dude I don’t care whose name is on the building, it’s the same effective ownership

Cheradenine ,

Conde hasn’t owned reddit in a while.

That’s only technically true since Advance owns Conde

CurlyWurlies4All ,
@CurlyWurlies4All@slrpnk.net avatar

No corporate control

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.

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.

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.

Bishma ,
@Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

spez has no power here.

AlexWIWA ,

It’s a better crowd. Feels more like 2009 Reddit and forums. I can use whichever app I want

niktemadur ,

Its’ best days are ahead, not behind. And being a decentralized entity - like Bit Torrent or Bitcoin - makes it an important social media experiment that is worth stoking the flames, and whose outcome will be much different than it was with reddit.

hate2bme ,

Which app do you use? I like Sync but am open to try others.

JackbyDev ,

Jerboa

AlexWIWA ,

Memmy. But it’s discontinued

mightyfoolish ,

No company owns every single Lemmy instance. That’s the only guarantee you are getting; however, that’s where all of the tiny differences come from.

Taleya ,

It’s not flogging your data, forcing you into using shitty apps or generally selling you for stock value.

leftzero ,

When one instance enshittifies itself you can just block it.

Also, no greedy little pigboy Spez.

Zerlyna , (edited )
@Zerlyna@lemmy.world avatar

No ads, no trolling bots. I never want to see “He Gets Us” again.

snooggums ,
@snooggums@midwest.social avatar

We have free range human trolls!

InternetUser2012 ,

It’s not commercial. Your data isn’t being harvested to advertise to you.

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