Just found this space, I’m trying to play around with this platform. Can anyone help to explain?
Reddit feels like a corporate advertising driven hellscape where fear and rage is encouraged.
Lemmy feels like 2010 when the internet world was a lot more simpler and you could actually talk to people.
Yeah Lemmy feels a lot like Reddit from 10-15 years ago. Mostly cordial conversation on a wide variety of topics, the biggest difference I see is the lack of activity in certain communities, which is a bit of a shame. But I guess that’s a trade-off.
Give it time. Better to grow organically.
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In terms of the more populous instances, I think Lemmy reminds me of old Reddit before the site went mainstream, minus the jailbait, incest-posting, rampant racism and other degenerate shit that Reddit used to be known for.
3rd party app support…
There are many other reasons, but let’s be real. A lot of us ditched reddit because they dropped support for third party apps. Having an interface that isn’t trying to constantly milk you for all sorts of monetization schemes matters a lot, as it so happens. Enough to say goodbye to a lot of familiar and large communities with otherwise good information.
There’s many communities I miss, but without third party apps that place became unbearable. The equivalent ones are not as active, but i can actually read and participate in discussions here.
You can see the number of up votes and down votes.
The API is much more open to third party apps.
The people are generally nicer.
Features are not paywalled.
Code is open source, so anyone and everyone can contribute.
No one on the platform side is incentivized (or capable) of controlling things, which is nice.
Steve Huffman isn’t here, so that’s a huge plus.
Steve Huffman? Former moderator of r/jailbait and current CEO of Reddit? That guy?
Self-proclaimed future leader of an apocalyptic survival compound, and obvious Elon wannabe? That Steve Huffman?
Uj/ wait, what?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich
steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn’t usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. “If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me recently. “Without them, I’m fucked.”
…
Huffman has been a frequent attendee at Burning Man, the annual, clothing-optional festival in the Nevada desert, where artists mingle with moguls. He fell in love with one of its core principles, “radical self-reliance,” which he takes to mean “happy to help others, but not wanting to require others.” Huffman has calculated that, in the event of a disaster, he would seek out some form of community: “Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.”
There are some other funny bits in that article, like Spez having “large blue eyes” and once was a competitive ballroom dancer.
Nah he’s here. It’s the guy downvoting all the anti reddit posts
No, that’s me. I don’t care to see Reddit, Twitter, Threads, etc posts.
I think it’s a huge plus that it’s not run by big tech corporations. How many such things do we have today?
Somewhere along the way, I learned that for a village to thrive, the creative people (the artisans, the musicians etc) must move in first, they form the roots, then the rest of the village follows them.
The creative people moved from Digg to Reddit. That’s what made Reddit Reddit, not the brand, or the UI, or some genius exec.
The creative people have mass migrated to Lemmy, & hence Lemmy will thrive. How do you know - see where og memes originate. Genius is not the domain of AI, & hence Reddit is Deaddit. We’re now just waiting for the rest to follow.
I’ve yet to see artists migrate here. The artists started on DA, Newgrounds, YT, Tumblr, etc. The professionals moved to Twitter.
Reddit started from geek & tech culture, not creatives. Its ability to foster discussion extended well to not just techies but to everyone. Most creatives I’ve seen shy away from Reddit.
Creative people in the Reddit/Lemmy village are the geeks & intellectuals
This makes sense. I wonder if it’s different now, since reddit has became such a big platform.
It’s kinda cool to go to pretty much any post and go “hey! I know almost everyone in the comment section!”, but that’s a bit of a double edged sword
Some apps (like Boost) even let you add tags to people’s names.
I always get so confused until I remember the context
Interesting, I use boost and didn’t know about that. Like client side flairs, neat!
Haha, yeah. Luckily it’s more “Oh, it’s you” and less “Oh, it’s you”. lol
Though I do tend to block trolls very quickly.
Oh, it’s you!
Oh it’s you
Oh, it IS you.
R2D2 it is you it is you!
(insert random squeaks)
Two things that come to mind:
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Lemmy’s protocol is open, so anybody can make 3rd party apps to work with it. Third party Reddit apps used to be popular when Reddit had an open API, but Reddit destroyed that on purpose.
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Because Lemmy isn’t run by a singular company, you don’t get the same restrictions. Reddit admins had a whole host of rules on what a sub could or could not contain. Many of which were heavy focused on making Reddit more advertiser friendly.
The funniest part of killing 3rd party apps is they cut off a widely used method if collecting more commenting data from the average user. I guess they figured audience style interaction on the official app is worth more.
The official app purportedly has a shit ton of interaction tracking. I can’t find the link anymore, but somebody on HN even claimed what they wanted to track was so invasive that he walked out of a job interview for Reddit.
What I can say for sure is that the new Reddit “shreddit” website is absolutely fucking full of tracking. I reverse engineered it for reasons, and every interaction with UI elements was reported back before the actual interaction was allowed to take place.
They definitely gain more value out of user data from interaction tracking than they do from their comments.
What about old.reddit; would that have tracking? If not it would explain why the new Reddit UI seems so slow on browser
Tracking clicks on links with JS is pretty normal. I always implemented that with Google analytics for my e-commerce sites.
It helps you track things like downloads of files, email links, exit links, etc.
As a former web dev, I know it’s normal industry standard stuff, but it’s really hard to give Reddit the benefit of the doubt here.
Their tracking is completely ingrained in the webcomponent-based SPA itself, beyond what’s reasonable for anonymized analytics. Disabling cookies even broke loading content, despite being logged out.
And for point one, I use Voyager, which was heavily inspired by Apollo for Reddit, so Voyager makes this place feel more like home.
You can also use Voyager on Android! If you squint real hard, you can pretend Apollo finally released on a non-Apple device.
Interesting, for point 2, I thought having restriction in subreddit make it harder to advertise?
Oh, there were plenty of ads. You just didn’t recognize them as such.
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By default? A nicer UI. It still pales compared to classic Reddit, but having things like keyboard shortcuts built in is nice, and it doesn’t bog down/fire up a bunch of pop-ups like neo-Reddit.
You can pick an instance that aligns with the way you like to be. But those instances are still kept in check because if they get too shit, they get defederated.
For example, feddit.uk can operate in a uk-style way for which words we do and don’t find offensive, and the level of piss-taking we do.
I think it’s mostly subjective or anecdotal, but what comes to mind:
- The community generally is more friendly. Absolutely, there are still jerks or trolls around, but the ratio of jerks or trolls feel way less than reddit.
- I feel more active here myself. This one I can’t explain. The community is smaller, so maybe I’m not subconsciously worrying about being drowned out by other comments? On Reddit, I’d average about 1 comment a month at best. On here I usually leave a few comments a week.
- This point might not mean much if you didn’t join reddit when it was younger: I joined reddit when it was still young. I think back in '08? Lemmy feels like a young reddit, back when I enjoyed it most. Again, I can’t really explain this since it’s just a feeling, but one example of what I mean by “young reddit” is community wide memes. Wayyyyyy back in the day, everyone on Reddit was ravaging about “The narwhal bacons at night” or something like that lol. There were also a bunch of dickbutt memes… if you know, you know. Well, my first week on Lemmy everyone was posting beans for a good couple of days. No reason. Just beans. A few weeks ago there were a bunch of “Taylor Swift going to Australia,” Taylor Swift taking a swim," “Taylor Swift spotted at the airport,” titled posts, but all those posts were pictures of airplanes. The rotating meme right now I think is Jeans??? Idk. This is just a symptom of a younger community, and why I like it more, but there’s more to enjoy about it than rotating memes. This place just feels more genuine as opposed to artificial if that makes any sense.
- I feel like I’m not missing out on anything on Reddit and I have a healthier relationship with social media on this site than with reddit. Every once and a while, I log back onto Reddit to see what’s going on. Most of the “Big news” that’s posted on there is also posted here, but the experience now feels more bloated compared to here so I don’t stick around as long. As for this site… Yes there is less content. Yes there is less to scroll through. At the same time though, you can scroll for a very long time if you really want to. This eventually led to me being on my phone less and being somewhat a little more productive as opposed to doom scrolling.
- Lemmy absolutely has better third party support for well, anything. Sure, it doesn’t have official apps, but go to the app store and count how many different Lemmy apps there are vs reddit. Nearly all of these apps are better than the reddit app IMO. Most of these apps are also FOSS; they’re free with no ads. Yes, there are still few paid apps as well if that tickles your fancy. I know Sync for Reddit came over to Lemmy as Sync for Lemmy as an example. This shouldn’t stop at apps though. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are browser plugins.
- You have more say in your experience here. Again, with the smaller community, your voice is louder. On top of that, is your server’s admin doing something you do not support? Your instance is doing something you don’t like? Create an account on other instances! Lemmy is federated, so most of what you see should be the same as in other instances, but you aren’t under the rule of one toxic CEO anymore. I myself have like 4 accounts on 4 different instances lol.
- Piggy-backing off of the previous point: if reddit is down, it is down. If your instance is down here? Sign into another instance!
- On the opposite end of the spectrum, does some instance have a bunch of members or just communities you don’t want to see? Lemmy might not have native tools out of the box, but some Lemmy apps will let you block entire communities.
- One fun thing I like about Lemmy is you can post pictures in comments!
If anything, the only reason why I still use reddit is for smaller, niche, communities. To that end, yeah Lemmy is smaller, thus the smaller reddit communities are even smaller here. If I find myself wanting to make a post on a given niche topic, I typically post on Reddit AND here. Sometimes, my post on Lemmy will somehow get more comments than reddit still though. Reddit posts seem to fall off after a day or so, that’s not typically the case for Lemmy if you do trend something.
At the end of the day though, this is just a social media platform, and the enjoyment you get out of it comes down to you. ☺️ One tip I do have though is to sort by “Top of 6h” or “12h”. I don’t like the “Hot” sorting on here that much.
I don’t think this is definitively “better” than reddit. The functionality of the site is more bare bones. No big hidden features or anything like that. What you see is what you get as far as interfaces go. But I am enjoying it. It reminds me of a much younger Internet and much simpler times. I am loving that Lemmy servers are run by your average joe who just wanted to start up a Lemmy community. No single CEO who only cares about how profitable a site is.
disclaimer: i am not a web developer or a programmer, so if the language use is semantically incorrect, i apologize—I am merely trying to provide a layman’s explanation.
it’s just a bunch of little “reddits” (general discussion forum websites) that are independently hosted, but have the ability to cross post with one-another (so long as they are “federated”).
lemmy is the underlying technology that lets that happen, not the top level entity (like how reddit is the name of the website that is the forum host). so what you have is a bunch of different independent websites running lemmy that users individually create accounts on, and a lot of those individual websites communicate with each-other to create cohesive “fediverse.”
on the front end, whatever lemmy website someone signs up on, they are able to see all the content created and posted across all the separate websites that have federated together with the initial website the user signed up with.
so in short, you may have signed up with Lemmy Server 1 that has 800 individual forum topics (communities/ or subreddits) but you can also post in and interact with Lemmy Server 2, which is separately hosted and a very specific forum that only allows forum topics about bunny tossing so there are two topics: /BunnyTossing and /BunnyTossingMemes. So long as lemmy servers 1 and 2 are federated you’ll see content from Lemmy Server 1 (your home server) and Lemmy Server 2 (rad tips on bunny tossing).
if in the future your home server defederates with another server, you will no longer see content from that server or be able to interact with it as your user profile from that home server (in this instance Lemmy Server 1). in this situation however there is nothing stopping you from creating a user account on Lemmy Server 2 and continuing to see rad tips on bunny tossing by logging into lemmy server 2 directly.
