Ask Lemmy

it load faster

It's way less addictive. Seriously, the last time I opened my Lemmy client was 5 days ago. Back when I was active on Reddit, I spent 3 of my waking hours on it every day, that's 21 hours a week.

Reddit wouldn't always let me say what I wanted. They would block/shadowban/mute me. Which I realized is inherently wrong in a society that intends to be a democracy.

So I hope Lenny is better in that regard. If I say something I don't want it taken away. I want it to have a chance to be challenged for what it is.

Once I realized this, I considered how many other probably healthy opinions that never got seen because mods, rules, restrictions and probably also financial and political biases ruined their chances of being challenged and seen in the first place. If only specific opinions are allowed, the whole site is inherently biased. I don't like that. I bet that would explain the dumb stuff I've seen there. Because if nobody can challenge an opinion it will never grow.

Lot less bloat

3rd party app support is probably my #1. Community is no different here than my 15 year experience on reddit, at least here there's less spam comments. My posts asking for advice or help here are also usually met with more productive support here.

Oh and no ads or sponsored content. I haven't even back to reddit since the exodus but before I left the sponsored content was so annoying.

No profit motive.

It's open source, has no ads by default, supports custom clients and is built with Rust which means it's very performant. Sure, it lacks some features that are very useful like flairs. And the moderation tools could be improved.

Reddit's website is literally shit and bloated as fuck. While Lemmy is pretty minimalistic. Some UI improvements to make it more pretty could be made but it's fine to be honest.

Custom clients

I mod the [email protected] and in about 6 months of taking care of it, I've needed to take down exactly one comment. One. It's so, so much nicer here.

Free from corporate interest.

Lemmy is so much more performant than reddit.. It is crazy! Try going to reddit's deskop site and then go to a Lemmy site..

Also, reddit is now blocking VPN users, unless you are logged in...

And finally, if I use reddit, I am contributing to a rich guy buying his nth car/house/yacht.. On Lemmy, I am not enriching the wallets of the already rich.

1. Open source
2. Federated
3. Community driven and ran
4. I hate supporting and being fucked in the ass by corporations

I think if the population was just slightly smarter and less submissive then more people would use and support open source software. I don't even mean lemmy, just OSS in general

Reddit feels like a weirdly dead place. Depending on the sub, there can be a lot of posts and comments but it's very hard to engage with. You need to comment early and what conversation there is decays very early. A lot of it is fake too, with bots stealing comments to repost.

It's a little bit better on smaller subs, but Reddit has a way of funneling everything into a larger subs if there is one for a topic, so outside of niche topics they tend to be ghost towns.

Lemmy is more like a small, weird forum. It's hardly perfect but at least it doesn't feel like a bunch of chat bots talking to each other.

No ads masquerading as posts.

I don't need any other reasons, that's enough.

The top comment of this post would be some reposted for the 8000th time "inside joke" on reddit. For me, it didn't matter what the post was about, every comment section was the same. It was especially frustrating when the post itself encouraged conversation and the top comment would be completely off topic.

Third party app support. Love Sync for Lemmy, Photon and Voyager.

Just my impression but there seems to be a slightly older crowd here.

1. It's open source and grants me the opportunity to participate.

2. It's distributed (federated) and not just one company making the choices for me and all of us.

3. No ADs, gamification and nagging me to buy in-game currency.

Yeah, and it has an usable app.

I think the most important aspect to me is 1) the freedom it provides me with. I don't like all my communication being in the hand of big tech companies.

Because I can just use it. Reddit doesn't even allow me to do that without using their shitty app.

Less astroturfing

I just signed up after lurking for a while. So far it’s very limited compared to Reddit and if not for the loss of Apollo I wouldn’t be here. But I’m using an app that looks and acts like Apollo (Voyager) so it feels like Reddit did for years.

It's not reddit. I'm all for choice and alternatives. Plus, I support the underdog.

So first, these things are why Lemmy is better for me. Obviously, to each their own.

• Lemmy supports different apps, like Reddit used to.
• I’ve experienced less spam on Lemmy.
• Lemmy is full of Linux nerds, like me.
• Lemmy has fewer Nazis in my experience. I do understand that there are instances full of Nazis, but I don’t see their posts.
• Lemmy is open source. I like open source.

App and less bots

Yes, no ads + third party apps and a better political atmosphere is a win for me

Reddit -> corporation, greed driven, you are but a product fır the advertisers

Lemmy -> software, community run servers, service provided by people for people no money incentive

Besides what everyone else has said, I find the conversations here to be smarter. People who left Reddit are probably just more attuned to what’s happening. There’s probably less diversity of opinion here but that’s a trade I’m willing to make.

Basically, quantity vs. quality. I chose quality. Even on Reddit, I was mostly into smaller subs where experts responded to questions (like AskHistorians or AskPhysics) than the bigger ones. (I was banned from r/relationships for asking why women always think you’re hitting on them when you’re actually recruiting a team of elite female assassins. The mods apparently didn’t think it was funny.)

Good third-party apps.

I'm not permabanned here for being obscenely anti-russia.

No ads. Accessibility, server choice, no ads, no corporations to worry about stealing your data.

1. 3rd party apps.

2. Fewer Nazis.

3. Small enough to not have ridiculous rules that make it so only the mods and friends of mods can actually post something without it automatically being removed by an automod bot.

4. Fewer dickhead mods.

5. Either fewer dickheads in general, or at least fewer of them making multiple accounts so that blocking a dickhead actually works.

6. Open source, not owned by a megacorp.

Because Reddit got worse