Reddit

In strict technical terms, yeah it's okay, albeit with the shortcomings to be expected of a smaller development team. In terms of population and activity with this format, I think it may be at the top compared to alternatives as well.

There's still others and other software options though for this format that people could try, which honestly may even be technically better, but lacking population/activity means they're in an odd spot.

The first of these you'll read about on here are likely Kbin/Mbin, possibly followed by PieFed or still-in-development Sublinks. Kbin/Mbin is definitely the runner-up in terms of federated Reddit-alternatives, as it was one of the few options available at the time people were leaving Reddit.

PieFed and Sublinks have emerged more recently with different priorities and approaches compared to Lemmy, but with the same desire to offer a federated option for people to deploy.

The last you may read about around here would be of stuff like Discuit, Lobste.rs, Raddle (and any other sites built with Postmill), Tildes, and the like, which are all most like Reddit in terms of their being stand-alone sites, unconnected to any others running the same underlying server software. However each of these, I think, may have lower population than the cumulative population of the Lemmy network of sites.

All that said, cutting to your last question: ultimately it heavily depends on the instance/site you settle into.

Lemmy isn't a monolith, which is both its greatest strength and weakness compared to Reddit. You may be able to find a Lemmy instance/site that heavily blocks out politics and moderates lightly, but the irony of this is that it means it may have to be overly-policed to achieve that, and might appear less active in the process from heavy disconnection/defederation from any instances/sites that permit political posts/discussion.

Right now though, much of Lemmy is heavily political, and it's arguably because of lax moderation to keep political posts/discussions to relevant communities, which is itself probably in part because of lacking moderation tools to enable lighter touches to redirect posts/discussions.

Nevertheless, it's possibly the best option fitting the format available at the moment given the rest, but if Lemmy and federation doesn't suit you you might check out Tildes or Discuit. Although be advised: Tildes remains invite only for now.

Links to all options/alternatives mentioned:

• Kbin, flagship site: Kbin Social
• Mbin. No flagship, check list of instances.
• PieFed, flagship site: PieFed Social
• Sublinks. No flagship, still in-development as drop-in replacement for Lemmy.
• Discuit. Not federated, but open source.
• Lobste.rs. Not federated, but open source. Requires invite.
• Raddle. Not federated, built on open source Postmill.
• Tildes. Not federated, but open source. Requires invite.

One last point, I swear, but if you do stick around and just want to chat about tv shows, movies, and music, I'd recommend visiting:

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

Honestly I think any general/casual discussion community would welcome posts about those subjects as well, which there are a number of across Lemmy sites to check out.

Idea: Try exclusively using Lemmy for a week.

If you love it, switch. If you hate it, don't. If you miss Reddit, use both.

Me too just in . And uh yeah its great the content is obviously lacking and hoping it would grow . But the clients are steller especially jerboa and privacy , security , Foss aspects are unmatched . I'm not planning to stay tho not because of Lemmy but mostly because I'm losing sanity an.. Yeah no .

Small but great!!! Once I've blocked Hexbear (the proud boys pretending to be far-left), everything is pretty fun and respectful.

It's similar in a lot of ways and this is still an echo chamber and the echo chamber we have here has a lot of overlap with reddit... but, while reddit mostly just leaned left... Lemmy... just leans anti-west. As mentioned, there's a lot of overlap there, we've got a lot that is shared, but the parts where those two groups differ can cause some serious wtf moments if you're used to the reddit community. As far as over policing, moderation logs are mostly public and there have been some controversies, but mostly people just stopped caring or left. If you stick around long enough, you will notice policies being applied unfairly if you're on the 'wrong' side and it's a lot easier to be in that category here.

All that to say, you'll likely have some moments where you think... Maybe that old echo chamber wasn't so bad.

Welcome to Lemmy.

One important thing to point out, your upvotes and downvotes are mostly public here, so if you want to maintain anonymity with your votes you'll want to setup a separate account for voting only and no commenting.

I tried a few apps for interacting with Lemmy and Voyager has been my favorite by far.

I still go back to Reddit for very niche communities that can't be found here, or just don't have the userbase to churn out content like they can. I use an app like "Stealth" to browse any of the subreddits I still frequent, but I've been able to replace a lot of the generic ones with Lemmy communities.

You will find a lot more users here that will take any chance they can get to blame capitalism for all of the worlds problems.

Some opinions are still heavily downvoted here, but you can always join up with an instance that ignores/doesn't display any downvotes.

You will need to be a lot more active in your own communities if you want to turn it into the kind of place you want to keep coming back to.

As far as moderation goes, there are some Lemmy instances that have stricter mods than others. Just do a little research and pick a main one where you won't get banned if you decide to voice your opinion about a dictator one way or another.

Just note, if you pick one that's too small there's a greater risk of them shutting down for one reason or another.

@007KeyLimePie welcome!

Discoverability takes a bit longer here. If you're looking to add content, then alongside the usual directories it's worth checking out the lists at https://kbin.social/magazines/collections

Moderation is transparent here.

Also, protip: if you're in a thread where everyone is raging about "libs" or "the liberals," on reddit that would indicate a conservative sub, but here there's a 99% chance they are communists or anarchists.

Feels like early internet here, enjoy it while it lasts. Good chance this place will blow up and the normies will come in.

I made 1 “controversial” comment and I got perma-banned

From a subreddit or from reddit as a whole?

My perma-ban happened in a discussion within the r/EveryoneKnowsThat search for a lost wave song

If from Reddit as a whole, unless the admins have changed a LOT in the last year, that sounds weird. They usually only banned accounts over calls to violence and promoting piracy blatantly.

I once got temporary ban for saying I preferred Zelda Breath of the Wild over Tears of the Kingdom

wat. was a small personal sub? That's just a random suspension.

I found I had to block a large number of communities from my feed that were very narrow minded. Once I did some diligent editing, however, Lemmy has become my daily browse and I'm happy with the change. I still use reddit for some of the niche communities that don't have a counterpart here, but the larger topics (news, memes, technology) are well covered and open to discourse.

Don't say you weren't warned.

Reddit felt like a massive echo chamber

Lemmy is a way bigger echo chamber, it's as "no matter who vote blue" as it gets tbh (with very few exceptions).

Where people aren’t pushed away for respectfully voicing their opinion. Is Lemmy the answer?

Nope, it's the opposite if anything.
I'm constantly getting attacked with ad hominem (my favourite one - getting called a fascist) here despite voicing opinions as respectfully as it gets, as well as providing sources for my claims whenever people ask.
Gotta have really thick skin if you are not left-leaning, but if you are - you will feel right at home :)

It's the best I've found, but I wouldn't call it a "good" alternative myself no.

Many others have commented on the small communities/lack of niche communities so I'll simply say I agree with the takes in this thread there.

Personally though, I generally find Lemmy to be far less tolerant of any dissenting opinions across most communities. And man do I mean any. There's a plethora of topics that aren't even worth trying to discuss here because if you introduce the slightest bit of nuance to a hardline take you'll be downvoted, insulted, and ignored.

A quick example that comes to mind are services such as Spotify/Youtube. To make a long story short, I find that I use Youtube often enough that I don't mind paying for Youtube premium. They need to make money somehow to continue providing that service and I can't fucking stand ads so hey sure it's worth the monthly payment to me. I'm a pretty satisfied customer all things considered.

Try offering that perspective in any related thread and you'll be called bootlicker and made to feel like you're propping up Satan himself for daring to pay for Youtube and be happy to do so.

There's other, similar topics. Some are easier to avoid, like the FuckCars community. I was a pretty big fan of that community on reddit but on Lemmy most threads seem to truly believe we need to go 100% no cars at all and there is no middleground damnit. Other topics manage to work their way into damn near any thread. Biden could literally pull a child and puppy from a burning building and there will always be comments about how he's still a genocidal maniac and basically evil. That entire war is basically just not worth talking about here imo.

And then there's little stuff. For example, don't ever say you use Windows here lest a whole horde of people jump in to call you an idiot for not having switched to Linux I mean really what's wrong with you using the most popular OS in the world by a large margin. Stuff like that.

So I guess to summarize my feelings here, I personally believe the echo-chamber is far worse on Lemmy than reddit and that's primarily due to the smaller community. A lot of likeminded people came to Lemmy and we're missing a lot of middleground opinions that come naturally with a larger, more diverse population. Too many people view everything as black and white and if you sit in grey both extremes are against you.

There are absolutely exceptions; I have seen respectful discourse on the site. But the general trend I perceive here is that the echo-chamber is far worse.

Lemmy is good but very, very small in comparison to Reddit.

For example, /r/mildyinteresting has 286k subscribers. Lemmy has around 51k active users across the entire platform and all of it's communities. And /r/mildyinteresting is a misspelling of the even more popular /r/mildlyinteresting (23.4 million subscribers).

Even some of the niche gaming communities are larger on Reddit (/r/Kenshi, 145k; /r/factorio, 370k).

However, the small community feel is much more pronounced here on the federated Lemmy servers. You'll see the same names pop up so everyone isn't a complete stranger. Third party app support is miles ahead of Reddit's crappy app. And if you don't like your instance for any reason you can hop to another one easily.

You'll see certain trends on trending communities here. There's a lot more posts on Linux, Star Trek, and Tech news that isn't as pronounced on Reddit unless you subscribe specifically to them. The meme community is top notch though and doesn't have the incel and misogyny issues that plague Reddit.

Lemmy is smaller and more... particular. Users here are more respectful, and more sensitive. Politics seem to bleed into everything more than at reddit. Lemmy is absolutely an echo chamber, but of a different flavor. More "kill the rich" and less " the narwhal bacon's at midnight"

You can still get nuked arbitrarily for annoying a mod.

I say try it out, but use the ban tool liberally the first few weeks. Block instances like hexbear, lemmygrad and possibly ml if you aren't interested in leftist discussion, and in for former instance's cases, trolling and dogpilling. (Or keep em, if you like that 😁)

After a few weeks of banning users and instances I have a generally palatable but still pretty left leaning time-dump / memefeed.

Welcome!

I also moved over from Reddit, some time ago now, Lemmy is great if you don't mind it being quieter and you're not into super niche things.

If you are into super niche things, definitely make those communities and begin fostering growth by posting, it's what I'm doing for my home country of Wales, slow but steady and all that.

Hope you enjoy Lemmy!

Sadly, it's a worse echo chamber. In my experience mods are far more likely to wield power like little dictators and ban for good faith dissent, as there's no governing body above them to prevent this. I've been banned for being pro-Israel by several such petty tyrants.

Upvotes and downvotes are generally per-server though. It's interesting to see how posts and submissions are regarded on other instances.

I've been discussing this on Mastodon too, but more focused on features and limitations related to federation rather than people being dumber in one place or the other. But I also want more open conversations, which is one of the things I believe ActivityPub helps with.
So instead of voting for Lemmy I'll go ahead and say I prefer Kbin since I've found it easier here to interact with posts from other fediverse platforms.
Just read carefully the rules of each group/magazine/community as everyone is free to tidy up their spaces as they wish, reasonably or not.

I like Lemmy as a substitute for a general non-specific social forum to engage with others. It's not as popular so it's more intimate here.

What's missing is the general popularity and existence of robust communities. I think this is a good thing because it drives me to find other more specific websites and forums related to my interests. Some of those communities are harder to find and have less content though.

There's a middle ground between Lemmy and Reddit that doesn't yet exist. The hope (I think) is that the infrastructure will mimic the best of Reddit while rejecting the worst of Reddit.

I was complaining about the Reddit echo chamber for probably close to ten years. The arrows have not been used as designed for a long time. They're supposed to mark an item as relevant or not relevant, not as a like or dislike. Had they been used properly... well, let's put it this way, AI is now being trained based on what people like, not based on what information is relevant or correct.

Incidentally, I was brought to Lemmy for a reason similar to you. I posted one innocuous question on one sub that got me banned from a totally unrelated sub where I wasn't even a member (evidently, engaging with one sub, regardless of your reasons or opinions, is enough for another sub to ban you, even if you fully support the other sub).

I really did always hate that Reddit felt like a massive echo chamber.

Lemmy is a collection of independent echo chambers that believe different things. You can make an account on some instance you never heard of before and get people assuming you have certain beliefs just because of your instance because apparently a lot of people stick primary to their home instance? In one instance, you have an echo chamber of "bOtH SiDeS aRe tHe sAmE" and other echo chambers that say things like "I won't vote for someone who aids in genocide".

Some instances block more instances than others (the one you are on has blocked 172 instances, for example). And some instances are blocked by a lot of instances (lemmygrad is blocked by 89 instances). Also some instances disable downvoting, if that's something you're interested in.

I don't think overpolicing is an issue in most places? Like, there's that one person who openly is pro-genocide in all of the palestine-related threads (like, they explicitly call for killing of even infants and that anything less is antisemitism) and I guess they're tolerated (just probably one of the most heavily downvoted people on lemmy). But if they're on an instance without downvotes, they wouldn't even see them.

Its the same small group vibe reddit lost when they got big and greedy. You will actually learn names outside of the top reposter.

The only thing I miss is the really neiche communities. There's some but they struggle to take off due to the smaller user base.

You do have to look though a few different servers till you find one that fits what you want. Mods are still clowns depending on the server. Avoid the top few instances to avoid power trippers. Some things never change.

I basically found a cozy server and settled in after nukeing my reddit account. I don't miss reddit.

The echo-chamberiness of Lemmy is different from Reddit, but still a thing unfortunately. It'll really depend on the community you're in, but since the population of the Fediverse (and especially the Threadiverse) is very small compared to Reddit you tend to have the same people cropping up a lot. I haven't been banned from anywhere (that I know of - I don't actually know if I would get notified) but I find myself hammered with downvotes more frequently here than on Reddit when I say something unpopular.

I'd say, mess around a bit and see.

Eh it's slightly like Reddit in the sense you have to walk on eggshells. If you look at the Modlogs, in my case for example, you'll see I had comments deleted because it appeared to be disrespectful? Someone who I was responding to decided to label my response as having an, "attitude".. I'm too old to be a d*ck to people online - unless of course I'm returning the favor but even then I mostly brush it off and I don't go crying to the mods or reporting comments. Sticks and stones and all that.

But so far while the community is much smaller, it's definitely a lot more open to discourse between people with different/opposing views, or so it seems so far except you will definitely get downvoted for opposing views.