No Stupid Questions

No Ads, federated, Open Source, No big coorporation, community driven, no investors and stock market push, decentralized is the future IMHO.

It's not owned by a greedy soulless corporation with a pigboy in control. There's more assholes on here (the AKSHUALLY is quite strong) but there's less hivemind.

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.

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

When people say Lemmy is better, they mean the software and the platform are better. You’re talking about the users of the two platforms. Lemmy users are still idiots, just like Reddit users, we just use Linux and don’t use chrome

Decentralization.

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

It's federated so much more unlikely to be enshitified by money interests.

Right now the community is smaller and manageable so less bots and trolls

No corporate control

I recently migrated here. I did so as a precaution, and still browse reddit sometimes .

Reddit IPO'ed, and is now focused on making money. They removed the API to centralize it's power and remove 3rd party apps. They threatened subreddits who protested, and shut some down. And have made sweeping changes to accommodate to advertisers.

The straw that broke the snoo's back was the CEO hinting at subreddit paywalls. I figured I would try to learn Lemmy again, and what do you know, it's more serious, has better comments and posts, segmented even more than reddit with the distros, and fully free/open source.

It also helps that I'm a huge computer nerd, and there's a lot of that on here, but you can find your niche.

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

Ads look better in the official ad delivery app - download the app

"Oh, you already have a third party app that you love? Too bad, we're killing it."

Download the official app to view the rest of this comment

Loony power tripping moderators can only ban you from their little bit rather than from the whole site.

For me its multiple reasons.

I really like the aspect and feeling of a small bonded community. There are a lot of people that are fairly active on Lemmy and you see them quite often.

The next thing is, that I personally had the experience, that people on Lemmy are much kinder than on Reddit. There are so many kind people on Lemmy and I had a lot of useful conversations that aren't like two monkeys throwing poop at each other.

What's also a really good thing is, is the fact of redundancy and federation. The fact that there are multiple instances, each with a unique style and feeling, is good so that everyone can find an instance that suits their needs(or they can host their own one if they want to). There are also sometimes multiple communities for the same topic on difference instances. I as example have blocked lemmy.ml due to their modding behaviour and I don't want to support this. This also means, that I won't engage in their Linux and askLemmy community's, but this isn't to bad, since both have duplicates on other instances.

No ads disguised as posts.

So.. Two things..

I have a funny story regarding modding on Lemmy..

Ran into two bad mods the other day (related to the same convo). But, gist of the story is, I got into a discussion with someone who heavily exaggerated and claimed I wanted to kill an entire minority, as I only 80% agreed with them (they were basically demanding government benefits which would cause a huge issue if applied to other communities which was required to be fair , and they couldn't even set the parameters of the rules for it). A Beehaw admin freely ignored the outrageous comment that the other mod made, and branded me instantly as "starting a fight".

As I was deleting my Beehaw account, I noticed that same non-beehaw mod had actually been in a thread I had also posted in a month ago which was discussing more conservative people moving to Lemmy (I'm VERY left). They basically said in the discussion they were constantly needing to remove "conservative" and people who were trying to start fights . This was ironic because doing the huge exaggeration thing and calling someone a derogatory name is basically out of the conservative playbook (and they were certainly the only ones fighting), and anywhere else it would be seen as rediculous behavior.

People in that thread though also made it sound like the rest of Lemmy was a cesspool. This colored my opinion of Lemmy and I realised my opinion came from that same thread, so, I didn't want to leave beehaw, and only took the leap recently.

I was actually hugely surprised by Lemmy World. Everyone is a lot more respectful here than I expected and I think its even a better safe space than beehaw, where . There are a lot more connected instances, so the bad actors get drowned out easier, and it promotes a healthy discussion, where science is encouraged. We might not all agree, but it's a lot easier to avoid echo chambers. The science memes community is also AWESOME on Lemmy and beats anywhere else imho.

Reddit on the other hand, doesn't seem to have good moderation (most mods are unpaid and the power hungry ones will try to manage hundreds of communities). It has degraded into people fishing for karma , and has a higher percentage of abusive people who also likely abuse others on facebook (many aussie subs have degraded into far right wing where science is discouraged and people purposely try to push an echo chamber). THere are a lot of good mods here though, and if you don't like a community, you can block it and find another one.. The cool part is that I suspect over time, this will eventually keep mods honest.

The biggest problem is that Reddit SHOULD have acted on FatPeopleHate, the Donald and Female Dating strategy. They didn't act on jailbait either apparently. Those people established themselves permanently into the community, grew to some of the largest communities and the moment mods left, many of those same communities likely did a power grab too. Reddit staff don't really care either, and since the people running the servers don't seemingly care (similar to facebook), it simply encourages them

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.

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.

Third party apps

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.

We control it. It's libre software.

There's a lot less commercial interest.

Not just no ads, but also no users trying to push products or gain karma for account selling and all that crap.

Mass down voting was not the reason I left Reddit. Was it why you left? If so then, we'll, sure, maybe it's not better for you lol. Lemmy doesn't track your total points (or "karma" as some call it) which most people seem to appreciate.

NO SPEZ. That's enough

Democracy manifest!

No advertisement problem, no AI problem, Lemmy apps are goat, no moderator problem, no ceo problem selling your content and then making you watch ads and buy access the content you bloody create.

Fuck reddit.

Simple, no Karma whoring, real people to argue, no bots posting fake stories about something that happened related to the post, and best of all, controlled by users and not corporate people.

No spez. The rest is kinda similar (except on a technical level that mostly matters to nerds)

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.