No Stupid Questions

I am a new Lemmy user (and new to this fediverse, although I have more fediverse experience from other decentralized platforms such as Matrix). I've been liking Lemmy, for the pupose it's thought for, a thread-focused platform (while Mastodon, for example, is post-focused, microblogging). For starters, no advertisements nor sponsorship nor tracking (yet my adblock is active everytime anyways). Possibility of integrating multiple kinds of platforms through ActivityPub (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc). Open and accessible API. Definitely, not only Lemmy is way better than Reddit, but the fediverse is way better than any mainstream social network.

I wouldn't say "better", because then people will assume, as you have, that it solves all of the problems with Reddit. Lemmy solves certain specific problems that are evident on Reddit. Namely the centralized ownership of the platform and the enshittification that can result from that.

It doesn't solve the problem of certain bad-faith user behaviours like downvote brigading, trolling, etc. If anything, those problems are a bit worse in the fediverse since ban evasion is really easy. We recently had a problem with a troll who spent two months posting incel stuff to a variety of different communities, and when he got banned from one instance he would just create a new account with a different instance. He went through like 15 accounts, though he does appear to have finally given up as of a week ago.

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

It's not, but it's old Reddit with more attributes that prevent a transition to corporate Reddit so I'll take it.

Open mobile app support

Ad free (depending on the app and instance, but its pretty easy to get Lemmy without ads)

No CEO to make whacky, unpopular decisions without clear purpose or recourse

No shareholders whose priorities will always take precedence over the users

There's also something to be said for being part of a smaller community

Of course any and all problems can occur in microcosm within a particular instance or community, but it's trivial to just block that instance/community. As for brigading, bullying, and harassment, Lemmy offers no solutions to human nature, unfortunately.

spez has no power here.

Listen, I won't dig into all the tech and philosophy of decentralization and anti-corporate ownershipa. There are other people here for that. But let me tell you why I am enjoying it: it's small, it ends, and it feels like early internet.

I load up Lemmy, and see a series of disjointed memes, or a current ongoing meme (like pondering the orb) and absorb that for a short while. I see a couple world news articles, a couple about Trump and a couple about places that aren't the US. I read an article about Ryzen's new chips not performing well on Windows and see someone's retro-gaming setup. Then, after about 10-15 minutes of scrolling, I go "oh hey, I remember this post from yesterday", and then I close Lemmy because, and this is the important part, I've hit the end of new content in my feed.

I still get the news, I still take in a couple memes about the current state of politics, or a celebrity flying her plane altogether too much, but I am never stuck here. There's no one trying to rage bait me for the sake of user engagement, and any argument I find myself in wraps up and moves on. I don't feel disconnected, but I am also never completely absorbed, and my life is better for it. Sure, sometimes while I am waiting in a line I load Lemmy only to discover there's nothing new for me in the hour since I've closed it. Sometimes I do the age old, "looking to busy myself", close Lemmy because there's nothing to see, immediately open Lemmy because I am looking for something to occupy my Internet poisoned brain. But being bored for a minute here and there is worth it, if it means a lot more free time because I am no longer absorbed in the rat race of infinite scrolling social media.

I think Lemmy is better in a series of ways, but the one that really matters is that it helps me put down my phone, and do things that I enjoy.

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

I was practically forced to move to other platforms, including Lemmy, because Reddit's way of dealing with things is absolute garbage. Their app is garbage, their ethics are garbage, their admins and moderators are garbage.

In short I got permabanned on the entirety of Reddit after confronting a moderator in my favorite sub violating their own (and Reddit's) rules and content policy. Which eventually led being banned on the sub by said moderator, and later Reddit got triggered as I was "avoiding a ban" with an alternative account (which happened accidentally).

Since then it's been impossible to get in contact with admins, and they've been autobanning any new accounts I tried to set up. I've been trying to appeal my bans dozens of times in the past year, but never get an actual response from an actual admin, I doubt they even have humans working at Reddit at this point. That's on my 8+ year old account..

Previously I also got permabanned on dozens of subs for commenting in a sub that was supposedly brigading, I didn't even have any harmful intention or said anything worthwhile of a ban, yet all those completely unrelated subs banned me for "participating" in the brigade thing.

It just shows what absolute trash moderators and admins of Reddit are. They're all only playing their own little agendas. They're only destroying their own community with stuff like this. I miss my favorite communities, but I absolutely don't miss the garbage surrounding it.

I like the choose your own adventure element. If you want strong content moderation you can go to Beehaw; if you want something more catch all, Lemmy.world is good; if you're a Stalinist, you have at least three solid options.

The instances talk to each other, but many fulfill slightly different functions.

At Reddit, it seems the stupidest posts often get thousands of upvotes. Here, they're lucky if they get 50. So that makes me feel less crazy, I guess.

You own your data, you can self-host your own Lemmy instance and still connect to other Lemmy instances (Like what I do)

Also you can share whatever you want, no one tells you "If you say that again I'll ban you from the entire network". And of course, there are no ads or algorithms showing you what their owners want you to see. It's freedom.

Life on Lemmy (and reddit/social media in general) becomes a lot better when you turn off vote displays

less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose.

Depends on where you landed and your political alignment, but lemmy.world is fairly reasonable at least by what I'm looking for. If you start saying radical things like "Mao's Great Leap Forward" wasn't a very good thing on certain instances, you may be banned from there, but with your account residing here, it wont be deleted.

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.

In terms of variety of communities it isn't better, but the hope is over time people will continue to come over here as reddit decays and eventually it'll catch up.

I left reddit when they killed the 3rd party app I used. I didn't want to switch and I ended up here. in my opinion Lemmy still has a long way to go to be as good as what I left, but I don't want to support reddit anymore and I find it to be good enough here to still be enjoyable. I can still look at memes, and there's still some good discussion to be had.

The biggest thing Lemmy is missing is niche communities and a broader and less techy audience. I think both of those will happen overtime if the platform keeps growing. Crossing my fingers we get there.

If you have a shit opinion that noone agrees with and they downvote you to hell, that isn't "brigading"... As for it being better....the mods alone make it 1000x better.

Less locked down than Reddit. No CEO bent on taking your user created content and charging for it. No CEO trying to polish a turd for advertisers to make $$ while simultaneously completely taking for granted and disregarding the mods and users that actually make Reddit exist. No communities captured by shills and groupthink. Well…except for places like hexbear or some .ml, but there’s no pretenses there. You know what you’re getting into. Lemmy is more egalitarian, plenty of apps for mobile devices, people generally have a discussion and not just be the retread cheap quip for upvotes.

Also, Reddit IMO has gotten “colder” for lack of a better word. People don’t upvote. You’re more likely to be criticized for a position than engaged with. Opinions that disagree with the hive mind are often quickly downvoted regardless of whether or not the position has validity.

Lemmy is just more chill.

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.

I haven't been banned for suggesting child molesters don't deserve to live. Can't say that about Reddit.

The biggest upside to my Lemmy experience, so far, has been that you can stay within you communities, and actually have a decent conversation about the topics being posted. On reddit, it's consistently been the exact opposite of that.

I get that not everyone is this way, but there are a lot of really, really frustrated people. Every comment ends up being either ragebait, an argument, or is neither, but still gets downvoted into fuck all, because people cannot differentiate a different opinion, from an incorrect one