this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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Ask Lemmy

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[–] [email protected] 113 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It has support for 3rd party apps.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

Here on principle for the 3rd party apps.

I realize the hardware and software cost money for a site. I'm ok with paying either by a friendly use of ads, or a decent subscription.

I was on the verge of starting to pay for Reddit to stop the ads when I used the website. I happily paid for my 3rd party app. But that was right when Reddit nerfed the subscriptions and went to their current version. And then stopped the API.

I happily paid for the Lemmy 3rd party app. I need to look into donating for the server.

[–] [email protected] 78 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Lemmy doesn't have u/spez, so it's already infinitely better

[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It also has you too which is cool.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Simple, it's open source and distributed, and that's what matters.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago

A social network/online community can either be significantly profitable or healthy for its users. Pick one

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I find the moderation is better here. My posts aren't being removed because they didn't match some forced title formatting or some other arbitrary reason.

People also aren't just redirecting people to decade old posts and megathreads which is nice.


Think about what AskReddit is like with the same kind of posts over and over again because they decided to limit posters to the title text.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

I had a really positive interaction with a mod on a NSFW instance. I commented on how I thought the dude was working in an unsafe manner...

I wasn't banned! If this has been reddit I would have been banned and told to Fuck off.

It's nice to have a place to go that'll engage in conversation and education when needed.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

If communities end up with hundreds of thousands or millions of users, you will start to see more rules here too.

I’m not saying any specific rule choices are good or bad. But they become increasingly necessary when the user count crosses a threshold.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago

I can see real upvotes and downvotes.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago

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.
[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)
  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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago

in a nutshell, it's made for people, not for money

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.)

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

Accessibility is a big plus. Reddit is opposed to 3rd party apps while their official app is appallingly stuttery and feature-incomplete.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's owned by people, not a person.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (3 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago

Because Reddit got worse

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)
  • Open-source; no one party has monopoly control over the codebase.

  • Federated; no one party has monopoly control over the existing network.

  • The operators have no problem with third-party clients.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I can use whichever method of access I want while not having to deal with 26263663 different types of data harvesters.
The few ads there are are easily recognizable spam posts, as opposed to sanctioned ads camouflaged as user content.
Fewer reposts.
Generally better quality members. Yes, that includes YOU

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Probably related: seems to me like the people here are just ever so slightly more level headed than on Reddit. Have barely ever gotten into so much as a heated discussion over here compared to Reddit.

Then again, when I migrated, I kinda skipped trying to find equivalents of the more toxic subreddits/communities here on Lemmy. No publicfreakouts or shit like that. Just sound and wholesome stuff. Maybe more IT stuff as well.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I stopped using Reddit around the great anime purge. Became an unfriendly place to hangout.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

Why was there an anime purge?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

The only reason it is better right now is a combination of obscurity and people not grasping how federation works as a slight barrier to entry means it has fewer people who all want to be here instead of somewhere else.

Reddit went downhill when it because universally popular and enough people were there to attract jerks who just go where everyone else is and overwhelm moderation. So I don't want federation to become the standard, as other less popular options won't be there to attract the attention seeking jerks that are drawn to the popular sites.

Popularity ruins social media because the most popular place is where the worst tend to congregate and overwhelm moderation.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Federation has a built-in solution to address this. Once the garbage starts overtaking quality, you can just move to an instance with a stricter federation policy. Traditional services do not provide this option.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

While it provides a level of mitigation, malicious actors can overwhelm the system as a whole by switching instances, creating new accounts, and other intentional actions. Moderation cannot scale indefinitely even with better tools.

If the vast majority of users moves to instances with stricter policies that will increase the moderation burden on those instances. Kind of like how on reddit the smaller subreddits were managed well and most of the trash were ruining the popular subs.

So the current solution works for now, and might scale better than a centralized system, but if it reaches a certain point it will either end up being fractured significantly or end up swinging back to centralization.

All of those are reasons I think lemmy's smaller population is a benefit right now and there is still plenty of room to grow.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The discounts you get when you stay at a Holiday inn

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (3 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)
  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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

No ads masquerading as posts.

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Good third-party apps.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

foss, decentralised, no spez, api

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Spez isn't in charge

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] stoy 6 points 4 months ago

Parts are better, I like being able to block entire instances of troll users.

But I miss the constant barage of new content and a more active community.

I supose that I am still dealing with the aftermath of using Reddit for 8,5 years and suddenly dropping it even now after the better part of a year.

I am glad however that /u/spez isn't running things here, and I hope that he stubbs his toe hard once every 7-9 weeks for the forseeable future.

I have found that the Lemmy community as a whole seems to be quick with branding people fascist if they say anything even slightly less left than socialism in political discussions, though that has mostly been from Hexbear, so it is probably just a vocal minority.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

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.

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