I was here before the Reddit API kerfuffle, because I care about an open and decentralized internet.
Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
Mostly for memes about beans.
Uh but for real because reddit quite literally sold out and went full corpo.
Because I believe in the idea of the Fediverse and I want it to succeed.
I've been posting on internet forums for almost 30 years now. It's just a thing I like doing.
I'm here now because it's the best place I know of at the moment.
communists aren't allowed on reddit, but communists built lemmy
seemed natural
Quick notes for those who only know of Lemmy after the reddit API fiasco: from what I understand, reddit's banning of /r/chapotraphouse in mid-2020 is how Hexbear came to be (biggest instance prior to API drama, albeit unfederated at the time due to major software divergence) and the banning of /r/genzedong, /r/genzhao and /r/genzhukov in March 2022 brought a large exodus of users onto lemmygrad.ml, making it the most popular federated instance until the reddit API changes.
Because fuck Spez, thatβs why.
Because fuck u/spez
- The r/conservative mods got my main account global banned for using the βreport misinformationβ button too much. That sub used to have good quality textposts but when the trump cult took over, it changed to nonstop ragebait/lies/propaganda news articles. And on slow news days youβd see articles like βThrowback: Dont forget that Obama did X six years agoβ to keep the people furious 7 days a week
- Enshittification
I like having ownership of my internet experience so I run a lemmy instance and my friend administrates it. It is more fun than using a botted network.
i came here like most lemmy did; because reddit; and i hope to be here for a long time since all substantially financed social media platforms enshitify eventually like reddit or facebook did or enshitify immediately like bluesky did when they banned gazans.
Once RiF announced it would shut down due to the API changes I made my account here. I only used Reddit on mobile so just staying on old.reddit wasn't an option. Tried a few different apps for Lemmy and landed on Sync since I can set it up as close to RiF as I could, but with improvements like sliding to up vote.
It's a much better place here, and I actually comment more here than I ever did on Reddit due to the toxicity and just getting buried by bot accounts. My account was 12 years old when I left, now I've been here over a year and don't plan on leaving any time soon. You're stuck with me now
Reddit got redundant. I like arbitrary All and Popular feeds and boy did those suck after the nth made up feel good repost.
As for staying, I'm more inclined to comment here. I'm shy even by online standards but Lemmy feels like it needs more commenters.
i dont have anywhere else to go
Big, centrally owned platforms aren't a good idea.
Reddit did some API nonsense, and that was when I left there. I was already off twitter, and never used facebook stuff.
I need somewhere for my meme and internet highlights supply, and lemmy has been ok so far.
Non-ideologically: the culture is measurably better. Here's why.
- The Lemmy Algorithm. This is a big flaw with Reddit -- people have the attention span for the first ten comments, and then subcomment upvotes halve (with decent std. dev -- we aren't Zipf's Law devotees there) until invisibility. I don't think my Reddit comments are even seen, let alone replied to. But here, new comments have a chance.
- The sense of "mineness". A lot of people see this place as "their own", so there's responsibility to raise your communities right, and another to interact (hence, variably lower hostility). I don't post much but I respond a lot to the people who comment in them, because I feel that it'd be nice to contribute to do my part and keep this place up.
- At risk of sounding self-absorbed/elitist, the entry level helps culture too. People are here because they were dissatisfied with the state of other sites, then made a jump; this is a sieve that to an extent increases the standard of sorting by new. (This has limitations of course -- we still have extremists for example -- and it isn't necessarily advocating for Lemmy to never be mainstream.)
e.g. that Draw a Duck post a while back is probably far beyond a lot of platforms' capabilities/proclivities.
(I admit: this is a paraphrased comment I made a few months ago)
Just want to support Fediverse π
Better engagement than Reddit at this point I'm starting to believe it's all bots for real.
Fortune and glory.
Because I love sync
As in, why here and not reddit? I drifted away from posting on reddit about 5 - 8 years ago. I was icky over their ads and tracking and it was just a time sink I didn't need back then, but I would still use alternate frontends (the current equivalent would be libreddit) to lurk while on the train trip to work and back.
I forget whether I found lemmy from /r/piracy exploring bunker options (raddle and lemmy) or if it was through FOSS, but I liked its potential and have been here posting here since 2022.
Reddit banned me. They hate anti capitalists and anti fascists
Because spez was being a dip shit. Other than that, yeah, idklol
Reddit banned r/chapotraphouse for saying "slaveowners should be killed"
Cause need to take the web back.
Came because I liked open source software and hate corporations. Stayed because communism
It started with a distaste for how Reddit was treating developers and moderators, but now I genuinely believe in the future of the fediverse.
For the snacks
Honestly don't remember why I signed up. I like it though. Kind of similar vibe to when I used Reddit except much better. It's got some nice small-ish (but not too small) communities for FOSS stuff.
I tried Reddit but I had enough with all the rules and corporate cleanliness of it. I used this site called 'Saidit' for a bit but but no one ever posted there so I looked into Reddit alternatives and stumbled across Lemmy. The rest is history
Spite
Corporate greed puts me off.
For an actual community. I was tired of Discord and Reddit.
I was in F-droid searching for stuffs, then I found lemmy, since my phone can't install reddit cause I have storage problems, I tried out lemmy. And now I believe this is better than any community apps.
Lemmy tell you how...
sync for Android
I just enjoy it here.