Welcome here!

Copy pasting from a recent thread on /r/RedditAlternatives trying to address usual criticism against Lemmy.

Federation is confusing, people want a single website they can go to

• Go to https://lemm.ee/

• Have a look around, see if the content and the formatting is appealing to you, register an account if you want to be able to curate your feed further

• Go to https://lemm.ee/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world to see communities (equivalent of subs) that might be interesting to you.

• Use Voyager as a mobile app: https://www.lemmyapps.com/Voyager. When they ask for your “instance”, use “lemm.ee”

• If you want more choices for apps, have a look at https://www.lemmyapps.com/

Email has been working on a federation model for decades. People have to remember if they use Gmail or Outlook, but that’s it. It’s similar here.

Several communities have the same name, it’s confusing, active communities are hard to find

Reddit has a similar issue: you have /r/games as the main gaming community, but there is also /r/Gaming, /r/videogames /r/gamers, etc.

How does someone know what the main community is, whatever the platform? Looking at the number of subscribers and active members.

There was the example of beekeeping: if you search for that topic, the most active one is definitely https://mander.xyz/c/beekeeping with 97 users per month.

The others have barely 1 user: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=beekeeping

To find active communities: https://lemm.ee/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world. There are regular threads with active communities on topic such as gardening, movies, board games, anime, science, etc.

Who is going to pay for the server costs?

Here is a link to this question to Lemmy admins: https://lemm.ee/post/41577902

Summary of the answers:

• lowest number so far: lemmy.ml with 0.03€ per user per month
• a few others (feddit.uk, lemmy.zip) have around 0.11$ per user per month
• some instances are running on infrastructure that the admins would be anyway, so it’s virtually “free”

Most of the instances costs are paid using donations. They regularly post financial updates such as this one: https://lemm.ee/post/41235568

Obviously there is a sweet stop where you can minimize the cost by having the maximum number of users on a fixed infrastructure cost.

If you want to have a look at the number of monthly active user (the “MAU” column): https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/

Anyway, $ per user is usually meaningless because most of the servers are small enough to be hosted on some random cheap server - adding more users doesn’t cost more because they are still well below server capacity. Only the biggest servers have to worry about $ per user.

I had posted this earlier this week on this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fiuuo5/how_much_does_it_cost_per_user_to_host_a_lemmy/

There is too much political content

You can block entire servers and specific communities.

Instances to block to avoid political content

• https://lemmygrad.ml/
• https://hexbear.net/

Communities to block

• https://lemmy.world/c/news
• https://lemmy.world/c/politics
• https://lemmy.world/c/world
• https://lemmy.ml/c/worldnews
• https://lemmy.ml/c/usa

With those blocked, you are avoiding 95% of the political content. There might be a few other communities that pop up, but blocking them is still one click away.

Lemmy is developped by hardcore tankies and I don’t want to use their software

As Lemmy is federated using an open protocol, there are other options to connect to the communities without using Lemmy itself.

The first one is Piefed: https://piefed.social/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world

The other one is Mbin: https://fedia.io/m/newcommunities@lemmy.world

However, those are stil a bit less mature than Lemmy, so for instance if you want to use mobile apps a lot, Lemmy is a better choice.

On top of that, every Lemmy server is managed by different people. You can see regular criticism of lemmy.ml (the instance managed by the Lemmy devs) on threads such as this: https://lemm.ee/post/33872586 or even dedicated communities like https://lemm.ee/c/meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works

That shows that even the Lemmy devs are not protected from criticism.

There isn’t enough people

Lemmy has 46k monthly active users (https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats) (Mbin and Piefed have around 800 each). Active user is someone who voted, posted or commented.

In comparison, Discuit, which was praised during the API shutdown as “easier to use as it’s centralized” has 234 active users: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/KdiI1akq. Not 234k, 234 total.

For obvious reasons, the activity is not going to match Reddit levels, and niche communities aren’t there.

But it’s not an all or nothing situation. Most people on Lemmy still use Reddit for their niche communities, but are also active on Lemmy. And some niche communities are getting more active on lemmy. https://lemm.ee/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world (!newcommunities@lemmy.world ) promotes them.

Also, having less people provides better interactions, as your comments are less likely to get buried in thousands of others. And bots on Lemmy are quickly spotted and banned, while Reddit doesn’t seem to do much about that: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1fmcelm/askreddit_is_simply_over_run_with_bots/

Yes for me it’s absolutely a viable alternative. It’s still small and that has pros and cons. The overall quality of discourse is high because it’s a fairly hip crowd that has found Lemmy and joined. Feels more like the early days of the social web, before social media shat the bed. But being small has cons too. Some communities just aren’t here, and a lot of the ones here are small and less active. But there’s absolutely a viable base here that can grow over time. I’m glad that the internet figured this out because we were too dependent on Reddit before - it had totally consumed all concepts of online community and that was okay before the enshittification got into high gear. Lemmy from its inception is structurally designed not to go down that path. So spend time here. Share it. Help it grow. Start a niche sub and feed it.

I would say no to me it’s more like IRC. Its small enough to be not noticed by influence operations as much and each instance has its own personality just like IRC networks. It’s a great mix of local community and access to a wider view points.

It’s feels to me like how the ancient redditors said reddit worked.

Some servers come closer to reddit like world which copied all the popular subs.

Others are definitely smaller communities, maybe a post or two a day and plenty of discussion.

I feel great about it all so far.

Been on Lemmy a few months now and it feels like moving from shitty Digg to fresh Reddit. I had canceled my account on Reddit even before the last enshitification, and kept just reading. Lemmy feels good enough to participate in posting and commenting. Small is good.

Less niche topics, but higher quality content

This biggest thing that helped me was putting the app icon in the same spot on my phone as my old reddit app

No. Reddit has a userbase that allows it to be all things to everyone.

Lemmy has a userbase that allows it to be a pretty good linux disscussion forum.

Once you venture away from technology, its crickets. There’s a community here specifically for the Cleveland Guardians. It’s dead quiet. The Guardians are even in the ALDS right now…granted they’re down 0-2 in the best of 7 series…but the ONLY post since they started the playoffs, is me asking why the community was so dead. That topic has 0 replies despite being posted days ago. On reddit, I wouldn’t have even needed to make that post, because there would be topics on almost every minute thing the Guardians have done right, and wrong, since the playoffs began.

And then I’d get heckled for saying that Ketchup is the hot dog derby champion. Now and forever! But on here? Nothin…

It reminds me a lot of Reddit in the first few years.

I initially joined Reddit because Aaron Swartz’s involvement convinced me it wasn’t going to go the route of other corporate social platforms, but I think Swartz would have been far more at home on Lemmy.

Yeah on Reddit at this point it feels to me by bots for bots. Maybe the bots here are just better but it feels more human.

In terms of design, I find Lemmy to be basically a 1:1 replacement for Reddit. It’s a link aggregator with communities, comments, and voting.

I like it a lot, even though the communities are smaller and there’s less content. It’s just a nicer communal experience for me compared to Reddit. I feel more pressure to actually comment since the communities are smaller and every little bit helps, lol.

I switched from Reddit to Lemmy cold turkey, not willing to put up with that user hostile enshitification shiticane reddit was going through. There are a few communities that I really miss (/r/weightroom) but new Lemmy things (/c/tenforward) that give me joy. The Internet is getting pretty shitty but Lemmy is a great small corner of it that’s resistant to much of that fuckery

As others have said, as a “front page” with voting and real people in the comments, I like it. It’s like hanging out at the one locals’ coffee shop in a small hippie college town somewhere. You don’t get to talk about everything you might like, and there’s a definite vibe, but the people are generally polite, informed, and surprisingly cosmopolitan. That’s where Lemmy really shines in relation to reddit, the quality and accessibility of conversation on general interest and shitpost threads. Even assuming they’re not overrun with bots, and they likely are, the biggest subreddits are just noise and fake internet points, or at best a passing conversation with a stranger on a bus.

I still go to reddit for (American) football and mechanical keyboards, but for the former I don’t even bother participating, because we’ve got a fun handful of folks here (to extend the coffee shop analogy, imagine a table in the back with a few professors who fondly remember going to a big football school 20 years ago). For the latter I can get the occasional fix here, and I seek that out, but I like seeing the pretty aluminum rectangles and sharing the little bit I’ve learned with newbies. To the extent there’s still a baby splashing around in the bathwater, I’d prefer not to throw it out, but I’m clear-eyed about reddit’s trajectory, and “home” is here.

Depends on what you are looking for. I think Lemmy works great and I only really go to reddit when a google search leads me there for something. Though I do miss the niche communities and the “there is a subreddit for everything”.

Lemmy is also healthier, I used to just scroll through reddit for literal hours, it’s possible to reach an end of sort for the time.

On r/, i only really followed my interests - cats, cannabis, crochet, etc. Those topics getting less action here forced me to follow more communities. It surprised me how much i enjoy the general ask, news, eli5, til, art communities that i never would have followed when i had more niche content.