No Stupid Questions

Not for science fiction literature, guitar pedals, and synthesizers which was primarily what I went to Reddit for in the first place. There was some effort to get those communities going here back during the mass migration here from Reddit, but they've never really thrived. It sucks, but I'm not going back. I take a peek at r/synthesizers on occasion, and really it's just a gaggle of self-promoting synthtubers and umpteen iterations of "what should I buy?".

Lemmy communities have the potential to be just as toxic.

That said, the broad majority of interactions I have are very positive.

It really depends on the community choice. I tend to choose Lemmy communities rather than "reddit refuge" communities.

I imagine that plays a big part in my personal experience.

Current reddit is not like "reddit" anymore for a while... nothing is forever

Effective? No. Considering the purpose of all internet communities is to grow and have diversity, it's not effective. Aside from the currently low number of users, the fact that you can have the same community in different instances means a community will never grow large enough. Add to that the "you're literally killing children if you're a centrist" people and all the tankies, and what you have here is a leftist circlejerk that will remain small and irelevant enough to suit its need to be an echo chamber without any actual diversity. So maybe it's effective from that point of view? Idk.

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.

it's perfectly fine but there's not enough users

14 year Reddit person and leaving was for the best. After the initial "what am I doing", it branched to me checking out Mastodon, then pixelfed, and then Fediverse is awesome. My only real beef is the sports situation is not it. Outside of that I haven't used reddit for a year and don't miss it honestly.

As much as I'd like it to be, it doesn't have the network effect/popularity that Reddit does. It covers maybe 70-80% of my Digg+ needs, but there are many topics/subs I want that Lemmy just doesn't have.

"Be the change you want to see" is always there: if a topic/sub doesn't exist, you can always create it yourself. But no good deed goes unpunished, so you're now the owner/moderator...

A large part of what's hindering Lemmy is search engine visibility, the "append reddit to your query" trend is really helping Reddit while it can sometimes be somewhat difficult to find content on Lemmy or the fediverde more broadly

for me, yeah. Honestly much better

Lemmy is free and libre, but I sorely miss my world news and Ukraine updates.

Not yet but i hope soon. I started to like lemmy

The only reason I use it is because Reddit killed the mobile app I was using. Lemmy is less useful to me by every metric, and I still use Reddit when searching for stuff on desktop, never Lemmy.

I think Lemmy has steadily been getting better. For having a good conversation, I think this is the best platform, everyone here seems like actual people I would run into irl.

What I think is still lacking is a way to search up anecdotal evidence on something, that I still heavily rely on reddit for. For instance if I type in google "french press coffee brew time" the only valuable results with the in-depth info I'm looking for are usually youtube videos, which are too long, or reddit threads. So I usually just end up adding site:reddit.com for all those type of search results.

But lemmy is getting good. I could see it replacing some info sources for the more tech-y niches I follow in the near future

Well ever since reddit died it's the best thing around.

The userbase is too small for now. But I hope more people start coming over from Steve Huffman's hellhole.

Yes. It’s different, but good.

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

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.

I'm honestly more afraid to offer an opinion or ask a question on Lemmy because there's always some high and mighty jackass that thinks they are the final authority on whatever topic and rather than have a discussion, people seem to just resort to name calling.

At least, that has been my experience.

Otherwise I've enjoyed it. It can be a cool place once you figure out how to block the malcontents.

I used to think it was better than reddit, but I hate to say it, I've started to notice facebook meme communities jump onboard. Science memes is amazing and isn't affected (it seems to be all unique posts I'd never seen), but once those facebook repost meme communities jump onboard, you're going to end up with all the people that makes facebook rubbish too unfortunately.

I've already seen an increase in dumb car meme posts which get reposted 3000x on Facebook (which brings along the same toxic anti-science people). We're already seeing an increase in people who don't seem to have much common sense

I want a community which is science and fact oriented, and I'm growing increasingly concerned that as we grow, we're moving away from that.

But for now, its still awesome in comparison imho (last I looked, many reddit communities were overrun by nutjobs after the mods all left)

It has been growing, but it depends on the community the people who are submitting posts of each community. It also depends on the engagement of the discussion and whether participation decays or is allowed to decay into toxicity.

I think Lemmy could be doing a lot more than Reddit, like showing who votes what, but people want the ability without the responsibility or transparency. It's ironic because not only is it perfectly visible to the admins, but there are ways you can get a pretty good idea of who's performing them as a normal . It would help not just in the sense of getting a better idea of why or where someone is coming from and prevent false suspicions, but it would also allow you to keep different groups of users whose recommendations might be something you would like to prioritize over other submissions or whose moderation you'd like to favor over the standard. Abusing the transparency would be easy to denounce and moderate, too.

In regards to the modlog, I don't think it's doing enough, the text in the reason field might as well be "word" and the transparency isn't compensating for the lack of a resolution process that many if not all social networks seem to want to skip. There are still things like no notification of mod actions that affected your comments or your user, and some decisions, like allowing mods to ban you, remove some of your comments while allowing others to remain, shaping or serving a narrative without giving you the ability to delete or edit your contributions while the ban is in place, give foreign instances and communities more power than they should have.

There's no way to contest modlog actions within the modlog, and the maturity of the people has been proven to be very, very questionable when they've been outed. It has also adopted reddit's policy of obfuscating the moderator performing an action even though creating an alt is easier than ever and many of them already have them, which works against the supposed commitment to transparency.

But it's very slightly better than reddit's, and there's nothing like shadow bans here. Parting observations, don't feed your carnivore pet vegetables if you aren't prepared to go all the way to seek and get an approved diet and dietary supplements for a bonafide veterinary, and it's funny seeing all the anarchy people not have a problem with the present power imbalance between the users and the leadership within the current system, but then again, they have a nice instance with the label.

Overall, fuck spez.

I've had no need to return to Reddit at all.

Using mbin at fedia.io,

I have access to Lemmy (Reddit-like) and Mastodon (Twitter-like)

I grew very tired of Reddit's Bot-Spam and AI-bot drivel, over 50% of the shit you see/read on Reddit is copy-pasta old shit or completely fabricated.

What do we mean by effective?

One might say that the effectiveness of reddit is its niche communities that allow each and every user to find somewhere they feel like they belong. Not only this, the complexity of niches gives rise to interesting information that bubbles to the surface and front page of the platform where more users have exposure. One might contribute this to the quantity of users on reddit's platform, and also the discoverability of the platform itself.

Personally, I think Lemmy is decently effective now aside from the saturation in political and tech news and memes. I think things will get better as for-profit companies squeeze more and more people out of their platforms, and people look to alternatives rather than dropping their digital consumption habits.

I do think discoverability is still a downfall of Lemmy, from both internal and external views. I want to better find /communities from inside the platform and via a search engine should my use and value of Lemmy increase. Wonder how development has gone on this front.

Ultimately, the FOSS nature of Lemmy is one of its greatest strengths. It can improve over time, ripping features from the big players without the destiny of being killed eventually if not profitable. I think this characteristic alone gives rise to the potential of Lemmy to be very effective over time.