cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1276669
Like a lot of others, I’ve been looking at Reddit alternatives recently which is what landed me here at Lemmy.
How do you think Lemmy compares to Reddit? But also, for people who have tried other Reddit alternatives than Lemmy, how do they compare? What has been the pros and cons of each community for you?
Lemmy is the closest thing yet for sure.
The main pros: decentralized*, productive conversations, no karma, open source.
The main con is that “decentralized” is a good idea, but it only works if practiced. Most people have jumped onto lemmy.world instead of spreading out. Minor cons include a lack of decent video embedding, missing some niche communities, and small bugs.
Overall I’ve rediscovered a lot of the internet that I had simply stopped checking because reddit took over my digital life. I read HackerNews again, the NYT, and a lot more. It’s nice.
Most people have jumped onto lemmy.world instead of spreading out.
The main reason I chose lemmy.world is because I wanted to set up a community and my account on an instance that seemed less likely to disappear. I suspect that’s the reason for many others as well, though it might end up being a false hope. Who knows…
I agree completely and I’m in the same boat. Hopefully “community migration” becomes possible where you can ship all your posts to a new instance if necessary.
I jumped onto BeeHaw when I first left Reddit, but found I couldn’t connect to some communities. It turns out that BeeHaw defederated from some Lemmy instances (like Lemmy.world) because they have more open registration. So I left BeeHaw and came to Lemmy.world.
Does this mean that I might need to occasionally interact with someone who doesn’t share similar views as me? Yes, but it also means I’m more free to join different communities that I wanted to join.
For me I started on lemmy.ml because that is where you get kinda herded to when you come initially. I don’t know if it’s still clunky, but when I was on there it was slow. Tried lemmy.world a couple days later and it was smooth as butter. My goal was the smoothest experience after the initial impression I got from lemmy.ml I was worried. But lemmy.world was way better. Been here for a month, lemmy.world went through a few server upgrades and the reddit hug of death on the first, but either they handled it pretty quick or I have become patient with it as I learned how the fediverse works.
Today is my first day on lemmy.world. I was on VLemmy but it vanished without a trace yesterday. So I picked the largest instance I could to avoid having to recreate my feed list a third time.
I deleted my 10+ year reddit account right after spez’ AMA. I find lemmy quite serviceable as a replacement except I was missing my local subreddit. So I stood up an instance I’ll try to build up. But now I need to tell people about it so I had to create a new reddit account and post links on my local subreddit.
I like Lemmy more than I thought I would but it’s really rough in areas that Reddit’s polished more and it also is, well, pretty quiet. It’s a little hard to really dive into it when so much is clearly missing on even just the people not being there. I certainly miss a lot of subs I’d spend more time on, subs that have miles more subscribers than people who even use Lemmy as a whole. I’m hoping that more people jump over to here but it’s definitely not the same because there is still a void left unfilled. But I’ll live, it certainly reduces how much time I use social media overall since I never was a Twitter user.
For those reasons it reminds me what coming to Reddit in the first place was like. It’s really fun to build up a community. It’s hard to see compared to what Reddit is now, and the polish you speak of that to me while there are some conveniences or extra features has overall messed up what I liked about it. Lemmy or some other system may or may not ever be as popular as Reddit, but it’s way more engaging to be part of a growing community than an oversaturated one IMO. You get to help define what the place will be like to a much greater extent.
I came to lemmy/kbin a few weeks ago to check things out, and have been here ever since.
Quora - It’s just AskReddit, 24/7. Kinda gets boring after a while if your sole purpose is answering questions all day.
SaidIt - AltRight Central, taken over by the crazy lot to project their zany conspiracist views.
Voat - Dead, but once used to have been harbored by said conspiracists of altright.
Lemmy - Has a lot of potential, still developing.
Squabbles.io has some traffic
I signed up for most of the biggest alternatives and this is the only one I’m nearing 1k comments on so that tells you something.
“All” as in a lot of them? There’s not many as far as I know unless you’re counting mobile apps for Lemmy. There’s a good range of Lemmy mobile apps already and more coming. But then it’s just different ways of accessing the same content.
If you’re talking about kbin versus Lemmy, I think Lemmy is more feature rich, but kbin has a nicer looking layout. Even so they’re both Fediverse platforms so again it’s just different ways of accessing the same content.
In any case the number of users here on Lemmy/kbin is a tiny fraction of Reddit. They have like half a billion monthly active where Lemmy/kbin has maybe 100k. Though the content is as much better as the difference in user numbers. It’s mostly noise on Reddit like low effort memes, shitposts, astroturfing, bot spam. We don’t have that here…yet. Don’t know how long it will stay that way, but I’ll take it long as I can get it.
I self host a lemmy instance and old.reddit style frontend: https://mlmym.srcfiles.zip/
I may have found a new home
That looks really cool!
Never stopped using that UI. It’s clean, it’s functional, it’s responsive, etc.
For the life of me, I have no idea why people changed. I understand if you never saw it, but to have used it and still decided to migrate, that’s beyond me.
no doubt. I remember folks complaining about the he gets us ads and I never saw one with old reddit and no script and an ad blocker. not sure which was keeping it out.
Found out about it searching for Reddit alternatives. I’m liking it so far!
Lemmy.
KbinRaddle/squabbles
Anything else.
That’s pretty much it that’s a direct reddit replacement and is worth using at present.
Saidit is deadit because they got taken over by nutters.
Raddle seems to be edging the same direction, where it’s all political asswipes dominating everything.
Squabbles is so far doing a good job at not being dominated by any given group, and is often enough going to mimic reddit’s “feel”. But it’s also not as well developed yet.
But lemmy is where it’s at in terms of people. Things are varied enough that no single group is dominating everything. There’s enough people from all walks of life to get good info if you’re patient. The app ecosystem is booming. It’s decentralized to an extent. I think it’s going to be the dominant platform for reddit style forum/aggregation. It’ll certainly be the dominant non corporate one for a while at least. Maybe a decade or more before corps try and dig their hands in and make headway.
I think kbin and lemmy have been my favorites so far. I’ve been using kbin more simply because of the interface, and the microblogging features.
Tildes is a close second, where its more about discussion rather than memes. The user culture there is very respectful, so it’s my preferred place for nuanced discussion.
I’ve only peeked in Raddle a little. It’s basically if beehaw was it’s own site, but even more so overtly Anarchist. It’s like reddit design wise, it feels like they tried to cloan reddit to a tea, but forgot some of the qol feature, in a way it’s basically leftist voat.
I’m using Kbin familiarity
