As others have said, it doesn't quite have the user base to reach critical mass. A lot of my old favorite subs aren't here.
Also...the user base isn't as diverse. I used to click through to see the comments on Reddit to find those comments that provided fresh perspective, gave more context, or explained nuance. You'd click on some thread about Trump's latest legal troubles and get some real information about why things are moving slowly or why the defense made a particular choice. Or go into a thread about some upcoming video game being cancelled, or Google plan being changed or whatever, and get an actual analysis about how the financials don't work, or maybe how the market changed, or how some users were abusing the system.
On Lemmy, I often find myself just skipping the comments. They seem much more uniform, all just repeating the popular line: variants of "Ha, fuck Trump!" "Lol, Russia sucks!" "Company X doing this should be against the law!" etc. I can usually predict what the comments are going to be without bothering to read them, and rarely do I come out with new information. It feels much more like an echo chamber.
Part of it is just that there's not as many users, I think, so there's just not as many posts and thus fewer 'gems'. Also, I think that the users who made the effort to migrate from Reddit probably skew younger, tend to be more uniformly left-leaning, and a larger share will be students or programmers as opposed to lawyers or carpenters or auto mechanics.
The especially annoying thing is that the same thing seems to have happened on Reddit. Yeah, I still moonlight there when I run out of content on Lemmy. And the number of comments seems to have dwindled, and the viewpoint diversity seems to have narrowed there, too. Maybe the normies just gave up and left.
This might sound weird but there are a lot more assholes here than reddit.
On Reddit you can expect some percentage of the people to be assholes because some percentage of the population are assholes... but here, heaven forbid you go against the grain of the narrative.
As opposed to reddit, where most of the people are nice and some are assholes, here only some are nice and the majority are assholes.
For now, I find it kind of boring. On reddit, I used to spend more time in comment sections than regularly scrolling. Now I don't really do that, because there are either no comments or the comments are the same.
When I started using lemmy with the default sorting option ('active' i think?), I would see the same posts for days, now I use top 6 hours and that problem is fixed, but lemmy now feels like a news site with comments. Also I am European, but it feels like 50% of content is some local American politics. I don't care about my own town's politics, so I don't care about that guy from Minnesota either.
A post from asklemmy hasn't shown up in my feed in a long time and I kind of forgot it existed, but looking into it, looks like one of the only interesting places here, so I guess, I have visit it more often.
Linux/FOSS Bros are ruining it for me more and more every day.
Not even with my comments, but others. I'm so sick of seeing basic comments extremely downvoted because "ThaTs NoT OpeN sOurCe".
Like a post a was reading a few minutes ago about Microsoft Paint being updated, and someone said it was Windows 11 exclusive, and the other guy said Windows 11 isn't half bad. The comment is super downvoted, because Linux best, Windoze BAD!
You're going to drive away people who just want to have a conversation if you guys don't learn how to be normal, holy shit. I'm a tech bro and you're driving ME away.
It's a solid meh.
I came for a reddit replacement and instead I found an interesting subset of what I got at Reddit. And it is not better content or engagement wise. It's useful but niche, and therefore less useful overall than Reddit was.
I wish some of the niche communities were more active but overall I like it very much. It's my go to diversion.
It's organic, and full of Internet weirdos, feels like reddit of decades ago, except everyone kinda knows each other here.
Sometimes the reddit circlejerks do flare up though.
Meh. Its slow, and the politics are more extreme. I've spent a good portion filtering most politics that I can out of my feed.
It's alright here. There's enough to keep me off reddit and not enough to keep me on my phone constantly.
I LOVE the idea of Lemmy and the decentralized web and people coming together to forge our own way. But there's a far too high ratio of elitism, smugness, arrogance and belittlement to people that just want to discuss the things we enjoy. It is just really unfortunate. I don't engage very much, or at all really so I understand part of that is on me, but every discussion I find I'd like to chime in on is already polluted by assholes. It's just disheartening.
I like Lemmy, but I do have some problems with it. Based on my experience.
All the big Lemmy instances is biased for the Left wing, like Reddit is.
If you go against the popular opinion. You will get dogpiled. To be fair, this happens everywhere. But I was hoping Lemmy will be different. So it's mainly on me for hoping.
The niche communities are dead or dying. This a population problem, but it still sucks.
They need to give us (the users) the ability to block instances.
Outside that stuff, I like Lemmy.
i wish there were more people on here, i feel like i'm talking to a wall
i'm pretty sure i'm basically the only poster on r/hongkong and i'm not even a mod there (which would be a valid reason for being the only poster)
Buggy and full of loud ignorant assholes. So pretty in-brand with my decades of experience online.
Good aside from all the repetitive content. One of the problems with federation, I suppose. Someone sees an article they like and they feel they have to post it on every community related to politics on every instance they can find, for example. Mostly a politics problem, but also memes and gaming and technology. Okay, not mostly a politics problem.
It’s alright. Doesn’t replace what I got from Reddit but I also use it less and it’s only form of social media so that’s a plus.
The political environment is rough. Lemmygrad and hexbear are toxic cesspools, which is unfortunate because I would genuinely like to engage with their political ideology more seriously but it’s inevitably drowned out by… well… them.
I’ve blocked most of the top posters over there and things are much more peaceful, if quiet.
There’s still a lack of content creators out there, which is an issue. Growth is going to be a problem because, to be blunt? Lemmy is dogshit before you block all the spam, political shitposting, and those fucking Reddit repost bots.
Until the new user experience is cleaned up I don’t expect Lemmy to gain users on average. I’ll probably spin up my own instance in AWS at some point to play with it, or self host on some inexpensive hardware.
Tl;Dr: I get what I want from it but don’t see it having healthy long term growth
The people here are my people. However, Lemmy needs a bigger user base, and at the same time I fear that Eternal September
I feel like Lemmy is on its way and its main benefit is that it's not as cynical as Reddit to EACH OTHER.
So many people on reddit gripe about the smallest shit, especially the Steam Deck reddit, that conversations become either you're with my ideas or you're against my ideas. Like even though you're just trying to help others play a game, "I'm insulting you for free because of the way you said lowest fps is 33 with drops down to 29. I don't think it means what you think it means." (of course shoving a meme in there because that's their identity at this point)
I clearly meant average, but oh here comes -20 comment score when I explain that.
I see nicer comment chains from people on opposing political sides here even though I know a usual reaction these days would be to tear at each others' throats. Lemmy isn't devoid of it, but Jesus at least it isn't like how Reddit predictably uses a scalpel on your comments to find something to complain about.
But I think this might be the result of tailoring my experience over time with instances I want to see from and communities. That level of customization is awesome. But it does suck to see so many instance drama things happening in a much more rapid pace than reddit.
Great for daily mindless scrolling.
Still has a ways to go before it's as useful as reddit was for searching for specific information tho.not nearly enough niche content like reddit because of the sheer lack of users, but browsing all is ok. except the content on all is lacking too its usually a linux post, an old meme, or biden in some capacity.
ahem and the porn sucks
i can only use the reddit app for like 5 minute intervals so u can extrapolate what i use it for
I like it. No FREAKING ADS disguised as posts/comments. I was late to know third party apps exists for lots of things, so being aware of lemmy has changed my browsing habits on other platforms i.e looking for alternatives that work or have a model that I don’t feel too conflicted about (which honestly makes me happier). It’s the right amount of silent and busy for me. I’m just hoping for elephant-obsessed people (among other niche communities) to exist/gain a medium level of traction (frankly, even a basic amount would be okay). I also like that its name sounds like LET ME/ LEMME (lemme do what anything I want as long as it doesn’t harm the next person).
It needs more memes and less edgy teenagers screaming about politics (that they clearly don't understand and take way too seriously).
Seriously I come to websites like this to get a mix of news and humour, not get yelled at by children who advocate for totalitarian regimes to "own the libs", I am on the verge of changing instances because lemm.ee won't let me block all of the two offenders at once, and I have to constantly remove every bullshit new sub they create, not to mention them infesting the comments section of anything news related to scream about "libs".
Literally they are indistinguishable from reddits T_D crowd, they act just as hateful and use the same language, they seem more concerned with "the libs" than any other political group, and they worship mass murdering dictators while being holocaust deniers / apologists. They can call themselves leftists as much as they want, all I see from them is hatred so they might as well be Trump Qanon Cultists.
Cool. I just really wish there was more people on !amateursatellites@lemmy.world . Currently there's just one more person it seems.
I like it, it's just missing some niche communities.
But overall, I get more response in "populated" communities compared to popular subreddits which is neat.
Overall I like Lemmy, but there's also a lot of doomers on here that do everything they can to make everyone feel miserable. I had to trim out a lot of communities that they tend to infest, so now I'm not getting as much interaction and have moved some of my traffic back to Reddit to have enough things to browse
Hell yeah! I feel like a chill new pub opened up in my neighborhood. I found a new place where I belong
With sync, it was a pretty easy transition from reddit to here, though there are obviously differences in size and functionality. Overall, though, l'm happy to report that I can doomscroll and be just as miserable here as I could on reddit.
It's no Reddit.... And thank goodness!
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I like it a lot, enough to stay through the tumult of figuring out issues like CSAM, spam, federation inconsistencies, and an inability to block instances at a user level. It’s small and doesn’t have many active niche communities, but Reddit had the same issue in the beginning. Honestly I like the small size of Lemmy, there’s enough content to keep me interested but isn’t so crowded that it feels like I’m shouting into the void.
It’s not bad and has improved rapidly. It still needs a lot of growth. It has most of the main topics covered like news and politics, but what’s really missing are all the niche interests. Reddit still has all the small topics. It’s going to take time to build that here. Although federation is cool, it doesn’t help that an interest might be split across several communities. For instance, there are several steam deck communities. It makes it hard to build the user base large enough to get good, consistent content.
I like the format but I'm having a hard time finding the time to curate my own feed so I can see something other than the same rephrased headlines for a mile of scrolling.
I love it.
I have accounts on a dozen or so instances, though I'm only really active on maybe half of them. That gives me a fair amount of variety (every instance is different, depending on who they're federated with and what communities the users have subscribed to), and makes it so that if one of them is having issues, all that means is that I won't be using that particular account.
The relative lack of users doesn't bother me in the long run - yeah, it's sort of unfortunate that there aren't enough people to maintain really narrow communities, but I much prefer a thread here, on which there might be only three responses but they're all trying to actually communicate ideas, as opposed to a thread on Reddit, where there's 100 responses and 99 of them are just regurgitating memes.
Really, my biggest problem with the threadiverse is all of the people who want to make it into something it's not - who want to centralize and streamline and homogenize it so it'll have more appeal to easily-confused, meme-regurgitating idiots. I like it pretty much the way it is (with minor improvements around the edges of course), and would much rather that it be left to just slowly and surely draw in people who actually appreciate it for what it is.
It's a better setup being free of corporate ownership, and it's slowly growing, but I wish we could get the word out somehow.
I'm really loving it.
It's good so-far, & I hope it continues to grow & improve. I've seen some communities partially shift to Lemmy, which is good, & I hope more of them come over. There are/were some thriving niche communities on Reddit which might be better served on an open platform like Lemmy. We already have c/vexillology for instance, but it's still relatively small & inactive compared to the old r/vexillology. I've got some stuff I've been working on myself which I hope to help contribute to this project.
I like it. Left reddit a while ago and this fills that spot.
Same shit different platform. Dumb that people keep bringing up Reddit though. I don't have an app though so I still use Reddit on my phone. Sometimes porn.
I enjoy all of Mötorhead, not just Mr. Killmister.
Oh wait, that's not the Lemmy you ment.
It lacks the critical mass of users needed to make even moderately niche communities feasible; basic examples are: City communities, State communities, communities based on car make/model - these are types of communities that Reddits excels at having and it's because of the size of the user base. The only point I'm making with this is that Lemmy is a very long way off from being a viable replacement for Reddit.
Next big problem is: Lemmy has a HORRIBLE new user experience...which I'm sure is significantly responsible for slowing Lemmy adoption. Single biggest issue is content discovery (which is just-ok if you got lucky and joined a super-massive Lemmy instance when you first joined, all the way to an atrocity if you got unlucky and joined a small instance when you first joined.
There's also a lot of complicated activities needed just to be a functional Lemmy user: like regularly backing up your user/instance preferences (including subscriptions) and replicating those preferences into another account/instance in case something happens to your current account/instance or your instance becomes temporarily or permanently inaccessible. This is asking too much of your common non-technical user, but it's still currently necessary just because of how often instances have problems. Think about all the user accounts on all the .ml instances that had to be re-created from scratch because there's no built-in way for users to do it. Users should be able to sync their user accounts similarly to how instances sync their content with each other.
For the record, the first instance I created an account on (when I was a brand new Lemmy user months ago) was a very small instance (but recommended on the very first page of the official join-lemmy.org site), and there just wasn't functional content discovery at all on that instance. It was a barren wasteland. The fact that servers aren't even aware of what content is out there on federated systems until some user on that system already happens to know about the content/community and subscribe to it is setting a lot of new users up for failure. Once I realized that it sucks being on a small instances, the second account I created was on Lemmy.world, but that instance suffers from it's popularity and is the frequent target of DDOS and was going down for me several hours a day. So, there's also a penalty for joining a big instance. I ultimately had to create numerous accounts on numerous instances and then try to keep the user preferences in sync across multiple accounts on multiple instances so that I can easily swap to a different account when an instance had problems.
Elitist user base: I swear, some lemmy users are worse than the old BSD forums and worse than stack exchange when it comes to taking criticism about the platform. Guaranteed, this comment will get downvoted, and I'll be mansplained about how content discovery is facilitated through having to have foreknowledge about some 3rd party websites that keep track of communities (which don't always work because not all instances can be indexed yet do to a laundry list of other problems), and what an idiot I am for not knowing this, etc, etc.
Having to go to this length just to use a reddit alternative - that's unacceptable to most non-technical users. Lemmy doesn't stand a chance of gaining momentum until these issues are solved.
I think it's good for broad, serious/informative discussion but lacking for more niche or casual stuff. Niche is just because there's not enough users. Casual is probably partially that, but also because Lemmy just attracts a more serious crowd. Even the general gaming communities disproportionately trend towards serious discussion of industry problems. And a Lemmy that's better for casual stuff is probably worse for serious stuff.
Its decent for me. As others have said it's still got a long way to go but it works for what I use it for. I'll likely be sticking around here unless something better pops up or lemmy goes the way of the dinosaurs.
I love it.
It replaces most of my Reddit time. I still find myself going to some subreddits that have activities wince several here that are more niche have zero activity.
The UI is nice, although seeing duplicate posts can be annoying. Pagination could use some improvement. When browsing by new, new items posted seem to push the list so you could see the same items over and over it enough new items are posted. Adding some kind of timestamp and better list filtering could improve the experience.
The people here tend to be nice. Conversations have been mostly pleasant.
Overall, I have enjoyed it.
I still see and experience blind down voting and people missing each other's points, but much less than on Reddit. Overall I'm more aligned with the viewpoints shared here, especially because the vibe on the other site has really changed a lot after over 10 years.
I definitely use lemmy a lot less for mindless scrolling, due to the lack of content, which is great to be honest.
I spend more time researching stuff through articles, forums, YouTube, and yes, also the other site still when it's through specific Google searches.
I still see way more US centric content than I'd like but there's definitely a good European presence, and it's also on me because I'm still browsing basically the whole unfiltered feed at this point.
It's okay. I'm certainly not going back to reddit, but Lemmy has its own share of problems. I feel we need better protections with defederating and banning. It is far too easy to get stuck on a dead-end server or have some aspect of Lemmy irrevocably ruined due to minor political squabbles between servers. We are still far too centralized, and lemmy.world/lemmy.ml/beehaw.org/etc control a lot of the Lemmy experience with their defederation posture.
Just today, a community had to do an impromptu shut-down because the lemmy.world admin decided to permaban the main mod for trivial/subjective/biased reasons (read the comments).
One of the larger instances recently defederated another smaller instance and now Lemmy is effectively ruined for those users. It's already annoying enough for normies to sign up for Lemmy and get the hang of it, and now they need to be worried about switching instances every 2 months when some admin decides to effectively wipe out a smaller server because of something out of the users' control. The smaller instance in question had NSFW communities that the larger instance got annoyed by, so the larger instance decided to defederate every community and user from that smaller instance.
I feel we need some sort of infrastructure to limit the effect of these types of things on different parts of Lemmy (users/communities/instances). Users shouldn't be lumped in with communities when defederating (at least not by default). Having an escape plan for communities also seems like it's very important. What if lemmy.world announced it was shutting down tomorrow? All those communities will be gone in the blink of an eye. Maybe we should be able to export communities to other servers somehow, so we can be more decentralized against failures of specific servers and admins.
Even a single community being inaccessible to a certain user can really destroy their experience - the problem isn't fully solved by breaking up "mega-servers" like lemmy.world. What if I couldn't access the main Linux community anymore? Guess I'm fucked? Make a new account somewhere else? Is that really the best solution we can come up with?
good but mapping communities lacking alot
I like
Same for Kbin
I kinda like it, it's a bit lonely here though. Lot of improvement needed still.
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Lemmy has its own cuddly places
To add something that I haven't yet seen mentioned (didn't read the whole thing), porn. It hasn't taken off like it did on reddit, and I do miss that. I don't want my feed covered in porn, but I would like to have quality porn properly covered in an adult instance. Pornlemmy and lemmynsfw just doesn't cut it.
Im on infinity, and I don't love that there's little to no support for popup gifs and videos on the feed, I mostly have to go into a post whose title may catch my attention then wait for something to load (or not to load, redgifs has been incredibly hit or miss for me as of late, lots of forbidden requests and failed playbacks due to it). Idk, it's not the experience or the content that you'd expect on reddit using any reddit 3rd party app.
Other than that particular thing, it's been getting very us-centric, with political memes or stuff that only us people would care about. I might have to try other instances.
Other than that, I appreciate Lemmy, it made me mostly drop reddit except for Google searches, and I feel comfortable interacting with people here.
It's good enough to be part of my username.
Definitely room for improvement but has that old reddit feel, I like it!
he was a great musician🤘
I still use reddit for my city subreddit and some niche things but overall it's decent. We've come far from Facebook haven't we?
I think about it daily.
I'm enjoying it. It has a "not yet critical mass" feel to it. There are a few features I'd like to see (Hide Thread, something like RES, etc) and there could be more traffic, but I genuinely don't miss Reddit.
I'm liking it. The one thing I think is missing is it is sorta difficult to get critical mass for a community. It would be nice if we could have "meta" communities which just combine every instances community with the same name. It would likely be very problematic moderation wise but it would help get critical mass in a lot of places.
It seems just somewhat useful for tech news and discussion. For everything else I still use Reddit.
I like it a lot and it's still early days.
Will done Devs.
Can't wait for the rest of the Reddit subs to come over.
I like it so far. I wish niche communities were more active in comments (I see plenty of upvotes). Beyond that I'd love to see less copy posts but I guess it hard to pick who wins unless it's just some first come first serve for "front page?"
I like it a lot. I check it every day, several times a day
I like it. I'm glad most of the chaff that cluttered up Reddit stayed on Reddit.
Nice though it has already gone off to political fringes to the point I avoid the comments for many news and political postings
I wish there was a little more content, particularly engagement in the sports communities, but it seems to be filled with actual people rather than agenda driven bots like the last site so I remain hopeful
I just joined yesterday after repeatedly getting permabanned from Reddit for reporting pedos, and I think I like it here. Compared to the amount of content on Reddit it's quite anemic here but that's to be expected given how long the platforms have been online, respectively.
I know this sounds nuts but something that may be helpful is adding in a "firehose" community that's connected across the boards, with anonymous posting (chat and links), like notabug.io had on their front page. This might be inviting to new users and ppl just wanting to get their feet wet here. Idk it's just a thought. And to prevent it being annoying, make it not show up in "all" or "local" feeds. Some ppl (myself included) enjoy posting alot bc its relaxing and fun but there's not always a good place for that.
