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Is Lemmy an effective alternative to Reddit?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
259 points (95.4% liked)
No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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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:
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
Communities to block
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/
Why are you actively against lemmy.world?
On Reddit you list several alternative instances, and you somehow left us out.
LW is already the largest community by far, to a point where geographically distant communities cannot stay synchronized
That is a software problem, I thought you guys were all computer experts.
If world wasn't so big, it would have probably not even been noticed, now it is hopefully getting fixed with the next update, if I understood that right.
Federation works waaay better than when the big reddit influx happened, that was kinda disappointing and I'm glad Lemmy will be prepared better for the next wave.
It's also a governance problem as well.
If a billionaire buys LW tomorrow for a few millions because they host most of the Lemmy active communities and users, and prevent instance migration overnight, how many users are going to go through the hassle of creating new accounts from scratch, create new communities? That could kill the platform, with the LW starting to show ads and only being compatible with an enshitiffied app, so most users would probably go back to Reddit.
Also, there has been some concerning behaviour from LW mods, which know they can just go with it as people are already on their communities and are not going to move: https://lemmy.world/post/20947890?scrollToComments=true
Fair. I don't agree with most of your points, but you make a good argument.
I still think we over prioritize decentralization. Federation is important, but's not a primary feature to be sold to users. It's not because we need a thousand instances. It's so that if Gmail gets too enshittified that we have another email option.
World is where the activity is, and you do a reasonable job of balancing that.
It depends.
!movies@lemm.ee is more active than !movies@lemmy.world in monthly active users.
Same for !showsandmovies@lemm.ee and !television@lemmy.world, which also doesn't have any moderator besides bot accounts.
You are doing a good job there, also with advertising the community, but I'll say again that the world community looks more healthy to me, it's a variety of different users posting there, while the ee one consists half of emperors and your effort to try and force this, actually it is only three topics that have been created by non moderators on the first page.