As a ‘front page of the internet’ it has been a pretty great replacement for me as it’s where I go each day to just see what’s going on. However, due to the smaller size you do lose a lot of the activity in more niche communities and the sheer volume of posts/comments compared to Reddit. That’s the biggest downside. Still, you also lose the incessant ads/bad UI/UX decisions and ever accelerating late stage capitalism driven enshittification so that’s a big plus.

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/

Yeah, but no, but yeah.

On Lemmy, individual communities aren’t big enough to be communities but the community is big enough to be a community.

So any post that makes it to the front of the entire Fediverse has quite a few familiar faces and feels like old reddit would.

The issue I find with wanting Lemmy to be as big as Reddit is, you’re pining for an era of Reddit that doesn’t exist anymore. You can’t go back to 2011-2020 Reddit. It isn’t there to go back to. Bot posts aren’t just indistinguishable on occasion, they’re upvoted all the same, by other bots.

This is the best you’ve got. Pitch a tent and make the most of it, fam.

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.

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…

Platform-wise, it’s already proven that it’s a viable alternative (with some advantages even - the federated nature for one), but content-wise, it has A LOT to catch up (because let’s be honest - in addition to all the bullshit and toxic people, Reddit has tons of useful information and good people still).

Short answer is No. It suffers from many of the same issues of echo chamber, bias, and bullying. Just on a somewhat smaller scale due to fewer users. And never forget - Winter is coming. There will be a time in the future the bots will notice lemmee and come for it also.

But I suspect this is all a human thing. We are a contentious bunch at best and down right hateful at worst. We build communities only to poison and kill them in the end.

I last logged into Reddit in 2022.

There’s a lot of things missing - especially niche communities - but there’s enough people to get into silly debates with and enough memes for me to scroll each day.

Depends on what you mean “effective.”

The structure is very similar, and on the surface, it works about the same way. So in that sense, yes.

The lack of centralization improves on reddit - no authoritarian rule-making, no limitation of content by the laws of a single country, etc. - but also adds flaws. The biggest one is the potential for redundant groups on different servers, but also a concern is the potential for someone taking down their server and leaving the users high and dry. (I don’t know exactly what happens to the content in this case, but that could be another issue.)

Practically speaking though, it is not a meaningful replacement for reddit because it is lacking content. I browse “all”, and get fewer total posts that I saw on reddit on my 20 or so subscribed subreddits alone.

Community is the key. Community is what made reddit, and lemmy doesn’t have a developed community. Yet. We can get there, and then discover what other problems with the platform are.

The strength of many reddit communities is in the people themselves, and unless you’re really into Linux or star trek, the people aren’t really here.

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.

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.

I was a 15 year Reddit veteran and modded a couple dozen communities over there. I’ve moved over here with no regrets. The only thing that takes me back to Reddit is search results, and that’s getting less and less as more people have abandoned it and deleted comments.

The amount of bots there now is astounding. It’s making me believe in the Dead Internet Theory.

On the one hand, I find idle browsing on Lemmy to be a lot more enjoyable than reddit. I see more stuff that I’ve never seen before, and I see less unfunny, uninteresting stuff.

On the other hand: I drew a comic and posted it to what is basically the only Lemmy comic group. I wanted to give Lemmy an honest chance, so that was the only place I shared it. I figured it’d be a nice change of pace since the group is almost entirely reposts from reddit.

My comic started to get some traction, and then the only mod in the only Lemmy comic group removed it for profanity. The profanity in question was the word “balls”.

A few days later I mentioned this story on reddit. Someone asked to see the comic, so I posted it to r/comics, and a few hours later it hit the front page of r/all.

So in my opinion, Lemmy suffers from a lot of the same problems as reddit (like petty tyrant mods), and some of those problems are exacerbated by its small size.

It satisfies my social media addiction, but will be years before it shows up on many search results.