What are your thoughts on the Lemmy ecosystem?

I’ve been trying it out for the last week. I have my own opinions, but I’d like to hear others and see if we have common ideas on what is good/bad/indifferent about the Lemmy ecosystem.

  • FrankLaskey@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    276
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • Carnelian@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      102
      ·
      2 months ago

      Yeah, I love it and actually prefer it to my old reddit experience for general browsing.

      What isn’t quite there yet is the ability to like, sit down all day and scroll and post in a community dedicated to my current hyperfixation of the week. Be it guitar maintenance, some indie game, or whatever.

      But reddit also didn’t have that when I started using it. Excited to hang here and watch the garden grow

      • acosmichippo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        37
        ·
        2 months ago

        But reddit also didn’t have that when I started using it.

        reddit also didn’t have to compete with reddit.

        • gdog05@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          49
          ·
          2 months ago

          No but it was competing with Digg and Slashdot until Digg screwed the pooch. It’s been a while, but reddit really owes its size and popularity to Digg 2.0 and the fiasco of bad decisions driven by investors.

          • acosmichippo@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            14
            ·
            2 months ago

            I’m talking mostly about the vibrant niche communities the comment above mentioned. That all happened well after the Digg and slashdot stuff. Niche communities grew on reddit relatively unchallenged.

            Sure, reddit could have a similar meltdown to Digg, but I don’t think it’s a forgone conclusion. Social media has inertia. The bigger a platform is is the harder it is to lose people, because the mass is the feature.

          • Plum@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            14
            ·
            2 months ago

            I came to reddit from fark, before the digg migration or exodus or whatnot. There was also stumbleupon, and the others are all lost to me.

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          2 months ago

          Some of us old folks remember when it had to compete with Digg.

          A far more popular competitor that made some unpopular decisions and lost their user base to reddit.

      • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        16
        ·
        2 months ago

        “can’t scroll all day”

        I keep saying that’s a positive thing for other productivity, but sadly, that’s not happening for me. Turns out, I want to sit and bum just as much as I always did before. I’m more likely to actually read articles, but I know meta gets more screen time now. As you said, lemmy doesn’t have those full niche communities. I know, sacrilege to admit around here.

      • Lawdoggo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        2 months ago

        I’m sure this gets repeated on Lemmy all the time, but I feel like the quality of Reddit posts, even in niche communities about guitar maintenance or whatever, has really gone downhill in the past 10 years or so.

        This might come off as mean, but I’ve noticed a significant dumbing-down in terms of what people contribute to Reddit communities but also what people expect to be spoon-fed by those communities. And it’s all presented as this sort of democratization of hobbyist knowledge, where it’s every hobbyist’s duty to educate newcomers on all of the absolute basics and persuade them of why they should care about any of it.

        Maybe this is just a side effect of Reddit recommending subreddits to non-subscribers and pushing to become a Facebook-type service for “regular” people - after all, that’s how they make the line go up.

        I still prefer old-school forums, which tend to be more insular, less accessible, and expect you to arrive with a modicum of understanding or at least RTFM first. To be blunt, I miss the days when the internet was primarily for geeks.

    • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      2 months ago

      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 also leads to a lack of diversity of opinions.

    • Fuck spez@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      There’s also a wide and endlessly customizable variety of web/mobile clients, something reddit will apparently never have again.

      e: Federation is pretty cool, too.

    • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 months ago

      Once upon a time, there was Then Reddit, and Now Reddit was Then forums. One day, Future Lemmy will be Now Reddit, and Now Reddit will be Now Forums.