No intrusive ads or trackers. Less AI slop and more genuine human interaction. The ability to easily block communities, users, and instances is nice too.
And it's safe to say Luigi here
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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Casual Conversation
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All this plus no profile karma. Meaning instead of chasing numbers to inflate our accounts and increase our perceived worth (whether consciously or subconsciously), people just are.
Or as you put it: more genuine human interaction.
To me it's more like the numbers mean something different. While they still mean mostly nothing, the numbers that display on your profile tell what kind of user you are and how much seniority you have here. Been here close to two years? Maybe you came from the API fiasco. Got 1000+ comments and 50+ post? Somewhat active user you probably seen once or twice before. 0 post and below 50 comments but seemingly active? Potential lurker. Still mostly meaningless because it could be alt and who really cares but NGL when I look at the stats of the really active users I'm like damn they really contributed to the Lemmy content mill.
I like the fact I'm not giving some megacorp ownership of my 0 thought comments
Don't worry, they're here scraping everything being said to train AI
Yeah, model the AI you're going to sell to the military off my comments.
- Self hosting
- Can't get banned
- Feeling of being a part of something larger but not overwhelming large yet still having some control
- Good range of mobile and web frontends
- No adverts
- No tracking
- Memes, sometimes older memes and not getting ridiculed for them
- Seeing other users from my instance on my travels
Some things I tolerate
- American politics
- Random porn
- Bot spam
Can't get banned
Well, technically if you're a chud, you can get widely defederated.
True enough. I hope that my instances behaviour would never warrant such drastic action by other instances.
Your instance is cool!
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No ads, apparently no bots, no reddit-style comments like "This.", no corporation involved
No Spez, and not getting permabanned for criticizing Corporate interests, or Musk, specifically.
Less reposting of "funny" TikToks / Instagram reels / YouTube shorts.
I do NOT miss those
I feel like this will be inevitable with growth. Unless we get to foster a consciousness about its problems and get instances to actively prevent those
I can sort my subscribed page by top 12 hours and only use Lemmy once or twice a day. Helps with controlling doom scrolling.
Other than that, there's better human interaction here. I've started recognizing names and pfps which is pretty cool too. Some of y'all seem rad.
NO U SEEM RAD
I like how open the ecosystem is. You can pick any instance, any web app, any mobile app, block instances you don't want to see, etc. You have much more control over what you see and how you interact with the system.
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- Third party apps.
- The subscribed feed doesn’t contain uninvited random junk. I guess irrelevant trash drives engagement among some people, but it’s just driving me mad instead.
- Lemmy is still wild and untamed, like Reddit used to be.
Not THAT wild and untamed, unfortunately. I’d love an eyeblech/NSFW community, but that’s not really welcome here.
Funny rat image.
It's not reddit. And it's not for profit. And the people here are great!
I genuinely feel different writing here. On Reddit I constantly analyzed the 18 different ways some random person would take my comment badly. Now I just write stuff and people don't instantly assume I'm an evil moron.
The fediverse compatibility. I feel like I'm on the cutting edge of the internet atm.
It’s decentralised. Decentralisation just makes sense for something that requires hosting a lot of data and using a lot of bandwidth, less load on the servers and such. Insane how YouTube was able to survive so long before Google bought them.
The users are cooler than anywhere else. 😎
Does this mean I'm cool? 🥺
You're on an internet chat board. By definition you're uncool.
You're just less uncool than other such places.
🤭
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I can use whatever 3rd party client I want to interact with it.
I never really did spend much time on reddit, so Lemmy was never a replacement for me.
Even now Lemmy feels much different than it was a few years ago. It is wild seeing posts with only a few comments and hundreds of up/downvotes.
Fewer conservative dickheads with a persecution fetish than reddit
They're here, they're already on the new Digg, but there aren't as many of them. Yet...
They really hate it when they're bigots and someone tells them that they're a bigot
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Ability to selfhost.
I can browse it unhindered behind a VPN, that is nice
A lot less mod power trips, willful misinterpretations, rage-baiting, and neurotic narcissists on the verge of episodic breakdowns.
I do wish Lemmy felt more than just an online repository, though. I don't know how to get to know anyone since there haven't been many things relevant to me.
You are free to pick an instance that aligns with your values and preferences for moderation. Its a double edged sword because it enables echo chambers which I think isnt great but it seems many people like those actually.
The sub's, filters, and block list serves as a manual replacement for the algorithm. Its hard building it up but once you do Lemmy becomes mostly enjoyable as long as you keep to what you like.
I share what you like (smaller, more intimate) along with the absence of ads, and the more original content over just cutting and pasting that I find in other equivalent large-scale boards.
No ads/sponsored content cluttering my feed!
It's open source, would be hard for an entity to take over, and permits for third party clients.
The idea that you can make it your own, the feeling of starting from the scratch to see the potential it has (both good and bad) is refreshing.
There are some things I've grown to like. I feel better represented by my choice of instance. I could self host my own, but don't really want to incur that maintenance. I do like that if my instance were to do something I disagree with, I don't have to leave the community as a whole like I did with Reddit, and should instead find a new home.
I also kind that it's easier to filter out the personalities that bother me, since they tend to flock to specific instances. I still have to contend with them occasionally, but that's no different than Reddit, but less often.
Most of my interactions here have been with reasonable people, even when we disagreed. It does feel a little quiet at times, but that's ok.
Honestly, I like that it's Reddit-like. Minus admins slapping [removed by Reddit] onto things and minus the kinds of moderators that make your comments disappear without notice.
Personally, I wish there were more people here though. Maybe it's great if your jam is memes and politics and nothing else but I miss the discussions everywhere from Reddit. The not dead communities. Being able to visit the Harley Quinn subreddit in between seasons to still get your fix of silly memes and discussions and newcomers giving their reviews, just as a wild example. Having alternative style communities that are for more than just posting Spotify links to songs. Having more options in general so that if the one community around dealing with a thing that you're actually interested in turns out to be not on the level, there's another 5 at least to choose from.
Also, I liked being able to disappear into the crowd on Reddit. Here, I often feel more like deleting something I've posted a couple of days later because I feel like I stick out more here
Personally I'm not that interested in the technical aspects. I just want a Reddit-like platform to interact with my interests, learn from people, mingle with people from different walks of life to me and expand my mind. The federation thing is a bonus but not what I'm actually here for.
Yep I love my serials so I'd love specific comms about them. People would always pick up on things I hadn't... it's missing here
And it wasn't just ongoing stuff but pretty much anything you could think of, including some obscure '90s series that you never even see anyone mention, there'll be an active subreddit for that. Same goes for individual bands or artists as well.
Like, I totally get what people are saying when they say they like it smaller than Reddit here. I actually agree to an extent because even Reddit was better in a lot of ways 10 years ago when Spez wasn't trying to be the next Zuck.
But I do still think it could do with more users than it has now for a lot of reasons. Enough users for there to be a little more variety and choice than there is right now.
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Personally, I wish there were more people here though.
Most of us do. The people who always complain about growth when we're barely at 50k monthly active users are a vocal minority
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I like the tone and feel here as of yet. People are more friendly, interactions are more pleasant and it feels easier to participate. A higher proportion of comments are worthwhile to read and/or engage with. It's still small enough that you'll have your post or comment seen by people instead of being immediately drowned out by one liners and karma farming injokes.
It's also still got that homely feeling where it's small enough that you start recognising usernames, which makes the community feel a bit more closely knit. Sometimes even perhaps being recognised yourself, which makes you feel more like part of a community rather than a faceless Redditor screaming into the void.
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I like that it's smaller. I usually sort top of 6 or 12 hours (also something you can't do on reddit) and eventually I start scrolling so far that I've basically run out of posts to see, which helps stop me from doomscrolling
Also the people here are way cooler
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