Asklemmy

I came to Lemmy after being permabanned on Reddit, and I didn't have any problem signing up, logging in, or using it.

I also miss the smaller crowds, but I don't miss the pages of puns, shitposts, trolls, 4Chan refugees, contrarians, novelty accounts, bots, Russian Propaganda Farmers, etc. I do miss the active forums for some of my favorite subjects, like guitars. The few forums that exist are very quiet, with posts every few days, weeks or even months, instead of constantly, like Reddit.

I find it much better for politics, if for no other reason that we can talk openly without getting suspended or banned.

I don’t think it’s probably being bottled. I think there are just a combination of people who would rather be unhappy where they are than face a bit of resistance getting themselves out of their rut and people who are fanatically devoted to legacy social media due to sunk cost and have a hard time abandoning their decade old accounts. So whenever the topic comes up they are happy to trash Lemmy rather than improve their situation. They are on Reddit alternatives sub for a reason but they won’t get off their ass because nothing is perfect enough for them

I gave up on Reddit a few months back, but to say that Lemmy is as simple and intuitive as reddit just isn't true. I only use Lemmy now, and it's not very convenient, but I get the highlights from the news, which is all I really wanted.

I miss the days when reddit was full of tech-minded people (back when they had to compete with Digg). These days it's full of normies, and normies tend to be fucking idiots. Just look at any YouTube comment section, which is filled with them.

I used to think I want as tech savvy as the average reddittor, then I saw this shit and made an account. It wasn't super streamlined, but most definitely manageable if you've done anything more advanced than click a link in a verification email.

I don't think Lemmy is too confusing to use but I do think it's poorly explained. Most people new to a server are only looking at two things:

1. Overall content on the front page and how effective its filtering is.
2. A topic specific community they are interested in.

But when they begin see the content can be vastly different from server to server and the topics they care about can be split into many communities on different servers they aren't sure how to access what they want and lose interest.

join-lemmy.org could show the posts from all, with a big join button at the top. The introduction page can be shown if somebody presses the join button.

yeah, the ui sucks ass if you dont use an app

Really? When I have posted comments on /r/RedditAlternatives about Lemmy being too complicated and that it won’t gain traction, I’ve been getting downvotes. Despite saying I use it.

Concepts like federation and instances are definitely part of the problem. Reddit is quite easy to understand. Make an account on the website (or not), go to /r/all or type in /r/whatever, and away you go. Lemmy is not that easy to understand. Many people that could be interested in Lemmy don’t have any idea what the different instances are or which they should use, so they just give up.

Lemmy doesn’t need to take off like reddit did, but those touting it as the next big thing are being very optimistic. The barrier to understanding is just too high.

I just tried to use Reddit with a new account. After spending about a week in it, I suddenly noticed that all my comments and postings received no upvotes or downvotes.

That's right. I was shadowbanned, which is to say that some part of the Reddit system (AI?) decided that I need to be put into a cage that I don't see, without telling me that it happened. Perhaps I was "evading a ban" or something. I don't think I did anything to deserve it, and the reddit admins don't answer to queries about it.

So yeah, Lemmy is infinite times better than Reddit.

Just a reminder that Reddit was once difficult for people to understand.

To be honest though, I'm a bit disappointed by the other users here. The quality of comments is really poor, both idiotic and adversarial. I'm talking fox news comment section level.

Reddit at this point a psyop for multiple different countries, political parties, celebrities, influenzars and such. US, Israel, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and others have Internet task force to push propaganda and limit negative PR.

Votes aren't public in reddit and is a great cover for hiding any coordinated influence. Keep creating new accounts, make it seem natural by posting on random subs, use old accounts for posts/comments and new accounts for votes. To an unsuspecting user, nothing seems out of ordinary.

On ActivityPub all votes are public and manipulation can be detected or analyzed now or in future. Instance admins could check this and see a pattern. And there are many many many instances, so any one might run into something.

Also mod logs are public in lemmy, unlike reddit. Censorship from mods and admins are already a constant cause for drama but makes it a lot more transparent for the community.

So it's less influential. So, they try to dissuade people from making Lemmy and Mastodon less interesting.

I'm not saying it's not possible here, but it's too early and needs a lot more work than reddit. People already do not interact with users from instances they dislike. You already see some patterns in how users of instance behave and avoid them.

Maybe, but I believe in Occam's razer. The simplest solution is probably correct.

The average user is incredibly lazy. Insanely lazy. Reddit has taught them that they should be just spoonfed content constantly with no assistance. People aren't used to going out to find communities anymore. To them even these basic concepts are then "frustrating" and "complex". It's unfortunate, but that's really how lazy they are.

They can't go to the search bar, type in television, and hit subscribe, it's literally too much for them.

I think its surviorship bias: the people who understand lemmy are on lemmy, not reddit.

Stupid people thinking little Lemmy is too complicated to use is a feature not a bug. If someone can't figure out how to use the Lemmy interface why would we even want them here?

Yes. Of course the big platforms actively seek to undermine competitors. There's billions of dollars at stake. Something that really convinced me was reading about how Facebook ran VPN services to spy on traffic so they could spot budding competitor platforms.

We know reddit used bots at the beginning to generate activity to make the site look popular. Something I'm not convinced they ever stopped doing. I believe reddit corporate still bots their own site for whatever purpose they require in the moment. I absolutely believe they troll their own site. Remember spez is the guy who live edits the production database.

Most of the negative answers on /r/RedditAlternatives are either botted or bad faith.

!fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com to see a few examples

I'm probably the least tech savvy person on Lemmy. If my dumb ass can figure it out, the subset of Reddit's population who we'd actually want in Lemmy's community should have no problem.

That said, onboarding could have been better, and you're right about the potential hangups: "fediverse" sounds like some kind of federal government function like a hub website that links to all the different .gov agencies, and "Lemmy" sounds like a cartoon character. Choosing an instance was more stressful than it probably should have been; ultimately went with .world by blindly following the advice of a YouTube video, but on day 1 I was pretty oblivious to the extremist shit that's associated with instances like .ml and had no clue what 'tankie' even meant.

That was two years ago though - no idea if that reflects what getting started is like today.

And again, that's all coming from a relatively tech-dumbass, so I'd imagine it's probably smoother for people less prone to starting a fire when they turn their computer turns on.

Edit: sorry to anyone who had to read that before the edit... when I'm tired I have an annoying tendency to think a word as I'm typing and then just skip to the next one. And I'm tired all the fucking time, so my posts have a lot of holes Q_Q