Asklemmy

I took July off from any of this stuff. After Sync released (my preferred app before), I've come to lemmy to try to see how it's going, but honestly, I've lost most of the desire to blindly browse random stuff like I did.

Actually, I've found just the opposite - I've been more likely to spend more time on lemmy/kbin over the last couple of months than I spent on Reddit in years.

It got to the point that I'd just pop onto Reddit, look around, see the same basic variety of botspam, astroturfing and concern trolling, and go do something else. It wasn't even worth posting anything, since any response I got was almost certainly going to be from a bot or a human-who-might-as-well-be-a-bot, and it was going to be the same thing either way - just some shallow bit of stock rhetoric that at best might be sort of tangentially related to what I actually said.

But then I came here and rediscovered the pleasure of reading posts written by actual people who actually think about what they're saying, who will actually read and think about what I actually say in response, then write a response that they've actually thought about.

And that was it - I was hooked in a way I hadn't been for years on Reddit.

That said, it's nowhere near as good now as it was a few months ago, and I have been less active recently. The last big migration in particular, after the API changes went into place, led to both more bots and more humans-who-might-as-well-be-bots, and the quality here went sharply downhill.

It's still better than Reddit though. And it's been improving again of late.

Less niche communities. Don't worry. Doom scrolling is ready to pounce.

Reddit uses algorithms to drive engagement. I mean, not old.reddit, but regular reddit. Lemmy doesn't.

Basically, modern Reddit, like other big name social media, is specifically designed to be addictive because it's evil. Lemmy isn't.

It definitely would be to me if there was more diverse content, I usually stop scrolling after seeing the same news articles reposted over and over again, posts that have been in my feed since yesterday, and one too many posts about Linux/FOSS or whatever.

I still love it for what it is, but it can't keep me interested for as long as Reddit did yet.

I felt the same and it's good. I guess that's the upside of no algorithm.

I find it just addictive enough. There are definitely lulls in activity, but they're short-lived and I have things I should be doing besides shitposting so it's actually helped me.

The quality, however, is much higher. This can be very subjective, but I do have some real world evidence. The number of times I'd show someone a meme and have them say "Please send that to me" has definitely gone up since I switched to the fediverse.

Endless content can definitely lead to a more addictive platform. Because it's trying to encourage more users to generate their own content, there's certainly less of it, bit definitely less garbage to wade through.

That said, I feel that I'm learning more, sharing more, and interacting with others more.

It's also much nicer than R×ddit, because I've seen so much less: ragebait, fake stories, sensationalism, intentional factual inaccuracies/disinformation, shilling, shitty bots, etc.

I don't know why but personally lemmy is much more addictive than reddit. The content makes me discover more relevant things and with reddit I felt like been in a loop with always the same content or not relevant content maybe the threads I subscribed to were not the bests.

I find it very addictive actually, at least the endless scrolling lasts a bit longer than in Reddit, tho there is still more top stuff on Reddit (bcs there is more content that gets distilled into good content, whereas I feel like on average I see better content on Lemmy).

Tho if I need some technical review of some obscure product, Reddit is still where I look it up.

For me a big thing is that because Lemmy is so small, it's not diverse. It's mostly liberal-to-leftist nerds from America and Western Europe. I roll my eyes and scroll past whenever there's a post about any Asian country because you know it's just gonna be a bunch of foreigners (whose exposure to the country is limited to news headlines) pretending they know anything. And unlike Reddit there are seldom any locals available to set people straight.

It's just a lack of posts and comments. It's not busy enough here to allow for endless scrolling.

And that’s a good thing.

I am kinda glad, and it reminds me of early Digg. When I first used Digg, it didn't tailor the order or content of anything to you, it didn't use an algorithm to keep throwing content at you, changing the order of what you see, and Lemmy reminds me of this.

I'm not here up be addicted or scroll endlessly, if anything, Lemmy feels healthier, like I can walk away and do something else.

Eeeh, nope. It's 6:25AM and I already spent 2 hours on Lemmy.

the fediverse definitely is not as addicting as reddit and i stopped doing reddit so now it feels like my mental state is improving because of it.

Yes, i feel the same and I love it.

It wasn't until I started using sync, and my scrolling time skyrocketed.

I can't meet ya on that brother, I don't comment very often, but I feel like I'm terminally on here. I do wish more non-tech related stuff popped up in my feed, but that's the flavor of Lemmy for now I guess. All in all, I like it here

With Connect app it's exactly like Reddit. Maybe you need to subscribe to more sublemmy or scroll on global and not local. It's literally the same as Reddit minus the amount of reposts, astroturfing and a little less negative. Maybe you miss that?

Nah, Lemmy is just a tighter experience.

Cut out Reddit completely if you haven’t already, that helps a lot.

Reddit is so much bigger, but if you remove that competition to cure the same “itch”… you’ll be here more.