Idk I don't exactly find Lemmy a bastion of my interests. It's very clear the community is far smaller. The niche communities of topics im interested are mostly nonexistent and it's largely a sea of memes and references I don't remotely understand or care to. Something about communists or some shit? What? Pass.
What interests do you have that aren't found here? Some tiny niche interest communities are being built, you sometimes just gotta find em
They're typically so small there is a post a week and few if any comments.
Also I find it's difficult to find communities in the first place.
Speaking as someone actively building niche focused communities (literature.cafe for books and writing & lemmyloves.art for art) this kind of defeatist attitude saddens me. Community's don't explode over night. I fully get that community discovery is hard as hell right now though with lemmy, and attempts are being made to fix it. But with the communities that do exist, it's a matter of participating and starting conversations if you don't see one you want to participate in. On a new and emerging platform like this, you really can't be a lurker. Posting, commenting, engagement, and likes is the only currency here.
The thing with lemmy is that it does feel like screaming into the void sometimes, but you also have the benefit of a smaller community to have more focused discussions. Quality over quantity is the focus here rather than the mess that reddit had. Reddit has tons of content but a large portion of that is just noise and spam, it is much more preferable to have a high quality post once a day with an engaging and thoughtful discussion than a community filled with low quality spam most of the time and only one high quality post a day that's nearly impossible to find.
It's wild that art and books are niche in your words. Niche for me would be like a specific author or artist, but books and art I think of as incredibly vast topics, far from niche.
What interests do you have that aren't found here?
Active communities for specific video games that I play. There are general gaming communities that are active, but I'd rather be able to discuss specific games without having to start my own thread every time.
Tech communities that aren't just "Windows bad, Linux good". I get Lemmy is more likely to attract technical-minded, FOSS fans, and that's fine, but the amount of Linux zealotry is annoying. I've dual booted for 20 years now, but people here act like Windows is actively murdering your pets while Linux "just works" and it's.... Just not true.
Communities for my area. I could make them, but I have exactly zero interest in running a community, let alone one for people I could know irl. I don't have the time to manage or grow a community, and completely lack the desire even if I had the time. My city, county, state, job, and school all have active communities on Reddit.
Acting like Lemmy has it all when it's total active user base is a fraction of some major subreddits active subscriber count is... Delusional at best. I want Lemmy to work and be a replacement for reddit. I miss early, smaller reddit even. But Lemmy just isn't it yet.
The "windows bad linux good" is a great frame for most communities ive found here. Like often wrapped in some delusional joke-meme that it's an extremely small parody of itself.
I would give my eye teeth for a Persona 5 community on lemmy.
A good one, ideally, which certainly would be a step up from reddit.
Yeah, lots of niche communities are dead compared to their subreddit counterparts. Examples: OnePiece, AvatarTLA, VentureBros, Plex, and the subreddit for my town. I’m hoping this changes over time, but I still find myself going back to Reddit periodically.
Fitness, /r/fitness is in the top 20 or so.
Food and icecream.
It seems mainly tech talk here, and anti Windows everywhere.
But based on my posts, someone decided to replace his petrol car with a Leaf. Someone else got into Home Assistant because of me. So it has its goods sides as well.
I love Lemmy, but I really struggle with the content here. Of course things are a little bare, but I have been able to find some really good stuff. My engagement is a lot higher here than on Reddit. However I find the litany of anti-work and political/left/right posts insufferable. They're everywhere here. At least on Reddit I felt like I could insulate myself reasonably well from political stuff. c/mildlyinfuriating is an example of this. At least half of the posts I come across are blatantly political or are anti-work. I get it, work sucks and you don't want to work and rich people/landlords bad. R/mildlyinfurating is a much better sub than ours is a community, imo. But I can't surround myself with this kind of Lemmy content every day because it just angers me and I didn't go to reddit to be angry every day. I have found myself drifting back to reddit for 60% of my usage. I hope this changes. I've tried to sub to different communities as well to limit how much I have to read about the latest communists and nazis and racists/fascists and tankies and all that Lemmy bullshit. Clearly I need to do a better job.
If you're looking for a community that doesn't exist, you gotta create it. People will come.
Not OP but the issue isn't creating the space, but creating content in that space. Growing a community is a lot of work. Unless you already have some strong engagement and or a few people creating content it's really just up to you to keep making post until the community gets more traction. Most people like the idea of starting the new community but not the work it requires as it often just feels like yelling into the void.
Community building is more about moderation and evangelism than it is about clicking a button. Its a ton of work. People think a lot of the time you just kinda declare a forum and then it happens. I moderated a community of like 5 people for a while and even just THAT was exhausting and time consuming
I've noticed Reddit is full of people who just don't understand how Reddit is supposed to work. Comments stopped being fun and it just feels like Facebook now
It's funny, I was noticing that. A little bit eternal-september-ish, fewer people willing to gently nudge people to the way it worked, more people not learning.
Nope. Their app and their CEO are both garbage, I'm not supporting either
Too much rage bait, also after a time in here it's quite apparent how much the algorithm tries to push you to addiction.
I miss the niche communities tho.
Reddit isn't fun anymore, I agree with that. I checked /r/all for this first time today in months. I haven't logged in or browsed since the blackout, but there are a few communities I miss and was thinking about going back over for those, so I checked r/all out of curiosity to see how things have been. The content was just so much trash, and I don't even think it's that much worse. It's just that I've been away for so long that I'm looking at it now like "how did I spend my days scrolling through this garbage for hours?" It's just boring, it's like just interesting enough to keep you scrolling hoping to find something actually interesting.
Here on lemmy there is far fewer users and far less content. But I'm starting to see that as a good thing. I pop by and scroll, but I don't spend hours here like I did on reddit. The discussions are smaller, but more engaging and thoughtful. I remember before I left there were certain threads I'd see and just skip because I already knew exactly what all the comments would be. Also, I'm actively engaging more here, so there is actually some "social" in my social media use, instead of just passively consuming like I mostly did on reddit.
Overall I think ithe switch to Lemmy has been good, for me at least. It's like I've broken the reddit addiction, and looking at it now I can't understand why I got so caught up with it in the first place. To me, reddit just isn't fun anymore.
I've occasionally ended up on Reddit accidentally when following a search link. Which immediately blasts me with notifications and pushy requests to browse in some other way than I want to. After using Lemmy for this long, which lets me peacefully do my thing my way, it comes off as really rude even before I get to the comments.
At this point, I've actually started actively avoiding Reddit links in my searches. I can generally find the info I need somewhere else without getting yelled at by the website.
I went over for an article I found. Scrolled out of morbid curiosity. It's just awful. Ended up commenting about it and was down voted back to hell, apparently where I'm told o belong.
The mood has shifted drastically! I can’t believe how much negativity I receive nowadays. It’s like all the friendly and helpful people left.
Because they did leave. It's like when Facebook was good for info, then the masses showed up and just went apeshit. Over population both digitally and physically is never a good thing.
Yeah, I still exist on reddit for news or a few niche communities. I see a lot of the recycled memes and point gaming. The few discussions get no traction or an overwhelming response. You can't really argue with anyone. It becomes ad-hominem and hurt feelings.
My wife mocked me for leaving Reddit in a huff for nerd reasons. A month later she started asking me what I used instead, since she could see that Reddit declined just in that amount of time.
I hope you mocked her for asking, then slept on the couch
I see a lot of the recycled memes
I think the % of OPs that are just straight up reposting bots has increased considerably. Front page is even more unusable than during TheDonald times...
Its just low quality trash.
TBH that’s Lemmy too.. the front page is kinda boring and most of it is reposts from reddit
I’m back to Reddit, I kinda gave up here, but I’ll look a couple of times a week.
Too much politics. Linux. Privacy. Bidet talk. ADHD. Bad memes. Techbabble. Snore
No matter the filters I just can’t get an interesting feed, I just blocked about 6 political subs just today - it’s kinda shitty content imo (for me anyway)
I’m happy this exists but the rage honeymoons over for me. Old habits die hard I guess …..now……..back to arguing with bots!!
Depending on which subs you see, the assholes have won. Holy shit the amount of right wing bullshit that got into the place. Like wallstreet silver. I didn't much give a shit before it started looking like the front page of diet stormfront.
The remaining mods are at large, S class window lickers and ableist who have been applying to get a position for years and just now get their chance to goatse the corpse of what was once a great website. Started seeing tons of people getting banned for the most petty of shit. Buddy of mine got a 30 day ban for linking another sub reddit in his comment.
Of course, I got banned too. on my 12th cake day no less, for saying a kids attitude was going to get him beat up in high school or worse.
But if anything, there are so many folks out there that can say they were there before they got spez'd and the assholes took over. It was nice for a while, but in the end, fuck reddit.
Honestly, the main reason is no fun anymore is the lack of a decent app (I loved BaconReader - YMMV). Since the UX has been downgraded severely (most have lost their preferred app), the user base, community and content have suffered.
I'd have been content to pay a reasonable subscription fee to keep using BaconReader. I'd even pay for ad removal - I'm not after a free ride. However, an enjoyable ride is now unavailable be it free or paid.
So, here's Lemmy. I hope it works out long term, but the growing pains associated with scaling are not to be underestimated. I suspect the challenges will be less technical in nature than in user wrangling and moderation. (though running the tech ops mustn't be underestimated).
TLDR - Yes.
I think for the way I personally used Reddit, Lemmy still feels lacking, and I'm excited for it to grow. The good news is it's getting bigger every day and niche communities are being created all the time, so we'll get there. But there's no doubt a treasure trove of question and answer posts on Reddit that I still need to access at times, so it's still useful to me in that regard, but I'm not actively checking it at all anymore.
There are a few subreddits that don't have a counterpart on lemmy, or the counterpart isn't as active yet. But when I go on Reddit, I'm spammed with posts I'm not subscribed to, nor really have a want to be subscribed to. As more communities become more active on lemmy, the less I will need Reddit.
Reddit is still a much larger archive of crowd sourced knowledge, so until Lemmy becomes more comprehensive there's still some reason for me to use reddit. Though I don't actively participate anymore.
It's been a pretty clean break for me. The only times I have found myself in reddit the last few months was just for some archived post that answered a question I had.
Nothing feels like it was lost.
It's really different, that's for sure. The front page is full of subreddits I've never seen much (or any) of before. Comments on posts seem lower by an order of magnitude on the most popular ones. I don't know about site visits but engagement seems way down. How u/spez will spin it for the IPO remains to be seen.
I only check back once in a while for my city’s sub because the lemmy equivalent isn’t as active yet. I no longer have an interest in checking out r/all or the frontpage.
The only thing I miss is HighStrangeness which was fun to go through every once in a while. The rest of reddit isn't really worth looking at. But here there are tech nerds and Linux enthusiasts ~~and pirates~~ everywhere! I am among my people.
I occasionally go there but for specific reasons. No more late night browsing for me.
During the APIcalypse I deleted my glorious multireddits and unsubscribed from nearly all the subreddits. This way I’ve intentionally made my Reddit experience very boring. Now that my favorite Reddit app is dead, I have to use a mobile browser, and the experience is… well not as bad as with the official app, that’s for sure. But it it’s still unpleasant or boring.
Because of all that, I don’t visit Reddit anywhere as often as I used to. Nowadays I check Reddit maybe once a week, browse for a few minutes, get infuriated by the ads and move on to something nicer like doing the dishes or folding my laundry.
I still use it from time to time because sometime I just need the information I'm looking for. I've justified it telling myself that I'm using it 1/100th of the time I used tt and only use it when necessary.
Don't be too complacent, of course. I've seen people on the Fediverse turn feral and Reddit-esque during discussions of particular culture war issues. It's not completely peachy here all the time; there are some subjects about which some people can't help losing their composure.