this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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Lemmy
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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
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There are exceptions to all of the points below, but generally:
Everyone is here trying to build something better. The developers are actually prioritizing transparency and user choice when making the software. Since the instances aren't after profit, there's no financial conflict of interest. It's actually possible for instance admins to prioritize user experience and a healthy community instead of making a profit.
I love seeing all the different organizational structures emerging; some instances are nonprofits, some are co-ops, some are benevolent dictatorships. I think in the long run this will produce a fairer and more representative online platform.
Also my interactions feel human. If I get 5 upvotes on Lemmy or 5 likes on Pixelfed, it feels like I connected with 5 real people. On Reddit, I just can't tell anymore.
Activity in niche communities, but that's changing slowly.
Also, as a mod, we could still use better moderation tooling.
I think over time it will become more like Reddit. As the user base grows, the average will shift closer to what Reddit is like. Also, at the end of the day, a number of the issues are because of how groups of humans interact and not the platform itself.
However, the reason I'm here instead of the many other Reddit alternatives is because of federation. I believe that as long as we maintain a healthy balance in the fediverse (and not let one entity control too much), we can avoid the enshitification while centralized social media becomes unbearable for more and more people.
Actually, two other things I do miss from Reddit: In the heyday (and even still to some extent now), it was so massive that you could have whole communities of types of real-world people you would never interact with. There is a subreddit for cops, one for air traffic controllers, one for sex workers, one for working historians to answer the general public's questions, and so on. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ghislaine Maxwell had active Reddit accounts. You could come into contact (in their weird text-box-only way) with people you would never come in contact with, and more to the point you could see what their hivemind looked like and their consensus on public issues. I always liked Reddit's community model better than the twitter "everything goes on the pile" model, because you could have these for-real communities develop, and it was fascinating sometimes to see what they thought of things or watch them in action.
Edit: Oh, the other thing, AMAs of real public figures, similar idea
That’s a really good point, I hadn’t thought about the AMA angle or how unique those niche pro communities were. Thanks for sharing that, definitely gives me a better picture of what people feel is missing.