No Stupid Questions

I like that Lemmy doesn’t have stupid levels of auto-moderation happening. And I like that threads don’t constantly get locked merely because people are engaging with them.

I like that it’s not reddit in terms of toxicity and powerdrunk mods. I really like the apps accessing Lemmy and the general tone in comments and discussion. As a German the community ich_iel is most of the content I need.

I dislike how long it took me to filter out the words „Elon“ and „musk“ because every second post on c/technology is about that man. Phew, my life is better without it. (I really like being able to filter)

No Ads. No corpos. No infinity scroll. No hate. Different opinions. Cool people. My daily bread.

My only gripe is it is EXTREMELY left leaning in general, and if anyone has a less polarizing opinion about something the hive mind reacts.

Not to mention you can’t talk about anything political without someone bringing up how my political views promote genocide.

I dislike that Lemmy is such a left-wing echo chamber. Reddit had a much wider variety of opinions being voiced openly; on Lemmy, there’s almost none. It doesn’t take long to figure out what’s acceptable to say here and what isn’t. It’s a kind of self-gaslighting because it can make you feel like the opinions of the average Lemmy user represent the wider population when that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Also, there are almost no blue-collar workers here, and most discussions revolve around office jobs and big city life.

EDIT: and the extreme levels of cynicism.

I like the way Lemmy functions, with things like an open moderator log and the way that instances can be created to prevent too much control from one singular instance from pushing people completely off the platform if they have bad moderation, for example.

I don't like the users. For every one user that is nice and wants to have a legitimate conversation, there are like 300 that just want to fight/argue or spew politics into a non-political conversation. The number of users I have blocked on Lemmy is far longer than the amount of users I ever blocked on Reddit, and my Reddit account existed for about 10 years. This Lemmy account has only been around for about 1/10th of that.

One of the biggest strengths of Lemmy is also one of its biggest curses. Due to its federated nature, anyone can create a new instance. The problem with this is that particularly nasty users can keep creating accounts on instances they keep creating in order to harass people they don't like. So even if you block them, they just switch to a new account, etc. They can also do this for vote manipulation, not like that really matters on Lemmy but Lemmy users seem to have fallen victim to the same problem Redditors had: seeing a comment with 0 or -1 score and then completely disregarding whatever it said, not reading it and downvoting it automatically.

I like the relatively sane moderation compared to Reddit.

I dislike the heavy far-left/communist presence here. I’m a lefty myself, but a lot of people here are extremists in my opinion, little better than the far right.

Like

Editable titles

"All" here vs other social media is much better

It's more likely that arguments are civil. There are still quite a few venomous arguments but I've noticed that it it proportionally less.

On Reddit or Facebook, if you didn't like a group you left and made your own. If you didn't like the admins, tough shit. Here, if you don't like the admins, you can use a different instance.

Likes and dislikes are separate, and are in some cases viewable who submit them. I feel like this keeps people a little more honest.

I like the modlog and transparency. It's so much easier that when someone complains about unfair mod action, to see if they are in the right or exaggerating.

There is an "end" to Lemmy. There isn't just infinite content to scroll through.

Dislike

Smaller user base means that niches that Reddit filled just aren't here.

There is an "end" to Lemmy. There isn't just infinite content to scroll through.

Neutral

The types of common negative personalities here are different from that of Reddit. Reddit has more misogyny, classism, antinatalists, and obnoxious atheists. (As opposed to the chill atheists.) Lemmy has quite a few people that are pretty shitty to those that are disabled or cannot get out of some situations. If you cannot work towards the greater good without any rest, can't escape a bad situation, or can't just extend yourself further, you are trash. There are also more fringe beliefs here. I do like it because of the different perspectives, even if I very strongly disagree. (It makes me think!) Unfortunately we still have the dumbass arguments about generations but you can't have it all.

The 14 year olds with "big brain" takes.

All the trolls.

The people. For both.

Like:

• It has that small-community feel still. I don't see (perhaps because I stay out of a lot of the more tech-ey communities?) the kind of farming, low-effort, generally mediocre content I saw on Reddit.
• Lack of the sense of a hyper-corporatized, "You're only allowed to do things that make us money" sense that's enshittified much of the internet lately. I'm not even sure if Lemmy can be monetized.

Dislike:

• Not yet large enough either. I don't want hundreds of millions of users, but I still miss a lot of the more niche hobby/discussion communities I used to be able to participate in. Even communities for fairly large hobbies or interests can be dead on Lemmy.
• The awful political takes. Everything from typical dumbness up to advocating violence (but it's okay because it's my point). And it's everywhere.

I genuinely cannot express how much it annoys me that I cannot have a blocklist for keywords.

Most of the things I read are from my subscribed communities, which i'm very happy about generally, however given the overall state of life today, half of the posts in completely unrelated communities end up being one of the following:

• Twitter CEO
• Hate speech in US politics
• AI propaganda for some pump and dump quick money

I really just don't want to see any of those things

Like: decentralization and a renaissance of the old- school dream of what the Internet should be.

Dislike: media bias fact checker bot spamming every damn post. Power tripping mods.

Like:

• Decentralized system that limits abuse

• Great customizaion

• It works (unlike much of the competition)

Dislike:

• Lack of even remotely niche content (aside from Linux and infosec content)

• Generally very pessimistic userbase

• Lacks polish and features in many areas

• Currently trends towards extremist echo chambers - the fact that .ml (an instance known for banning criticism of violent, racist, authoritarian governments) is one of the biggest instances, is a good example of this.

• tends to be extremely hostile to any sort of monitization, regardless of the quality or cost to produce content

It takes some time to block out stuff to make Lemmy usable. So much anime, bots and dumb American politics.

It's nice there are a bunch of apps for Lemmy, but using it without an app is not very welcoming. It needs a lot of improvement (e.g. manually compose urls to subscribe to communities on other servers).

The userbase is overall more mature and can actually discuss complex topics. Different instances have completely different feels, vibes, cultures and userbases, and that's amazing. Some admin teams are spez wannabees but the federated structure limits the damage that they can cause.

Relative lack of niche communities. Witch hunting is becoming a worse problem here than in Reddit.

I wish I could filter communities by language.

Also one thing I like is the open war we have with memes with censured bad words for fucking fuck's sake

Dislike: every post inevitably has someone complaining about capitalism, Trump, police, Musk, …

Dislike: Tankies.

Dislike: there is still no way to group communities into sub feeds, apart from subs, local, all. (and the work around some do of having multiple accounts seems silly to me)

I have loved my time with Lemmy so far. I feel like people are much kinder here compared to Reddit, it feels like a genuine community of people that are willing and able to help one another out and chat and talk, without the people of Reddit that just bully and make fun of for no good reason other than just because. I think that’s the biggest reason I prefer lemmy over Reddit, along with the benefits of being decentralized and federated.

But I miss the near infinitely larger user base on Reddit and the things that come with that. On Reddit I can find a community for pretty much anything I can imagine. I’ve always loved using Reddit as a tool to help me learn, because regardless of what it is I’m learning I can find somewhere that I can ask any question I could think of, and 9/10 times someone out there out of the millions of Reddit users can give me a decent competent answer. That’s my favorite part about Reddit. That is, if they don’t just call me stupid and tell me I’m an idiot or something like that.

But I feel hopeful that Lemmy can get to a similar point some day.

Decentrilization is both a blessing and a curse.

If there's an issue you can make your own community with blackjack, and hookers.

But at the same time these communities never seem to get super big (minus a few) and if you're subscribed to both there's not a good way to deduplicate the posts. So 5 communities post the same thing (or one person posts them in 5) sometimes you see all 5 side by side.

Likes: the small community, traditional forum vibe. No ads, no oppressive corporate hand to keep things advertiser-friendly. Interests and views tend to align, but I can have a healthy disagreement on many issues with most users here. Only a few famous borderline trollish users that aren't fun to chat with, most overt trolls are quickly dealt with.

Dislikes: heavy use of downvoting simply unpopular opinions (a mild annoyance). Difficult to pick between posting in a rarely active niche community and a very active but general community (sometimes I just crosspost). The threat of centralization, with Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml having by far the largest communities (I would like to see more active communities spread across sites, though I make an effort sometimes to comment on different servers). Some big features I'd like to see that still seem far from implementation, such as multi-communities.

Like: It's not Reddit.

Dislike: The userbase is too small and there are way too many circlejerks in some communities and you get bashed to hell if you dare to disagree with them.