What are your thoughts on the Lemmy ecosystem?
I’ve been trying it out for the last week. I have my own opinions, but I’d like to hear others and see if we have common ideas on what is good/bad/indifferent about the Lemmy ecosystem.
Copy pasting from a recent thread on /r/RedditAlternatives trying to address usual criticism against Lemmy.
Federation is confusing, people want a single website they can go to
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Go to lemm.ee
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Have a look around, see if the content and the formatting is appealing to you, register an account if you want to be able to curate your feed further
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Go to lemm.ee/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world to see communities (equivalent of subs) that might be interesting to you.
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Use Voyager as a mobile app: www.lemmyapps.com/Voyager. When they ask for your “instance”, use “lemm.ee”
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If you want more choices for apps, have a look at www.lemmyapps.com
Email has been working on a federation model for decades. People have to remember if they use Gmail or Outlook, but that’s it. It’s similar here.
Several communities have the same name, it’s confusing, active communities are hard to find
Reddit has a similar issue: you have /r/games as the main gaming community, but there is also /r/Gaming, /r/videogames /r/gamers, etc.
How does someone know what the main community is, whatever the platform? Looking at the number of subscribers and active members.
There was the example of beekeeping: if you search for that topic, the most active one is definitely mander.xyz/c/beekeeping with 97 users per month.
The others have barely 1 user: lemmyverse.net/communities?query=beekeeping
To find active communities: lemm.ee/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world. There are regular threads with active communities on topic such as gardening, movies, board games, anime, science, etc.
Who is going to pay for the server costs?
Here is a link to this question to Lemmy admins: lemm.ee/post/41577902
Summary of the answers:
- lowest number so far: lemmy.ml with 0.03€ per user per month
- a few others (feddit.uk, lemmy.zip) have around 0.11$ per user per month
- some instances are running on infrastructure that the admins would be anyway, so it’s virtually “free”
Most of the instances costs are paid using donations. They regularly post financial updates such as this one: lemm.ee/post/41235568
Obviously there is a sweet stop where you can minimize the cost by having the maximum number of users on a fixed infrastructure cost.
If you want to have a look at the number of monthly active user (the “MAU” column): fedidb.org/software/lemmy/
Anyway, $ per user is usually meaningless because most of the servers are small enough to be hosted on some random cheap server - adding more users doesn’t cost more because they are still well below server capacity. Only the biggest servers have to worry about $ per user.
I had posted this earlier this week on this thread: old.reddit.com/…/how_much_does_it_cost_per_user_t…
There is too much political content
You can block entire servers and specific communities.
Instances to block to avoid political content
Communities to block
With those blocked, you are avoiding 95% of the political content. There might be a few other communities that pop up, but blocking them is still one click away.
Lemmy is developped by hardcore tankies and I don’t want to use their software
As Lemmy is federated using an open protocol, there are other options to connect to the communities without using Lemmy itself.
The first one is Piefed: piefed.social/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world
The other one is Mbin: fedia.io/m/newcommunities@lemmy.world
However, those are stil a bit less mature than Lemmy, so for instance if you want to use mobile apps a lot, Lemmy is a better choice.
On top of that, every Lemmy server is managed by different people. You can see regular criticism of lemmy.ml (the instance managed by the Lemmy devs) on threads such as this: lemm.ee/post/33872586 or even dedicated communities like lemm.ee/c/meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works
That shows that even the Lemmy devs are not protected from criticism.
There isn’t enough people
Lemmy has 46k monthly active users (lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats) (Mbin and Piefed have around 800 each). Active user is someone who voted, posted or commented.
In comparison, Discuit, which was praised during the API shutdown as “easier to use as it’s centralized” has 234 active users: discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/KdiI1akq. Not 234k, 234 total.
For obvious reasons, the activity is not going to match Reddit levels, and niche communities aren’t there.
But it’s not an all or nothing situation. Most people on Lemmy still use Reddit for their niche communities, but are also active on Lemmy.
Also, having less people provides better interactions, as your comments are less likely to get buried in thousands of others. And bots on Lemmy are quickly spotted and banned, while Reddit doesn’t seem to do much about that: old.reddit.com/…/askreddit_is_simply_over_run_wit…
That’s it for now, feel free if you have any questions in the comment
FrankLaskey@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
As a ‘front page of the internet’ it has been a pretty great replacement for me as it’s where I go each day to just see what’s going on. However, due to the smaller size you do lose a lot of the activity in more niche communities and the sheer volume of posts/comments compared to Reddit. That’s the biggest downside. Still, you also lose the incessant ads/bad UI/UX decisions and ever accelerating late stage capitalism driven enshittification so that’s a big plus.
Carnelian@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Yeah, I love it and actually prefer it to my old reddit experience for general browsing.
What isn’t quite there yet is the ability to like, sit down all day and scroll and post in a community dedicated to my current hyperfixation of the week. Be it guitar maintenance, some indie game, or whatever.
But reddit also didn’t have that when I started using it. Excited to hang here and watch the garden grow
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
reddit also didn’t have to compete with reddit.
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
“can’t scroll all day”
I keep saying that’s a positive thing for other productivity, but sadly, that’s not happening for me. Turns out, I want to sit and bum just as much as I always did before. I’m more likely to actually read articles, but I know meta gets more screen time now. As you said, lemmy doesn’t have those full niche communities. I know, sacrilege to admit around here.
Lawdoggo@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I’m sure this gets repeated on Lemmy all the time, but I feel like the quality of Reddit posts, even in niche communities about guitar maintenance or whatever, has really gone downhill in the past 10 years or so.
This might come off as mean, but I’ve noticed a significant dumbing-down in terms of what people contribute to Reddit communities but also what people expect to be spoon-fed by those communities. And it’s all presented as this sort of democratization of hobbyist knowledge, where it’s every hobbyist’s duty to educate newcomers on all of the absolute basics and persuade them of why they should care about any of it.
Maybe this is just a side effect of Reddit recommending subreddits to non-subscribers and pushing to become a Facebook-type service for “regular” people - after all, that’s how they make the line go up.
I still prefer old-school forums, which tend to be more insular, less accessible, and expect you to arrive with a modicum of understanding or at least RTFM first. To be blunt, I miss the days when the internet was primarily for geeks.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
i think thats somewhat of an advantage
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
That also leads to a lack of diversity of opinions.
curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
Same as reddit when it was new.
I’d actually say Lemmy feels larger over the same timeframe, but that’s just sticking my thumb up in the air sort of measurement.
The problem with growth is that too much, and it ends up trolls and bots making up the majority, and too little growth means it withers on the vines.
With federation (and the ability to defederate), I think the ideal ground can be found. We’ll see though!
davi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
i think there’s plenty diversity outside of .world
Fuck_u_spez_@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
There’s also a wide and endlessly customizable variety of web/mobile clients, something reddit will apparently never have again.
fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 5 weeks ago
Once upon a time, there was Then Reddit, and Now Reddit was Then forums. One day, Future Lemmy will be Now Reddit, and Now Reddit will be Now Forums.