No Stupid Questions

It's not owned by a greedy soulless corporation with a pigboy in control. There's more assholes on here (the AKSHUALLY is quite strong) but there's less hivemind.

When people say Lemmy is better, they mean the software and the platform are better. You’re talking about the users of the two platforms. Lemmy users are still idiots, just like Reddit users, we just use Linux and don’t use chrome

I swapped because I refused to use their garbage fire of an app and they shut down my beautiful RIF. Unforgivable.

Ads look better in the official ad delivery app - download the app

"Oh, you already have a third party app that you love? Too bad, we're killing it."

Download the official app to view the rest of this comment

We control it. It's libre software.

There's a lot less commercial interest.

Not just no ads, but also no users trying to push products or gain karma for account selling and all that crap.

You're coming at this from the design and community aspect. I don't think Lemmy makes significant improvements over Reddit on those fronts, it's designed the same, has the same benefits and drawbacks. As of right now the small size of the community makes it lacking in diversity and impractical for niche interests (aside from tech-related ones).

My case for Lemmy being better is a business case: Reddit was a for-profit company backed by venture capital, and is now publicly traded. They are extremely susceptible to enshittification, and are in fact already deep in that process.

Meanwhile, Lemmy is an open source software that enables users to host their own social media. It's not even a business at all, i'm not even sure if the developer (LemmyNet) is a business or a person or some other legal entity.

Fediverse social medias (Lemmy, Mastodon) are structurally resilient to the enshittification that we're seeing from corporate social medias, and i like that a lot.

Open mobile app support

Ad free (depending on the app and instance, but its pretty easy to get Lemmy without ads)

No CEO to make whacky, unpopular decisions without clear purpose or recourse

No shareholders whose priorities will always take precedence over the users

There's also something to be said for being part of a smaller community

Of course any and all problems can occur in microcosm within a particular instance or community, but it's trivial to just block that instance/community. As for brigading, bullying, and harassment, Lemmy offers no solutions to human nature, unfortunately.

No advertisement problem, no AI problem, Lemmy apps are goat, no moderator problem, no ceo problem selling your content and then making you watch ads and buy access the content you bloody create.

Fuck reddit.

Everyone’s talking about the tech, but I’ll talk about the user base. When you make a post or comment on Reddit, it often feels like you get lost in some black hole of other posts or comments. No one sees your comment because there are 1000 other comments on the same post.

At Lemmy, there are fewer users and fewer comments, but your comments actually get seen. People upvote. I weirdly get way more upvotes at Lemmy than I did at Reddit, in spite of the smaller user base here. Because of that, I’m way more active here than I was on Reddit.

open-source, self hostable and federated

It’s more different than better, and by different I mean better

In terms of variety of communities it isn't better, but the hope is over time people will continue to come over here as reddit decays and eventually it'll catch up.

I left reddit when they killed the 3rd party app I used. I didn't want to switch and I ended up here. in my opinion Lemmy still has a long way to go to be as good as what I left, but I don't want to support reddit anymore and I find it to be good enough here to still be enjoyable. I can still look at memes, and there's still some good discussion to be had.

The biggest thing Lemmy is missing is niche communities and a broader and less techy audience. I think both of those will happen overtime if the platform keeps growing. Crossing my fingers we get there.

We have plenty of 3rd party clients baby!

Lots of great answers, but I would like to know from you, WHY did you leave reddit?

For lots of us the last straw was closing down the API, since that meant we were forced into the official app. Such a thing is impossible on Lemmy because it's federated, so if an instance decided to do that, it would just get ignored by everyone else.

I recently migrated here. I did so as a precaution, and still browse reddit sometimes .

Reddit IPO'ed, and is now focused on making money. They removed the API to centralize it's power and remove 3rd party apps. They threatened subreddits who protested, and shut some down. And have made sweeping changes to accommodate to advertisers.

The straw that broke the snoo's back was the CEO hinting at subreddit paywalls. I figured I would try to learn Lemmy again, and what do you know, it's more serious, has better comments and posts, segmented even more than reddit with the distros, and fully free/open source.

It also helps that I'm a huge computer nerd, and there's a lot of that on here, but you can find your niche.

It's federated so much more unlikely to be enshitified by money interests.

Right now the community is smaller and manageable so less bots and trolls

Overall, it isn't yet. Reddit has more developed niche subs, more in-depth posts and comments, and enough content even if you filter out the low effort stuff. Where Lemmy is better is that it is decentralized and not run like a corporate dictatorship with zero respect for its users the way Reddit is.

Hard to put into words. "Better" as in "more free" (as in freedom and no cost). Everything is maintained communally and so you and your data are not sold (out) for money.

Simple, no Karma whoring, real people to argue, no bots posting fake stories about something that happened related to the post, and best of all, controlled by users and not corporate people.

You can run your own instance and votes don't really matter.

No Ads, federated, Open Source, No big coorporation, community driven, no investors and stock market push, decentralized is the future IMHO.

For me it’s not that it’s “better” it’s just not the cesspit that Reddit has become. It’s certainly better for avoiding mindless negativity.

Loony power tripping moderators can only ban you from their little bit rather than from the whole site.

Decentralization.

That in itself is a huge advantage. Otherwise it's just Reddit 2.0

Why did you, personally, leave Reddit?

Listen, I won't dig into all the tech and philosophy of decentralization and anti-corporate ownershipa. There are other people here for that. But let me tell you why I am enjoying it: it's small, it ends, and it feels like early internet.

I load up Lemmy, and see a series of disjointed memes, or a current ongoing meme (like pondering the orb) and absorb that for a short while. I see a couple world news articles, a couple about Trump and a couple about places that aren't the US. I read an article about Ryzen's new chips not performing well on Windows and see someone's retro-gaming setup. Then, after about 10-15 minutes of scrolling, I go "oh hey, I remember this post from yesterday", and then I close Lemmy because, and this is the important part, I've hit the end of new content in my feed.

I still get the news, I still take in a couple memes about the current state of politics, or a celebrity flying her plane altogether too much, but I am never stuck here. There's no one trying to rage bait me for the sake of user engagement, and any argument I find myself in wraps up and moves on. I don't feel disconnected, but I am also never completely absorbed, and my life is better for it. Sure, sometimes while I am waiting in a line I load Lemmy only to discover there's nothing new for me in the hour since I've closed it. Sometimes I do the age old, "looking to busy myself", close Lemmy because there's nothing to see, immediately open Lemmy because I am looking for something to occupy my Internet poisoned brain. But being bored for a minute here and there is worth it, if it means a lot more free time because I am no longer absorbed in the rat race of infinite scrolling social media.

I think Lemmy is better in a series of ways, but the one that really matters is that it helps me put down my phone, and do things that I enjoy.

Less locked down than Reddit. No CEO bent on taking your user created content and charging for it. No CEO trying to polish a turd for advertisers to make $$ while simultaneously completely taking for granted and disregarding the mods and users that actually make Reddit exist. No communities captured by shills and groupthink. Well…except for places like hexbear or some .ml, but there’s no pretenses there. You know what you’re getting into. Lemmy is more egalitarian, plenty of apps for mobile devices, people generally have a discussion and not just be the retread cheap quip for upvotes.

Also, Reddit IMO has gotten “colder” for lack of a better word. People don’t upvote. You’re more likely to be criticized for a position than engaged with. Opinions that disagree with the hive mind are often quickly downvoted regardless of whether or not the position has validity.

Lemmy is just more chill.

NO SPEZ. That's enough

25% of reddit comments are chatgpt trash if not worse. It used to be an excellent Open Source Intelligence tool but now it's just a bunch of fake supportive and/or politically biased bots

I will miss reddits extremely niche communities, but I believe Lemmy has reached the inflection point to eventually reach the same level of niche communities

You're on lemmy.world, which is pretty much exclusively Reddit refugees, so you probably won't see much difference in culture there, but that's what I consider the main advantage.

As in, I left Reddit when I noticed the toxic culture was fucking with my mental health.
Lemmy isn't particularly great anymore in this regard either, but still magnitudes better.

No corporate control

The form of this kind of social media has got the same set of upsides and downsides as it does on Reddit. It won’t be exactly the same because the people are different, but the problems aren’t that different and the people aren’t that different either.

As a mostly lurker I find the experience pretty similar. I scroll through and find some interesting articles, bits of news, memes. It’s a slower pace, but I think in time it'll grow faster. People migrate over occasionally, but there may be a critical mass moment when it’s big enough that lots of people start flooding over. Or it won’t and it’ll just fizzle out to nothing over time, who knows. For the moment it’s good enough for me to have replaced Reddit entirely.

As for things that are better: you get a lot more control over how you want to experience it. There’s no singular controller always dragging the experience down toward profitability. There are clients a-plenty, the api is open, you can control what parts of the network you see and which you don’t. It does take some effort, of course.

As for worse, because there’s no singular entity controlling the network, there’s going to be some very dark corners. You can block them (many will be blocked by individual server operators already), but they’re still there and they get to carry the Lemmy name and newcomers are most likely to experience it.

Just my thoughts on the subject, it’s been discussed a lot, I’m sure other people have quite different perspectives.

Honestly? Muuuuuuuuuuuch nicer Posts. I see so many more wholesome Posts here. FFS, even the GreenText's are more wholesome.

It still falls into some of the same pitfalls that Reddit had (groupthink, reflexive commenting, power-tripping mods), but some of those problems I don't know that there's a way to get around them in this format, they're just a human nature sort of issue. I appreciate that Lemmy doesn't appear to be owned by a giant mega-corp trying to harvest our "intellectual", but we'll see how that pans out in the future. I've just gotten used to every online service I've used eventually going to shit.

I like that there's no advertising at the moment, I don't know that I would mind it so much if there was advertising, as long as it was kept minimal. I know these things don't just happen for free and if money is needed to help keep the lights on and such.

Lemmy isn't a single website like reddit.com is. It's rather a collection of decentralised servers ("instances") offering the same service (one very similar to reddit). It's often compared to e-mail - just as Gmail users can talk to Outlook users, lemmy.world users can post and comment on lemmy.ml from their home instance.

What this does is it removes the centralised aspects of Reddit - if a community has powertripping mods one can make an alternate community (like on Reddit). But this goes a step above - powertripping server admins can be reigned in by simply switching instances.

spez has no power here.

You've gotten plenty of replies, so I'm sure this has been said. There's nothing to make the content or behavior better. The thing that's better is it isn't controlled by a single entity. If 9ne of the hosts tries to use their power to restrict API calls, for example, the other instances can ignore them. Anyone can always spin up new instances as well.

That said, one instance (Lemmy.world) has far more users and communities than any other, which isn't ideal. If they were to just cut ties with everyone else then a lot of people and communities would become lost. This doesn't have to be the case, and hopefully it diversifies, but it is the case right now.

Reddit is owned and controlled by a corporation (Condé Nast.) They disabled 3rd party Reddit apps to force people onto the official Reddit app which also broke many third party moderation tools. This disproportionately impacted power users, frequent posters, and mods-- in other words, the people who made Reddit the important community it was.

They showed an unwillingness to listen to their community or work with the unpaid volunteer moderators, instead banning the moderators who took part in the Reddit Blackout and replacing them with mods willing to cooperate with the enshittification of the site.

They've been mangling the web interface to be uglier and less usable (old.reddit.com is still up, but the mobile version of old.reddit.com is gone). They've been experimenting with ways to show more ads and subtler ads.

Lemmy is open source and federated so it can't get bought up by a company and cored out for shareholder value. You can use different instances, or a variety of apps. You can use (or create your own) third party tools for accessibility and moderation.

Lemmy is currently a smaller universe than Reddit was, but it has a high ratio of good posters and moderators who care personally about their own communities, so hopefully it continues to grow.

No company owns every single Lemmy instance. That's the only guarantee you are getting; however, that's where all of the tiny differences come from.

It's a better crowd. Feels more like 2009 Reddit and forums. I can use whichever app I want