I was looking for a Reddit alternative for years. I would have been cool with anything non-corporate, but figured it would take ages to build.
It’s incredible what Lemmy has turned into so quickly. A Reddit alternative went from being impossible to actually existing within a matter of weeks.
As much as that makes a great story… The groundwork for lemmy goes back years. It’s true that lots of issues were addressed and client apps were ported after Reddit started going down hill, but a ton of work was done beforehand to make that all possible.
client apps were ported after Reddit started going down hill
For me, this can’t be overstated. I don’t work in an office/at a stationary computer and 99.9% of my Reddit time was mobile. I checked out the “mobile apps” for Lemmy, and hated them. I probably wouldn’t be active here at all if it wasn’t for good dedicated apps like Sync.
I haven’t used Reddit since the blackout. Thankfully Sync for Lemmy was out within a few weeks. Sort by TopDay and there’s enough content on here to scratch my itch.
Voyager for Lemmy is really good and open source. You should try it, might get a better mobile experience.
Plus building it is kind of the easy part – the hard part is getting people to migrate over and having enough active posts / users that people feel it’s worth their time to stay and post as well. Migration will inevitably splinter communities as well, especially small ones, where not enough people move over (or don’t move quickly enough). I’ve seen so many alternatives where the userbase was too small or not posting enough or just right wing trolls or the site was unusably buggy. lemmy managed to be good enough in all those categories at the perfect time - when reddit spat in the face of their users.
It’s the niche topics that need more activity. I love science - mostly space/physics - and it’s mostly a ghost town. Once the unique corners grow their activity, it’s going to be great.
I wish there was a better way to port communities over here. There are people complaining that Lemmy shouldn’t copy Reddit (I say, why not?), but then there’s legitimate complaints about homesteaders running to Lemmy and snatching up all the popular subreddit names.
Regarding the content problem, I see the repost bots are still active, I wish they could be either turned off or have their rates severeöy limited.
At first glance they make Lemmy seem active and vibrant, but since they are just bots few people vote on the posts and fewer comment on them, they post so much the any original Lemmy content in those communities gets drowned out by the bots reposting Reddit threads.
During the influx of users after the apikalypse these bots where probably needed to not scare people that there was zero content from different subreddits, but now they just seem to be holding those communities hostage.
Plus building it is kind of the easy part
I mean… not entirely. I’ve been on quite a few reddit alternatives over the years. Most of them passion projects by indie devs, and start struggling the moment they hit 4 digit users. Ruqqus was nicknamed “dumpster fire” because it would go down every time a new wave from reddit came over.
It’s incredible what Lemmy has turned into so quickly.
This couldn’t have been possible without the help of Spez and all the board responsible for the APIcalypse, thank you very much!
