cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1276669
Like a lot of others, I’ve been looking at Reddit alternatives recently which is what landed me here at Lemmy.
How do you think Lemmy compares to Reddit? But also, for people who have tried other Reddit alternatives than Lemmy, how do they compare? What has been the pros and cons of each community for you?
Lemmy is the closest thing yet for sure.
The main pros: decentralized*, productive conversations, no karma, open source.
The main con is that “decentralized” is a good idea, but it only works if practiced. Most people have jumped onto lemmy.world instead of spreading out. Minor cons include a lack of decent video embedding, missing some niche communities, and small bugs.
Overall I’ve rediscovered a lot of the internet that I had simply stopped checking because reddit took over my digital life. I read HackerNews again, the NYT, and a lot more. It’s nice.
Most people have jumped onto lemmy.world instead of spreading out.
The main reason I chose lemmy.world is because I wanted to set up a community and my account on an instance that seemed less likely to disappear. I suspect that’s the reason for many others as well, though it might end up being a false hope. Who knows…
I jumped onto BeeHaw when I first left Reddit, but found I couldn’t connect to some communities. It turns out that BeeHaw defederated from some Lemmy instances (like Lemmy.world) because they have more open registration. So I left BeeHaw and came to Lemmy.world.
Does this mean that I might need to occasionally interact with someone who doesn’t share similar views as me? Yes, but it also means I’m more free to join different communities that I wanted to join.
For me I started on lemmy.ml because that is where you get kinda herded to when you come initially. I don’t know if it’s still clunky, but when I was on there it was slow. Tried lemmy.world a couple days later and it was smooth as butter. My goal was the smoothest experience after the initial impression I got from lemmy.ml I was worried. But lemmy.world was way better. Been here for a month, lemmy.world went through a few server upgrades and the reddit hug of death on the first, but either they handled it pretty quick or I have become patient with it as I learned how the fediverse works.
I deleted my 10+ year reddit account right after spez’ AMA. I find lemmy quite serviceable as a replacement except I was missing my local subreddit. So I stood up an instance I’ll try to build up. But now I need to tell people about it so I had to create a new reddit account and post links on my local subreddit.
I like Lemmy more than I thought I would but it’s really rough in areas that Reddit’s polished more and it also is, well, pretty quiet. It’s a little hard to really dive into it when so much is clearly missing on even just the people not being there. I certainly miss a lot of subs I’d spend more time on, subs that have miles more subscribers than people who even use Lemmy as a whole. I’m hoping that more people jump over to here but it’s definitely not the same because there is still a void left unfilled. But I’ll live, it certainly reduces how much time I use social media overall since I never was a Twitter user.
For those reasons it reminds me what coming to Reddit in the first place was like. It’s really fun to build up a community. It’s hard to see compared to what Reddit is now, and the polish you speak of that to me while there are some conveniences or extra features has overall messed up what I liked about it. Lemmy or some other system may or may not ever be as popular as Reddit, but it’s way more engaging to be part of a growing community than an oversaturated one IMO. You get to help define what the place will be like to a much greater extent.
I came to lemmy/kbin a few weeks ago to check things out, and have been here ever since.
Quora - It’s just AskReddit, 24/7. Kinda gets boring after a while if your sole purpose is answering questions all day.
SaidIt - AltRight Central, taken over by the crazy lot to project their zany conspiracist views.
Voat - Dead, but once used to have been harbored by said conspiracists of altright.
Lemmy - Has a lot of potential, still developing.
Squabbles.io has some traffic
