Ask Lemmy

It's a message board like reddit, with the benefit that it isn't owned by one corporation.

So if a weirdo server owner goes weirdo, the others can just break contact, which has happened before. If one country creates stupid laws, the servers in the country can simply shut down or move.

Communication flows more like a spiderweb instead of a pyramid.

To your third question: yes. I actually moved here a couple of years ago from reddit, due to that API nonsense. It's a smaller community, with much less content. But honestly, it's better this way.

Let go of user count; return to quality.

Yes, it's like Reddit. But you've got a much much smaller population. And it attracts a certain type, you have to have a certain minimum tech aptitude to be able to figure out the fediverse.

You won't find anywhere near as much content here, and no niche content. You need to browse "all" and will run out of fresh content if you spend too much time doom scrolling. But it's still good and worth checking out.

It's similar to Reddit, but one of the defining features is that it's not owned by a company, or by anyone at all. Anyone can stand up a Lemmy instance and participate as a part of the distributed system. All the instances can interact (federate) with all of the others, or choose not to with specific instances.

Currently there is only a fraction of the user base on Lemmy as on Reddit, so there's less content. There are also a lot fewer bots and trolls, so conversations tend to be more civil.

Because getting started on Lemmy is slightly more complicated than Reddit, more of the user base tends to be technically inclined, and they tend to be more liberal, so you'll find Lemmy is more left leaning generally.

I believe the browsing style defaults to "local," which means only content on your local instance. Change that to "all" and you'll see more. The other selector let's you see different sorting views - if you're new you might start with "top week" or similar to see what has they most upvotes over they last seven days.

Welcome!

It's an alternative to Reddit in the Fediverse.

The Fediverse is a network comprised of such software (Lemmy, Mastodon, PieFed, PixelFed, etc.)

Federation is the ability for different platforms to communicate using an agreed upon language (in the Fediverse, this language is called ActivityPub).

So if Instagram and Twitter were federated, you'd be able to post your photos on Instagram and have them also be on Twitter, all without having a seperate account at Twitter. All the likes and comments on Twitter will be available on Instagram and vice versa.

And because of this, servers (or instances of platforms) are not really dependant on each other. So even if lemmy.world were to shut down, every other instance will still operate just fine. For example, I run my own Lemmy instance lemmy.asudox.dev. Even if every other Lemmy instance were shut down, my instance will still continue operating without any issues. Any new instance can then link with my instance and start federating. The power of decentralization.

A nice video explaining the Fediverse by the Peertube team: https://framatube.org/w/9dRFC6Ya11NCVeYKn8ZhiD

The video and my explanation are over simplifications. Federation will not work between all instances the same. Mastodon and Lemmy don't federate fully. For example, Mastodon has no communities. Mastodon users just post (or "toot", like "tweet" in twitter) on their profile. So you can't subscribe (or follow) users in Mastodon from Lemmy nor see their posts, unless they post it in a community (which appear as just another user in Mastodon).

If you want to know more about the technical details, check the specification for ActivityPub at W3C.

Like reddit but feels like an actual community. Just be forewarned, there are angry troglodytes here, just like any other online forum. Keep the positive, ignore the negative. Many people say to block .ml/etc adresses as they are here only to flame, but I haven't seen that correlation yet.

You can subscribe, or view All and then you'll see everything as its posted. But there will be a complete mix of stuff from different languages and interests, so you need to start subscribing to communities you like, or blocking communities that don't interest you (for me that's all of the anime / furry stuff).

It's nowhere near as big as reddit, so it doesn't have the same number of posts or range of interests. But I think the community is better, discussion more personal and popular posts have dozens of replies not hundreds, so it's less faceless.

Do you scroll all??? Because that should not be empty. If your subscribed is empty and you want to scroll on subscribe then yeah you have to subscribe to stuff. Personally I just scroll all and then block communities im not interested in. My main examples are sports and meme ones.

What is the user count vs reddit?

I'm not sure instances actually publish their user counts. You can measure by activity, which adds up to maybe 10 events a second. If you could figure out the average rate per user you could get an estimate from that.

Lemmy is a reddit alternative. The user count is much lower. Sticking around is up to you, walk around and see.

You can just browse all or browse all of your instance (the Portuguese lemmy?).

The pro vs reddit is that it's federated. This means that every lemmy instance can have its own rules, communities and members, but they can interact with other lemmy instances (for example, I'm from lemmy.world) as long as the home instance allows connecting to that lemmy instance.

It works similarly to reddit, but there is no one company controlling it all. You could start your own instance today and federate with any instance you like. The user count is a lot lower, as you might expect, but you'll still get a decent amount of content through actual users, but also a lot of bots posting news to specific communities.

I use Boost for Lemmy, it used to be a reddit client. It also gives you the option to block or mute users, communities or entire instances. For me, this means I can subscribe to stuff I'm really interested in but just use all for scrolling through the lemmyverse.

I think it's better. Reddit seems mostly bot regurgitated content these days. Also I'm still salty after getting site banned.

Beans

When reddit kicked out my preferred client I edited/shredded all my posts and comments, deleted my account, and came here. I don't regret it one bit.

Complaining mostly

Yeah, it’s basically an alternative to Reddit that federates. Since Reddit is centralized and closed source, they can push a lot of content on you immediately to get you started, which is a good thing. Lemmy, being decentralized and open source, would have a lot of push back if they tried to do that (which imho is bad, because it’s hostile to new users, but understandable, because there’s a sense of fairness that would be lost with that approach), so you start off with a blank slate, like you described. I recommend following some news and memes communities just to get started. You can also browser the All feed and follow some communities you see there.

One of my biggest gripes with Lemmy's approach is that I’ll see the same things over and over when I refresh my feed.

Overall, I think Lemmy is good. Its upsides outweigh its downsides to me.

1. yup, link aggregator / forum site that is not controllable by a corpo or single individuals
2. hard to measure, but here you can see a bit more info regarding activity on the lemmy part of the fediverse. 3)for sure. pros of lemmy: you don't get drowned out if you comment by a horde of meme comments, discourse is mostly civil and a lot more real discussion takes place in comparison to reddit. Lemmy also has a lot of apps that reddit lost.