My only gripe is it is EXTREMELY left leaning in general, and if anyone has a less polarizing opinion about something the hive mind reacts.
Not to mention you can’t talk about anything political without someone bringing up how my political views promote genocide.
I like that Lemmy doesn’t have stupid levels of auto-moderation happening. And I like that threads don’t constantly get locked merely because people are engaging with them.
I like that it’s not reddit in terms of toxicity and powerdrunk mods. I really like the apps accessing Lemmy and the general tone in comments and discussion. As a German the community ich_iel is most of the content I need.
I dislike how long it took me to filter out the words „Elon“ and „musk“ because every second post on c/technology is about that man. Phew, my life is better without it. (I really like being able to filter)
No Ads. No corpos. No infinity scroll. No hate. Different opinions. Cool people. My daily bread.
What I like: flexibility for clients,nice people,etc.
What I dislike: not every community is here and some of the communism here as well as finding a instance you want is not the easiest
I've got no problem with the communists. I like having a part of the internet that isn't completely commoditised and filled with ads and people trying to sell side hustles. I hate the search function.
like: people are nicer here!! it also still has the old forum/chatroom vibe, and if the admins suck on an instance you can just. join another. and still subscribe to communities from the old instance. modlog is also pretty cool, allows for transparency between mods and users. i also cant doomscroll because like the other person said, there's an 'end' to it.
as well as editable titles lmfao
dislike: niche communities are hard to find, and the ones that do exist are usually empty. also some of instances' ui/css is extremely fugly and i physically cannot use it (why i left the fediverse before) (also the nice css was one of my reasons for joining dbzer0). also the tankies, but at least they're contained within hexbear, .ml and lemmygrad.
Like: It's not Reddit.
Dislike: The userbase is too small and there are way too many circlejerks in some communities and you get bashed to hell if you dare to disagree with them.
I'm not sure about the circlejerk thing. I am vehemently anti car and would like to circlejerk on one of the many "fuck cars" communities, but any post that gets some attention gets filled by comments of people not from those communities.
So I very often see posts where I agree with the content but the discussion and the comments are all over the place, from car apologists that are like "but IIIIIIIII live in the woods therefore public transit is not feasible for anyone", and it makes "circlejerking" difficult.
Like, if you have a community about mushroom and want to have enthusiasts discussing mycology, it'll be fine until a thread becomes popular and fills with users not from that community, asking what is mycology and why they should care.
To be honest, I had the same issue on reddit too and that's a major reason why I stopped going there.
What I like: The effort and persistence of the developers
What I dislike: The ActivityPub protocol.
I like the relatively sane moderation compared to Reddit.
I dislike the heavy far-left/communist presence here. I’m a lefty myself, but a lot of people here are extremists in my opinion, little better than the far right.
I’m also a lefty and often find myself going against the extreme grain here. The narratives about everything being a scam designed to steal your balls, the generational hatred, the cynicism and fatalism… That shit isn’t just more liberal than me, so I hesitate to even call it leftist extremism. I’m not sure what it is. Nihilism, maybe.
What I like: It is definitely nicer than Reddit was.
What I dislike: It lacks some of the communities I was frequenting in Reddit when it was good.
I dislike that Lemmy is such a left-wing echo chamber. Reddit had a much wider variety of opinions being voiced openly; on Lemmy, there’s almost none. It doesn’t take long to figure out what’s acceptable to say here and what isn’t. It’s a kind of self-gaslighting because it can make you feel like the opinions of the average Lemmy user represent the wider population when that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Also, there are almost no blue-collar workers here, and most discussions revolve around office jobs and big city life.
EDIT: and the extreme levels of cynicism.
The US has a left lean ("left" by US standards). What I mean by that is it's not an even split. The majority of Americans lean left. The only reasons the right has any power in this country is due to the first past the post voting system, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the electoral college.
I meet Trump supporters everyday. I see signs on the lawn in every town. I hear them speak in media regularly.
It's still in the sweet honeymoon period before getting ruined by redditors who compulsively shit on everything.
I wish I could filter communities by language.
Also one thing I like is the open war we have with memes with censured bad words for fucking fuck's sake
I have loved my time with Lemmy so far. I feel like people are much kinder here compared to Reddit, it feels like a genuine community of people that are willing and able to help one another out and chat and talk, without the people of Reddit that just bully and make fun of for no good reason other than just because. I think that’s the biggest reason I prefer lemmy over Reddit, along with the benefits of being decentralized and federated.
But I miss the near infinitely larger user base on Reddit and the things that come with that. On Reddit I can find a community for pretty much anything I can imagine. I’ve always loved using Reddit as a tool to help me learn, because regardless of what it is I’m learning I can find somewhere that I can ask any question I could think of, and 9/10 times someone out there out of the millions of Reddit users can give me a decent competent answer. That’s my favorite part about Reddit. That is, if they don’t just call me stupid and tell me I’m an idiot or something like that.
But I feel hopeful that Lemmy can get to a similar point some day.
The sidebar says email is optional but it's required to sign up, and your required to wait for approval before you can post.
It takes some time to block out stuff to make Lemmy usable. So much anime, bots and dumb American politics.
It's nice there are a bunch of apps for Lemmy, but using it without an app is not very welcoming. It needs a lot of improvement (e.g. manually compose urls to subscribe to communities on other servers).
Honestly I've been raw doging Lemmy. I chose an instance that doesn't block anything and I haven't blocked a single thing. I just scroll past the politics and usually sort by new comments. I don't see many bots at all
Like
Editable titles
"All" here vs other social media is much better
It's more likely that arguments are civil. There are still quite a few venomous arguments but I've noticed that it it proportionally less.
On Reddit or Facebook, if you didn't like a group you left and made your own. If you didn't like the admins, tough shit. Here, if you don't like the admins, you can use a different instance.
Likes and dislikes are separate, and are in some cases viewable who submit them. I feel like this keeps people a little more honest.
I like the modlog and transparency. It's so much easier that when someone complains about unfair mod action, to see if they are in the right or exaggerating.
There is an "end" to Lemmy. There isn't just infinite content to scroll through.
Dislike
Smaller user base means that niches that Reddit filled just aren't here.
There is an "end" to Lemmy. There isn't just infinite content to scroll through.
Neutral
The types of common negative personalities here are different from that of Reddit. Reddit has more misogyny, classism, antinatalists, and obnoxious atheists. (As opposed to the chill atheists.) Lemmy has quite a few people that are pretty shitty to those that are disabled or cannot get out of some situations. If you cannot work towards the greater good without any rest, can't escape a bad situation, or can't just extend yourself further, you are trash. There are also more fringe beliefs here. I do like it because of the different perspectives, even if I very strongly disagree. (It makes me think!) Unfortunately we still have the dumbass arguments about generations but you can't have it all.
I like the way Lemmy functions, with things like an open moderator log and the way that instances can be created to prevent too much control from one singular instance from pushing people completely off the platform if they have bad moderation, for example.
I don't like the users. For every one user that is nice and wants to have a legitimate conversation, there are like 300 that just want to fight/argue or spew politics into a non-political conversation. The number of users I have blocked on Lemmy is far longer than the amount of users I ever blocked on Reddit, and my Reddit account existed for about 10 years. This Lemmy account has only been around for about 1/10th of that.
One of the biggest strengths of Lemmy is also one of its biggest curses. Due to its federated nature, anyone can create a new instance. The problem with this is that particularly nasty users can keep creating accounts on instances they keep creating in order to harass people they don't like. So even if you block them, they just switch to a new account, etc. They can also do this for vote manipulation, not like that really matters on Lemmy but Lemmy users seem to have fallen victim to the same problem Redditors had: seeing a comment with 0 or -1 score and then completely disregarding whatever it said, not reading it and downvoting it automatically.
Here's a ~~hard~~ (edit: damnit! "hint"!) that when I noticed it, improved my experience on the Fediverse enormously. Enough to convince me not to leave it outright as I nearly did. Pay attention to what instance someone is from. It's no 100% guarantee... but it's not useless either. This is like 1000% more relevant for someone on an instance other than Lemmy.world, but it still helps for you too.
The aggressiveness also varies by community, so likewise, some of those are just straight up worth blocking (so that you don't keep forgetting and end up replying in it yet again and again) and finding alternatives for.
Dislike: every post inevitably has someone complaining about capitalism, Trump, police, Musk, …
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