I was a long time reddit user, and made a couple new accounts as throwaways last year from different emails but they kept getting shadowbanned everytime I tried to post, comment or send a message. Just last night, my 3 year old account I had no issues using it at all got shadowbanned as soon as I sent a message. It’s just so frustrating how hard reddit is moderated and there’s no explanations given either they just shadowban you and I don’t even know where to ask anyone either I installed Lemmy, hoping it’ll be a good alternative and it is great and a lot of things I like about reddit, but there’s a significant lack of the type of communities that I browsed in reddit. Hopefully I’ll find them here or more people will join and it’ll be better. So what made you install Lemmy and what did you wish Lemmy had?
I assume you mean the federation in general or at least the reddit alternatives like mbin or lemmy. this is asked every so often and there are sorta multiple waves and I came in response to the reddit api thing were it was really apparent how things were gonna be.
Early last year I decided I wanted to join social media so I’d periodically look up lists of different social media websites and I joined the ones I vibed with. Lemmy was on one of those lists. I’ve been having such a great time so far! 😃
It seems like most people joined Lemmy for the 3rd party apps. I admit I am not familiar with reddit 3rd party apps and what they do in terms of functionality, I’d love if someone explained them to me
They’re just apps not made by Reddit, but made by Reddit users, some of which were paid. And many which were significantly better and more reliable than Reddit’s.
A quick example on Lemmy just with the web, these are all lemmy.world but different UIs:
- https://a.lemmy.world/ - Alexandrite UI
- https://photon.lemmy.world/ - Photon UI
- https://m.lemmy.world/ - Voyager mobile UI
- https://old.lemmy.world/ - A familiar UI
And that one too: https://tesseract.dubvee.org/
And that’s just the web browser ones, there’s a bunch for iOS and Android too. Reddit had even more.
A good app that matches your style of scrolling really makes a difference.
The Official client was mid at best and hundred of thousands of people where on various third party apps.
Then Spez wanted to sell API access to train AI so it became prohibitively expensive for most third party reddit clients to continue.
So I didn’t want to apply their app and on top of that it was to sell my data to AI businesses.
I actually wanted to nuke all my comments to be sure they couldn’t use them but didn’t manage to do it reliably.
But yeah the fact that they completely killed the reddit client I used just to sell my data for AI training was the last straw for me.
Also reddit was getting quite toxic especially in some subreddits IMO.
They literally acquired the Alien Blue client, which at the time was the best Reddit client according to many people, and used it as the base for their official client. How on earth did they fuck it up this badly??
I never used Apollo since I was stuck on Android. But I still wish I had the chance to use it while it was available.
What a shame. It’s almost like the biggest companies make the worst crap or something.
The goal of 3rd party apps is to do what’s best for the user so they continue to use their app
The goal of Reddit’s official app is to do what’s best for Reddit
It’s possible to expand on the functionality but that’s the fundamental misalignment on priorities regarding users
Tired of 14 YO “experts” and trolls.
I used Boost for Reddit but well, we know how that went. I really loved Boost. The dev pivoted to Lemmy, so I did as well. So far the experience has been pretty solid.
I’m not sure I’m aware of reddit boosts or 3rd party apps, could you please explain to me how those work and how it was a deal breaker to so many people here on Lemmy?
Reddit changed the API which meant that any popular third party apps were going to have the pay thousands or even millions to Reddit just to access it.
Third party apps like Boost, Apollo etc all left the platform but some devs created apps for Lemmy instead which gave people the experience they were used to. Reddit official app is full of ads and you can’t download half the stuff you want.
I always wanted more decentralized alternatives. But none of them ever had any real users, then June 12, 2023 happened and I found out about this, that everyone is going to. And actually not a dead platform.
Also, booty: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com (blocked by lemmy.world instance)
I already quit many corporate social media platforms in the years before, switching to decentralized alternatives for some of them (Mastodon mainly), but was still active on Reddit somehow. Then during the Reddit blackout protest, it was as good a time as any to check out and switch to Lemmy. Its downsides for me are also part of the upside: there is no endless scrolling to be done.
I quit Reddit many years ago, because I noticed the toxic culture was fucking with my mental health. Then I was on Mastodon for a few years. Lemmy started to exist in that timeframe and the premise sounded good, so I joined pretty early on, when there were only a handful of posts every week or so. But yeah, these days Mastodon is what I check only occasionally and this place has taken over, as I do like the format a lot more.
Reddits CEO.
Reddit just isn’t fun without Reddit is fun.
I still have RiF installed for the nostalgia.
I left it on my phone for a long time. Then I started to get worried about it not being maintained.
Wait, you guys are getting paid!?
Damn and I did it for free?? Where can I redeem my 20 bucks for becoming a lemming too?
I came over with everyone else in the big exodus wave from Reddit when they killed third party apps.
I didn’t even use a third party app so it didn’t affect me, but as an old-school Internet user I believe in federated networks over centralized services and it seemed like the one opportunity to finally get critical mass.
I have a very similar experience, I only left because I noticed just how awful the website has turned by the time the API fiasco happened, and I was definitely getting a bit addicted to the website so leaving essentially made me combat this addiction. I haven’t logged into Lemmy for over a month. Yeah, it has definitely helped me cut down on social media usage.
Same here, both the X and the Reddit things came at a time when I was trying to cut down on social media usage as it was definitely having an effect on me. Having social media that runs out and doesn’t just go on for infinity is so much healthier.
Fun fact: I deleted Twitter exactly 23 days before it was renamed to X. I was just tired of scrolling through drama.
I’m the same but I used Apollo, and the ads + principle of what they did drove me away permanently And I scrambled all my comments
Not sure which wave in the toilet bowl I rode in on, but I do know I will one day be flushed.
Don’t hang on to tightly.
Happy new year and welcome to Lemmy!
TL:DR; Reddit sucked, I got bored when it was offline. Lemmy has similar moderation BUT a transparent modlog. Post grouping, more niche communities I’d like to see.
I had first heard about Mastodon in early 2022, but since I wasn’t into Twitter-style posting I kind of forgot about it and moved on.
The quality of discussions I was having on Reddit had noticeably declined over the years, and top posts were bots posting reposts, and the top comments under those posts started to become straight up copied from past top comments.
Compact mode got turned off, and later the apps had an outage in March 2023, so it was actually out of boredom when I had stumbled across Lemmy for the first time. It was a tiny thing of around a few hundred active users across all sites then.
API pricing scandal happened a few months later, my distaste for Reddit increased and simultaneously Lemmy’s popularity exploded. So for June I made it my transition period to convince others to join, and in July I made my farewell post, swearing never to post or comment on Reddit ever again. I peek into Reddit on occasion but Lemmy had fully replaced my Reddit habit by September.
Conversations here have been far more lively, nuanced, mature. It doesn’t always happen, as there are immature clowns and trolls here like anywhere, but we have reasonable people who are able to have a productive conversation while having positions at odds with each other. This virtually never happened on Reddit.
Tip for you, there are some types of comments allowed on some communities but banned or frowned upon on others. If you get a comment removed, check the modlog, filtering for your username as to why it may be. It may feel like censorship or power tripping, but at least it is more open and transparent. You can make an account on another server or post on different communities, if it’s simply a matter of differing philosophies with the controlling admins.
I’d want to see grouping features of communities, and also there are a number of bounties on features that would be great to see. Development isn’t fast so I just have to be patient. More niche topics would be cool to have.
Apollo for Reddit died. Came here as it was supposedly a better experience. Used to be super active and use Reddit for hours a day for nearly a decade, now I barely use this platform at all as it’s insufferable and tiny tbh. The Linux Cultism here is off the charts and cringe as fuck, the communities are tiny and spammy and bloat the All page, so I block users and communities every day, and it’s been a pretty mediocre experience here for the year I’ve used it. Reddit is ofc a crapshoot now so it’s not worth going back, so I just use this platform for maybe 5-10m a day and that’s all my social media browsing for the day. So Reddit dying and not being replaced with a decent alternative actually cracked my addiction for endless scrolling which is super nice.
Just ban Linux as a keyword? It’s easy to do on the voyager app.
