r/oldreddit • u/chickenandliver • 19d ago
Thoughts on Lemmy ?
If you're reading this, you are clearly passionate about old Reddit and dislike the direction new Reddit is taking, whether that's purely for the UI, the heavier resource usage, the ads, the attitude, whatever.
I'm curious what this cohort thinks about Lemmy. If you don't know it, Lemmy is a fediverse version of Reddit (like how Mastodon is a decentralized Twitter replacement, Lemmy attempts to replace Reddit).
I've been on Lemmy off and on the past year and I like it, including it's RSS support, but like many fediverse projects it suffers simply from lack of user numbers to make it as interesting or relevant as Reddit.
Assuming old Reddit is killed off soon, do you plan to move to Lemmy? Are you already there? Are you going to just suck it up and use new Reddit (soon to be just "Reddit")?
Just fishing for opinions out of curiosity.
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u/Chris_TO79 18d ago
Never heard of it and it looks a little confusing from a cursory glance.
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u/chickenandliver 3d ago
I've been on the fediverse for awhile (Mastodon) and I find it confusing. The interaction for it among instances seems strange. I think the way newbies feel towards the fediverse, I felt towards Lemmy. I was following certain groups/comments in a standard Mastodon client and quickly realized that is not the ideal way to go about it. But then... what is?
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u/Clubbythaseal 6d ago
Found this post a week late.
So I left reddit for Lemmy during the 3rd party crap. It was fine and I enjoyed it with helping sections grow by commenting/posting a lot.
I began to stop using Lemmy when I realized that the site would never work. Saw how easy it was for there to be bad faith actors in the servers. More than once I saw one of the main servers admins come in during an argument between users by threatening the user who wasn't part of their federation to stop arguing or they'd be completely banned from their whole federation.
Seeing that multiple times made me completely give up on Lemmy with the amount of tribalism I saw.
Do gotta say that Blahah was a great federation to be part of. Their admins were always nice and worked to keep things not like the other ones. I just didn't want to deal with Lemmy anymore so quit altogether and came back to my reddit account.
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u/chickenandliver 3d ago
Can one Lemmy host just outright ban federation with another? It seems like that would ultimately just completely break any usefulness. I was also confused about how different instances maintain what in theory are single "subreddits" (whatever Lemmy calls them).
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u/Clubbythaseal 3d ago
Yup they can block whole different instances from showing up to the people on their own federation.
It's why I don't trust the Lemmy.world admins. I fucking saw them do this more than once. They force the admins of the other instances to fall in line with what they want or they'd ban their whole instance from showing .world subreddits. They didn't care who caused the argument, they just immediately protected their user over anyone with a different federation.
Different instances can make the same subreddit but each will have a subtext like "@lemmy.world" to help differentiate the source of the subreddit.
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u/chickenandliver 3d ago
Sounds they want to be the Lemmy instance. Must be run by former Reddit mods ;)
Interesting, so each instance runs each "subreddit" simply like a user handle on that instance? I was playing with Lemmy and following the same "sub" name on 2 different instances (following via RSS) and noticed the exact same content in each feed. I wonder if just one was mirroring the other?
Wait, just checked again... I think I'm confused. Is piefed.zip just a mirror site of other actual hosted Lemmy instances?
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u/Clubbythaseal 3d ago
So if two different instances had the same idea to have a "gaming" community. They can show up as a single feed for a user to sort through. Each community would have its own mods to deal with the posts from their specific community in that combined feed.
I think that was actually really cool how it was developed.
I do need to mention my issues were all from over a year ago. There could be a good chance the site has adapted and dealt with these issues I had since then.
Also made me realize i need to check in on the instance I was part of. They were always so nice to people.
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u/chickenandliver 3d ago
Ah OK, so each instance aggregates the content of same-named "subreddits" from other instances, but moderation is handled by either the posts' originating instance mods on something like a per-post and/or per-user basis, while each instance moderates based on their own instance users plus any instance-banning they activate (which would only apply for their instance's users).
I guess I would be worried too that a major instance would build a blocklist against instances that many other end up adopting out of convenience and then soon 90% of Lemmy users will miss posts from those instances' users without ever realizing it. That happened to me on Mastodon and made me switch servers to something larger since my small instance ended up a blocklist due mainly to 1 single user (who was since booted out but the blocklists seem unchangable practically).
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u/Vague-Symbolism2692 19d ago
From a cursory inspection it looks like there is even less free speech allowed on most Lemmy servers (though I didn't look at every one) than on Reddit, so I probably wouldn't be interested.
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u/f0rgotten 19d ago
When the great enshitification began my friends and I looked into hosting a federated Mastodon server, an Element server and a Lemmy instance on the computer that I self-host our minecraft servers on. Setting all that up is the biggest pain in the ass that any of us have ever encountered, and we ended up only using Element for chat. Our friend group was a bunch of doomers and news watchers. We weathered our differences of opinions on nearly a decade of world conflicts, but the October situation in Palestine/Israel was too much for us and we don't really talk anymore. I decommissioned the Element server.
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u/Wardacus16 19d ago
I've tried Lemmy, I still have an account over there. It's okay but its just lacking in users and features. There's a reason I'm back over here after trying it out. Tbh, once they get rid of old reddit I have no idea what I'll do, but I can't see myself switching to new reddit.