Just a little rant. When I first visited Lemmy Sites a couple of months ago it felt empty. Besides the really mainstream community pretty much everything else just felt empty.

Meanwhile though traffic has increased a lot and I feel well entertained by the traffic in c/hfy c/noncredibledefence c/keepwriting c/worldbuilding and so on. It is certainly less than Reddit but often quality is substancially higher and is “enough” to keep me entertained.

Also I like that you can actually post something without running into a bazillion deletes, bans and moderator shitshat because your post was two words to short, not NCD enough and so on.

Sure, the C64 community on Lemmy is laughable. So is the ARMA community. I still use REddit for that. Also I often check up stuff on r/hfy and r/NCD but since one week I have been prefering Lemmy for that.

Also my longer posts don’t get eaten up any more. God, three weeks ago most posts with 3k an more just got lost without feed back. Nowadays I have even manges posts around 20k without breaking them up. Though the editor is still lacking for longer posts. On Reddit I can copy-paste pretty much anything from Libreoffice into Reddits Editor (which is also pretty lacking but differently lacking). On Lemmy I have to run most text through a little perl script to get them even using correct line breaks perl -pe ‘s/\n/\n\n/’ and different sizes for Headlines are much to few to select from.

Not perfect, not even very good but definitely promising.

  • MyOpinion@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Slowly? Lemmy is easily as entertaining as Reddit and it is just getting going.

    • Bucky@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think people really understand that reddit is an 18 year old product. Their original site was iterated on for 10 years before they stopped building on it.

      Lemmy will get there and beyond. As the fediverse attracts more users, it will also attract more contributors. I’m starting to learn Rust myself in hopes I can contribute to the project at some point down the line.

      • someguy3@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah Reddit 10 years ago was very different than Reddit now. Too many people demand* a 1 for 1 replacement right now.

        *You don’t even need all those people. It was plenty good 10 years ago.

        • Riker_Maneuver@startrek.website
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          1 year ago

          I was on reddit before the digg exodus, and the current state of lemmy feels somewhat reminiscent of those times. When communities are smaller there is just a completely different feel than the 1 million+ subscriber goliaths some subreddits became.

          • devious@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Honestly, this is exactly how I feel too. I remember browsing Reddit when Digg was my primary source and Reddit felt so small and unpolished at the time! I don’t know if Lemmy will grow in the same way as Reddit did, but it is certainly on the right path.

          • tool@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I was on reddit before the digg exodus

            Man, I remember when that shitshow happened. It was like reddit’s version of Eternal September.

        • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
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          1 year ago

          That was the best era. The source code was open sourced, subreddits members know each other pretty well, the most prolific reditors are not reposters or super-mods. Actually fun AMAs and community-initiated events (meetups, secret santa, etc). Now it’s all gone, replaced by a TikTok clone.

        • SageWaterDragon@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Frankly, I really miss the Reddit of ten years ago, so this is great. Outside of fruitlessly pursuing infinite growth, none of the additions or changes to the site since then have improved it.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The flip side is there are some people who have been here a long time tho…

        But they’re almost exclusively rightwingers who were ip banned from reddit. Like the exploding heads instance is/was over a year old, and those people were insanely annoying before everyone defederated.

        The more time goes by, the more regular people join and water down that extremism

        • o_oli@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yeah I mean looking at the stats of new users, that watering down has already happened to the point where any extremeist shit is statistically insignificant by now. 99%+ of people here are just looking for a replacement reddit and that’s all, rather than some censorship haven where they can chat their extreme views.

        • Bucky@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yes it was interesting finding communities banned from Reddit who seemed like they had been here awhile.

      • vamp07@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I also think you’re going to see Lemmy continue to grow overtime because it does not need to be a Comercial success. It doesn’t need to go through the new owners, whims or financial needs. It’ll just continue to slowly grow until someday it overtakes Reddit. The mere fact that it can’t be taken down is in itself a huge advantage/defense.

    • deranger@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’ve been spending a majority of my time on here when I do my “Redditing”. I only visit the old site for niche topics. I spend as little time as possible there, I don’t upvote or downvote anything, and I don’t comment either. It’s read-only for me out of principle. I save all interactions for the fediverse.

      I doubt all the communities will rebuild elsewhere, but I’m okay with that. Some fragmentation is necessary. Smaller communities make individual voices louder, and you have less ugly “sidedness”. When humans get into a critical mass IRL they can start to do strange things, I think we see this in social media as well.

    • papajohn@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      I have way more fun on Lemmy. I do need some of the more esoteric an vast archived content from reddit from time to time. For that I just google reddit and no longer sign in. Fedi will get there soon enough though.

    • wth@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Its getting there, and there is some entertaining content on here (comments and posts). But I think we are still missing the super high end responses. No matter what the topic, one or two people would jump on and have deep specialised knowledge of the field - be it naming an insect from a blurry image or commenting on a geopolitical situation. I still see lots of posts that generate nothing more than “huh” or “wow” type comments.

      When that starts appearing more broadly, I think the quality here is going to take another leap.

    • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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      1 year ago

      I certainly hate the people here a lot less. I like how it isn’t the same garbage comments on every post where they hyper analyze videos frame by frame just to call things fake.

    • Plopp@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I love how people have different opinions and value different things. Personally I so far find Lemmy very very very much not as entertaining as Reddit. The lack of comments in particular makes it way less enjoyable imho. But hopefully it’ll grow.