And here on Lemmy, nothing looks like obvious bot posts. Content seems real.

This is one of the biggest positive differences at the moment. We are still (mostly) too small to be worth investing with botnets. You get a lot more actual human interaction here.

Lemmy.zip federates (servers that accept messages from other servers) with everyone, so you’re on a pretty good instance too. 👍

In case there’s any content you don’t want to see though, feel free to make liberal use of blocks (at the user level, community level, or instance level) to tailor your feed to your liking.

Yeah, Reddit is deep in a downward spiral, as it arguably has been for years.

And Lemmy (along with the fediverse/threadverse in general) is pretty great. Of course, it’s much smaller here for sure, but that has its ups and downs. As much as I would love to see the fediverse grow, I’m happy right now that it isn’t suffering many of the same problems that the big legacy corporate social media platforms are (bots, scraping, corporate shilling, endless slop mills, addictive and manipulative algorithms, power-tripping mods and admins, dark patterns, etc.). This place feels like a real community, or rather, a bunch of real communities all tied up together. It undoubtedly takes a little more effort and participation on the part of the individual user to get the most out of Lemmy, but I think it’s in many ways more rewarding in the end.

I’m now permabanned from Reddit for some stupid reason, and so the new requirement to be logged in to even read the site has made it pretty much useless for me under any circumstance. After more than a decade on the paltform my relationship with Reddit is all but over now, and that’s probably for the better, frankly.

Hopefully we can continue to find a way to grow the platform without inheriting many of the problems that Reddit has today.

I recently looked back at some of the subreddits I used to frequent. There doesn’t seem to be as much engagement as I remembered. It may be a smaller community here, but people seem more active? Could just be some sort of perceptional bias, but reddit doesn’t seem the wellspring of ideas and witty comment threads it once was. I like it here better.

The Fediverse in general and Lemmy in particular aren’t necessarily immune to poison and bots and the like, but we do have some resistances that might keep us safer.

The first and most obvious is that there’s no ads, and because there’s no ads there’s also no benefit to the site admins or devs wanting to trick you and addict you into using the site more with algorithms and stuff. Like, we could write dark patterns… but why? We don’t get any money or anything from you being here… in fact if anything all the usage you do technically costs the hosts money! I mean, don’t stop posting stuff, it’s worth it, but the people running it really are running it just to facilitate community and communication.

The second thing is that there’s no karma. There are upvotes on posts and comments, but those are basically just used to sort things relative to other things. But what it means is that people want to engage either because they’re interested in making the community more vibrant, or because they’re a perpetually online loser 😉 but they don’t actively benefit from posting just to farm.

These two things make the community more organic. That having been said, there can be exceptions still. I could make a bot that posts “you should buy these headphones: AMAZON_AFFILIATE_LINK”, and essentially run my own ads in the posts and comments sections of communities just because there are eyeballs there. We don’t see a lot of those because we’re small, probably, but if we grow we’ll probably see more of them, and we’ll have to figure out what to do then. There’s also a version of this which is NSFW posts where they’re advertising their OnlyFans (or equivalent) in their profile, so their whole thing is kind of an ad. I’m not saying there’s necessarily anything wrong with this second one, but it’s an entity with different goals than conversation, for sure.

And then there’s the kind of bots that are politically motivated rather than financially motivated. The kinds you sometimes see on other social media who aren’t trying to get eyeballs really, they’re not trying to sell you anything, they’re just trying to make you sad or angry or distrustful of the people around you. We don’t really have any built-in defense against that any more than other social media. We’re currently small enough that maybe it’s not worth it, but when it comes for us it’ll probably hit the same here as anywhere else.

So some benefits from the tech and ethos, but some benefits just due to newness and smallness.

Followed a similar path as you - a few months ago. I went from using the self-compiled infinity app on Reddit, (which so far still works) to Voyager on Lemmy. At first I was sort of opening both like 50/50, but now I’m at the point I only open Reddit like if I do a search and need to see an answer that happens to be on Reddit.

Lemmy was a little too slow at first but I see post volume going up slowly, and I keep subscribing to new communities. I share a lot of the sentiment here and am excited to see Fediverse systems continue to succeed and pull people away from the advertisement machines.

Stopppp you’re making us blush🙈☺️

i just noticed the forced log in on mobile, its alot more aggressive on a mobile phone than on a desktop, you can easily use ublock origin to put custom filters on desktop. on the phone if you try to bypass, they will disable the comments(hide it) if you remove the popups. also they are slowly rolling out the forced login, so they can figure out how to bypass ublock origin altogether.

im actually hearing reddit lost quite alot of traffic to the site recently, likely due to sheer amount of AI bot posting, spamming going on. and reddit likely is running out genuine user content which AI is scraping the site for data, so the forced login is way to bring user generate content back.

Plus reddit purges for months on end after the election early last year, it banned multiple accounts of actual users, so now they have less users to datamine from. botters/spammers are not going to be stopped by the stupid login anyways, they can easily purchase hundreds if not thousands of accounts as throwaway, plus propaganda troll farms can make tons of accounts use automation. and google is the beneficiary of the reddit data, which is why they try to limit the amount of accounts on your devices/phones for a google account. and yes i made one using a hotmail to bypass google, for niche content on reddit.

as soon as the purges died down, the lack of actual users is noticble, and the increase of AI bots as well. it is a matter of time reddit uses facebooks aggressive login tactics. and alot of his were here from 2 migrations, 1 from the API disaster, and 2nd from the massive purges last year.

Welcome!

Welcome! I’m also a Reddit refugee. The first thing that struck me was how like ancient Reddit it is, like you. I hope as more people come over it stays awesome like it is now.

Yeah, seriously! I joined Reddit sometime around 2010 because I used to have this web-based IRC link aggregator I would browse every morning and it went dead. Reddit’s interface (now “old” Reddit) looked almost exactly like the aggregator. I looked at Digg too, didn’t like it. Well then the Digg thing happened and Reddit exploded in popularity and was basically worthless outside niche communities within 3-4 years. Too many damn people, impossible to get a word in edgewise or be seen at all.

I got on Lemmy two, going on three years ago now… and it has always felt exactly like Reddit did in 2010. Quiet, threads big enough to read and to participate in but not so big you get drowned in a sea of bullshit. The best thing is, all these years in and it’s still not enshittifying! The Fediverse don’t care about being the big boys and imo it’s great because of it. I hope it’s like this for a good long while. Just enough patronage to be sustainable would be perfect.

Edit: I just noticed your username! A man of culture, I see.

One of us!

Welcome, glad to have you here! Yes, the feel of this site will be quieter, more human and personal and a lot like early Reddit, with the good and bad attached to it. Please enjoy your time here.

The fediverse is pretty much a project of the community, without an overarching moneyed interest pulling the strings. Every bit you can contribute to a healthy and vibrant discourse will be appreciated.

I’ll put forward a couple of the challenges Lemmy and Piefed have, so you know it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, you can level your expectations accordingly and ride out the bumps.

As a site largely of tech freedom enthusiasts that contribute their free time, users, mods and site admins here tend to have strong convictions and sometimes that has brought about extreme personality traits that can seem unreasonable from the outside. That means is now and then, you might face a couple dozen downvotes for what seems like a normal take to you, a post removal or comm ban from a mod or admin that doesn’t like the topic you post about, and some drama and bickering between prominent users or admins. Just don’t take it personally.

Understand that unlike Reddit where admins have full centralized control and are like kings of their empire, Lemmy and Piefed servers are like smaller fiefdoms that each respective admin has control over. Your account at lemmy.zip allows you access to other Lemmy site’s communities but just be aware you are subject to that site’s rules and idiosyncrasies as well. Luckily we have a public modlog where you can review the reason given for what happened to yourself or someone else. You can make a new account on a different Lemmy-compatible site or even host your own, if .zip doesn’t suit your needs. Lastly, the way to publicly appeal unreasonable mod behvaiour if direct communication fails, is post to !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com, bring your old account name and people can judge who is the reasonable one.

So get out there and have fun!

Welcome!

You might also check out your sister site, PieFed.zip. Even if you like Lemmy.zip better (maybe for the UI? though Voyager should work fine for both), PieFed has just absolutely fantastic onboarding tools, and can make you aware of many communities that you may want to join.

And a shit-ton of other features as well. One major caveat though is that most of those are only accessible via a web browser, as Voyager currently offers only rudimentary support for PieFed. Still, it’s worth checking piefed.zip out via Web browser (i.e. make an account and go through the sign-up wizard steps) at least once so that you’ll know what’s possible.

Either way, whether you stick with your initial Lemmy account or switch permanently to a new PieFed one, the .zip admin team seems superb - you should really enjoy your experiences there.

I’m here because I, again, got banned on Reddit for no reason. I had a comment taken off. I contested it and within hours I was banned. They won’t tell me why my comment was bad, then my entire account. If you break a rule then tell me which one! It’s super obnoxious. And it’s a damn bot that does the banning. Makes no sense. So I’m here because I want something similar and it’s better here. It’s taking a bit of getting used to but I’ll figure it out.