What are your thoughts on the Lemmy ecosystem?

I’ve been trying it out for the last week. I have my own opinions, but I’d like to hear others and see if we have common ideas on what is good/bad/indifferent about the Lemmy ecosystem.

  • Blaze (he/him)@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    0·
    14 days ago

    Welcome here!

    Copy pasting from a recent thread on /r/RedditAlternatives trying to address usual criticism against Lemmy.

    Federation is confusing, people want a single website they can go to

    Email has been working on a federation model for decades. People have to remember if they use Gmail or Outlook, but that’s it. It’s similar here.

    Several communities have the same name, it’s confusing, active communities are hard to find

    Reddit has a similar issue: you have /r/games as the main gaming community, but there is also /r/Gaming, /r/videogames /r/gamers, etc.

    How does someone know what the main community is, whatever the platform? Looking at the number of subscribers and active members.

    There was the example of beekeeping: if you search for that topic, the most active one is definitely https://mander.xyz/c/beekeeping with 97 users per month.

    The others have barely 1 user: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=beekeeping

    To find active communities: https://lemm.ee/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world. There are regular threads with active communities on topic such as gardening, movies, board games, anime, science, etc.

    Who is going to pay for the server costs?

    Here is a link to this question to Lemmy admins: https://lemm.ee/post/41577902

    Summary of the answers:

    • lowest number so far: lemmy.ml with 0.03€ per user per month
    • a few others (feddit.uk, lemmy.zip) have around 0.11$ per user per month
    • some instances are running on infrastructure that the admins would be anyway, so it’s virtually “free”

    Most of the instances costs are paid using donations. They regularly post financial updates such as this one: https://lemm.ee/post/41235568

    Obviously there is a sweet stop where you can minimize the cost by having the maximum number of users on a fixed infrastructure cost.

    If you want to have a look at the number of monthly active user (the “MAU” column): https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/

    Anyway, $ per user is usually meaningless because most of the servers are small enough to be hosted on some random cheap server - adding more users doesn’t cost more because they are still well below server capacity. Only the biggest servers have to worry about $ per user.

    I had posted this earlier this week on this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fiuuo5/how_much_does_it_cost_per_user_to_host_a_lemmy/

    There is too much political content

    You can block entire servers and specific communities.

    Instances to block to avoid political content

    Communities to block

    With those blocked, you are avoiding 95% of the political content. There might be a few other communities that pop up, but blocking them is still one click away.

    Lemmy is developped by hardcore tankies and I don’t want to use their software

    As Lemmy is federated using an open protocol, there are other options to connect to the communities without using Lemmy itself.

    The first one is Piefed: https://piefed.social/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world

    The other one is Mbin: https://fedia.io/m/newcommunities@lemmy.world

    However, those are stil a bit less mature than Lemmy, so for instance if you want to use mobile apps a lot, Lemmy is a better choice.

    On top of that, every Lemmy server is managed by different people. You can see regular criticism of lemmy.ml (the instance managed by the Lemmy devs) on threads such as this: https://lemm.ee/post/33872586 or even dedicated communities like https://lemm.ee/c/meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works

    That shows that even the Lemmy devs are not protected from criticism.

    There isn’t enough people

    Lemmy has 46k monthly active users (https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats) (Mbin and Piefed have around 800 each). Active user is someone who voted, posted or commented.

    In comparison, Discuit, which was praised during the API shutdown as “easier to use as it’s centralized” has 234 active users: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/KdiI1akq. Not 234k, 234 total.

    For obvious reasons, the activity is not going to match Reddit levels, and niche communities aren’t there.

    But it’s not an all or nothing situation. Most people on Lemmy still use Reddit for their niche communities, but are also active on Lemmy. And some niche communities are getting more active on lemmy. https://lemm.ee/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world (!newcommunities@lemmy.world ) promotes them.

    Also, having less people provides better interactions, as your comments are less likely to get buried in thousands of others. And bots on Lemmy are quickly spotted and banned, while Reddit doesn’t seem to do much about that: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1fmcelm/askreddit_is_simply_over_run_with_bots/

    • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
      1·
      14 days ago

      Lemmy is developped by hardcore tankies and I don’t want to use their software

      I think the main point about this is that, so far, the development has been completely politically neutral and developers have in no way interfered with any instance having other political opinions.
      So they have been more neutral than Reddit developers even if they are public about their tankies ideas on their personal publications.
      Furthermore, it’s open source, so it could be forked any time if needed, unlike Reddit.

    • doctortran@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      How does someone know what the main community is, whatever the platform? Looking at the number of subscribers and active members.

      I don’t disagree but this is also kind of sad. We’re just recreating the same issue on Reddit of “definitive” subreddits controlled by whichever moderators were there first, and once a mass of people settles there, it becomes virtually impossible for smaller alternatives to grow.

      You’re also basically just telling people to go to whichever community happens to be on Lemmy.world. Which means centralization on one instance, which is the opposite of how this place was sold.

      Edit: Ignore the double comment.

  • GHiLA@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    13 days ago

    Yeah, but no, but yeah.

    On Lemmy, individual communities aren’t big enough to be communities but the community is big enough to be a community.

    So any post that makes it to the front of the entire Fediverse has quite a few familiar faces and feels like old reddit would.

    The issue I find with wanting Lemmy to be as big as Reddit is, you’re pining for an era of Reddit that doesn’t exist anymore. You can’t go back to 2011-2020 Reddit. It isn’t there to go back to. Bot posts aren’t just indistinguishable on occasion, they’re upvoted all the same, by other bots.

    This is the best you’ve got. Pitch a tent and make the most of it, fam.

    • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
      0·
      12 days ago

      Unfortunately the bot problem is coming to Lemmy.

      Bots posting content is already a thing here, and then taking up front page space is already a thing.

      Lemmy is speed running “How to lose your sense of community”.

        • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 days ago

          Yes, and with reddit having a baseline corporate & bot astroturfing rate of ~25% that’s not exactly a good bar to measure by.

      • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        I disagree somewhat bc of one very crucial factor: here bots exist but they tend to be labelled as such. Look in your settings on the web UI if you find this not to be the case.

        You click on a user account, then click block them, repeat just a handful of times and then bam, pretty much you have blocked all the bots there are. Yes it takes effort - it’s not done by default - but at least it’s possible, whereas on Reddit there is simply nothing that can be done, with virtually any amount of effort. Over there they are baked right into the system… right?

        And here the bots are, or even can be, helpful. A bot that you know is a bot is a good bot, or at least an honest one.:-)

        • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 days ago

          I… That’s not how this works. Or at least that’s not the context I’m referring to.

          I can make an account (or 1000, Lemmy doesn’t exactly have controls to stop me) and run it as a bot, and NOT mark it as a bot. And use it to automatically manipulate the tone of conversations and threads without anyone knowing. And the premise of your argument is now void.

          Labeling of bots is done via goodwill.

          We’re not worried about goodwill users in this context. We’re talking about astroturfing bots posing as actual users. That said, labeled bots are still a problem if their content out grows organic user content, since that just isolates us, and erodes our community in favor of w/e interesting content bots scaped up today.

          Which is a massive problem on almost every social media platform already. And will come to Lemmy soon enough.

          • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            Oh… then yes, ofc.

            But if we can’t stop it, then so be it. Nothing is perfect, but you try anyway.

            Wikipedia has some nice ideas about trusting people incrementally to increasing degrees depending on the outcome of previous manually curated efforts. And PieFed is bringing some of those thoughts into the Fediverse: https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/.

            But part of it is not merely bots vs. humans, and rather different styles of what human psychology tends to gravitate toward: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb. e.g. people saying things like “^This”, “I also choose this guy’s wife”, “And my bow”, etc.

            Lonely people just wanting to be heard… but unless emoji reactions are provided, how else other than to write a comment? And/or upvote an existing one that says what you wanted. Therefore… “^This” it is then indeed, none of us are immune to such, and any system that relies on people never falling into that trap is going to be vulnerable. The same way that news organization in the West were vulnerable to being bought out by the wealthy - it was always going to happen.

            Anyway, wishing for something doesn’t make it happen - that requires effort, like the PieFed approach, imperfect as it may be.