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Reddit Migration's Impact on Lemmy (2023)

13 points Rochus 1 hour ago 8 comments

Rochus 55 minutes ago | parent

I was looking for a Reddit alternative for quite some time, since the once lively communities that interested me have almost dried up, and their moderators seem to see their main role in preventing contributions rather than encouraging them. What I wanted instead was fairly simple: topic-based communities, titled posts, and nested discussions. I am interested in discussing programming languages and their implementation, not building a following. I could never really warm to twitter-style platforms, including their decentralised alternatives. I came across and tried programming.dev and did some research about it. My first impression was that it felt closer to what I liked about Reddit years ago. According to the attached paper and [1] I seem by far not to be the only one with this experience.

I wonder what experiences other users here have made. Do you consider programming.dev a suitable successor, or are there better recommendations?

[1] https://programming.dev/post/23029

petcat 39 minutes ago | parent

Lots of tech people thought they could build alternative platforms to things like Reddit or Twitter. Mostly because the tech stack is relatively straightforward and the mechanics are proven and easy to implement. But none of that is ever the problem. The enormous amounts of moderation required to make a community even remotely useful is a burden that most people will never be able to undertake. The worst content, the most toxic users, bots bots bots. It's basically a cesspool that nobody in their right mind would get into at this point.

add-sub-mul-div 32 minutes ago | parent

If there's hope, it's that Reddit/Twitter/etc now function as a quarantine or flypaper for the eternal September, the bots, the scammers, the slop, etc. And newer sites/networks can flourish at a smaller size because there's not enough profit in targeting them.

im3w1l 14 minutes ago | parent

AI will bring the cost of ruining smaller communities way down.

squiffsquiff 5 minutes ago | parent

Ah so I see you're new to the Fediverse then? On Lemmy you can enjoy:

- People creating endless sportsball subs for a single team or even a single player

- Duplicate subs for the exact same thing across multiple instances, e.g. you might find two dozen Lewis Hamilton subs (forget the Lemmy name for them). And then duplicate that for ALL the topics...

- Endless subs in foreign languages because, why bother to specify your language for a sub if you're on a not-english-langiage instance?

- Getting shadow banned because your instance administrator and another instance administrator have beef or have political/religious/moral convictions or whatever and decided to de-federate, you know, just how telephone companies decide you aren't allowed to speak with someone THEY don't like...

- Endless, endless furries, especially trans/non-binary furry subs

- Breaking version changes every year or two, as in your (main) instance maybe literally being broken

- Struggling to share a link because maybe you'd open the upstream sub and not be signed in, maybe synced via your instance and you would

- checking that you are signed in on the right account to the right instance and that the instance itself is synced and on up to date version...

I checked out when I realised I had hit 1000 blocked subs and was trying to sync them across a dozen or so accounts to multiple different instances

vidarh 24 minutes ago | parent

Less than moderation, my biggest problem with e.g. Reddit is that Reddit isn't one destination, it's a million. I go to Reddit for a specific set of sub-reddits much more than the site itself. Each one of those has its own separate network effect.

The biggest shot Lemmy has is that Reddit is taking every possible step to drive users away - just today I had to install another block rule because I started getting obtrusive overlays to drive me to the mobile app even when browsing it logged in on my desktop.

But even then, the fact that so many of us are willing to go to increasingly extreme lengths to keep using Reddit for various subreddits even as the site gets worse and worse shows just how sticky the network effect of the existing communities is.

I've been in some of them for nearly two decades, and finding a community with the same topic elsewhere won't reproduce the set of people.

AnneTrotter 5 minutes ago | parent

I am literally here now because reddit became so unbearably botted that I deleted my account in disgust.

ierukah 37 minutes ago | parent

Oh hey, I know this guy! He PMed me on Lemmy back in 2023 about a survey for his master's degree. I had no idea he actually went on to publish this document until I came across this post on HN. Great to see that it all led to something!