No Stupid Questions

Platform-wise, it's already proven that it's a viable alternative (with some advantages even - the federated nature for one), but content-wise, it has A LOT to catch up (because let's be honest - in addition to all the bullshit and toxic people, Reddit has tons of useful information and good people still).

Effective? No. Considering the purpose of all internet communities is to grow and have diversity, it's not effective. Aside from the currently low number of users, the fact that you can have the same community in different instances means a community will never grow large enough. Add to that the "you're literally killing children if you're a centrist" people and all the tankies, and what you have here is a leftist circlejerk that will remain small and irelevant enough to suit its need to be an echo chamber without any actual diversity. So maybe it's effective from that point of view? Idk.

I personally think it's a ton better. The platform is a bit less mature, but the people are much nicer and the filtering/blocking is lightyears ahead

I imagine we all have different use cases, my idea of Lemmy succeeding may not be your idea.

That being said, as a replacement for Reddit, where I can scroll through the top say 50 posts once or twice a day, it absolutely fits the bill.

Engagement is much better for me here, I imagine due to the smaller size of the community, that lends itself to their being much less useless garbage comments and much more constructive or informative discussion.

The above being said, I do wish there were more people here.

No. Lemmy posts are always left leaning. There is no right and no center. Thats disheartening. Next to that most communities are too small so no viable discussions follow. Most communities die in months.

Then again, reddit.com doesnt exist anymore because some schmucks have taken over, resulting in obtrusive ads, profiling and tracking.

I dont post on reddit anymore. Still follow some subs though because they just dont have an alternative.

I went from 1 source (reddit) to several(lemmy, mastodon, 4chan, 9gag). And still it feels empty. Mostly because while some memes are nice, 4chan is filled with morons and 9gag... That's a "racist app" according to its own users. But it doesn't stop there. A lot of posts there are just vile. Not just right wing nut job, no, they are worse. And masto is mostly the same as lemmy.

I just love it here. But I also know that while most communities are really nice, we rely a lot on two (2) individuals who provide a sizeable part of Lemmy's content (Picard and PugJesus). We should all try to do our part!

I last logged into Reddit in 2022.

There's a lot of things missing - especially niche communities - but there's enough people to get into silly debates with and enough memes for me to scroll each day.

Current reddit is not like "reddit" anymore for a while... nothing is forever

So far so good. Its like the early days of reddit and I dread all that trash I left behind there coming here. I only miss sipstea.

We have less people, We have a better signal to noise ratio. So far we seem to have been spared the idiot community rules, like the moderators of r/music telling you that you need to go to tip of my tongue to crowdsource a list of songs with a certain theme, well they only accept a very narrow genre of music. Upvotes and down votes don't absolutely sink or blow up a post, you can say something relatively controversial here and not have it get buried.

We have some discoverability problems that they're working on. We're lacking a lot of niche interests. You're not going to find a sub here for every trade and game that exists. A significant amount of our traffic is just posts from other places with a minimum amount of discussion.
Upvotes and down votes aren't magically universal across every node. Some of the smaller fringe nodes can end up with delays and receiving posts.

I stopped reading Reddit At the very beginning of the API wars. It's honestly so much more healthy here.

Of course not. People discuss like three topics in here.

As much as I'd like it to be, it doesn't have the network effect/popularity that Reddit does. It covers maybe 70-80% of my Digg+ needs, but there are many topics/subs I want that Lemmy just doesn't have.

"Be the change you want to see" is always there: if a topic/sub doesn't exist, you can always create it yourself. But no good deed goes unpunished, so you're now the owner/moderator...

It satisfies my social media addiction, but will be years before it shows up on many search results.

it's effective for wasting my time in a less frustrating manner, for whatever that's worth

Depends on what you mean "effective."

The structure is very similar, and on the surface, it works about the same way. So in that sense, yes.

The lack of centralization improves on reddit - no authoritarian rule-making, no limitation of content by the laws of a single country, etc. - but also adds flaws. The biggest one is the potential for redundant groups on different servers, but also a concern is the potential for someone taking down their server and leaving the users high and dry. (I don't know exactly what happens to the content in this case, but that could be another issue.)

Practically speaking though, it is not a meaningful replacement for reddit because it is lacking content. I browse "all", and get fewer total posts that I saw on reddit on my 20 or so subscribed subreddits alone.

Community is the key. Community is what made reddit, and lemmy doesn't have a developed community. Yet. We can get there, and then discover what other problems with the platform are.

It works for me because I'm into a lot of the stuff discussed on Lemmy. My biggest problem with reddit was that at some point they seemed eager to smoosh all the subs together into one big Basic Betty fest. For example having r/all be a mandatory sub and having a million default subs...It kind of felt like towards the end everyone was discussing the same stuff on every sub, and it was basically the same stuff being discussed on Twitter (and many posts were just pics of tweets).

I know Lemmy kinda has some similar issues, but because the whole ecosystem is its own niche it still works for me.

Nah. Lemmy is nothing like Reddit, it's actually good.

On the one hand, I find idle browsing on Lemmy to be a lot more enjoyable than reddit. I see more stuff that I've never seen before, and I see less unfunny, uninteresting stuff.

On the other hand: I drew a comic and posted it to what is basically the only Lemmy comic group. I wanted to give Lemmy an honest chance, so that was the only place I shared it. I figured it'd be a nice change of pace since the group is almost entirely reposts from reddit.

My comic started to get some traction, and then the only mod in the only Lemmy comic group removed it for profanity. The profanity in question was the word "balls".

A few days later I mentioned this story on reddit. Someone asked to see the comic, so I posted it to r/comics, and a few hours later it hit the front page of r/all.

So in my opinion, Lemmy suffers from a lot of the same problems as reddit (like petty tyrant mods), and some of those problems are exacerbated by its small size.

The only reason I use it is because Reddit killed the mobile app I was using. Lemmy is less useful to me by every metric, and I still use Reddit when searching for stuff on desktop, never Lemmy.