I’m an old reddit user, going back to '08. Like many of you I’m sure, I’ve seen the site rise and fall. Killing 3p apps was a major blow, along with the purge of so many subreddits, and now you have to log in to even view it…it’s getting real bad.
I had heard of the fediverse back when Mastadon was first announced. Briefly checked it out, but didn’t give it much mind. This morning I was browsing reddit and read a thread about the continual degradation of the site. Someone mentioned Lemmy (new to me), but I thought "hey! I’ll check it out, why not’'. A brief google search gave me some iOS apps, and I wound up using Voyager (10/10 btw, Voyager reminds me a lot of Apollo in it’s hayday). I applied/logged in…and just…wow. Wow y’all. Lemmy reminds me so much of reddit circa late 00’s. Sure, there is a smaller user base, but so was reddit at the time. I remember the subreddit you were supposed to go to when you made an acccount and introduce yourself :D
And here on Lemmy, nothing looks like obvious bot posts. Content seems real. In correlation with that, the post titles seem pretty reasonable and not based around rage bait / click bait.
After setting it up on my phone, I found the desktop site (I’m on a laptop some times) and I adore a.lemmy.zip. To me its the perfect layout. The other incredible thing about Lemmy is just how seamless it was to set up, on both mobile and desktop. It feels super accessible to non-technical users, which is something I don’t think is true for a lot of fediverse things.
But seriously, I used to adore reddit so much. Watching it fall apart has made me sadder and sadder over time. There was seemingly nothing in its place. I really felt like that era of internet over entirely. Just my first few hours on Lemmy has made me realize I was wrong, in the best way possible. It gave me chills. I’m looking forward to this platform growing. So anyway, thanks for any/all of you who developed/are developing Lemmy. It really, truly feels like a return to the golden age of social.
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!
Thanks so much! Great info. I had a question - can I group communities together into a custom feed? I can currently view all subscribed on my Home feed. But if I have , for example, 6 news communities, can I group them into a single “MyNews” style feed?
It has been “coming soon” for some time now in Lemmy, officially implemented in upstream code on June 17, 2025, however it is for a long awaited 1.0 release which there is no publicly announced timeline and involves many API overhauls, while virtually every lemmy server is on version 0.19.xx at this moment (latest status update). The feature is currently available with an alternative software called Piefed, and some Lemmy frontend user apps such as Summit.
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.
My one problem with lemmy is you have to double take that the news sources are reliable before you read the post titles because people will just post stuff from publications nobody’s ever heard of, sometimes it will be straight up lies and there is always going to be one federated news /c/ that will allow it
So just in the past 6 hours like, what is “wafa.ps”? What is the bylinedtimes, dexerto, or commondreams.org?
Then you look in the comments and everyone is taking it like the gospel. Super rare to see anyone question anything about a seemingly unknown source and their reporting.
Maybe they’re fine, but since nobody’s checking for you and moderating it, it takes a bit more cautiousness
Edit/ All the examples are leftist news but that’s just because of the communities I follow
Israel infects female Palestinian hostages with scabies in their torture chambers
Lumping in Dexerto with those others feels like you’re intentionally slandering them
I just don’t know them. Apparently bylinetimes is legit too. That’s not the point though. The point was if you don’t know the news source nobody here is going to enforce a whitelist of domains you can post on news communities.
my only questiom is how can anyone tell me that what has haopened to reddit wont happen to lemmy?
Three primary points.
A) No one owns all of Lemmy. Or the fediverse in general, for that matter. No single power hungry or nutbag admin can pull a spez and make wide sweeping changes to the app, or who its run. Admins hace control over their own instances, and that’s about where it ends There’s dozens of significantly-sized instances and hundreds of small ones. They’d ALL have to agree in order to make changes that affect the entire userbase.
B) There is something kinda close to singular all-powerful admins, that can make changes affecting everyone, and it’s the Lemmy devs. They do control the software, and ultimately can do whatever they want with it. However, that issue is already mitigated two-fold. For one, Lemmy is free-and-open-source, so if push came to shove, the software could be forked (I.E. copied) and maintained by others. For two (and much more significant) Lemmy isn’t the only software that makes up the reddit-like corner of the Fediverse. We ALREADY have k-bin and PieFed, which many users already use and prefer over Lemmy. And they all talk to each other seamlessly.
C) There’s no profit motive. Lemmy instances aren’t funded by ads or venture capital, they’re funded mostly by donation, and sometimes just by nerds who can afford it. Because instances are smaller scale, rather than the single giantic monolith that is reddit, they can be run for just a couple hundred, or maybe a couple thousand, bucks a year, depending on size.
That’s not to say that there aren’t entirely different issues that may threaten the health of the Fediverse as a whole. For example, following on point C above, there is risk that costs will increase as the Fediverse continues to grow, faster than some instances will be able to keep up with. There’s also risk that, while most admins are well-meaning and try to be transparent, nothing prevents admins from being actively malicous and, say, running data harvesting, or injecting malware into their web frontends.
Overall, I think the Fediverse has a MUCH healthier foundation than reddit ever did.
Point B is the most important. The software is open source and can be forked… if there is enough interest and support. We’ve seen it happen with OpenOffice/LibreOffice, ownCloud/Nextcloud, mySQL/mariaDB, and other cases. In many cases both projects will continue in parallel, sometimes even remerging (node.js and io.js) or cross-developing (lots of Neovim features made it back into Vim).
Thanks for all those points. I diidnt know about any of that but I can see how. they mitigate the possible eventual enshittification of Lemmy
Much weirder things will happen here, but in theory it should self-heal as long as there are people to keep it alive. For instance, the other week the maintainer of a custom web UI used by a few instances tried to sneak his own secret ban list into the software. Fortunately, people noticed and he was roundly ridiculed and the repo forked into less duplicitous ownership.
…I have no idea what those last two sentences were but OK. Im glad that the story ended …good? …Right?
Thanks for letting me know though about the other people keeping Lemmy in check.
Roughly speaking, apps hosted on the internet can be divided into 2 parts: the frontend and the backend. The backend is the server that provides access to any of the data associated with the app, as well as handling any operations a user might request; this is typically done through sending specifically formatted data to specific URLs on the server. The job of the frontend is to make it more natural for a human to access the data and available operations.
A frontend can be many things; the most common, however, are webpages and apps. In the case of lemmy, there is a webpage frontend that comes default. There is also a popular third-party webpage frontend called Tesseract.
A few weeks ago, after updating the version of Tesseract they were using, the db0 instance noticed a large number of errors. In the end, they went through the code of Tesseract — which is publicly available on github — and found that it would silently reach out to a Tesseract server (importantly this is not the backend that whomever installed Tesseract was trying to communicate with), download a filter list, and silently apply it while disguising filtering any post you tried to access as an error.
The filter list was very opinionated, and often felt arbitrary; and due to the fact it was downloaded from the internet, it could be updated at any time without notice. Additionally, any of the options Tesseract provided around filtering had no effect on the secret filtering.
Because the code is publicly available, the instance owners forked it (made their own copy, with some ability to keep getting updates from the original source) to remove the secret filtering.
So we probably need to define exactly what the “what happened to Reddit” is, but in general whatever that thing is, it absolutely will happen to Lemmy.
The trick is that we can just run to the next instance.
On Reddit you can really like video games. So you subscribe to /r/gaming. But then that becomes garbage so you subscribe to /r/Games. But then that becomes garbage so you subscribe to /r/TrueGaming, or /r/TrueGames or whatever and the list goes on and on. Maybe you always have to keep jumping ship. Now you’re subscribed to /r/NoSeriouslyTheBestGaming.
But what do you do when Reddit becomes garbage?
When the core is rotten what do you do?
On Reddit you’re fucked.
On Lemmy, you go elsewhere. Lemmy.world sucks? Go to piefed.world. That sucks? Go to the next thing.
The core of Lemmy can’t be rotten, because the core of Lemmy can just be tossed aside.
Yes, it’s all probably going to take a bit more work, but a small jump or a small shift isn’t much at all when you really look at it.
Is there ever the possibility that ALLll instances get bought out , muzzled (as in you camt express certain opinions on all instances, even helpful ones) , and turned to advertiser-paid karma farms?
Edit: I just hit up r/laundry and apparently there are offshore karma farmers there that have been bought by the company ‘actiive’ to shill actiive brand products there! looool!
Not really, because it’s relatively easy for a technical user to spin up their own instance. Unlike some other protocols, there’s no centralized authority that says who can or can’t spin up an instance. If you wanted, you could make an instance for just yourself. Or a group of people can set up a few instances that are completely separate from the rest of the network like a little island. You can never buy out ALL instances.
The best answer I have for your original question is that the people who built this technology have specifically designed it in order to prevent it from becoming an enshitified walled garden like old social media sites. There are many little things that have been done in order to make it difficult for the network to go bad. Many of the people participating in the network contribute their own safeguards because they believe in that mission.
For example, I’m a part of the team that runs lemmy.ca. We don’t design the software, but we do own the servers and manage the donations people send to pay for the servers. We came together and set up a non-profit organization and registered it officially, so that there is a legal requirement for future team members to continue serving the best interests of our users. You can see the original announcement about that here: https://fedecan.ca/en/announcements/2024-04-08_incorporated
About your edit, we do get those posts here from time to time.
They get banned very quickly. We have no use for spambots that waste our server resources and make the community unpleasant.
It will happen eventually. Just like Capitalism leads to Fascism.
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.
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.
One of us!
One of us!
Also, fuck Spez
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.
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.
appears them purging so many users last year, resulted in this. google is the main recipient of scraping reddit data, and they are likely complaining that they are running into more and more AI content(AI scraiping AI) because so many users left the site due to it.
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.
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.
No you’re absolutely correct. I vividly remember reddit 18 years ago. Pretty much every post on every subreddit was intentional. Early on, even the concept of comments on posts was disputed as a good feature or not. Now its entirely different. The big reddits now are ones like poursTea, sipsTea, different variations of infuriating, and WhitePeopleTwitter, etc. They’re all basically rage bait holes, designed to get an emotional reaction out of you, and the comments are people arguing with bots, or bots arguing with bots. And with the scale on reddit now, you can effectively doomscroll /r/all, as more and more posts flood in. It’s not far off from Instagram and TikTok.
Lemmy has less posts, less upvotes, but they are all [presumably, hell I’m sure there’s an exception] real.
It’s feels like trading in a giant box of cheese balls for a small, but very nicely cooked steak. Smaller but actually filling.
whitepeopletwitter went kinda boring after they came back from being banned temporarily. i suspect thats why reddit is doing the login popups, too little users less and more than 60+% bots on the site. too many got purged , AI banned(with no recourse to appeal). with forcing log in, they are trying to claw back some actual user data. i saw on some of the subs that were discussing the popup, they were temp banned, or banned they ended up just browsing reddit logging out to avoid potential future bans altogether(aka lurkers).
and also google limiting thier number of accounts per phone, and yes they likely are working withr eddit.
i noticed too, i went to a niche sub about a youtuber, there used to be constant posts, or discussion about it, and now maybe bi-monthly posts at the most. im guessing its due to reddits increasing strict AI filters/ and banning detection methods. and you know the main subs are just AI generated posts.
Stopppp you’re making us blush🙈☺️
Oh, wait until the next federation drama.
“The sh.itjust.works guys are mad at the lemmy.ml guys and might declare that lemmy.world is their new BFF and defederate the lemmy.zip guys.”
Every instance you mentioned and your own is trash
Seeing this after your zero-engagement “Reddit has less drama” comment is just…
🤌
If it smells bad whereever you go, it’s time to check your shoes!
It’s your photo on the bottom of my shoe.
That’s the spirit!
You shame your ancestors with your garbage instance!
Yes you do.
Welcome cowbo-er, cowperson! Glad you found Lemmy and yes Voyager is A++ primo browso.
Because there’s no algorithm you have to scroll All and block the comms you know you’ll never read, and favorite ones you want to post in later (favoriting just makes it quicker to get to).
I recommend superbowl for a best-of-Lemmy thing, and would point out there are multiple “politics” comms and news comms due to the multiple instances. You may prefer one over another.
dull_mens_club is also kind of a hoot, and justpost gets regular use. And now we’ll introduce the other members of Lemmy:
Bruce teaches classical philosophy, Bruce there teaches Hegelian philosophy, and Bruce here teaches logical positivism and is also in charge of the sheep dip!
I believe the gender neutral equivalent of cowboy youre looking for is “cowpoke”
Ty so much for the tips! I’ll look into all of those. To start, I sat down with my subreddit list, found correlating communities here, subscribed. Now my subscription feed here looks very similar to my legacy reddit home feed.
I wanted to ask about starting a community. As I understand it, you have to be an admin (or a privileged user of some kind) in order to create a community on a given domain/federation. Is there a process to go about doing that, or is it more correct to start your own federation?
The reason I ask is that my favorite linux distro doesn’t have a lemmy. I think it’d be awesome to start it up. I’m not against going through the labor of spinning up a lemmy if that’s most correct, but would prefer leverage what already exists, if that’s a possiblity.
I admit it’s been awhile since I looked but afaicr setting up a new community was pretty much point and click. You don’t need to do anything special (although I suppose it may depend on your instance, I don’t think lemmy.zip has anything to prohibit it)
Just be aware there’s dozens of us on here - dozens! So it’s not the sea of input that reddit was (i haven’t been there in awhile, but you know what I mean). You’ll pretty much exhaust the day’s posts in a couple hours as it stands. Which is not a bad thing.
Looking forward to the future linux comm. There at least seems to be a fairly broad and positive consensus on linux. I’m a Debian with PopOS rising :D
Ohh! Right on! I’m rocking EndeavourOS. Been my desktop go-to for a while. And just started the community here. Love me some debian though, it powers all the servers in my homelab.
Unless an instance restricts community creation (lemmy.zip doesn’t), any user can create a new community. As you’re using the Alexandrite frontend (the ‘a.’ before the domain), you probably need to switch to the default frontend at lemmy.zip to create the community before switching back.
Oh my goodness you’re correct! Ty so much
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.
i call reddit the future role as facebook 2.0 , thats whats its moving towards, especially with all those bots.
Hello, fellow new Lemmy user! 🐣
Switching from Reddit to Lemmy has been quite a breeze. I still check Reddit occasionally but it honestly doesn’t feel like I’m missing out too much if I don’t, it’s so nice. I’m at the point where my Boost usage is beating my RedReader usage.
I’m an iOS guy, and have been sideloading Apollo. But even then, reddit has been slowly coming after that. So grateful I found lemmy before they completely pull the plug there.
