Is Lemmy an effective alternative to Reddit?

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

• Go to https://lemm.ee/

• Have a look around, see if the content and the formatting is appealing to you, register an account if you want to be able to curate your feed further

• Go to https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] to see communities (equivalent of subs) that might be interesting to you.

• Use Voyager as a mobile app: https://www.lemmyapps.com/Voyager. When they ask for your "instance", use "lemm.ee"

• If you want more choices for apps, have a look at https://www.lemmyapps.com/

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/[email protected]. 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

• https://lemmygrad.ml/
• https://hexbear.net/

Communities to block

• https://lemmy.world/c/news
• https://lemmy.world/c/politics
• https://lemmy.world/c/world
• https://lemmy.ml/c/worldnews
• https://lemmy.ml/c/usa

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/[email protected]

The other one is Mbin: https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]

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/[email protected]

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/[email protected] ([email protected] ) 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/