A platform without ads or evil corpo ownership? Yeah, I'd scared too.
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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Fediverse memes
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Memes about the Fediverse.
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Lemmy doesnt have any proper discussions though. Its just memes. Personally i have to check reddit to actually get proper content to learn something from.
But still, Lemmy is at least not big tech!
Not true! you can get into arguments with random people about Marxism AND Linux!
You can even meow at a transfem :3
Meow
Meow
Woof
Mrrrp!
I don't think there's anywhere online where Marxists with arguments can't find you
...and Star Trek.
that's what .ml stands for, right?
You can also ah... uh... well....
There is discussion but the userbase's interests arent super wide so at the moment its techy and politicsy. Which is fine at least we arent following reddit which started out with racists, atheiests and child porn.
I've recently been checking out reddit to see discussion on a few topics not covered here, MMA and beyond all reason. I'm shocked by how low quality the comments are. I can open a 900 comment thread and not see a single comment that discusses the thread topic or discusses anything.
Honestly, that's not accidental. Reddit's a hot mess right now..
Once the IPO dropped last year, the algorithm started steering users to the least productive, most rage-bait inducing content. I was on many art-related subs and within 6 months, my feed pivoted to the political feeds.. MurderedByWords, LeopardsAteMyFace and others. The AppleHelp and VintageGaming and VintageApple where I had the best, most in-depth conversations all but vanished from my home page feed.
Oddly enough subs like anime_titties (which was non-US based global-only news with the sub's title used to keep the 50-cent Army from seeing it as the Great Firewall doesn't like anime_titties) also went down my feed list. Then mystery subs with really rage-inducing content like NewsHub which was lots of middle-east and Gaza related stuff appeared - and I hadn't ever visited that sub.. stuff that I han't even heard of showed up.
NGL, I fell right into it. It's slick, that's for sure.
Eventually the rage-bait posts got me.. I had started to get snarkier and snarkier and the mod-bots bumped me yesterday - within a minute - of making a metaphorically mean post. I spent the evening on old reddit getting at the unarchived content I'd posted and manually deleted it. Then managed to get to the delete account page and left. 14 years. Oh well.
The AI they're using isn't as well trained as they think, (hence the Reddit stock tanking in the past 2 weeks) and of course Steven MIller (the real POTUS right now) is looking to go after the mainstream social media sites.
It's getting a bit schizophrenic, what with the fear of the Trump Administration meddling on one hand and the algorithm on the other driving engagement by highlighting the EXACT strident content that makes it a target.
Oooooffffff. Fun times ahead.
Atheists are way less likely to create child porn than a catholic priest.
Don't make me pull out citations and evidence based data in this thread. I'll do it.
What are you on about? There's tons of atheists still on reddit now. They don't spread child porn.
I think they might be talking about the “atheist culture” that used to exist on reddit back during the New Atheist Movement. This might seem unnecessary but maybe we should distinguish between atheism and Atheism, since that’s usually what people are objecting to.
Reddit removed /r/atheists from :r/all years ago so it's not as visible now.
Arguably a big part of the enshittification imo.
There are great discussions here.
The problem is that we have too few users, so most topics you'd want to discuss aren't going to have existing thriving communities to chat with you. All of Lemmy put together is dwarfed by single reddit communities. for niche topics.
I'm not complaining, because the barriers to entry and lack of popular awareness keeps the user base here smarter and more interesting to talk to. But for the good of humanity I do think we need open tech like this to get widespread adoption, and it's going to take a long time. Reddit had almost two decades' head start.
And looking at a timeline, at this point in Reddit's history a few years in, the most popular subs with the early adopters were politics, programming, abe science. Sounds familiar, lol.
I saw bluesky take off and get millions of users right away. Appearently they have 38 million users now.
I guess advertising works... :p
It is the barrier to entry - most people probably stopped on "choose a server".
The concept of Lemmy being servers was easy for me to understand (thanks MMOs, I guess?), but having to jump through hoops to actually sign up with many of them was the primary difficulty. Nobody wants to have to write an essay on why they should be accepted to a server.
I wrote one sentence
I did a few times before I figured it out.
It's sobering to consider how tiny Lemmy is. Both the Linus Tech Tips forum and the Crackberry forum are bigger and more active than all of Lemmy together.
Back in the day, even something niche as the Blitzbasic forum was bigger than Lemmy is now.
It's probably a good thing too, since both performance and in the way moderation needs to be done on Lemmy is so inefficient that it's right now already at the point where instances are getting closed down because they can't handle the workload and cost.
Lemmy being small works for me. Reddit is horrendously toxic now, so I'll occasionally lurk, but refuse to interact with it. I don't want Lemmy to become Reddit.
Be the change you wanna see. They set this up to be as user driven as possible. You can start communities, discussions, all of it. I started a Zombie community to have somewhere to discuss my take on season one of Fear the Walking Dead. Not much engagement yet but ya gotta start somewhere. It'll never take off if everyone who isn't permabanned keeps slipping off to reddit.
One thing I find satisfying is noticing how much more intelligent people are here than on reddit. It speaks volumes regarding the types of people who get permabanned from [insert any scathing adjectives of your choice] Reddit.
We're growing slowly but at least we are growing.
Agreed.
I don't think anyone that believes different was on early Reddit.
!movies@piefed.social
!casualconversation@piefed.social
!science@mander.xyz
There are serious discusions, you just have to find them. Mostly news and technology articles, but there could be more.
The thing is it's super hard to start a niche community due to a fundamental issue with federation. Which instance do you start the community in, and how do people find it?
With reddit you just needed /r/[obscurehobby]. In lemmy you need to check all the instances, and you may find a different versions of the community, but all of them are dead with like 2 posts from 8 months ago because they never got the critical mass needed to catch on because the community was split.
https://piefed.social/communities
Piefed search is your answer. You can filter by activity. It also has feeds too that are topic themed.
I'd actually argue its way easier now to start new communities on the Fediverse than Reddit, for a variety of reasons.
This site is just way too diffuse and has too few real people actively participating. It is also missing some very basic things that would accelerate engagement. Right now, your profile doesnt tally your upvotes. This should be a pretty simple fix and would promote visibility into who the top contributors are and the perceived quality of their upvotes.
Organized events would also keep momentum going. I remember back when reddit had AMAs that were actually interesting and fun instead of thinly veiled opportunities to plug a recent project while talking to someone's PR manager.
The aesthetic could also use a revamp. Nothing tailored to smartphone usage (blech), but maybe something that fills the screen by default, and improves readability? Comment sections are less easy to follow than on pre-IPO reddit. Native hoverzoom would also be nice. Is there anywhere to actually have an exchange with the people running Lemmy?
no carma is a deliberate feature
makes the comments more of a sensible people talking, less of a standup show.
From a practical standpoint, there is a karma system on this site, it just is not implemented - every comment and post has upvotes. That those upvotes arent recorded on the user level is a choice.
It is always a balance of features. I dont necessarily agree with your framing, but even if I did, the community needs to ask itself if the goal is to be a tiny, uncompetitive alternative to reddit, or do we want to be relevant and deal with the consequences of more diverse participation? Incentives like the possibility of notoriety can motivate positive contributions as well. Some people want to be recognized for their meaningful contributions as much as people do not want to be downvoted for unhelpful contributions.
Personally I'm really glad that we don't have karma farming on Lemmy. It creates a lot of content for reddit, but it's mostly regurgitated low quality filler.
You will find that there are reasons behind all of this. For one thing Lemmy is developed using Rust, which even experienced C++ programmers do not enjoy using, and for another there's tankies and only slightly less relevant, the amount of time that the developers spend moderating their tankie instance leaves little time to actually make changes to the software. Requests go unmet for YEARS, while other requests actively move backwards in functionality, if by forwards you mean democratic principles and backwards is towards greater levels of authoritarian control and less freedom by the end users.
Seriously, as others are saying, try PieFed. It releases new features practically every other week, and has a way better interface. You can even help by designing themes or your own custom CSS. And you can still access the entire Threadiverse, exactly as you can with Lemmy, except with better control (more functional, e.g. more fine-grained) such as the Topic/Feeds that are user customizable and shareable.
There are apps and other frontends to choose for the websited. There is also https://piefed.social/
You might try piefed? It's a fediverse platform so still links/syncs etc with lemmy and everywhere else but the UI is nice and I think it does a lot of the stuff you mention (except for the ama style stuff.) I followed PugJesus here (and am using Piefed right now) and exported all my feeds etc so the switch was relatively painless.
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions etc. I probably won't be able to help but uhhh, I'll commiserate?
Honestly I like the conversations here, it reminds me a lot of the old internet.
FLAMEWAR
I agree with the criticism of the content, especially since we solved a lot of these problems on reddit years ago, but as I’ve said on here before, we need a critical mass in order to achieve the kind of platform we’re looking to replicate. If lemmy keeps growing, it might come. Acculturation might not be possible though.
But Lemmy isn't growing. In fact, it's declining: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=1000
(When looking at these stats, remember that the post and comment counts are all-time comments/posts that are available at that specific day on the platform. In June 2024 there were more total comments than now, and in November 2024 there were more posts than there are now.
And all numbers are including the NSFW instance.
What sort of discussion are you seeking? I'm spending most of my time in the comments, droppin truth bombs on dey heads.
All the pro of Reddit and 100% Big-Tech-free... (just 15% Tanky).
There's no lack of people willing to have discourse. No one is asking the questions.
People go to Reddit with hard questions (an other things) they want to crowdsource
People don't come to Lemmy with it, but other than not knowing which tech forum to ask it in, there's no reason they can't.
I don't agree. Do you mean that you require us to do it or are you just not engaged in it?