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

It’s alright but I think the low res weird mouse thing mascot isn’t the best, I’ve always hated reddit’s smug bastard shitty alien thing though.

Also it feels relatively empty even though there’s data to back there being half a million users.

Also the language filtering is super imperfect to the point I can’t use it, so I have to manually filter out 500 non-english communities.

kinda so-so, so far. shows promise but I’ve also run more immediately into what could be called ‘reddit rot’. For example mod behavior that resembles russian bot farms, etc.

It will take years for Lemmy to take off in much the same way as Reddit had slowly built up.

As I and other mentioned before, the main downside of Lemmy is that the community you care about isn’t here (and frankly, I don’t know if they will even come here at all). Like, we don’t have AskHistorians here, and the Lemmy for your hometown or country is either quiet or just completely died. So, I end up having no choice but to return to Reddit to keep in touch with those communities. However, as someone who is privacy conscious since Reddit now sells your data to train AI, I try to log in to Reddit with Tor. But even with the Onion site of Reddit, it won’t let me log in at most times because of technical discrepancy with stupid captchas or something. Sometimes I could log in via Tor but most times I’m not able to.

Anyhow, I would love Lemmy to take off as soon as possible but there is teething problem common in new communities. But the pessimistic side of me thinks it may not since so many people have become too invested in Reddit. And the latter intentionally hooked people in for the worst reasons.

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.

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.

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

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 strength of many reddit communities is in the people themselves, and unless you’re really into Linux or star trek, the people aren’t really here.

An effective alternative in every sense of the word to Reddit? Nope, not by a long shot, but that’s mostly a function of time and general awareness that the platform exists. For now, it’s a great place for better political debate than what Reddit offers, and in general the memes feel more intimate, like you’re viewing something that a lemmy user might have made rather than triple deepfried imgur vomit all over Reddit.

Partially. I think it’s a good drop in replacement for:

• Anything technology oriented, from software to hardware to what different open source projects are up to, to what tech corporations are doing, and various discussions around ecosystems (the internet itself, specific services like Discord or Reddit or LinkedIn, app stores, social networking, etc.)
• Funny memes or other humor

It’s got pretty good coverage of certain topics:

• Politics, at least on specific sub topics
• Science and specific scientific disciplines

It has a few pockets that work for very specific things:

• Specific TV show or movie franchises (looking at you, Star Trek)
• ADHD or neurodivergent support/advice
• Noncredible Defense is actually here. Love it.

And it’s just missing a bunch of things I loved on Reddit:

• Sports, especially the unique culture of the NBA subreddit
• Other specific interests in television, film, music, or other cultural interests.
• Local things in specific cities
• Finance and economics stuff
• Lots of specific interests/hobbies are missing, or just aren’t as active.
• Advice/support for career/work life, especially specific careers (in my case, the legal industry and life as a lawyer)
• Advice/support relating to personal relationships, from parenting to dating to very specific support forums for things like divorce or cancer. Even what does exist here is disproportionately neurodivergent, so the topics of focus seem to be pretty different than what would be discussed in other places.

I’ve stopped using reddit completely. I do tend to check twitter a lot though.

Yes for me it’s absolutely a viable alternative. It’s still small and that has pros and cons. The overall quality of discourse is high because it’s a fairly hip crowd that has found Lemmy and joined. Feels more like the early days of the social web, before social media shat the bed. But being small has cons too. Some communities just aren’t here, and a lot of the ones here are small and less active. But there’s absolutely a viable base here that can grow over time. I’m glad that the internet figured this out because we were too dependent on Reddit before - it had totally consumed all concepts of online community and that was okay before the enshittification got into high gear. Lemmy from its inception is structurally designed not to go down that path. So spend time here. Share it. Help it grow. Start a niche sub and feed it.

No. Reddit has a userbase that allows it to be all things to everyone.

Lemmy has a userbase that allows it to be a pretty good linux disscussion forum.

Once you venture away from technology, its crickets. There’s a community here specifically for the Cleveland Guardians. It’s dead quiet. The Guardians are even in the ALDS right now…granted they’re down 0-2 in the best of 7 series…but the ONLY post since they started the playoffs, is me asking why the community was so dead. That topic has 0 replies despite being posted days ago. On reddit, I wouldn’t have even needed to make that post, because there would be topics on almost every minute thing the Guardians have done right, and wrong, since the playoffs began.

And then I’d get heckled for saying that Ketchup is the hot dog derby champion. Now and forever! But on here? Nothin…