I recently stumbled upon Lemmy from SimpleX github. This is my first interaction.
Why Lemmy? It seems to be an alternative to Reddit, but what sets it apart? I’ve explored, participated and built nodes in Nostr, which positions itself as a Twitter alternative, so I’m curious about what makes Lemmy unique and what it needs to succeed?
Who Lemmy? Like Nostr, the community here seems to define the platform. Without algorithms to shape the narrative, the vibe is driven by its users—radicals, dreamers, and wayfarers. Is that a fair read? Who else calls Lemmy home?
How Lemmy? What’s the vision here? How does Lemmy aim to change the social media landscape? Decentralization is intriguing, but what’s the endgame? Escape from algorithms is exciting but from what I see raw and unfilters humans have chaotic thoughts.
Where Lemmy? Where’s the Lemmy Lobby? When folks onboard where do they go to connect? The communities Ive checked seem to have a variation of really old posts and infrequent posts. Are we that early or is this platform suffering from slow growth?
What’s your perspective on the success of decentralized social media?
Lemmy, and the Fediverse in general, is an open source social media made by people that have evolved past the corporate overlords.
The user base might be smaller than big social media sites, but the users tend to be more intelligent, far fewer bots, and no advertisements.
That’s my take on it so far, I’ve been here over a year now.
I’d love to add something original to this post, but you’ve pretty much covered it.
To your point about corporate overlords: many of us loved Reddit until we realized it was a cesspool (for any number of reasons) and moved on, and it’s almost a shameful thing to admit we ever liked Reddit at this point.
To put it more simply: we just love federation and we love the format. We could always jump ship to Mastodon or any other federated platform, but long form discussion is what I believe drives adoption of Lemmy in particular the most.
Oh a lot of us knew it was a cesspool, at least, it has corners that are in it, it’s no 4chan. What brought the majority here was the CEO lying multiple times about why they were closing public APIs off to third party app makers instead of just telling the truth (we need money to stay in business or make money and we want to control what you see). And obligatory, fuck spez.
What is shameful about loving Reddit? Honestly asking.
Biggest red flags I saw was non-FOSS, beginning of enshitification, overall cringe and mean user base.
For me: it engages in the same discourse shaping that legacy media employs to manufacture consent to please their investors.
The most savvy media literate people have difficulty deciphering the unspoken truths from social media, including reddit, so there’s very little likelihood that the average person won’t be affected and your circumstances determine your views, so you too will be affected by someone like reddit’s manufactured discourse no matter how much you try.
Seems like more than enough to me.
I’m not saying that others would be shameful of someone liking that but I personally would be ashamed of myself liking it.
Reddit used to be FOSS :(. There used to be a badge for having a merged reddit PR
Also it’s a lot less likely to enshitify since there’s no corporate overloads nor investors to please
Importantly (at least to me) the Lemmy source code is licenced under the AGPL which means any modified server code must be provided by the server owner. Also I’m not sure if this was clear but anybody can spin up an instance and there is nobody who controls all of them.