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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I have to be honest, the fact we have an active alternative(s) to reddit at last makes this a complete success for me. I’ve lowkey despised reddit for years. Particularly from 2016 on when bots kind of overran the website and the front page was just filled with toxic garbage that never really went away to this day. I actually did use the revanced patch to get my RIF app working again (though I can’t get my ad-less premium back unfortunately), but I’ve been on here far more than there. I think im just having more fun on Lemmy than I have been on reddit in years. The only reasons I hop back are for sports team specific communities (and really the game threads because I like interacting with other people watching when im watching alone). On the instance i’m on currently there are generated game threads but it hasn’t got the users to make them particularly active as of yet. If that ever happens i’ll happily cut off reddit for good



  • So when I was scoping out an alternative, there were five platforms I was looking at.

    1. Lemmy
    2. Kbin
    3. Squabbles
    4. Tildes
    5. Raddle

    I opted against places like tumblr since I was looking for a similar experience to reddit (didn’t mind some innovations, but places like mastodon or tumblr weren’t the right fit)

    Squabbles was interesting but I did not care for the interface, especially on desktop. It’s a bit better on mobile but it’s basically the card interface on steroids and it’s not my preference. I like the flexibility in apps/ways you can consume Lemmy in comparison

    Tildes is invite only and tightly controlled. If you aren’t interested in like the 4 topics of discussion they have there it’s just not that engaging.

    Raddle is open source and not for profit which are pluses, but outside anarchist political communities and a few meme ones theres basically nothing else there. Also some of the theming for their forums on desktop are atrocious.

    Kbin has some pluses in that in that it can interact with Lemmy and the fediverse. It even has some better integration with places like mastodon due to the microblogging tab. It’s still an option in my mind depending on how it and Lemmy evolve. But for now im on Lemmy and haven’t regretted it.

    I think the big reason Lemmy grew though was exposure and circumstance. It’s very decentralized nature I think appealed to people who have experienced what guys like Musk and Spez have done to their social media sites lately and the idea that if an admin/owner here goes off the rails there’s some recourse available besides having to entirely leave the platform they’ve invested their time and energy to. Squabbles, tildes and raddle can’t really promise that by the fundamental fact they are closed platforms. So when the reddit drama popped up and after what people have dealt with in Facebook, tumbler, digg, Twitter, etc this place and the fediverse was pushed really hard as an alternative experience that sought to resolve this recurring problem.