New here. Migrated from Reddit. Still trying to figure out Lemmy - what’s everyone’s experiences like coming from Reddit and does Lemmy serve as a good alternative? Pros and cons/differences?
I was a fairly active member at Reddit with a good social standing, I made 1 “controversial” comment and I got perma-banned… this sucks. I mostly followed music pages like r/TheBeatles and loved to just rant about Beatles albums, Paul McCartney’s latest tour, discuss new releases from other artists and also movies/TV shows. I can’t think of any other website that offers that kind of forum-like discussion other than Lemmy?
I really did always hate that Reddit felt like a massive echo chamber. The way the system works with upvotes and downvotes, if I said anything people don’t agree with, I’d get massively downvoted. I once got temporary ban for saying I preferred Zelda Breath of the Wild over Tears of the Kingdom… it really felt like I was treading on egg shells. My perma-ban happened in a discussion within the r/EveryoneKnowsThat search for a lost wave song. Really petty.
I’ve always hoped somebody would create basically a clone of Reddit, but without the politics and without being overly-policed. Where people aren’t pushed away for respectfully voicing their opinion. Is Lemmy the answer?
First of all, welcome.
Depends what you’re after, really. I find that lemmy has less of an echo chamber, but the average political stance is a lot more left-ish than reddit.
If your opinion is considered garbage, you’ll probably be downvoted for it, but banned is another thing; You can find an instance more to your liking, for example if you post tankie stuff on lemmygrad, you’ll probably only get praise from there.
It mostly comes down to how a platform with many people tend to naturally operate - garbage people get treated at such by the rest. So whatever your leanings might be, I suggest you find an instance that is somewhat reasonably close to share your values.
Other than that, one of the main differences from reddit is the content quantity - Smaller user base means less content. And I’m perfectly fine with that, as I can keep up with the feed without scrolling for hours.
Also, here I can say that I don’t give two shits about neither Zelda nor Link, without fear of backlash. At least yhe contemporary games - Everything since Link II for NES has been kinda meh in my book.
And if you want to filter out politics, blocking lemmygrad takes away most of the tankie-spam.
This is true once you’ve blocked Lemmygrad and Hexbear, which are as much echo chambers as r/The_Donald ever was.
I haven’t blocked hexbear (yet). As annoying as I find their views, they do produce some funny shit now and then.
You’re fine as long as you don’t decide to jump in and offer a contrary opinion.
Yup. They claim to not have downvotes in an attempt at forming a diversity of opinion, but as soon as there’s an attempt at voicing a hint of such diversity, the ad hominim is engaged by a swarm. They started creeping through my comment and post history to find something damning, but only came up with a meh of a nothingburger, so they started to claim my opinion as invalid because I was on feddit.nl (lol?) instead, never refuting my original claim. I honestly don’t remember what the topic was about at this point. I probably called out something verifiably false or misleading.
The thing I find most perplexing about those communities is that although they themselves support marginalized communities, they also defend highly authoritarian regimes (Russia, China) that actively persecute said groups. It’s very strange to see that horseshoe wrap-around effect where at times they have the same things in common with the right wing but for entirely different reasons.