I was just reading this post https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1gmv76n/is_reddit_going_to_remain_the_primary_space_for/ and many barely see the fediverse as an alternative and they seem to have a negative bias towards it. Super ironic when it comes to the self-hosting community. Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views. But it doesn’t really matter when it’s federated and FOSS. I think it’s clear-cut that the selfhosting community on Lemmy is a perfect alternative to reddit. Why is there such a negative bias?
I definitely avoided Lemmy the first go-round with the API fuckery because it seemed from the outside like basically just a tankie protest Reddit in a similar way to how Voat was just a neo-Nazi protest Reddit. To the Lemmy devs’ absolute credit, they don’t push new users toward any of those, though.
I thought one day after having had a Mastodon for some time that I might not have given Lemmy a fair shake, so I went back and ended up finding that most instances are basically normal Reddit fare but honestly less shitty than Reddit proper (there’s a trade-off that posts are less frequent and that small, niche communities can attract unwanted attention by having their posts almost immediately show up in ‘all’).
Yup, things have definitely improved, especially with more extremist instances like lemmygrad being defederated and phased out. I do also want to give a shoutout to the devs for not pushing their stance and letting the platform grow naturally.
Just gonna put this out there. The devs push their stance plenty. Within their scope to do it from their echo chamber. Other than stopping development there’s little they could currently do to impact growth in any way. And there have been issues with their development focus that have negatively impacted growth. Recalcitrance to focus much on moderation tools for instance. As well as at least reported issues difficulty contributing to the project by others. Though that at least is hearsay.
I think it helps to think of it this way: WE are using THEIR platform.
They don’t need mod tools that work for communities and users located on a different instance as much as say Lemmy.World since the devs/admins simply use the instance-wide ban hammer for their own space. Hence that is not their focus. You can go to the trouble to learn Rust, and then fight with them to get your modifications accepted or…
Actually, I need to modify my statement above: YOU are using THEIR platform, but for those of us on Mbin, PieFed (which I’m on right now, and two new instances just opened up including one now in the USA), and soon Sublinks will come too (January was at some point a target iirc?), we have already moved on. None have reached feature parity yet tbh, though even so there are a lot of features that exist that Lemmy itself lacks, so there’s that, and being written in common languages should help enormously with them catching up.
So whether these are “as good as Reddit”, well, beauty is in the mind of the beholder. It’s not a clear win either way, but they are getting closer to being comparable.
