Ask Lemmy

I feel like this questionnaire is missing one rather obvious path:

I'm not using Lemmy because I prefer it over Reddit in any way. It has more technical problems, it lacks the niche communities that Reddit is famous for, the community is more toxic and rather extremists, and it is a splintered mess

However,

It's not really a matter of choice. I simply can't browse Reddit on mobile anymore. I'm not blind or anything, but the official app is simply not useable at all. Even the FOSS POS apps of Lemmy are better, and that's saying something

It's not a matter of preference. It's a matter of necessity

Responded!

Have you noticed an increase in Lemmy usage since the Reddit migration?

This probably needs an option for "not applicable". If someone came in with the migration, it's hard for them to compare with the Before Times that they weren't here for. (I had to choose 'not sure'.)

Answering questions you didn't ask:

1. Did I move from reddit exclusively to Lemmy? No; I'm getting some of my tech needs from ycombinator, meme content from imgur, and I'm also on tildes.

2. How does your frequency and type of interaction (post, comment, read) on Lemmy compare to your time on reddit? I'm slightly less active on Lemmy than I was on reddit, mostly because some effort is sucked onto yc, imgur and tildes. Anecdotally, I know some people who are less active here because they're finding less content to interact with; as well as people who are much more active here, because the communities aren't overrun with bots, trolls, shills, and other people acting in bad faith.

Done

The biggest strength and weakness to Lemmy IMO is the lack of content. I doom scroll less but for most niche communities I can't reliably assume that someone else has already made an answered post with a question I might have.

For example if I wanted the answer to a technical question like "What height scope ring do I need to mount a scope to an AR-10 rifle?" I can't find any posts with that answer here, but there's a bunch of posts on the specific topic on Reddit.

(Before someone answers the example question it's usually the tallest or second tallest ones the manufacturer makes. >1.5in)

Posting this from my Lemmy.ml account so you can see the account age - it's from 2020. When taking the survey, I noticed the phrasing/answers on some of the questions could maybe be improved if you want to find out what Lemmy was like before Reddit came over.

I am a long-time user of Reddit. My Reddit account is well over a decade old at this point, and I've disliked the admin team since about 2013-2014 or so. I continued to use Reddit because of its scale and the ability to have niche discussions on it, but I have always taken any alternatives seriously. Over the last 10 years, my trust in the Reddit admins has continually shrunk; bear in mind that I am also a moderator of a medium-large subreddit (600k subscribers).

I discovered Lemmy from this post on Reddit. At the time that post was made, Lemmy didn't really have any federation yet. Lemmy.ml was the only real place with any activity (although Lemmygrad was founded and beginning to grow).

I used Lemmy for a while, but left for a couple reasons:

1. Conversations were slow, with 1-2 weeks between a post and a reply

2. People on there had unsavory politics that I disagree with, including the creators of Lemmy itself (who ran Lemmy.ml, which was - again - the only instance with any notable activity)

I also was frustrated with the lack of an Android app; I was recommended one at the time but it has since stopped development and is now abandoned.

These factors drove me to Reddit again, although Lemmy stayed in the back of my mind. But I checked in every 6 months or so, just to keep an eye on things. Which brings me to my real point here:

It's really hard to talk about "Lemmy" as a whole. It's not quite like Mastodon, where there is very much a culture that's shared across instances. Pre-migration, there were politics between Lemmy instances and these politics have always been dividing lines.

People federated with Lemmy.ml because there was no alternative. That's the "stock" place people go to sign up. It was the only place with activity, and thus if you didn't federate with it you didn't have anything in your feeds. (Not that there was much going on anyway... there were maybe a couple dozen active accounts per month.)

Despite this, you still had places like Beehaw which had a very strict moderation policy (basically a safe space for people who disliked Reddit and Lemmy.ml), but Beehaw still federated with Lemmy.ml. You had Hexbear, which technically turned off federation altogether and used Lemmy as a traditional forum after their subreddit got closed (like Truth Social is to Mastodon). Etc.

The way the survey speaks about all these places as a monolith sort of ignores a lot about what Lemmy was like before the migration from Reddit. Each instance was very different from the others; now they've sort of run into one another but prior to that you had very specific "look and feel" for individual instances.

Because of this, questions like "How do you feel was the response from the existing Lemmy community towards the migration?" will get very different answers based on what instance you joined. Asking how Beehaw reacted is very different from how Lemmy.ml reacted, and Lemmy.world didn't exist at all before Reddit came over.

Another confusing question: "Which platform's user interface do you find more user-friendly?"

This can give you very different answers based on whether people are coming from New Reddit or Old Reddit. I very much dislike New Reddit (and have since it was launched). Old Reddit is much more functional, but I have no way of indicating what I'm comparing Lemmy to.

I hope you can share back here the results of your study once it’s done. Good luck!

I was filling it out, but I have to ask, "What about Kbin". There are several different interfaces that all communicate on this protocol. So I'm on asklemmy, but technically I'm not a Lemmy use, I'm a Kbin user, does that count as "Lemmy" for your study?

I have also completed the survey. I think it would also be interesting to see how permanently people left reddit.

For example, I was Lemmy exclusive for a while, but started missing discussions on more niche subjects (aquarium and shrimp keeping, audiophile equipment), and have since gone back to reddit sometimes. But I also think many people that were part of the migration completely deleted their accounts.

Filled it out, nice initiative 🙌 I was wondering if it would have made sense to include questions about mobile apps, as I barely use the web version of lemmy. I’m on Mlem but have tried a few others (Voyager, Memmy). I mostly just wish we had an Apollo for Lemmy though 🫠

Sent a response, hope it'll help!

Sent. Good luck with your research!

Done. Best of luck with your study! Now I’m curious. I hope you consider sharing the results with us!

Fuck off /r/spez

Responded!

Done!!

Hey can you do a survey for kbin?

Done

Done 😄 sent from kbin