No Stupid Questions

80% effective. The porn quality is weak.

If you pick a good, internally stable instance, it's great. Local can be more curated to your tastes, All can be more general.

What do we mean by effective?

One might say that the effectiveness of reddit is its niche communities that allow each and every user to find somewhere they feel like they belong. Not only this, the complexity of niches gives rise to interesting information that bubbles to the surface and front page of the platform where more users have exposure. One might contribute this to the quantity of users on reddit's platform, and also the discoverability of the platform itself.

Personally, I think Lemmy is decently effective now aside from the saturation in political and tech news and memes. I think things will get better as for-profit companies squeeze more and more people out of their platforms, and people look to alternatives rather than dropping their digital consumption habits.

I do think discoverability is still a downfall of Lemmy, from both internal and external views. I want to better find /communities from inside the platform and via a search engine should my use and value of Lemmy increase. Wonder how development has gone on this front.

Ultimately, the FOSS nature of Lemmy is one of its greatest strengths. It can improve over time, ripping features from the big players without the destiny of being killed eventually if not profitable. I think this characteristic alone gives rise to the potential of Lemmy to be very effective over time.

Platform-wise, it's already proven that it's a viable alternative (with some advantages even - the federated nature for one), but content-wise, it has A LOT to catch up (because let's be honest - in addition to all the bullshit and toxic people, Reddit has tons of useful information and good people still).

I imagine we all have different use cases, my idea of Lemmy succeeding may not be your idea.

That being said, as a replacement for Reddit, where I can scroll through the top say 50 posts once or twice a day, it absolutely fits the bill.

Engagement is much better for me here, I imagine due to the smaller size of the community, that lends itself to their being much less useless garbage comments and much more constructive or informative discussion.

The above being said, I do wish there were more people here.

I personally think it's a ton better. The platform is a bit less mature, but the people are much nicer and the filtering/blocking is lightyears ahead

Effective? No. Considering the purpose of all internet communities is to grow and have diversity, it's not effective. Aside from the currently low number of users, the fact that you can have the same community in different instances means a community will never grow large enough. Add to that the "you're literally killing children if you're a centrist" people and all the tankies, and what you have here is a leftist circlejerk that will remain small and irelevant enough to suit its need to be an echo chamber without any actual diversity. So maybe it's effective from that point of view? Idk.

I last logged into Reddit in 2022.

There's a lot of things missing - especially niche communities - but there's enough people to get into silly debates with and enough memes for me to scroll each day.

Current reddit is not like "reddit" anymore for a while... nothing is forever

So far so good. Its like the early days of reddit and I dread all that trash I left behind there coming here. I only miss sipstea.

I just love it here. But I also know that while most communities are really nice, we rely a lot on two (2) individuals who provide a sizeable part of Lemmy's content (Picard and PugJesus). We should all try to do our part!

We have less people, We have a better signal to noise ratio. So far we seem to have been spared the idiot community rules, like the moderators of r/music telling you that you need to go to tip of my tongue to crowdsource a list of songs with a certain theme, well they only accept a very narrow genre of music. Upvotes and down votes don't absolutely sink or blow up a post, you can say something relatively controversial here and not have it get buried.

We have some discoverability problems that they're working on. We're lacking a lot of niche interests. You're not going to find a sub here for every trade and game that exists. A significant amount of our traffic is just posts from other places with a minimum amount of discussion.
Upvotes and down votes aren't magically universal across every node. Some of the smaller fringe nodes can end up with delays and receiving posts.

I stopped reading Reddit At the very beginning of the API wars. It's honestly so much more healthy here.