I’m a huge fan of Reddit. In fact, I use it every day. There’s something about the community-oriented structure of the platform which makes it easy to reach like-minded people and to discuss things which are of interest to me.
As of April 2023, Reddit receives around 1.7 billion visits per month however, recent changes to their API has lead may subreddits to protest this decision by making them private as a form of blackout.
This important as the changes to the API mean that many third-party apps (which many people would prefer to use) have stopped working, which resulted in many people leaving the platform and flocking to find alternatives.
As part of my ever ongoing ramblings about the Fediverse, I shall take a break from talking about Mastodon and, instead, I shall talk about a new platform on the Fediverse which seeks to be an alternative to Reddit.
This platform is Lemmy.
Introducing Lemmy
Much like Reddit, Lemmy describes itself as “a link aggregator for the fediverse” where uses can subscribe, submit links and posts to different communities and participate in conversations.
Before singing up, users are required to pick an instance to join and register an account. There are multiple instances available, and a few popular choices include lemmy.world and lemmy.ml.
How it works
While there are many different instances to join, the beauty of the Fediverse and the ActivityPub protocol means that users can engage with other users or communities on different servers making the overall social network more scalable.
Lemmy provides a complete directory of communities to join, both locally (on the instance) or across the Fediverse (other servers).
Again, much like Reddit, within a community, users can submit posts in the form of text posts or external links where users can upvote and downvote posts as a way of collectively ranking content.
My thoughts
What are my initial thoughts of Lemmy so far? I think it needs some more work and attention.
I love the community-centric design of the platform, as it closely resembles Reddit (which I like). It reminds of the traditional web forums we were so fond of during the early days of the web (and yes, I do have memories of those days).
However, I don’t feel that it has gained enough momentum, in the same way Mastodon has as an alternative to its centralised alternative, Reddit. Also, (this may just be me) but it just doesn’t have the same user experience and community feel which Reddit has.
Despite this, I do feel that Lemmy has a promising future, as the lack of trackers and ads makes it appealing to privacy nerds like me. It also has an API, which is pretty convenient for developers and researchers alike. Who knows, maybe I’ll use it for a few data analysis projects in the future.
In short, if you want a federated alterative to Reddit without the drama, Lemmy is the platform for you.