Saw the whole fiasco of Reddit unraveling and then went to Lemmy. Seriously fuck Spez and how he treated the developer of Apollo.

Came because of the reddit API. Stayed, because I couldn’t stand reddit users anymore.

To spread the word about the ultimate beverage: WATER

Found out about it from Reddit, and it seemed better in several ways, so I tried it out.

Because reddit shut down my favorite app.

Reddit made me constantly angry, then the API thing forced me on their app which made me angrier.

Lemmy makes me feel good and the app I use fits my needs near perfectly.

This is a pretty decent group of weirdos we got here.

I’m a bit less extreme about it than many here. But, in short, back when Reddit made sweeping API changes it immediately gave me ‘the ick’ and so I sought less centralised platforms. Lemmy is the closest thing I’ve found to people just hosting their own message boards like back in the early internet.

I’m a big fan of decentralized platforms and I love the concept of ActivityPub.

That said, I still use Reddit and have recently started to really enjoy BlueSky, so I’m not militantly against the corporate platforms or anything.

Finally, I just like the natural selection things like Lemmy and Mastodon have for those who are naturally more techy and nerdy.

Allows Tor and VPNs

UI is so clean and mobile browser friendly

No “Download Our App” annoying BS

No ads

Federation make it censorship resistant when it comes to discussions, no one person can ban all dissent, while consensus of the instances can ban all the hate speech, and there’s the tool of defederation to stop instances that allows hate speech to go uncontrolled.

Lemmy and fediverse platforms are probably the best examples of “Free Speech” platforms there are that, unlike those other “Free Speech” platforms, this isn’t just filled with hate speech all the time, although it isn’t perfect, and there are still jerks sometimes.

Edit: As to why a “Reddit” type platform with communities and upvote/downvotes, its because I don’t like the “Twitter” style of following people. People become bad all the time. I like to discuss topics, not focus discussions on a person.

Reddit’s API fuckery. That’s it, that’s the whole reason. Fuck spez.

Reddit was reddit. I left when I was forced into using their stupid app and watch ads.

I’ve generally enjoyed Lemmy.

Edit: or to and

Came in support of Apollo; I just couldn’t in good conscience continue to support Reddit (even after 19 years) with how they treated external clients.

Found it similar to Reddit so it scratched the same itch.

Because Reddit is a shit hole from which no intelligent life will ever escape.

Left Reddit because of the API stuff. Still on Lemmy because it’s not as addictive and has a much higher concentration of leftists.

Was ready to jump ship from Reddit before the API changes were to come in full effect.

Joined Lemmy after I heard about it and saw Jeroba worked well on my phone.

Completely switched over once ‘Reddit is Fun’ stopped working.

I think that public forums should be publicly owned. These are essential social tools that allow us to have discussions with each other and shape our views and opinions. These forums must be operated in an open and transparent manner in a way that’s accountable to the public.

Privately owned platforms are neither neutral or unbiased. The content on these sites is carefully curated. Views and opinions that are unpalatable to the owners of these platforms are often suppressed, and sometimes outright banned. When the content that a user produces does not fit with the interests of the platform it gets removed and communities end up being destroyed.

Another problem is that user data constitutes a significant source of revenue for corporate social media platforms. The information collected about the users can reveal a lot more about the individual than most people realize. It’s possible for the owners of the platforms to identify users based on the address of the device they’re using, see their location, who they interact with, and so on. This creates a comprehensive profile of the person along with the network of individuals whom they interact with.

This information is shared with the affiliates of the platform as well as government entities. It’s clear that commercial platforms do not respect user privacy, nor are the users in control of their content. While it can be useful to participate on such platforms in order to agitate, educate, and recruit comrades, they should not be seen as open forums.

Open source platforms provide a viable alternative to corporate social media. These platforms are developed on a non-profit basis and are hosted by volunteers across the globe. A growing number of such platforms are available today and millions of people are using them already.

From that perspective I think that open platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon should be the focus. Instead of all users having accounts on the same server, federated platforms have many servers that all talk to each other to create the network. If you have the technical expertise, it’s even possible to run your own.

One important aspect of the Fediverse is that it’s much harder to censor and manipulate content than it is with centralized networks such as Reddit and BlueSky. There is no single company deciding what content can go on the network, and servers are hosted by regular people across many different countries and jurisdictions.

Open platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads and popups.

Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook or Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another.

On the other hand, a federated network that’s developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network.

Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it’s actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens.

Marxist theory states that in order to be free, the workers must own the means of production. This idea is directly applicable in the context of social media. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored by corporate interests.

No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it’s going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn’t suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform.

On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they’re developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them.

It’s time for us to get serious about owning our tools and start using communication platforms built by the people and for the people.