Like a lot of others, I’ve been looking at Reddit alternatives recently which is what landed me here at Lemmy.
How do you think Lemmy compares to Reddit? But also, for people who have tried other Reddit alternatives than Lemmy, how do they compare? What has been the pros and cons of each community for you?
Here’s my opinion on a few I’ve tried:
Kbin: I liked the UI but I thought calling communities “magazines” was weird. Also, there were features that I felt unnecessary like “boost” or “microblog”. Self-hosting documentation was much worse compared to Lemmy.
Squabbles: It took me a while to figure out the UI and honestly did not like it. The icon looks very funny as if it’s mocking what the average user is supposed to look like. It also isn’t decentralized.
Tildes: I liked the UI and the name. Not much to say other than that it’s also not decentralized.
Discuit: The best UI out of the bunch. It’s very easy to navigate. I wish it also had a naming community prefix like “!” or “m/” or “s/” or “~”. Generally, it feels very Reddit-like but it’s also not decentralized.
Lemmy: Very rough start but this and Kbin were really the only real options for me because they’re both decentralized. It’s gotten a lot better over the past month in terms of performance and UI. There’s a lot of apps being developed for it too. Most of Lemmy’s annoying quirks are its bugs but those are being fixed after every new release.
Tildes is a non-starter because I’m not cool enough to know anyone to provide an invite.
Just email the dev and ask. That’s what I did.
Same. I firmly think if Tildes had opened up more, it would have risen fast as a viable reddit alternative. That ship has likely sailed, but it’s aiight cus it’s still got great communities.
They didn’t have any interest in becoming a Reddit alternative, at least not for the vast majority of Reddit content like memes and puppy pictures. I think the entire place is text only, which does tend to foster more thoughtful commentary.
I forgot about that. Yeah that’s probably the biggest con.
Also, the Squabbles icon is named Bort. How could anyone dislike Bort??
I had no idea he had a name. I hope he could cheer up a bit!
I actually liked Squabbles when I first understood it but it quickly lost its charm. It’s clearly made with the intent of scrolling past topics, as it basically only gives you a glimpse at one or two comments.
But thing is, I spend too much time actually inside said topics, and the set up leaves too much blank space and I don’t need the actual topic contents on screen at all times, it’s wasting space. And the “show select comments” thing leans too much towards reading the comments that got selected as the overall reaction to the topic, whereas sometimes it is not and the second and third responses say more.
I also tried these and a couple more alternatives to reddit, and unfortunately, kbin and lemmy truly, undoubtedly, are the only apt replacements. There are other good websites for browsing actual, active content (tumblr is still alive guys), but their setup is too different.