Was originally thinking of posting Lenmy content on Reddit to less directly advertise Lemmy, but in the communities I follow, its almost exclusively content or already posted to, or directly originating from Reddit. This got me wondering if there were any niches that Lemmy serves better than other, larger platforms.
I for one, unsubscribe from communities that copy and dump content from someplace else. I found they’re low engagement anyways. But there are plenty good ones. Idk what to recommend because I don’t know other people’s interests and spoken languages.
(It might be a different story for meme pictures, since they’re usually circulated and regurgitated. That happens on other platforms as well.)
[email protected] can help
And the Lemmy Explorer. Though, I recommend brushing up the knowledge which instances are nice. I skip lemmygrad, hexbear and even lemmy.ml these days. Also lemmit.online since that’s just reddit bots.
While reddit has much more activity and posts due to the amount of users it has amassed over the years, I’ve found most of the stuff on the frontpage is just bots reposting the same memes over and over again to farm karma. On Lemmy, I see a lot more new OC and memes I wouldn’t see on Reddit.
The news posts seem to be about the same, but I find the comment section on Lemmy to be better for conversation. Reddit comment section on popular posts is basically just the top few comment chains, a lot of bots, and a plethora of single comments getting lost in the swarm.
Edit: to add to the second point, Lemmy feels a lot more engaging to me. If I reply to something on Reddit it most likely will not be seen by anybody unless it’s in a niche community.
When I was on reddit, I got into a habit at some point of replying to standalone comments with just a handful of votes to start conversations and make people feel seen. It appears I’ve still retained that.
Trek memes
Definitely the Internet’s superior source ofl Star Trek memes.
The flashlight community is lit
Plenty of people don’t like it, and plenty of them block it all out… but love it or hate it there is a lot of communist and anarchist discussion here. I was on Reddit for a long time and never found so many people interested in leftist discourse so far outside of the liberal mainstream.
One thing it doesn’t is fucking ads that are the majority of the content on bullshit like instagram
Trash political takes, communism, anarchism. That’s it mostly
In addition to what people have said here, try local content. I’ve seen some of that crossposted back
Also content tagged with “OC”
Oh, hell yeah.
The big three would be, first, technology, with a focus on Linux and home networking/self hosting being way better.
The second is the depth and breadth of the LGBTQ community. You get way better info, better discussions, with less dross or interference.
Third, I gotta say that the meme presence is vastly superior across the board. Less stale bullshit, less reposting, more funny. However, there’s also a good degree of niche memeing that won’t make sense to outsiders of the community, and a lot political memeing that’s just rants in picture format, with no real wit or creativity. Still miles better than reddit.
Those are the ones where, even when I switched fully in 2023, I was like , damn, this is great here.
I’d also say that lemmy is better at being open minded inside niche communities. We don’t have the numbers of reddit, which is part of it; more people, more assholes. But when it comes to hobby/interest based communities, there’s less parroting of whatever the established answer is, and more real, friendly discussion. Like, the flashlight, knife, and general edc communities on reddit were insular as hell. You couldn’t offer up an alternative opinion on a frequent subject without getting screeched at. Here, you may get disagreement, but it’ll be nice way more often than not.
That last one is why I spend so much time on lemmy. You still get assholes (and I’ve been known to put my asshole hat on sometimes), but they’re somewhat nicer assholes, if that makes sense? But the majority of the time, people outside of political topics are mostly just nice. They’ll express support and compassion easier, you’ll see more thanking each other for discussions. Even when it isn’t like that, the good stuff makes it seem less important. So what I ran into a jerk? I’ll be having a pleasant exchange in twenty minutes, so it just doesn’t matter.
Some communities have a lot of homegrown posts that you could share over there, especially text heavy posts, though they can be interspersed between links to elsewhere as well.
as an example, @[email protected] made a ton of really well done informative posts in various communities on my instance, such as this one.
If you really like socialism this is the place to be
Piracy, Linux, Self-Hosting, Anarchism
Conversation, mostly. By the time I quit reddit around two years ago, every top comment was a repost of a previous joke, or some predictable mutation of one.
Anything that went against the common preconceptions was shutdown immediately. I’m an expert/professional in a few niche subjects, and the final nail in the coffin for me was any comment I made turning into a fruitless debate with armchair experts too dumb to even understand why they were wrong, while correct info was downvoted to invisibilty.
None of this helps you crosspost, I’m aware.
inserts joke about the office
Followed by a a multi-page string of puns…
I’ve noticed this with news communities on here.
The discussion is often more nuanced and level-headed. Something that used to be the case on Reddit years ago, but now if I find the same news article linked there the comment section isn’t as helpful
Most people still on Reddit are bad people. Idk if it would be helpful to lure them over.
Some, I assume, are good people.
deleted by creator
I second that. in reddit you can find in any other post people (and other bots) claiming it is a bot karma farming and whatnot.