Lack of ads and ideological sympathies for FOSS is a huge part of why I came here but I stayed because the smaller size of lemmy allows for a feeling of community that reddit cannot achieve. I see and interact with users I recognize and know a decent deal of information about.
Most of all: it’s run non-for-profit. There are no ads, donations are optional (I have the means to chip in a bit each year) and its not VC funded and therefore has no intrinsic pressure to enshittify like reddit repeatedly did. Lemmy does not exploit me.
I’ve been able to make (very minor) improvements to the codebase.
I could download and host an instance if I thought there was one my hobbies needed.
I can move around pretty easily without missing much if admins are moderating in a way I disagree with, or kowtow to corporate interests or garbage national laws. And some of the reddit admins (not merely subreddit mods) were abusive.
Well the apps and interface is better for sure.
I still doom scroll reddit I’m somewhat ashamed to say, but I only post on Lemmy. I do rather enjoy the smaller base here to interact with.
We enjoy you too buddy.
Gosh that warmed my heart way more than it should! Maybe that’s why I love Lemmy!
I try to sprinkle a bit of love where I can, here and there. Makes the place feel more like home. 💓
It’s calmer. Less clearly corporate interest promoted content. Less rage baiters. Less bots.
Conversation can happen in the comments on lemmy.
No they cant! So anyways, did you do anything cool this weekend?
Just house work buddy. Moving sucks.
Reddit’s culture is extremely toxic. Like, I actually left Reddit before Lemmy existed for that reason.
It can be toxic here too. I had my misadventure with a bunch of “experts” absolutely sure that the future is communism and “stupid you brainwashed fool” if you don’t get it.
Oh I remember that, lol. It was a bunch of people giving long, well thought out explanations of their position to you, and you responding by ignoring them and insulting them.
Communism is the logical progression of society. It isn’t a certainty, but the alternative in the long-run is disaster and barbarism.
I don’t feel like I am being scalped for every ounce of data.
Right? What’s with all the obvious data gathering posts with huge upvotes like: “What was your favorite commercial as a kid?”, or “What’s that one thing you keep secret?” Really? It might as well be a day old account with 30 karma posting: “Please post a list of your favorite passwords alphabetically if you’re cool”.
I feel more free to post my controversial opinions: downvotes don’t really count nor have an effect on my account
It’s small enough that you can know people on your instance. And posts get engagement for way longer.
Also separate up and down vote numbers is nice.
I don’t yet– found my way here after getting banned.
Welcome :)
No ads, and generally more left-leaning.
No corporate pissbabies extracting value for shareholders for starts
My instance doesn’t sell what I write to train AI.
Of course, the AI sumbitches probably scrape Lemmy for content too like they scrape everything for content. But at least Lemmy doesn’t give them my content on a platter, nicely packaged up and ready to exploit and monetize. They have to do the scraping.
Eh, if they run their own ActivityPub server they can probably extract everything in a neat format.
Yeah but they have to set it up. It’s not sold to them ready to exploit - and crucially, Spez doesn’t get to make any money off my back.
Nobody needs your instance to sell anything. The AI companies can access the data for free, just like the rest of us do through the web.
Some instances like solarpunk sit behind anubis which makes each request from scrapers cost exponentially more than usual. Its not much but at least people on lemmy have the mind to try and strike back, on reddit they take it laying down.
and other instances that federate with solarpunk have almost the same data and are easier to scrape
There’s (slightly) fewer cunts on here.
No ads and no corporate censorship.
