Reddit is Dead. Lemmy is Not As Busy.

Jan 3rd 2025

Sadly, these algorithmic differences don't make any difference if the communities are dead

Two months ago, I got fed up with Reddit and decided to host and use a Lemmy instance. But now, I've given up on both.

Why I left Reddit should be obvious to some who have used it long enough. Simply put, Reddit used to be very good, and now it's not.

I don't know for sure why Reddit turned to shit, but I think it's a byproduct of capitalism. It used to be that you would go on Reddit and find information you've never seen before. There would be exciting things; things to discover. I think that Reddit was under pressure by its founders and investors from Y Combinator to clean up the balance sheet and go public via their IPO. And I think that the pressure to become a publicly traded company ruined the spirit and ethos of the platform.

Content on Reddit was shifting slowly over the years; possibly due to the influx of more varied users that did not fit the hipster archetype. But the rate of change reached a breakneck pace after these goals of commercialization were publicized. For example, a lot of subreddits were completely scrapped. The removed subreddits were generally niche, and possibly had some content that might be viewed as offensive to some. Not a good look when you're trying to get advertizing money.

Alongside the subreddit bans, there was a huge exodus of mods. Both from banned subreddits, but also from other more popular subreddits as well. That exodus made me appreciate what kind of effect the moderators of a platform have on the community, as I will circle back to later.

But anyways, I just didn't like the content being posted. It started to become repetitive, uninteresting. I also think that there was a lot of rage bait.

For example, I'm from, British Columbia, Canada. Naturally, I'm subscribed to the subreddits for British Columbia, Canada, and a whole bunch of alternative subreddits that are from the same stream. There's the main subreddits for these geographical areas, but then there regularly seems to be alternative subreddits for the same areas. It seems to me that, when people got fed up with the moderators of the original subreddit and wanted to post content that had differing views, they would go and start posting to alternative subreddits.

For r/Canada, there's an alternative called r/onguardforthee. And I subscribed to that subreddit because, basically, it had accused r/Canada of being too status quo; not allowing posts that were critical of the government. For reference, the current federal government is a liberal party, and r/Canada was accused by some as unwilling to publish articles that were more conservative in nature. Now, I wouldn't describe myself as a conservative, but I like hearing and seeing differing opinions and judging those that differ from my own. You know, it's like, if I can see somebody else's differing opinion and really dissect it, then I can strengthen my own opinion.

But both of these subreddits... just kind of went to shit. They started posting content that was very inflammatory. This came mostly in the form of opinion articles that were taking a black-and-white stance on a subject, skewing the facts, and suggesting solutions that were extremely one-dimensional. And while politics probably had something to do with this; I feel like this kind of stuff was present on "both sides of the aisle" so to speak.

For a more concrete example, there were lots of posts of people's hot takes on the housing crisis and immigration. And with the inflammatory nature of these takes, I found myself getting really sucked into these cycles of reading said article, reading the comments, and just generally being let down by everyone's reaction to the issue at hand. There would be like alarm bells that would go off. Like, I kind of realized that, "Hey, you know, maybe this isn't representative of what actual people think." And I think I was right to some extent.

There were allegations by certain members of the community that these platforms cater to bots and astro-turfers. I'm convinced that organizations decided to use these platforms as a way to promote certain political views. And my evidence for this is, frankly, not to be taken as a primary source. If you Google "reddit onguardforthee astroturfing" there's a lot of posts with comments of people complaining about astroturfing, but no hard numbers to back it up. Reddit killing their API makes it pointless to try to use tools like subredditstats to try to find user overlap or keyword frequencies. More on that later...

Regardless as to who is actually behind which astroturfing, it's still probably likely that the views you see are concentrated to a select group of people, and are not representative of the real distribution. In addition, most of the comments regurgitate the same ideas, and users basically egg each other on. In Reddit terminology, a circle-jerk. So yeah, I didn't like that.

Another thing that I want to mention about Reddit is that on July 1 2023, Reddit decided to charge exorbitant amounts for letting third-party apps use their API. APIs allow services like Reddit is Fun to access Reddit. That's the app I used on my phone to access Reddit. I found it to be an unobtrusive, very clean application that provided just the bare minimum to get onto Reddit.

It was very nice. There was no fluff. It didn't make me want to use Reddit for more time than I wanted to use Reddit for.

Unfortunately, the company Reddit decided that these third-party apps should pay exorbitant fees to access Reddit. And that's how Reddit is Fun went offline. Obviously this was tied very closely to their desire to commercialize.

I haven't looked into it, but I wouldn't be surprised if by forcing users to install Reddit's proprietary mobile app, that Reddit gained additional information on their users that they could use to better serve advertisements.

I tried using Reddit's own app. But I found the UI to be; while it looks more sleek, it's actually less functional. Some of the search features are nice. What it really promotes is infinite scrolling. Anything to get your users addicted to watching advertisements am I right?

In Comes Lemmy

When I use social media, like Reddit or Facebook, I want to see are posts that are representative of my local community. I have limited time in my day, and while discussions of American politics (who said what shitty thing on Fox News) is certainly entertaining sometimes, I'd rather save my energy for reading things that affect me very directly. Eventually, this led me to discovering Lemmy.

I know that most readers of this article are probably coming from Lemmy, but for the uninitiated, what is Lemmy? Lemmy is essentially what Reddit is, but it's decentralized. So while Reddit servers were owned by the company Reddit, and run exclusively by the company Reddit, Lemmy is a service that runs on multiple servers that different people can control. In short, Lemmy is not subject to any of the financial pressures that Reddit faces. It's must more grass-roots. People volunteer their time and server resources to build communities that are free from advertizement, excessive moderation (because Lemmy is not that active, it's not a good idea to censor the small amount of interactions that do take place), and censorship. The downside is that the community is much smaller.

I decided to jump head-first into Lemmy; not by simply joining a community like most people do, but by hosting my own private instance. (ps. I left some setup notes if you are interested). I "self-hosted" not because I wanted to keep my data private or anything. That wouldn't work, as posts are basically duplicated on multiple subscribed servers. I guess I'm not sure why I did that other than just seeing what the process was like. Some vague feeling of digital control perhaps? Take that as a commentary on blurring privacy boundaries in today's digital world.

So anyways, I installed Lemmy, and I jumped into all the various communities that Lemmy has. When you use Lemmy, you have to subscribe to specific communities in order to see the content from those communities. So it's a little bit of setup compared to Reddit, where they kind of sometimes decide to show you things that you aren't subscribed to.

Some of the communities that I saw the most posts from include retro gaming, comic strips, programmer humor, memes, Lemmy shitpost, a community that is critical of modern transportation infrastructure called "fuck cars", technology, and Ask-Lemmy.

This is an awesome, continuous art project made by (probably) some computer nerd out there that provides artistic commentary on computers, technology, FOSS, Linux, and other things that a computer nerd would recognize. Their art style is very unique. The stories are imaginative. In their own words:

Automatism in the age of the children of Unix. This community is for all things related to computers, content, surrealism and wizardry.

ps. btw if you happen to be the technomage who is behind unix_surrealism, I would love to interview you. anonymously and through email maybe even.

They have basically created a universe of characters that just describe abstract thoughts and feelings related to the tech communities that I'm interested in. It is by far my favorite thing I've seen on the Lemmy platform. Be sure to check out their wiki to catch up on the lore, and their archive of related art.

It's interesting how Lemmy fosters these kinds of communities that do not exist on Reddit. For example, there's what feels like a lot of support on Lemmy for unix_surrealism. I think part of it is that there's kind of less algorithmic bias. I feel like Reddit supports "good" content, but it supports rage-inducing content even more. Whereas on Lemmy, the algorithm isn't really biased in this way. It just shows you the most active posts, which happen to be more "good" than rage inducing. So if you don't want to see something that infuriates you just don't subscribe to it. And on the other hand if you appreciate what you see, that really bumps up engagement.

Sadly, these algorithmic differences don't make any difference if the communities are dead. Because I self-hosted my Lemmy service, I thought I would subscribe to a community called self-hosted. But unfortunately, the self-hosted communities have two-month old posts on their front page. There's not much activity going on.

As an aside, I had to subscribe to two communities called self-hosted because of how Lemmy works. Lemmy splits up communities on different Lemmy instances, which means that there's multiple communities that are sometimes duplicated.

About lemmy.ca

Another thing that I found on Lemmy that was interesting was all the communities hosted on lemmy.ca. I thought, "oh, I would like subscribe to the Canadian communities on Lemmy," and I found them to be all nicely concentrated on a single Lemmy server.

What's interesting about Lemmy.ca is that it's run by a non-profit called Fedecan, or, "Federated Open Communications Canada". On their website it claims that it's funded entirely by user donations. This is interesting to me, as typically on Reddit, communities would be made by a small group of people that are really passionate about a topic. They typically wouldn't be run by an organization unless that organization was doing some self-promotion, and it certainly wouldn't be run by a non-profit that would be exclusively set up to run a subreddit, or group of related subreddits.

I did a little bit of digging, and I found that the non-profit is directed by a trio consisting of Mathew Pinard, Rafi Meher and Nathan March; according to public records. I searched for any grants going their way from the government of Canada, but I couldn't find anything.

The reason for the search is that my first thought was, "maybe this is a byproduct of Canada's telecommunication laws." If you're not familiar, Canada has laws regarding how much radio and television content must be Canadian. This also applies to online streaming as well, but the bill that was passed was frankly so unclear, that it's not exactly an easy question to answer if it applies to something like a Lemmy instance.

Creation of a non-profit that manages Canadian online communities basically screams "Canadian cultural protectionism", which I'm not necessarily opposed to. I just wanted to know if that was the case. If this trio hasn't yet considered taking grants from the government, they should.

I hope that one day Lemmy, or other federated services will take off. I think we need a break from online companies making money off users in ways that invade privacy. I think that the costs to run these services is low enough to do that, but the perfect mix of social embrace and technical ease is not quite there.

For instance, my Lemmy instance was run on a $5/mo Vultr virtual machine. It was their second cheapest VM plan, and I probably could have brought it down to $2.5/mo with their most-cheapest. If one can pay $30/yr for basically a private social network that's garbage and advertizement free, I think that should be more popular. But to make that happen we need an even easier system to set up; and we need the social effect.

I might be taking down my Lemmy instance and moving over to lemmy.ca. Or maybe I'll drop all social media. We shall see.