I was looking for a Reddit alternative for years. I would have been cool with anything non-corporate, but figured it would take ages to build.
It’s incredible what Lemmy has turned into so quickly. A Reddit alternative went from being impossible to actually existing within a matter of weeks.
As much as that makes a great story… The groundwork for lemmy goes back years. It’s true that lots of issues were addressed and client apps were ported after Reddit started going down hill, but a ton of work was done beforehand to make that all possible.
client apps were ported after Reddit started going down hill
For me, this can’t be overstated. I don’t work in an office/at a stationary computer and 99.9% of my Reddit time was mobile. I checked out the “mobile apps” for Lemmy, and hated them. I probably wouldn’t be active here at all if it wasn’t for good dedicated apps like Sync.
I know this comment could receive some negative feedback, but Lemmy lacks diversity in its userbase, compared to Reddit (or Tumblr in the old times). It’s just a feeling, when I scroll through comments and posts on Lemmy, I picture most of the users as 16-46 yo white males.
EDIT: changed “45” to “46”, see comment below.
That’s the vibe I always got from Reddit. But yeah, the vibe I get from Lemmy is that there are two demographics.
19-45 white male tech enthusiast and 19-45 white trans female tech enthusiast.
I’m not sure yet which one I am ಠ_ಠ
That’s how Reddit was for a long time too, and Reddit still is more like that than the other social networks. For whatever reasons that demo is more likely to be early adopters of this kind of platform. Diversity comes with growth.
Because Reddit was made for nerds, until more recently it didn’t try to attract the mass with shiny interfaces and promises of social recognition like FB and Instagram.
