The Four Best Reddit Alternatives
As Reddit melts down, users are fleeing to lemmy, kbin, tildes and more.
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Comments124https://lifehacker.com/the-four-best-reddit-alternatives-1850562547Open linkView original on lemmy.world
As Reddit melts down, users are fleeing to lemmy, kbin, tildes and more.
"Lemmy does not have upvote and downvote buttons"
uh... don't downvote me for posting this
It's been a long time since Lifehacker has been reliable for even basic facts.
What? I see and use upvote and downvote buttons in Jerboa. In fact I just updated your comment.
Are you talking about these things? Those are escalation arrows, not upvote and downvote buttons, totally different.
Different how, exactly?
it causes the device of the poster to operate at 1°F higher or lower, depending. (up= lower temperature)
But I'm european, I don't believe in °F
Well then they shouldn't affect you one way or the other!
thermodynamics doesn’t care…
Well for starters, they escalate things
And, of course, de-escalate
Ah, how could I have forgotten to include the all-mighty de-escalate *button
edit: arrow*
Yes. That's what I see. I had no idea it wasnt upvote/downvote as I use jerboa.
So the escalation arrows just push a comment to the top?
Isn't that what votes are for? lol
Yes, they escalate things to the top of the page.
"bring mummy her box of wine, I'm checking Lemmy"
For ppl who don't want to click the link (if using Memmy App) it's:
Lemmy, kbin, tildes and discord
I don't see how discord is a replacement in any way.
Discords can create their own forums, with static posts people can respond to in dedicated comment chains. I think the potential is there, but discovering discords you want to join is currently very difficult.
Not really, you just google the thing you want + "discord server", follow the invite link, and if it isn't what you want, just leave the server. It's 1 extra click of the mouse than searching for a sub on reddit.
It says it's not so much a replacement, but rather you might want to use it if you want to follow a particular community irrespective of the platform/format. For example, right now there are several games whose communities are more active on discord servers than any of the other mentioned websites including reddit.
Yeah Discord is chat rooms. Very different!
For specialized communities or works pretty well.
Except communities on Discord aren't search-engine-facing, so they're a complete dead end. Nobody can discover useful information there unless they are already members of that particular community. It's the "walled garden" effect.
As an example, the very specialized /r/IPv6 community seems to have adapted fairly well to Discord.
you don't? it's literally reddit but with immediate responses.
"immediate responses" is the problem. Chat discussions are very different in nature from forum-type communities. Often a lot more noisy and a lot less substantive.
Not really. Well moderated servers with large user counts are always divided into relevant channels where noise is suppressed by the mods and actual conversations occur. It's nowhere near as chaotic as you think it is.
Is Instagram reddit but with more personal images and hashtags then?
No. Don't be obtuse. Discord hosts special interest groups that can converse in real time and make sticky threads to be replied to forum-style.
Pretty sure there's no "posts" it only has comments, aka chat.
Nope. There are threads on Discord. You can use it like a message board.
You're looking for reasons to be mad about something you don't use. How about trying the thing? Also, you had no trouble creating a new lemmy acct. Why is discord anathema to you?
Ask a question, receive an immediate response. It's better than reddit in many regards.
It's also unsearchable from any search engine, becoming a black hole for information etc... Unfortunately
Not true. You search the discord server you want to join, follow the invite link, and boom, you're in the server. Start talking to people, ask the community questions, and receive immediate response. If it's not what you're looking for, it's easy to leave the server. Reddit isn't popular solely because it's posts appear on google search results.
I'm not just talking about popularity. To be frank, communities moving to discord is a problem imo. Discoverability is, frankly, garbage. Information provided by others users cannot easily be found at a later date, and even then YOU DONT KNOW where the information you might want could be. If I want information on an old game for instance, on a reddit or Lemmy like platform searching for the game would yield a result, on discord I'd first have to find out which communities exist and then search each one separately, filter out the garbage (Discord conversation is a lot harder to parse and a lot less information dense than Lemmy or reddit)... This leads to having to ask again, old information might be lost and much time is wasted, both for the person asking the question and the ones answering, for no benefit. Hope you can see my perspective here
Pretty sure tildes has an issue with the admin turning a side eye to particular user accounts who bully people on the platform
Though I learned that from someones comment on redddit in response to someone else talking about tildes and I can't be bothered to go and find it because it's reddit
i was on tildes for a few months. anyone who offers any dissenting opinion, however mild, is harassed by the bullies on the sub and they the admin bans them for 'causing trouble'
it's very much a 'say what everyone else says, or else' type of place. the admin wants it it to be his own little internet hugbox
I was going to ask how to get an invite, but if that's how it is, I'll stay away. I love how positive and friendly it is here and Lemmy.
What’s wrong with opening the link on Memmy? I just did it and it worked fine
nothing wrong but some just dont want to riskyclick like me... a mentality coming from reddit ;)
Fair, I get that. I just wanted to know if there was something I should’ve known about, glad there’s no real issues!
thanks!
Discord: home of the pedos
And every single game developer, special interest group, streamer, and university study group.
Oh? No up/down voting?
Ahh crap, can I have my upvote back then?
I already gave it to someone else :(
Wish you could, but we can’t! There’s just no way!
To shreds you say?
Yeah, kinda reads like the writer didn't actually try out the services themselves.
Probably confusing it with karma.
This is the principle where when you actually know a topic, it's amazing how wrong journalists get things. But when you don't it's "oh cool, I'm learning something"
I'd update your comment, but the article says I can't.
Where?
I wonder what the atmosphere at reddit HQ is like this week.
Phew we really fucked that up, but glad that's over! Now let's get back to finishing up these new mod tools and releasing a great mobile app and finally releasing the fix to the video player
-or-
fires! Spez-ssistant: "Mr. Spez, another investor is blowing up my phone all morning, can I transfer the call?" Spez: "No, hold my calls, I'm searching for a PR company. Did any of those other ones answer your emails yet?" Spez-ssistant: "No Spez, they all said they are too far booked out on this submersible company thing" Spez: "Dammit! What about our moderators?" Spez-ssistant: "Bad news, the top subs are full of literal buttholes and there is nobody to delete them now that we banned most of the mods" Spez: "What if I promote you and all your friends, can you guys stay on top of this for a while?" Spez-ssistant: "I just got an email from CircleJerk Securities, it says they are pulling out of the IPO!"
*Edit: I see that my battles with formatting will continue
More likely they are expecting this to blow over and people to return to reddit. This isn't the first-time people have called for a mass exodus and they are expecting it to go like it has before.
It all depends on whether or not lemmy can prevent itself from devolving into an ultra-political shithole, without becoming too restrictive.
Well how many people do you think actually left Reddit or care? Not counting the mods, maybe 0.1% of Reddit users???
You forgot the part where Spez-sisstant says "but if we exercise that much direct editorial control, we'll fall afoul of Section 230 and lose our DMCA safe harbor."
(But then again, I'm probably giving too much credit to Spez-sisstant.)
This has been so hopelessly broken for so long that it's basically become a meme of its own. It's been so broken for so long that its actually kind of impressive...in a bad way.
The second one
Switching to Discord is pointless. That's switching from a website controlled by one evil corporation to one controlled by a different evil corporation. Discord is still in hyper-growth mode, so they aren't going to be adding user-hostile features for awhile. Tilde has the same problem.
Outside of the username thing.
I don’t like the username decision but it didn’t seem hostile to users. People seem to pick a username, update their server profile, and move on. My account is old enough that I picked my username pretty early in the process though.
I agree that casual users likely found the discriminator confusing, though I never verbally shared my username with people. It didn’t seem like a strong enough reason to warrant the change.
Why do you consider it hostile? I doesn’t seem like it has degraded the overall experience.
I'm not OP but I have a friend that was pretty miffed about it. He had the same username on several platforms and on Discord he shared the name with a couple people. One of them apparently had priority and now he has to tell people "I'm blah on x, y, and z. And on Discord I'm blah123." It's not the end of the world but just gives him a reason not to share his Discord.
For a platform looking to maintain and grow users, it just seems pretty shortsighted to inconvenience even 5% of users. If the rename had led to some kick ass feature I'm sure people would be fine. There just doesn't seem to be any tangible benefit for existing users.
Yep, it’s not searchable and just another corporation. It’s fine for certain things but it’s NOT a replacement for Reddit.
I guess OP should have asked for 5. ;)
The irony is that reddit is creating its own competition - when before there was nothing.
Back tracking a few years when digg began to self-destruct, reddit was, in fact, a viable competitor.
Reddit never had a competitor until reddit itself, through the sheer incompetence of its gaslighting CEO, forced the creation of multiple (now) viable competitors.
yes and no: lemmy released in 2019, so let’s not sell the fediverse short! people decided that a federated forum-like platform should exist irrespective of reddit’s current implosion!
i think it’s important to acknowledge that these platforms exist not only because of reddit's incompetence: they have value regardless (ie, even if reddit does a 180 ;) )!
*edit: of course you’re totally right that reddit has helped to make the platforms viable competition with their exodus
4chan is a competitor, a shitty alternative, but still a competitor
Voat came out in 2014 and was kinda big for a while. I used it for a few weeks, but activity started dying down and I didn't think about it again until I found out it was being shut down in 2020. The Wikipedia article says many of the users migrated from subreddits on the right of the political spectrum, so maybe that's why.
This time it's different, though. The recent drama affects way more than just a couple subreddits.
Steve Huffmyownfarts thought he could squeeze his userbase for everything they're worth, because there was nowhere else to go.
Turns out, it's not that hard to create 'someplace else' if enough dedicated nolifers put their minds to it.
Tildes is invite-only, so it's not really much of an 'alternative' at all.
As far as I can tell, it's another centralized platform as well? I'm hoping we learn from the mistakes of reddit and move back to a less centralized forum
So pretty much useless sadly
Yeah, it's just as centralized as Reddit.
I don't disagree, but it's definitely a shame the decentralized platforms are hard for the average user. Most want a video feed, ease of use, and loads of content. While we are getting there with content, the other two are currently lacking.
Hopefully we can make the ease-of-use thing a reality, it's not realistic to explain to non-tech people how to utilize Lemmy, kbin, etc. Most will lose interest really fast
Reddit already wasn't a video feed, so if that's the requirement, all of these platforms are dead.
I agree to the rest, though. Even as a more technical user, the barriers to reading/commenting between different instances so far are obviously needing improvement.
100%, but users are all about whatever is easiest. With Reddit, they don't need to click a link (most of the time) to watch a video and instead can just scroll, and watch. So it's not really a "video feed", but it still had an easy way to view videos.
Hopefully we see similar here, as that would draw a bigger audience IMO. I understand the storage limitations currently, but there are ways to embed videos from other platforms, this wouldn't be as ideal (ads, modules, etc), but I think would be something that draws a lot of the video-lurking crowd.
Yes. Might as well go back to reddit then going to another centralized platform.
If you like another 'just a website, not a federation' alternative then squabbles might be more interesting?
I’ll see how it shapes up.
Can anyone get me an invite there. I love the super old school Reddit design
I would if I had one, but I don't.
Squabbles.io looks pretty slick too
I set up an account on Squabbles but I hope Lemmy/Kbin really take off as I would much rather not deal with another company.
I did too but it hasn't really clicked with me the way Lemmy has. I spent a little time in there, and its super slick, love the UI, seems to have a lot of active content coming up, but it also seemed pretty heavy on memes. I'll still check it out some more though. I like trying new stuff
It's super pretty and easy to use compared to kbin/lemmy and I think that alone is going to get it a lot of traffic. Which is great, anything to make it easier for users to leave reddit.
Unfortunately it's pretty much only cat posts and calls to make sure nobody that's not part of the reddit hivemind is allowed to exist there.
Yesh... I haven't dug in a lot tbf, but the default front page at least was a looot of low effort shitposts. To be fair, I did dip in on the day they first got inline pic previews, and everyone was clearly giddy about it.
I want to go back and sub to all my active interests, maybe block a few of the more active cat pic-style communities, and see if I can curate something more personal to my own use. Oh, they have hace a great mobile app too, I think called pulse?
I was trying out squabbles too. It says it wants to be a mix between twitter and Reddit but it feels much more twitter than Reddit to me.
I never liked Twitter one bit.
But aren't Squabbles and Tilde both not federated, and therefore potentially subject to changes or even an IPO by the owners?
is squabbles federated?
No, I don't believe so.
It is not. It is openly a business bet by the dev/admin. I was on it for a bit. It’s not a bad community at all, but honestly most of my subs on Reddit aren’t either.
If I were going to subject myself to the whims of someone’s business plan, then all drama aside, it might as well be Reddit’s, at least until the place actually crumbles.
There is also Raddle.me i stumbled upon, but i think i prefer lemmy/kbin still
From that article it seems like Lemmy has the best shot of replacing reddit! Not only was it listed first, it’s description was the most approachable.
I think it's relatively redundant in the fediverse which wins because all federeated instances reep the benefits of eachother (except I think maybe tildes)
It's because Lemmy's the most Reddit-like out of the alternatives, and anyone can make an account. It's gonna be confusing for a while (especially the whole concept of the fediverse) but this might be our best shot at preventing the overcentralization that all these dotcom moguls are trying to peddle.
Not being able to make an account on tildes kinda stopped me from even giving it a chance. Like I get they have valid reasons, but I want to curate my content and be able to be able to make the occasional comment.
Has Tildes gotten better?
Last time I used it the site felt like it was dead and pointless.
Well recent events have certainly made it seem more active.
I logged into my old account and yeah, it's still pretty quiet compared to Lemmy. Each group might only get 1 or 2 new posts a day from a casual glance. I think there's only been about 80 posts in the last 24 hours total which is OK I suppose.
Last time I looked at Tildes you had to email an actual person with your password to set it up or change it.
I signed up for it a couple weeks ago. I just sent an email to ask to join then he sent me a sign-up invitation. I didn't send him a password or anything of the sort.
edit: a word.
They must have finally fixed that bit.
Speaking as a web dev, it should have never worked that way.
Yeah this is an awful and thrown together article.
Well, three out of four ain't bad.
Why does discord look like a mess. I just can't get into it. The UI/UX seems off.
It is getting messier. They just did a complete UI overhaul about a year ago. The logo is worse and there's more Nitro ads, but ultimately it's still the same experience it ever was. A more feature rich IRC.
As far as I am concerned it's just Lemmy/Kbin for life.
I at least agree that it's definitely Lemmy/Kbin for now.
I'm not completely sure about "for life," though, just because it's too soon to be sure that ActivityPub will be resilient against all threats and won't need to eventually need to get replaced with something even more corporation-resistant (e.g. fully peer-to-peer, or perhaps even a darknet).
i hope sync also supports kbin, im ride or die sync
Supposedly the dev confirmed kbin support was coming "eventually" on discord
https://www.reddit.com/r/SyncforLemmy/comments/14g8eix/q_will_sync_for_lemmy_be_able_to_handle/
minecraft lemmy kbin maplestory
keep calm and mushroom game on 🍁
Didn't find a good mobile app for kbin so lemmy it is for me!
The webapp is good enough for me. (for lemmy)
I'm using Connect for Lemmy. So far the app is pretty good. UI could definitely use some more overhaul, but it's fairly intuitive and still in the early stages.