I was looking for a Reddit alternative for quite some time, since the once lively communities that interested me have almost dried up, and their moderators seem to see their main role in preventing contributions rather than encouraging them. What I wanted instead was fairly simple: topic-based communities, titled posts, and nested discussions. I am interested in discussing programming languages and their implementation, not building a following. I could never really warm to twitter-style platforms, including their decentralised alternatives. I came across and tried programming.dev and did some research about it. My first impression was that it felt closer to what I liked about Reddit years ago. According to the attached paper and [1] I seem by far not to be the only one with this experience.

I wonder what experiences other users here have made. Do you consider programming.dev a suitable successor, or are there better recommendations?

[1] https://programming.dev/post/23029

I used Lemmy for a while and enjoyed the technical-focused discussions (although they did not have the volume of reddit).

In the more general channels, it turns out I made a poor choice of host server, because it was still federated with lemmy.ml. Some specific hosts have historical revisionist tankie viewpoints and make deliberately bad faith contributions to discussions.

It was interesting to see this from tankies since I usually see such behavior from the far-right. But "North Korea is an ideal state" loses novelty quickly, so it became frustrating to read discussions.

> although they did not have the volume of reddit

The volume of r/ProgrammingLanguage posts went down to a few per week and maybe one interesting per month.

Simply block the channels you don't want to see. I don't mind the tankies at ML. I also want to see what others think (when they aren't abusive or hateful). SDF.org doesn't defederate, fwiw to others who are like minded.

Maybe 140 million people having been murdered by Mao, Stalin et al was worth it to achieve a socialist utopia.

I swear some of those are propaganda accounts. Or really severe mental illness.

I'm working on Topicle which is trying to recapture the feeling of old reddit, while taking a centralised approach as opposed to the fediverse. It has a 5 star rated Android app and growing at a rate of a few hundred users a month at the moment. Feel free to give it a try. https://topicle.com/

Lots of tech people thought they could build alternative platforms to things like Reddit or Twitter. Mostly because the tech stack is relatively straightforward and the mechanics are proven and easy to implement. But none of that is ever the problem. The enormous amounts of moderation required to make a community even remotely useful is a burden that most people will never be able to undertake. The worst content, the most toxic users, bots bots bots. It's basically a cesspool that nobody in their right mind would get into at this point.

If there's hope, it's that Reddit/Twitter/etc now function as a quarantine or flypaper for the eternal September, the bots, the scammers, the slop, etc. And newer sites/networks can flourish at a smaller size because there's not enough profit in targeting them.

AI will bring the cost of ruining smaller communities way down.

Closed boards always have been and always will be the way to avoid this. Read only for non-users, and an approval chain for new users so if someone brings in a bad actor everyone they brought in can be banned in one go.

Ah so I see you're new to the Fediverse then? On Lemmy you can enjoy:

- People creating endless sportsball subs for a single team or even a single player

- Duplicate subs for the exact same thing across multiple instances, e.g. you might find two dozen Lewis Hamilton subs (forget the Lemmy name for them). And then duplicate that for ALL the topics...

- Endless subs in foreign languages because, why bother

- Getting shadow banned because your instance administrator and another instance administrator have beef or have political/religious/moral convictions or whatever and decided to de-federate, you know, just how telephone companies decide you aren't allowed to speak with someone THEY don't like...

- Endless, endless furries, especially trans/non-binary furry subs

- Breaking version changes every year or two, as in your (main) instance maybe literally being broken

- Struggling to share a link because maybe you'd open the upstream sub and not be signed in, maybe synced via your instance and you would

- checking that you are signed in on the right account to the right instance and that the instance itself is synced and on up to date version...

I checked out when I realised I had hit 1000 blocked subs and was trying to sync them across a dozen or so accounts to multiple different instances

Most of it is just part of the fediverse instance model. This couldn't happen on atproto... then again everyone who leaves Reddit for Lemmy in protest is both a redditor and easily pissed off, so technical solutions probably wouldn't save it.

> Endless, endless furries

Can I get a link?

What stops people creating subreddits that already exist on ATproto?

Less than moderation, my biggest problem with e.g. Reddit is that Reddit isn't one destination, it's a million. I go to Reddit for a specific set of sub-reddits much more than the site itself. Each one of those has its own separate network effect.

The biggest shot Lemmy has is that Reddit is taking every possible step to drive users away - just today I had to install another block rule because I started getting obtrusive overlays to drive me to the mobile app even when browsing it logged in on my desktop.

But even then, the fact that so many of us are willing to go to increasingly extreme lengths to keep using Reddit for various subreddits even as the site gets worse and worse shows just how sticky the network effect of the existing communities is.

I've been in some of them for nearly two decades, and finding a community with the same topic elsewhere won't reproduce the set of people.

I am literally here now because reddit became so unbearably botted that I deleted my account in disgust.

> I go to Reddit for a specific set of sub-reddits

Same here. r/ProgrammingLanguages was great until about four or five years ago. Now the contributions guide is mostly about what you may not post and you almost need a lawyer to find out what is allowed, and the mods again have another opinion about this than what is written and just delete stuff. The result is that I didn't see an interesting post in month.

Could they be maliciously complying with the new (since 2023) Reddit rules for moderators? A lot of subreddits closed, and then Reddit replaced their moderator lists and reopened them (most of those subs are now shit). Maybe the one you mentioned is avoiding running afoul of the don't close your sub rule.

I don't know. But it is apparent that "the" moderator of r/ProgrammingLanguages has an agenda.

Yeah, lemmy is alright but doesn't have a critical mass of users (and may never have that).

I suspect that Reddit is running into similar problems with a slowly dying user base. The reason I suspect this is because Reddit has slowly started to try and hijack the UX to force me into seeing and interacting with subreddits I don't want to see or interact with. The default UX is now "You might be interested in this because you viewed that".

I've noticed a number of formerly pretty active subreddits to be ghosts of their former selves. I've also noticed a ton of new subreddits pop up that appear to be just a mass of bots trying to hook in real users.

A big part of the Reddit problem is that reddit has made it as hard as possible to tell whose a bot. You end up noticing a bunch of 3 month old accounts swarming whenever certain topics come up but you can't dig into their history to see if this is what they always do.

All and all, it feels like the social internet is just dying. I feel like I'm getting more value by revisiting the old forums. (See ya'll at anandtech).

its got around 50k active users retained for 3 years from a 200k peak. Thats pretty good retention and its enough to visit every day for its users.

Unfortunately a lot of old forums are now dominated by a handful of cantankerous or mentally ill people. After all, one had to be a bit weird to hold on to forums as the rest of the world moved away. Other than them and their antics, the place might otherwise be a ghost town. Forums are also greying out, because younger people tend to be less interested in a site accessed from a web browser (which they might never use) instead of a dedicated app.

I tried to recommit myself to forums around 2020, and already then it was too late to find the healthy community I remembered from the early millennium.

The problem with whatsapp is that it's meta, and they have a generally sketchy smell to them.

Banning two thirds of their user base probably has something to do with it becoming a ghost town too.

I'm moderating r/Oberon for some months now and it is no effort at all. If there were bots, they didn't stand out in a negative way.

This exactly. It's always confusing to me when people realize that [current centralized platform] is bad, and their solution to that is [new centralized platform everybody moves to]. None of these systems can work.

As soon as they reach a size where they become actually interesting to use, they also reach a size where they become interesting targets for attackers.

I think it's a simpler problem: the general public these days uses the internet from phones, not computers with actual keyboards. Phone just discourage longform text and nuance, and encourage 180-character quips. Even if you had a well-moderated forum that kept trolls and bots at bay, the average quality of posts is going to be poor compared to a decade-plus ago. No one yet fully perceived that yet back when Reddit alternatives were first proposed.

Oh hey, I know this guy! He PMed me on Lemmy back in 2023 about a survey for his master's degree. I had no idea he actually went on to publish this document until I came across this post on HN. Great to see that it all led to something!

Do you still use Lemmy/Fediverse? How's your experience been?

> Do you still use Lemmy/Fediverse? How's your experience been?

Of course, I still use the Fediverse. Mostly Lemmy. I am one of the moderators in [email protected].

My experience so far has been good. I like it there. It is pretty political there, but once you filter them out, it is a small, relaxing community of like minded people there.

But moderation is indeed a problem, so I've been working on a ActivityPub-powered project (so it itself is federated as well) to automate things inside ActivityPub Groups (aka communities).

It's a less shitty reddit by and large. That still leaves ample room for shittiness obviously, but overall it's okay and I'm not going back to reddit.

Lemmy seem to be political as hell. Reddit is political, but the feel is like there are good old paid political astroturfing.

Lemmy is like all the folks that bought that paid astroturfing and continue it, but sincerely.

And Reddit had corners, where people could hide and talk about interesting stuff, Lemmy doesn't seem to be able to compete in that, probably due to number of users (I'm not sure though).

I'm new on Lemmy (i.e. programming.dev), but I have the impression that there are the same "corners" with interesting stuff; though I must say that also in my 10 years of Reddit I never went to political communities.

They represent the three most oppressed minorities online: people who think real communism has both been tried and was successful, people who think humans have rights, and programmers who want to talk about actually programming.

Leftists believe reddit is conservative and rightists believe it's liberal, they're both right. The writing was on the wall when reddit went public and rolled out the default subs.

But everyone believes it's hard to find a good discussion about programming and that's where the truth lies. :-)

You're probably talking about either "lemmy.ml" or "lemmy.world" which for some reason people think is the same as Lemmy, probably because that's what it's called. But if I registered hackernews.cloud and filled it with stuff that wouldn't mean HN supported that stuff.

> Lemmy is like all the folks that bought that paid astroturfing and continue it, but sincerely.

The politics you probably have in mind on Lemmy is mostly rooted in the traditional radical left. You probably couldn't really pay human astroturfers to do all that even if you wanted to because it's too baroque and sectarian.

Anyway the general political outlook varies heavily by instance. It's worth knowing what you're getting into when you choose a home instance (or several; federation be damned).

I use Lemmy every day (there are dozens of us! Dozens!) and it has replaced Reddit for me. It's basically the way Reddit was way back when; geeky, somewhat political, memes, and you recognize a lot of usernames. That's all I need, the low amount of content actually forces me to stop scrolling and go outside or read a book.