I’m going to be a loner on this one, but I’m a big firearms guy and 2nd amendment supporter. Hard to be here when 99.99% are “eww guns”. I ran a few subs for niche communities. I miss the really tight group where everyone actually have a ahit, and nobody trolled each other. It was more for educating newbies, and helping those getting into it. Those communities were way nicer than anything else I was a part of.
A lot of the communities I frequent simply never made it. They were too niche, or it simply didn’t fit Lemmy.
Though I’d argue that what I miss more is the usability. Old Reddit and RES is a wonderful experience. Lemmy and Alexandrite are closer to new Reddit than old, including the poorer performance.
I know there are some interfaces that emulate the old Reddit experience, but they lack the RES integration that makes old Reddit particularly nice to use.
Yes, a photography community with such a broad audience that the “no sunsets” rule was actually making sense.
The content, engagement, and quality of conversations are much better here on Lemmy, and the platform feels considerably less saturated.
Unfortunately, what Reddit used to be, and what made it great, is long gone. That being said, the API changes were the nail in the coffin, not the sole reason for its decline. Reddit had already been on a downward trajectory for years before that.
The one thing I still appreciate about Reddit is that content gets refreshed much more frequently than it does on Lemmy. However, even that isn’t enough to keep me there for more than a few visits a week, usually out of sheer boredom.
Local community content, and content for less popular games like Quake
I miss Reddit from two or three years ago. But all my favourite communities were overrun by bots.
“Wow, that’s interesting. Could you tell me more about that?”
Anything good that Reddit ever had was because of people. It’s gone now.
I definitely miss peak reddit, like 2015 or so. The community and thus the content was awesome. That experience doesn’t exist today though, so I definitely don’t miss reddit in the sense that I’d like to visit the site as it is today. I think Lemmy is getting there though. If we keep this up, we can remake what peak Reddit gave us.
The thing I miss most from reddit is the ability to find decently sized communities for extremely niche topics. Lemmy just isn’t big enough to support that. However, I certainly don’t miss it enough to actually go back to using Reddit. There’s other places to go for that (like Discord servers / Matrix spaces).
Exactly. You can find an active subreddit for fucking anything. Find a new anime and want to discuss it? There’s an active sub for that. Find a cool bug and want to identify it? There’s an active sub for that. Want to ask a doctor for casual (off-the-record) medical advice? There’s an active sub for that.
But with Lemmy, the first would probably land in a more generic c/Anime, while the latter ones might struggle to find an appropriate community at all. Because even if the specific communities exist, the chances of them being active enough to get a response are low.
Exactly. I haven’t seen either a woodworking or sewing project over here since I joined, as one example.
No terrible first attempt at dovetails, no probable not first attempt at macarons, no woman wearing the sweater she just knit from alpaca wool.
And books. If I wanted a new scifi book here, I’d likely get 0-1 responses. There’s no book community here.
People post stuff there from time to time
It seems trendy lately to brag about how little one reads.
You’re kidding. How is that even possible? Conservative AI bots pushing for those uneducated masses? Probably, with 51% bot/AI post populations on social media.
In real life, I see the younger generation carrying physical, paper books around at work. We have them in my house, and the people in my house keep one in their cars for wait times.
My new thing is im trying to gradually reduce my topic specific questions in catchall Ask comms like this and instead submitting to the actual community that concerns it
Itll be slow but hopefully that can meaningfully shift my own stuff to help beef up the existing topical comms, if everyone does something similar we may actually get somewhere.
Sometimes im just gonna post here cuz its easier and people sort of know my deal already but i do intend to try to put things where they belong in hopes of making Lemmy more like that in terms of stronger non-centralized topical comms that are more likely to have domain-experts or at least more knowledgeable than is likely to be found in general purpose Asks
Smaller, niche subs. The state/city subs. The specific career subs. The hobby subs.
The amateur porn was way better
Amateur porn is how every site gets big. Tumblr was able to get as big as Reddit by allowing amateur porn and Reddit only managed to keep up by doing the same. The only reason you don’t hear about Tumblr now is because they stepped allowing it and scrubbed all their content. By the time they reversed their decision only two weeks later, everyone had moved over to Reddit, their momentum was lost, and the damage was terminal.
Game based communities suck pretty much everywhere. But the ones on reddit, you could at least usually count on enough activity to get good info.
i miss niche hobby and academic subreddits full of thoughtful reasonable people where insane nonsense was not tolerated or it was at least mocked relentlessly.
also circlejerk subs that mocked the big hobby subs where folks just endless posted photos of shit they bought and other people jerked them off on spending $1000s bling.
I miss being able to hop into a forum for pretty much any individual game outside of the lousy Steam forums. Even the soulslike fans are a pretty small group here. And I tend toward fairly niche or complicated games with rather small player bases as it is.
The niche boards for problem solving is about the only thing.
I’ll always miss the vastness of communities on reddit. There’s just something for everyone.
What I’ll never miss is the absurd way things are moderated.
