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The Lemmy userbase isn't much better than that of Reddit.
(literature.cafe)
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this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2026
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Unpopular Opinion
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I came to lemmy thinking it would be a space for old school pre corporate internet users. A place where people wanted to create something that was primarily leftist who wanted to work towards what we once had. Instead it was the opposite of that.
Lemmy seems like a place where people just want to recreate corporate spaces. People here don't want to change anything instead they want to solidify the stuff that already doesn't work. As long as you can sell these communities to advertisers then they're happy as can be.
Who is trying to sell a community on here?
This is just an observation and my opinion. My point is that this the past 10 years we've commercialized digital spaces for selling off to marketers and advertisers that it is now ingrained in how we create new spaces. Regardless if it is consciously or unconsciously. Lemmy is still new, but the behavior and rules and actions were recreated here.
The goal is to box everything. Everything in its box. Tightly controlled and and categorized. This way the space is ready to be sold. It sucks the air out of places. It leaves no room to build momentum or originality. But there's very safe.
I don't really know how a Reddit-like alternative would have to present and function to you in order for you to not consider it compromised in such a way.
I don't even know precisely what you mean by "boxxed" in this context.
That's the problem. You don't know. To me it is obvious. But to you everything is fine so why change it. Lemmy shouldn't be a reddit like alternative.
I see this place as one of the last spaces for leftist. If this fails it's kind of over for the left.
But let me ask, are you still on reddit? If you left, what made you leave.
I mean structurally. I'm still not sure what you're getting at here.
And I never said the Threadiverse is perfect (I'm not using Lemmy by the way).
I still use Reddit. It has the audience for many niches topics that the Threadiverse simply doesn't have.
So structurally I don't have an answer other than I know that what reddit became is a cancer. Structurally lemmy should find ways to counter commercialization
. One way is to avoid boxes. Communities should be more random and chaotic.
I also would push that mods should take a back seat and give back control to communities to upvote and downvotes content they do not want to see.
Recreate what was fun about the internet before the facebook's and Instagram came. It should be pro community but hostile to capitalization.
By design it already has done this via having no specific singular owner being able to control it.
I feel like this up to community owners. You can't make people run communities how they don't want to to bring about a specific vibe you want.
This has the potential to make many communities complete rubbish. I will use a Reddit example. Take r/metal. Without any moderation, the community would be nothing but nothing but posts of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Metallica, Slayer, etc forever. Because people just upvote music they already know, all the highly popular artists are always upvoted by people who pass by the subreddit. The moderators, in conjunction with the community implemented a popular artist blacklist (voted on in threads and updated every quarter) to stop that and provide much better coverage for lesser-known bands making it a much more valuable, less low-effort community. That's just one example I can immediately appeal to here.
Without curation, many communities would degrade over time and become slop.