The fediverse is much closer to what reddit was in it’s early days. Real people, real conversations.

The key benefit is that it’s public infrastructure that’s not owned by a corporation. Public forums should be publicly owned. These are essential social tools that allow us to have discussions with each other and shape our views and opinions. These forums must be operated in an open and transparent manner in a way that’s accountable to the public.

Privately owned platforms are neither neutral or unbiased. The content on these sites is carefully curated. Views and opinions that are unpalatable to the owners of these platforms are often suppressed, and sometimes outright banned. When the content that a user produces does not fit with the interests of the platform it gets removed and communities end up being destroyed.

Another problem is that user data constitutes a significant source of revenue for corporate social media platforms. This information is shared with the affiliates of the platform as well as government entities. It’s clear that commercial platforms do not respect user privacy, nor are the users in control of their content. While it can be useful to participate on such platforms in order to agitate, educate, and recruit comrades, they should not be seen as open forums.

Open source platforms provide a viable alternative to corporate social media. These platforms are developed on a non-profit basis and are hosted by volunteers across the globe. A growing number of such platforms are available today and millions of people are using them already.

From that perspective I think that open and federated platforms. Instead of all users having accounts on the same server, federated platforms have many servers that all talk to each other to create the network. If you have the technical expertise, it’s even possible to run your own.

One important aspect of the Fediverse is that it’s much harder to censor and manipulate content than it is with centralized networks such as Reddit and BlueSky. There is no single company deciding what content can go on the network, and servers are hosted by regular people across many different countries and jurisdictions.

Open platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. It’s also more difficult for third parties to collect data since it doesn’t all conveniently live on the same server that some company owns. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads and tracker bloat.

Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook or Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another.

On the other hand, a federated network that’s developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network. More users joining Mastodon is a net positive for Lemmy because we get more content and more people to have discussions with.

Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it’s actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens.

In order to be truly free, we must own the means of production. This idea is directly applicable in the context of social media. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored by corporate interests.

No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it’s going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn’t suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform.

On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they’re developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them.

At the end of the day, it’s about owning our tools and using communication platforms built by the people and for the people.

To me, it’s the resistance against enshittification on the principle of interopability. Also, most servers are run by volunteers and donations, not corporations that will eventually squeeze profit from you.

The main draw of the fediverse for me is not being a product for a company to sell to the highest bidder.

I don’t get banned for saying billionaires should be murdered.

So, what is the actual benefit of using Lemmy or PieFed over Reddit?

not making a few asshole owners rich from your content ? as one.

Granular control, down to setting up your own instance if you wish, as another

“Safe spaces” eg maga have their own instance as another.

Top benefit is less bots and thus less artificial pressure on your opinion and world view, less propaganda and less emotional engagement. Reddit was 99% plastic and 1% good niche content from real human non-bot creators. Then reddit changed policies and it was not even usable anymore as an independent cross section.

The traffic and infinite content on reddit was mostly artificial, do you realize that? Fake shit show.

resisting enshitification through federation, and talking to humans instead of bots. not seeing covert ads on the front page. being able to talk about anti-hegemonic anti-billionaire topics openly without getting banned.

Less of a bot problem, more influence over the features added, no ads, no dealing with mergers or shareholders or ceos, anyone can build software to interact with it, code is open source and auditable, if you don’t want to deal with moderators you can self host. A lot of people left reddit because reddit was acting like a bully.

I hope more people join so that niche communities can form but I’m happy to make do with less people for the time being.

There was a time when there was no content here, but people came because of what it stands for. Decentralisation, freedom from monetisation and corporate censorship, etc. The fact that that the content is now comparable to reddit is a huge achievement. And you can still visit your niche communities on reddit. No one’s going to ban you for using both.

Biggest for me is no promoted garbage. Second is that I can have more indepth conversations than on Reddit. Your replies can get seen if you post on “Hot” even if they’re not cheesy one-liners. Quality of discussion is far better than my last few years of using Reddit full time (until 2023).

Once in a while I glance at the Reddit website and there’s just so much short form video on the front page that it’s so annoying to know what’s going on.

Of course the more popular discussion topics (USA, tech, politics) are largely going to be the same as Reddit.

One advantage of this model is that moderation is more tailored to the instance topics of interest, without losing too much of the wider sphere. So .world can handle most of the popular general topics, but mander can handle moderation of topics from a more scientific lens, .dbzer0 can handle the intricacies around copyright law, .blahaj zone vehemently protects users right to call themselves whatever they wish, so on and so forth. With Reddit, if the site admins don’t like something you do, you get shut down no matter whether the community there accepts it or not. Here, if that happens and is unpopular, people can leave and go to another domain without leaving the federated network. Another is that servers hosted in countries outside the USA (feddit.de, lemmy.ca etc.) don’t necessarily have to follow USA law, while Reddit does.

For me it’s being able to say we should have stronger sentences for child predators without getting banned. Can’t do that on Reddit. And I can’t keep my mouth shut about people who go out of their way to hurt kids. I think they should be locked up longer. That gets me banned on Reddit. Maybe an AI/bot did it, but a human upheld it. And that was all of Reddit, Reddit themselves, not a subreddit. Like I understand saying that on a jailbait sub, is probably gonna upset the moderators, but Reddit as a whole? Wild.

So the greater point is, I can’t get banned from YOUR instance. You’re on piefed.zip. If I piss you off, what you’ll do is either block me, or report me… to dbzer0, the instance I’m on. And they can ban me. The neat thing is, I can just go make an account on Lemmy.world if I want to. Or some other instance. Some instances defederate each other, which means the entire instance blocks another one. Lemmy.ml got defederated by some (including mine) for being not left enough or too right politically. I didn’t follow it that closely. People on Lemmy.ml can still post, they just can’t see me and others on my instance. Piefed.zip may not have defederated them, so you would still see them. But I can still see some lemmy.ml users (and I bear them no ill will). I see four in the comments. They’re fine by me.

Reddit algorithm feels like it’s trying to brainwash me. The admins and mods are unaccountable and out of control. The owners are capitalists, I will never trust them.

Theres lots of content but it feels like dead Internet. The niche communities are nice but not amazing. I don’t want reddit owners and shareholders privatizing niche communities anymore than I want Facebook doing it so I refuse to participate. Short term pain, id rather build the fediverse up and post here even if it takes a long time to manifest a bigger more fulfilling platform.

For the same reason I don’t invest in stocks or the market I don’t want to participate in niche communities on corporate owned social media platforms. I dont want to invest in a future where the capitalist class is empowered through control of my retirement or savings. I don’t want to participate in a future where the capitalist class controls the platforms where I engage with my communities online.

On the cool part of Lemmy, imperialists are first toyed with by the users like a cat batting around a bug, and are then promptly banned

It’s the same content but you retain ownership of your data (depending on your instance) and the ability to influence moderation policy by voting with your feet and moving your account if your instance doesn’t align with your preferences.

I don’t see much downside as I didn’t really engage with niche subs on Reddit. Or at least I don’t remember it anymore.