I miss niche communities. I enjoy games like Shadowrun, Blood on the Clocktower and video games where there’s a lot of meta discussion (e.g. Payday 2 back in the day). There are some less specific similar communities on Lemmy, but they just don’t hit the same. When I’m thinking of TTRPGs, I’m thinking gritty cyberpunk with a bucket of D6s, but the rpg communities on here are very D&D and Pathfinder focused.

I know the general response to this is “well you should start the community and generate the content”. But the issue is that, frankly, I’m not interested in that. Before Lemmy, rif was just the app I used to scroll mindlessly when I was bored at work. Lemmy is the replacement to that, even if it’s missing some of the specific content I’d want it to have.

I miss the abundant niche interest subs and subs that (once upon a time) had legitimately good information on everything from camping to bike repair. There were some solid academic subs too.

I don’t miss capricious powermods who control all the popular places or the administrators who do not give a single fuck or the broken ass reporting system that bans people it shouldn’t and ignores people who should definitely be banned. People game the shitty automated ban system using bots to ban anyone they wanted and the appeals process usually took days.

I once reported someone who openly admitted to doing this to get me banned and they didn’t do a damn thing, despite openly admitting he abuses botnets to manipulate the website because they were being paid to do it. He openly admitted this on their own website, nothing though. It became pretty clear that they don’t give a shit. This was before the IPO too.

Sports subreddits were much more popular there than here.

I miss being able to customize my feed through subscriptions and blocks. I could hide ads and ignore specific communities. That’s not at all possible anymore, and the ads have gotten much sneakier.

I don’t miss “Redditors of Reddit…” and I don’t welcome “Lemmings of Lemmy…”.

I miss some of the small recovery communities.

The only thing I still go to reddit for are the communities based on living in Japan and financial stuff in Japan. They never wanted to move over and have super useful info by people living here for decades that really help visa, legal, and financial issues.

Video content. I still browse with no account for certain video content about once per week.

IMO: Anytime you had a question that you wanted to learn about, whether it be shows or science, you could go into your preferred search engine and type reddit and [your question].

A good amount of discussions on the topic would show up and still do.

One day people will use Lemmy as the search engine to look for those discussions, hopefully!

tv show discussions.

it’s just not existing or not even close as active.

On reddit I can find an active community for pretty much any show, especially a currently running one

I miss the number of users meaning there was always some kind soul also interested in my niche interest, be it coding, obscure band I just found… that was neat. :)

I don’t miss the number of users meaning lame memes and boring gibberish clogging the pipes, not to mention the argument people on the big subs. :/

Miss:

1. Sheer number of users giving rise to lively niche communities
2. Searchability

Not miss:
Asshole business model

Stuff I prefer on Reddit:

• Size of userbase. There are some drawbacks to that too, but the large size lets you go way down the long tail, lets you do a lot of niche communities. We can do that here due to disproportionate representation of some areas, but that’s limited to some things like Linux (which, to be fair, was also the case for very early Reddit).

• Stability of “home instance” service. Lemmy.today, my present home instance, has been pretty good. Kbin.social had some serious downtime issues (along with some other issues on some other big instances). Early Reddit also had some major stability problems, including multi-day outages, but one of the ways in which late Reddit beats the pants off early Reddit is uptime.

• Composition of userbase. A disproportionate chunk of the crowd that started out here is far-left, which means that discussions about anything economic tends to have someone showing up and saying something like “we need to abolish capitalism”, which I’d call a little obnoxious. But I tend to hang out on the communities not specifically dedicated to far-left stuff, so…shrugs. And every community’s got quirks, and I suppose this isn’t the worst to have.

• IP-level privacy from user-to-user. Reddit doesn’t permit externally-hosted images to be embedded in comments. The Threadiverse does, which means that it’s possible for a commenter to know which IPs are viewing their comments. Most federated systems that I can think of, aside from some IRC networks, don’t expose IP addresses from one user to another.

• In that vein, no inline images. I make use of them, but if I’d built the system, I wouldn’t have included support for them. I think that they bring too many tradeoffs and have too few benefits. Old Reddit didn’t have inline images (though IIRC New Reddit did have some sort of support).

• Easy way to find new communities. A given instance on the Threadiverse doesn’t know anything about a community if it has no users subscribed to it. That’s good for scalability – a private instance consumes little bandwidth. But it’s bad for being able to find new communities. Lemmyverse.net runs a bot that builds a list of all instances and communities on those instances, but it’s not immediately obvious to new users, and there’s no native-client support to search for communities.

• Concern about loss of home instance. As it stands, if your home instance goes away – and these are all being run by generous volunteers who may-or-may-not continue to have the time and willingness to continue to run them – so does your identity. That wasn’t a concern I had on Reddit. I’d really like there to be support for linking an identity to a public/private key pair and supporting account portability across instances. Hell, if I could use two home instances interchangeably, the Threadiverse could also have outstanding uptime.

• Lack of support for styles in link text. Reddit supported Markdown of this syntax:

    I love [*Moby-Dick*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Dick).
  

  To produce something that looks like this:

  I love Moby-Dick.

  The best you can manage with Markdown here is this:

    I love *[Moby-Dick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Dick)*.
  

  That works for some things – for a link that should be entirely italicized, something that I do all the time, it’s functionally equivalent, but it doesn’t work if you want to hyperlink text and have only part of it be stylized.

Stuff I prefer here:

• Stability of overall system. This is in contrast to the “home instance” stability above. Reddit had times when the entire system wasn’t working. That has never happened to the Threadiverse as long as I’ve been here. All systems don’t go down concurrently. You can always use at least part of the system.

• Variety of software. Reddit had, well, New Reddit and Old Reddit frontends, and there’s some third-party software (which largely got blocked, last I looked, which is why I left). My home instance alone has something like three or four web frontends running for users to select from, and there’s a wide variety of client software.

• Some good system status monitoring tools. I don’t have a comprehensive list, but I’ve seen a lot of people build useful tools that expose a lot of useful information about the system, stuff like lemmy-status.org, to grab an example.

• Not bound to one company’s policies. Reddit has to make one set of content and behavior rules at the service level. That doesn’t exist on the Threadiverse (or, for that matter, the Fediverse as a whole). Maybe there will ultimately be something like that, as you had things like the Usenet cabal, and a hypothetical Fediverse Cabal could hypothetically exert influence, impose things analogous to the Usenet Death Penalty, though I felt that the UDPs didn’t become overbearing. But I’m pretty happy with a pick-your-own-set-of-rules environment, and the federated structure works well with that.

• I don’t have to worry about the system going downhill. I didn’t know for sure what Reddit’s monetization phase would look like, but I knew that it would eventually come. As it happened, it took a form that I considered unacceptable (elimination of third party clients). But I always knew that it could come. Or it could get purchased and have unpleasantness from the new owner. Here, the only real risks are spammers or the like figuring out tactics that make the system unusable. As long as someone wants to run an instance, the only thing that will replace it is a better instance. There’s a variety of software backends, and those could, worst-case, be forked.

• Transparency. You can see the bug-trackers for the backend software, know the status of a bug, can link other people to it. Can even submit fixes if you can code!

• User blocks don’t prevent responses. I haven’t blocked anyone here. But my understanding is that user blocking works the way it once did on Reddit, which I vastly prefer. Historically, on Reddit, if you block a user, you don’t see their posts, but they can still respond to you. Reddit at some point changed their mode of operation so that if User A blocks User B, then User B cannot respond to User A’s comments. After they did that, this was, predictably, promptly abused by people in arguments to make a statement, then block the other person so that they couldn’t respond and it looked like their point went unanswered. I remember outraged people responding all over threads on some subs I followed (“User X blocked me, but here’s my response…”). Was the one significant policy move I’d seen Reddit make that I intensely disagreed with.

• Markdown’s auto-renumbering of numbered lists apparently was disabled, at least in Lemmy (dunno about mbin and others). I generally like Markdown, but I think that this was a huge misfeature, caused many people to have incorrectly-renumbered items when they were trying to quote a specific numbered item.

Miss the network effect, don’t miss the amount of dudes there who very loudly lacked any female friends

Miss: Niche subs with active users.

Don’t miss: Spez. power mods, endless pun threads, mean-spirited circlejerk subs.