this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2026
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Not The Onion

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[–] Rhoeri@piefed.world 15 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Yeah. Pretty much. Reddit should not be cloned. It’s a bad move.

[–] the_q@lemmy.zip 40 points 4 days ago (3 children)
[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 25 points 4 days ago

Maybe an old.reddit.com clone.

But we've diverged pretty well since then.

[–] Rhoeri@piefed.world 13 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Not really. There is far more they don’t share in common than they do.

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 19 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I literally got banned from reddit 2 years ago, and searched "reddit clone". Found Lemmy, and here I am.

[–] Tigeroovy@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] CaptainMan251@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Holy shit same.

[–] BingBong@sh.itjust.works 13 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Federation means the fundamental infrastructure and dependencies are entirely different. Even if the interface may feel similar to you.

[–] rudyharrelson@lemmy.radio 18 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Even if the interface may feel similar to you.

I would say it's more than just the interface that makes Lemmy similar to Reddit. To end users, they are virtually identical services in terms of functionality. Link aggregators with built-in community forums. I think it's fair to call Lemmy a federated Reddit clone. Not to suggest Reddit invented any of the aforementioned features, just that Lemmy's implementation of said features is in many ways identical to Reddit's approach because it was meant to be a Reddit alternative for the fediverse.

Even the official Lemmy git repository compares the project to Reddit:

Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them.

[–] yakko@feddit.uk 4 points 4 days ago

Link aggregators are a medium, yeah. A social medium, even. Just because the underlying tech is different/better/more interesting etc, the basic user experience (as designed) is much the same.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 9 points 4 days ago (2 children)

PieFed has features that even Reddit lacks, like combining together comments across all cross-posts (and plans to tweak that still further, like add the ability to a community to opt-out of it, though I find that it helps with community discovery).

[–] tal@lemmy.today 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Historically, Usenet clients tended to respond to both groups in response to articles posted to multiple newsgroups.

This tended to result in trolls doing things like posting "I'm in the market for a computer. Which is better, PC or Mac?" to comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy and comp.os.mac.advocacy with the intention of starting flamewars.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 3 points 4 days ago

That exact flamewar will never not be funny!! 🤣 So sayeth we all. 🖥️💻

Bc the answer will always be Mac if money were of zero consideration, Linux if someone lives in the real world, and only use Windows if there is both a gun to your head at that moment and a very specific game that you wanted to play requires it, and even then try emulation first.

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Well damn. That sounds.....very nice.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 3 points 4 days ago

It is actually! It is one of the features that I love the most about it, it saves so many clicks, plus the interruption of the wait time, especially for those posts that appear in like 9 communities (which for some reason isn't nearly as rare as I might have expected, even though in those cases most communities will have like 0-1 comments, even if some others have >100).

That and maybe the the translation of all post links into relative ones on your local instance are perhaps my favorites of the recent additions. And the ability to read deleted posts instead of a page that looks more like a server error that doesn't even acknowledge that the post used to exist at some point in time. There's a lot to have to choose from!:-)

[–] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 14 points 4 days ago

Reddit was already the replacement everyone went to after they redesigned Digg in 2010 to focus on publishers and traffic fell 50% almost immediately. Digg had 40 million monthly visitors and a $160 Million valuation at the time.

https://www.startupbooted.com/what-happened-to-digg