this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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I hope this doesn’t come across the wrong way, but… does Lemmy want to become Reddit?
A few years ago when I first tried Lemmy, I had a lot of the same criticisms. I had no idea what instance to choose and was agonizing over it, until I saw a comment that said “it doesn’t fucking matter what instance you start with. Just pick a big one and get going.”
After a couple months of browsing and getting familiar, I now have multiple accounts on multiple instances and use a couple of them frequently. I don’t need one single identity on a social media platform, and because karma doesn’t matter, I jump ship on my accounts whenever I want.
At this point, I don’t think I want Reddit users to migrate over to Lemmy. A lot of the problems with Reddit come from their users. Lemmy has a far better culture than Reddit.
The user experience of Lemmy could improve, but there’s an assumption that Lemmy should be a kind of “Reddit killer”, but after a few years of using Lemmy, I could care less about that.
One thing I really miss from Reddit is that there's almost always an expert in the comments. And I don't mean a know-it-all, I mean people of the kind "I wrote the paper this article is based on", "I used this exact tool professionally for the last ten years", and of course amazing "Astronomer here". These people come from having much larger user base. I don't want all the people from Reddit here, but I do want more, and these in particular. Of course, if we get these, the others will follow, which will probably be sort of a problem.
Also, it would be have a wider range of people here, now it's very, very much skewed towards IT.
I think people are retreating more and more into chat groups. Those people are not on reddit anymore, they are probably in discord related to certain products hobbies etc.
I really wonder how long until we will start seeing the effects of not having more updated general knowledge in the public web, but oh well 🤷
On a side note, after all, the web always had a bias and a lot of fields never had easily available public discussions...