Gatekeepers are maligned but often necessary. Minimum hurdles help greatly, even. Any space in which you must pay to participate, especially for no guaranteed service or product, is likely to be better than the open public space.
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
12 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
53212 readers
401 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
Tildes. The discussions are indepth and not surface level like on other social media sites.
No. Lemmy > Tildes.
Tildes should be avoided as much as reddit: https://maximiliankohler.blogspot.com/2023/06/reddit-is-dangerous-humanity-needs-an-alternative.html
Tildes: I'm not a fan of the UI/whitespace, but the invite-only nature of it keeps it high-quality. It's another nice & unique option, but has the same "single owner" issue, as Saidit, Reddit, etc., so it would be risky to dedicate time and effort to building a community there. In the blink of an eye your years of work could be terminated by one person. I've also read multiple concerns/complaints about heavy-handed moderation, similar to what occurs on Reddit.
Tildes update:
I made a Tildes account many years ago when it first started up. I knew the founder was a Reddit admin, and I'd heard that it was a haven for Reddit admins & power-mods, but I hadn't spent much time there.
I recently made a post about the problems with Reddit, and while there were intelligent people and comments on there, the majority of votes went to people who were being extremely dishonest, and even outright lying; attacking me in every way possible while urging the admin to ban me. Neutral people don't behave like that. So they couldn't have made it more obvious that Tildes is merely an extension of authority-figures-of-Reddit with a different UI. All the same problematic people & behaviors exist there.
Based on the accusations one of them was making, and my history they were pulling up, one of them was either a Reddit admin or someone in cahoots with one of the Reddit admins that banned me. Tildes is invite-only, and the main accounts attacking me were brand new.
The Tildes admin removed my comments debunking the lies they were telling, and deleted my account.
My experience with Reddit has made me extremely hesitant to put in any amount of effort or commitment into any platform I don't own/control myself, and this recent experience with Tildes greatly confirms that concern.
If health is a topic you're interested in, I created a forum that matches your description: https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/
Hopefully, it won't be too long before Xenforo forums can federate with Lemmy.
I've tried going to back to forums after leaving Reddit, but many of them are filled with the same type of unintelligent people you find on Reddit and other social media.
That said, I'd still stick with forums & lemmy over Reddit.
I think Lemmy was being astroturfed during the recent reddit API controversy and exodus of some redditors to lemmy. Lemmy seems much more normal now, whereas reddit is still manipulated, astroturfed, and botted to hell.
Trolls? No trolls here.
That's extremely rare, and doesn't really exist on a single platform. I think you mostly find it on smaller sites that fill a specific niche.
For example, there is so much talk about the "bio hacking community" and I've never found one.
Hackernews It you are not a developer more than half of the posts might not interest you. But the rest will. Politics are only allowed if it is world news or something.
I would be shocked if a place like that existed that didn't charge a monthly membership fee, but I'm prepared to be proven wrong. I hope you find it!