the reddit fiasco where u/spez cuts off the reddit API and made the site a whole magnitude crappier was just around July of this year (as of writing). rising in popularity thanks to that was lemmy, pretty much the same concept but adheres to that concept better than reddit itself does.

what is it? yes, it's a link aggregator, like reddit is (it feels more akin to old reddit than current reddit though. which is always a good thing). you throw links there or post some of your hard-written text onto a community ('subreddits' for you reddit aficionados, which probably don't exist anymore), and people can either upvote or downvote your post and also yell at you in the comments.

how does it adhere to the whole concept of reddit better than reddit does? lemmy is federated. it's federated over the activitypub protocol. what this does is it lets every lemmy instance (or server) talk to other lemmy instances; like email does. so instead of having say, c/technology, we have !technology@lemmy.world, and you can follow this community no matter which server you signed up on! you don't need an account for every single server. heck, you can even (to an extent) interact with lemmy posts from another fediverse platform like mastodon if you want that! and so, maintenance and moderation of lemmy as a platform is not centralised, each server has its own rules and is maintained by their own team. unlike reddit, which is moderated and maintained by the reddit staff, and it's maintained by the big company behind reddit.

the stuff on lemmy, to me, is much better than reddit's content nowadays. there's more actual dicussions here on better things (define better?) to talk about. and the community is (mostly) nicer too, you won't accidentally stumble into a confrontation with a reddit debate lord every five minutes.

and the feature that wipes the floor with reddit's dead husk; third-party clients. i know, amazing.

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