Their “vetting” process sucked too. I just asked for an invite and they gave one with no questions asked. I could easily just start spamming troll stuff and they would ban me but still. Quality moderation and an approval process can accomplish everything tildes wants to do without stifling its ability to add users and variety of discussion.

So when I was scoping out an alternative, there were five platforms I was looking at.

1. Lemmy
2. Kbin
3. Squabbles
4. Tildes
5. Raddle

I opted against places like tumblr since I was looking for a similar experience to reddit (didn’t mind some innovations, but places like mastodon or tumblr weren’t the right fit)

Squabbles was interesting but I did not care for the interface, especially on desktop. It’s a bit better on mobile but it’s basically the card interface on steroids and it’s not my preference. I like the flexibility in apps/ways you can consume Lemmy in comparison

Tildes is invite only and tightly controlled. If you aren’t interested in like the 4 topics of discussion they have there it’s just not that engaging.

Raddle is open source and not for profit which are pluses, but outside anarchist political communities and a few meme ones theres basically nothing else there. Also some of the theming for their forums on desktop are atrocious.

Kbin has some pluses in that in that it can interact with Lemmy and the fediverse. It even has some better integration with places like mastodon due to the microblogging tab. It’s still an option in my mind depending on how it and Lemmy evolve. But for now im on Lemmy and haven’t regretted it.

I think the big reason Lemmy grew though was exposure and circumstance. It’s very decentralized nature I think appealed to people who have experienced what guys like Musk and Spez have done to their social media sites lately and the idea that if an admin/owner here goes off the rails there’s some recourse available besides having to entirely leave the platform they’ve invested their time and energy to. Squabbles, tildes and raddle can’t really promise that by the fundamental fact they are closed platforms. So when the reddit drama popped up and after what people have dealt with in Facebook, tumbler, digg, Twitter, etc this place and the fediverse was pushed really hard as an alternative experience that sought to resolve this recurring problem.

I had the same experience. There’s basically like 4 active communities there (including the general talk one) and if you aren’t interested there’s really no content. I think the guy who made it just wanted his own little personal fiefdom that he could tightly control. Which is fine but I ended up coming here and have enjoyed it far more

“Only 4 of us moderating”

“Refuses to add mods meanwhile accepting 1000s of applications to join and building said community in a federated space where anyone outside their instance can participate”

Yep, definitely well planned out by those folks hahaha.

I already seen a bunch of comments like “why are mods doing this, it’s hurting my and other users experience” and I’m sitting here like that’s kind of the point haha. Reddit relies on all those mods to curate those subs and so now they’re gonna to do it in a way to make the experience less appealing for them and for advertisers. Like it sucks but then again you are using a site heavily reliant on volunteers who are near universally upset by the recent changes

I think it’s because it’s a newer instance so it just hasn’t been spread around too much yet. In your case it’s because you were the first to federate from your instance to whichever communities you were looking to sign up to.

My current instance has a bunch of sports communities, and typically the first thing i like to look at when i was on reddit were the sports subs. I was previously on beehaw but they kind of shut themselves off from some of other big communities so i migrated off

$59.99 for an Atari 2600 game in 2023? That’s wild