I’ve been using Lemmy for the last couple days and have quite liked it. I want to hear the community’s thoughts on some of the other reddit “competitors”.
The only other (obviously non-federated) one I’m familiar with is tildes.net, mostly just because I have had an account on it for the last few years.
Tildes is the only other alternative that I know besides lemmy. It’s more focused on discussion, as you probably know. Personally, though, I doubt it can scratch my reddit itch. I do enjoy discussions, but I also need my “nonsense stuff” fix like memes. I do like what they’re trying to do. I think they’re a good complementary site to lemmy if someone is ditching reddit altogether.
There’s also kbin, which seems to be compatible with lemmy.
I would argue that for most purposes, kbin IS lemmy. It has 1/10th the native user-count and 1/100th the native comment count according to https://the-federation.info/platform/73 and https://the-federation.info/platform/184. I get the sense that a large part of what people use kbin for is as an alternative UI to access lemmy communities. It seems much further from achieving a critical mass of native communities though.
That’s not a knock on kbin, people use it an enjoy it. But I’d contend that to the extent that either kbin or lemmy are “reddit replacements” at all, they act together as a single federated option with multiple UX’s rather than two discrete options.
As a webdev I only consider alternatives that implement ActivityPub which is what drawn me to Lemmy. Other parties have come out with Reddit-like but a lot are still closed gardens under unknown people’s control. I trust the W3C on this one.
I kind of don’t necessarily want another locked in non-federated site to replace reddit when we have lemmy and other potentially better / less locked in options.
That said, I’m not against standalone forums, so tildes.net … well, it looks like a currently less successful lemmy instance with about the same or less engagement, and I can’t see how one would sign up if one wanted to. Last I heard there was an invite process? No thanks really.
You also need to really define “reddit alternative” - do you mean a forum? Or something trying like lemmy to be a sort of clone? In the “forum” link aggregation option, there’s HackerNews. There’s the BBS The Well. There’s sort of internet service provider focused forums like dslreports.com.
Yo dawg can I get a tildes invite?
I’ve also heard about https://raddle.me/, but I’ve never tried it.
If the site is not federated, it’s not possible to leave it without also leaving all its content behind.
