is Lemmy the most popular 'Reddit Alternative'?

My guess would be redlib as the most popular. It lets you read Reddit without having to turn off your VPN or log in.

The most popular Reddit alternative is day drinking and screaming racist abuse at passers by on the street.

I'm in

Not exactly the answer to the question but I do want to comment that I think a lot of people went to sites that aren't Reddit-like if they left Reddit. My husband went to Bluesky.

I'm pissed that so many people went to Bluesky instead of Mastodon
- I'm actually okay with it. All of the insufferable people appear to be on bsky (all of the Twitter converts) and all the really interesting people are on Mastodon. Bsky is also full of AI slop.
- Mastodon needs a UI that better facilitates on-ramping people new to the platform. I tried it a few times and it just felt like work finding people to follow.
  Bsky on the other hand is a twitter clone and so people leaving twitter really don’t need to rework their understanding of how to use the platform.
  I don’t like Bsky though so I don’t use either of them.
I like Bluesky a lot, but it's more a Twitter replacement than Reddit. Harder to talk to dedicated communities for things on there. Like if want show recommendations, I'd rather go to a community/subreddit that has 92k members than asking the 80 followers I have on Bluesky (only like 10 or less aren't bots I'm pretty sure or would even see my post) with the small chance a couple non-followers would see it and maybe comment.

I’ve looked on and off for a couple years now and Lemmy has the most momentum that I’ve seen.

I use hackernews as well but it's more tech industry focused. Not really a replacement for reddit since there are no subreddits. It is run by a big evil company though if that gives bonus points.

Probably. I went searching specifically for reddit alternatives. Found Lemmy immediately and haven't bothered to go looking for others. I assume many here followed the same path I did.

We're pretty lazy as a species.

The fediverse is your alternative, particularly Lemmy and PieFed. Welcome.

the fediverse is the most popular reddit alternative.

the individual platforms, like lemmy, are a part of an ecosystem.

https://fedidb.com/

I know you rehearsed this and everything but I don't think it quite fits
- Sure it does - it doesn't really make sense to separate Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin as separate Reddit alternatives, since you can generally access the same stuff from all three of them. Although arguably it would make sense to say "the threadiverse" since most of the other fediverse software isn't really Reddit-like.

There is lobste.rs which I see in Google search sporadically, but I think that is because it favors common domains and Lemmy content is spread out over thousands of indivdual domains

lobsters is invite-only so..... the definition of "reddit alternative" will vary per person in this case.
I don't think lobsters is a direct alternative to Reddit since its main topic is tech-related stuff and Lemmy's more like general-purposed. Also it's invite only so I guess hackernews is more appropriate?

i have nothing but anecdotal evidence to go off of but just today i saw a lemmy post used as a source in a news article, which i can't say i've ever seen of any other "link aggregator" aside from reddit. so it's certainly up there!

and like others said, the activitypub interoperability certainly helps. i'm an mbin user but i'd wager more than half of my subscribed "magazines" are actually lemmy communities

404media is exactly the site I would expect to be aware of Lemmy among the semi-mainstream tech outlets (along with TheVerge to a lesser extent).
I saw Lemmy on an Instagram meme page, and I haven't seen any other reddit alternative (unless you count 4chan technically)
Holy shit that’s pretty sweet

Along with the compatible platforms like PieFed, Mbin, Friendica, nodeBB, etc., this seems to be the biggest general-purpose with communities

It's nice that we can all work together. And the networking effect helps out quite a bit. We are not in competition, we are a collaboration.
I couldn’t figure Friendica out. I’ll see myself out.

Based on users yes, but also checkout PieFed. I switched to it a few months back, it's like Lemmy but better. (for me at least)

For OP's purposes they're probably identical.
What makes piefed better than Lemmy?
- Subjectively speaking, after switching to Piefed I feel like "the internet is back".
  Engaging conversation, good tools for filtering the front page to your liking, and the audience seems generally speaking more mature. I do expect that to change if the platform grows in size.
- The main ones for me are
  It's got on boarding and de-duplication, on PieFed if I view eg. this post https://piefed.social/post/749818#comment_6102866
  It combines/aggregates it with cross-posts/reposts
  \
  
  \ So I can see it in one place, and see all the comments in one place.

Atleast of which i know of and its good enough i guess. Its not perfect but its all i got and its not horrible so i'll take it.

Lemmy: The 3.6 Roentgen of social media.
- That's not great but not terrible.

For sure. If you check out the subreddit for alternatives it’s basically: posts advertising Lemmy, posts complaining about Lemmy, and posts for new alternatives with like 5 users, typically by the founder who appears to be engaged in some get-rich quick scheme.

Oh and people who for some reason buy the BS from Digg.

I confess, I've been cautiously optimistic about the new old Digg. What's BS about it in your view?
- Another corporate platform whose goal is to make its owners rich. It might look good in the early days when they need to attract users, but once they gain dominance, they will start to extract more and more value from you, just like Reddit is doing. And if they don’t reach that critical mass of users, it will simply fail. There is simply no pathway for a healthy, sustainable platform under corporate ownership.
  The nature of walled gardens greatly limits user bargaining power, allowing owners greater latitude in abusing their users. This is why the fediverse is a much better model. And why I’m here even though I think the Lemmy developers are just as despicable as the people who started Reddit and Digg.

Well there's Dread, the most active subdread has almost 500k subscribers

How many active users currently? That's a more important metric than total subscribers, because there's no way to tell how many of them may be dormant.
- Yeah I wanted to check for that but didn't find it in ~60 seconds of clicking around
  But your question prompted me to ask Perplexity, who said:
  Estimating the active number of users on Dreaddit (usually called "Dread"), the darknet's Reddit-style forum, is challenging due to the platform's anonymous and illicit nature. However, several reputable reports, including cybersecurity analyses and investigative journalism, provide the most credible figures currently available:
  User Estimates: As of late 2023, Dreaddit/Dread reportedly surpassed 200,000 registered users. This figure comes from contemporary cyber intelligence briefings and video analyses, which note that while this community size does not rival mainstream platforms, it is substantial for a darknet forum accessible only via Tor or I2P.
  Growth and Activity: Dread reached 12,000 users within its first three months in 2018, and by June 2018, it cited 14,683 users. Since then, significant growth has occurred, with user counts likely fluctuating in response to cybercrime trends, law enforcement actions, and DDoS attacks, but reliable reporting indicates the active number has stabilized in the six-figure range since 2022.
Is it Onion only?
- Yep.
- That's sort of its whole point, yes
I forgot abou that years ago

lemmy, mbin, piefed all aggregate the same stuff and its all reddit like. people make places to discuss particular things.

I like Mbin but Lemmy is probably more popular.

I prefer PieFed, it's growing a lot and shares content with Lemmy and mbin.
- Is there a way to migrate a Lemmy account to it?

Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.

Yes.

Survey n=1

As far as the Fediverse goes, yes. I looked into kbin a while back, and it looked promising, but Lemmy had a huge start and it seems like kbin’s development has halted.

Considering that Lemmy and kbin/mbin (and now Piefed) federate with each other, do they really count as separate Reddit alternatives anyway? It's just all the same Threadiverse.
kbin lives on via the community fork mbin! Ernest was great, but he got sick and overwhelmed ): hope he's doing okay.

I'm here but I'm also still on Fark after 25 years.

"b00bies"

I think digg is poised to come back? I looked but they only have an iOS app for some reason.

A lot of apps start on iOS because they have the majority of the mobile market in the US.
That would be kinda funny lol
I hope I can remember my password.

Touching grass probably has us beat

Overrated

Digg is returning to something resembling its OG days.

It's being led by the unusual partnership of Alex Ohanian (one of 3 co-founders of Reddit, better than Huffman), and Kevin Rose (Digg founder).

They bought back the rights and are building it now. It may end up being more popular than reddit.

Sounds like a scam to get VC money before it eventually turns back into old digg/current Reddit. I wouldn’t join it if I was looking for a good experience, I’d just stick with Reddit.
I’ll stay here instead
- I'll keep a foot in both; for as much as I like Lemmy, its marketing and intuitiveness blows and will sadly likely forever remain niche. That has its qualities, but also its downsides.
It has some flaws like a lot of ai built in, forced ai tldrs you cant turn off, daily leaderboards for top posters/commenters, but I still like it more than reddit's current form, but thats prob becuase it isnt public yet
- ai built in, forced ai tldrs you cant turn off, daily leaderboards for top posters/commenters
  Fucking barf. They're gonna breed an even more toxic culture than reddit with that bullshit.
  If you thought karma whoring was bad when they just had a number to chase, imagine how bad it will be when you have direct visibility of your competition on being the biggest karma whore in town...
- It is NOT difficult to build a superior product right now. But you're battling the legal side of Big Tech's takeover to get infrastructure/marketing. Enshittification demands that the people can't find the incentive or will to leave, and were firmly there as society.
- Ah you got the early access for a couple bucks? I'm bummed I missed the window.
  I have a lot of things to say having been in the software, journalism domain and thought heavily about conceptualizing what such a platform may look like for the betterment of society. Jimmy Wales has been trying, too. Was on their discord for a bit but I was a little skeptical of their direction, even if noble.