Now that you have settled here on Lemmy. What is your impression of it?
To me it feels like a matured Reddit. (At least most of the time 🙃)
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To me it feels like a matured Reddit. (At least most of the time 🙃)
Less content to go through, so you end up going through posts and comments a bit more thoroughly. This translates to higher engagement from users overall compared to Reddit.
The con of course is less content to go through.
Agree. For about half of what I’m interested in, there’s some activity on Lemmy and the conversations aren’t just “no u.”
I wish I didn’t have to, but I still lurk on Reddit for some very specific hobby and occupation hubs. I think there’s a lot more “blue collar” activity over there than there is over here.
A lot more entertainment, too.
I'm still astonished there isn't an active movies or television presence over here. Feels like the topics over here are primarily news, technology, politics, but pop culture, movies, music, television, even gaming have somewhat low activity. Really bizarre those haven't gotten firm footing.
I'm wondering how much of that is the sorting algorithm. Waiting patiently for lemmy.world to implement 19.0 so we can get the scaled sort working properly, but that seems to have been...stalled or something.
[email protected] and [email protected] has good enough engagement that every week there is something to talk about
So make some content. Almost all of these posts seem to be about not having content to consume, but someone has to make it too. Reddit used to have the same problem, the Internet was just smaller back then.
I think matured reddit is literally correct. People here at least seem older.
However people here definitely are also of a certain group. Which is not too surprising - it's a certain demographic taken from Reddit, not a random subsample. This is not really a good thing.
People here also seem more extreme in their political opinions (as in, not very "usual" or "casual" political views). This makes discussions a bit one-sided and polarized... But then again political discussions on reddit have always been so nice and proper and productive in comparison right /s
However I also see a lot of reasonable people and a lot of hope. I see more politeness (mostly outside of any political stuff).
I also like that people have choices - choice of instance and choice of client for example.
There's some good and bad but for me it's basically reddit with a bit less activity and slightly different experience but not significantly so. I'm confident that more people will come over time and that will solve most issues. And the benefits will still be there by then.
I like how on Lemmy we can actually talk about things such as Climate Change. If the question is 1 + 1 = ? then we can discuss whatever the actual solution might be - whether it be 3, -1, 1.9, 2.1, whatever - as opposed to "it's not even happening and you are stupid for thinking that it is".
That's not even Right vs. Left, it should just be Polite, and it is Engaging and Fun or at least more so than getting yelled at by bots and toddlers on Reddit.
Friendlier than reddit, but a lot more really stupid hot takes than reddit. Not as many shitheads; but the shit heads that are here are even shittier than anywhere else I've been on the Internet. Mostly the super paranoid security and super hardcore "free speech" folks that are like the main character of Conspiracy Theory. This platform seems to attract a lot of those.
Makes sense. There are two types of people here: those that left reddit by choice, and those that got ran off because they were assholes.
To be fair, I didn't exactly come here by choice; I was ran off of reddit because Spez is an asshole and killed off the only good way to use the site on a mobile device. Though had I known about Lemmy before the appocalypse I would have come by choice. I didn't know about it until all that kerfuffle and was already looking for alternatives.
Yeah, same here. But you could have chosen to use their shit mobile app, is what I mean.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. There are some hilariously poor takes on here, and some that were never an issue on Digg or early-days Reddit. I've had arguments on here that I've never had anywhere else, from Americans telling me that I am incorrect about my own country, people telling me that I am wrong about software I've literally worked on with my employer, and frankly some of the worst political views you'd find on a left-leaning board.
I can tolerate the Linux and security nutjobs, because they're just rehashing the same tired arguments from a decade ago, and will be making up the same nonsense about switching their parents from Windows to Linux and them just saying "oh, that's nice, it's really good" all while they're just happy that their son is interacting with humans for a change.
I think that's kinda just become an issue everywhere. People are a lot more brazen with their stupidity now than ever before.
Literally true, bc when an actual world leader (USA, UK, Canada, ofc Israel, Brazil, etc. etc. etc.) says stuff, some people strangely are likely to believe it.
Like: "Drink bleach". I am 100% not kidding you there - multiple people did precisely that!
It emboldens the crazies to realize that they are not alone.:-(
Ouch, man
Sadly so many of the tech people here are the kind of slashdot dredge that think gluing USB ports shut is good for security and installing a Plex server is the solution to any media-related problem expressed.
Self host everything or die kind of people.
There's also that weird "we're better than people on Reddit" smugness.
It's rare, but it is a unique brand of fuckery you don't have to deal with over there.
Back in the day I used to see tons of posts claiming that Reddit was "the elite", in comparison to the likes of Facebook, or Twitter, or Tumblr, or Instagram, and so on. So, while your statement is technically true (the best kind!), that anti-Reddit people don't tend to say so...on Reddit, so much as here anyway (though if you look in the likes of r/ModCoord, occasionally there is a comment that makes it past the new mods and is allowed to criticize Reddit in some way) I think it's common to all social media. We (in-group) are The Best! :-P
Isn't the Reddit equivalent something along the lines of, "We're better than people on [social media]" smugness? Social media being a catchall for say, Facebook, Twitter, or in the past few years, TikTok.
It reminds me of the classic silliness of competing forums for the same subject/topic back in the day. "We on TechFans95 are so much better than people on TechFans94" and vice versa.
The smugness can be a bit annoying but I interpret it as mostly jokes and healthy for the growth of the platform. I am enjoying myself more here than on Reddit, and when I see that others share that sentiment (smugly or not), it does embolden me to encourage my friends to give Lemmy a try.
Did you just reframe smugness as not only justified but helpful actually, and really it makes a place more popular?
That's some 4D smugness.
Idk, if all the discussion on Lemmy was 'damn this place sucks' then I wouldn't want to share it with my friends. Maybe it is just a bad take though lol I'm not feeling too hot on it reading it back now
This is all in good nature... I mean, there is a reason why quite a few of us are here. Myself included.
...and yeah, I'd like to see healthy engagement here and if that means a little smugness just to convince people to get involved, I'll take it.
Ever seen 4Chan? There are shittier shit heads out there.
As an open platform that's similar to reddit, I'm in favor of it.
The reality though is not that great. And a lot of it comes down to at least some of the people who are here.
There doesn't really seem to be enough content to allow for browsing a curated list of communities yet, so I mainly browse by all. And what I have seen are a handful of seemingly extreme viewpoints with little to no room for nuance and discussion and an attitude from those people that they are absolutely correct in their beliefs and ideas. I'm talking tankies, hatred for Israel, hatred for cars, hatred for landlords/renting, and evangelism for Linux.
I know that having extreme attitudes is certainly not unique to lemmy as it exists all over the Internet and elsewhere. But it does seem to be fairly concentrated here. And again, without enough engagement in the smaller or more niche communities there isn't really enough content on its own.
So instead of actively browsing communities I want which would likely end up with very little content, I have started blocking instances and communities instead so I can still get a mix, but filter out things that I don't like. And that doesn't make for a great experience.
I have also seen some really stupid/ridiculous admin/mod drama that people also seemed to think wouldnt carry over from reddit, but of course it has.
All that to say, I still enjoy it enough to continue to browse. But I don't really participate often. And it has to a degree eliminated at least some of the bullshit from reddit.
That's a good summation
If Reddit was a water park, Lemmy is the small adult jacuzzi room in the back.
The soak and poke?
Personally, I find the people here very elitist and unwelcoming, and I have found myself spending less and less time here because of it.
And argumentative and pointlessly contrarian. Reddit had that problem too, but it seems more ubiquitous here.
It's a human problem. Only way to avoid it is to not use social media. I'm about to hop off everything it is making me lose hope in my fellow humans seeing some of the comments I see. It's also baffling how genuinely stupid some people come across, or sometimes it's clear they just don't understand what the words they are reading are even conveying.
Yeah, it's really horrible. Never experienced this level of hostile, argumentative know-it-alls anywhere else.
I have to assume half of Lemmy is people banned from reddit for being like this. Im worried they're slowly scaring away everyone else and its distilling the ecosystem into a toxic pit
Could be worse, at least it’s not Voat, which consisted of ALL people and communities banned from Reddit (and usually for good reason aka racism, sexism, fat people hate)
Interesting, really? Maybe I just don’t engage with people that much, but it seems pretty chill or at least definitely no worse than Reddit in that regard
It definitely depends on the community. I'm mostly noticing it in the meme communities. A high percentage of jokes in the memes that I see are at the expense of a group that I am a part of, and I guess I just don't really relate to the people here. So I just don't come back very often.
That could explain the difference in experiences. I filter out those communities as best I can given the tools available.
Have you not seen the Linux fanboys on Lemmy? I see a post every day at least about how Windows is terrible or how x browser is inferior to Firefox.
Mmm, well yes the Linux bias is pretty strong but I don’t really like windows either hahaha. I see where you’re coming from though, that could be a little off putting if you aren’t at least a little into Linux
Apparently i should install Linux.
More depressing news and Linux enthusiasts.
As someone who spent around half my life in IT and half in humanities, there's a lot less humanities content here than in Reddit or old Twitter. You might not notice it because you might have gravitated towards the IT side of those sites but it's noticeable here
Yeah, I love Linux, but man, I get it, you use Arch...
Feels like an echo chamber filled with angry political activists that seem more interested in hating and breaking things rather than discussing solutions. Can't say I like it here but for some reason I keep coming back. I probably block on average 3 to 7 people a day but doesn't seem to make much of a difference. Makes me further lose my hope in humanity if I'm completely honest.
yeah we have so many useless instance that already exist and thriving in reddit so why bring it here? their subreddit already as sound proof as hell in reddit as echo chamber and they still come here to spread their annoying voice again, sigh( im tired of the post of hating rich people over and over) like come on man I know you hate rich people already
Or landlords or cars or windows or...
Well that's some thorny insight.
It's true tho. Calling for violence or people's death is normal here, no nuance in the discussion, it feels like very few people are there to discuss, rather than validate their own, cemented opinions.
I agree, the amount of "This person needs to die" is crazy here.
There is even less room for a nuanced discussion of anything.
Define "here". The acceptance for that sort of thing can vary wildly between communities and, IMHO more significantly, instances.
If you see such posts, stop and see which instance they're posted from. You might see some patterns.
Well, it wasn't hexbear or the other one if you are asking about that. It was one on the Blahaj zone, which supposedly is a chill instance, and yet plenty of hate.
Compared to Reddit
Hey in the spirit of the third point, I recently learned that if you put four spaces at the end of a line, you can then do a line break and it'll treat it as a real new line, instead of just moving your second line to the end of your first.
See?
Like this.
Pretty cool stuff.
Only 2 spaces
are required for this to work
Test
New line?
Hey even better. Thanks!
Cool. It does seem like there’s functionality in whatever form of markup there is here, but I barely learned Reddit’s and here I know very little yet
Agreed. My interests get way too little activity. Otherwise I love the platform.
Yeah, it's a little weird that even broader topics tend to struggle here (e.g. music/tv & movies/books). Not as surprising with the niche stuff, as that can be pretty quiet even on other more popular platforms.
Agreed on point 1 the answer is we all need to create more posts. We can't expect others to do it for us.
I was enjoying it, but two things are getting tiring: the lack of social sciences and humanities, and especially the misogynistic 'tone' of some users.
As a sociology major who is also a fan of the humanities, I totally agree with you. While I've always been much more of a lurker than a regular poster--even while I was on Reddit--it still seems like there isn't a lot of content here that I feel I can really contribute to or engage with. The most prevalent posts all seem to be tech related or are just doom and gloom stories. It makes this place feel cold and bleak.
And yeah, the casual and even blatant misogyny from some of the users is appalling (I still remember that post about the career fair for women months back that got overrun with angry men).
It really feels like Reddit circa-2023, particularly the bad ways. Lemmy.world is the worst for that.
I really wish there was a bigger psych community here.
I feel like half of the people on here are 45yo Linux sysadmins, and the other half are Germans
The sheer quantity of German memes never ceases to amaze me.
Yeah, my level of German has increased just reading them all 🇩🇪
And I like their pasta thing
Link? What’s their “pasta thing”?
They started putting noodles on all the memes' heads because the guy who keeps posting memes is called InstantNoodles
https://feddit.de/post/9031839
Thanks. That’s pretty funny
Dude, I thought you were taking about spaetzle...
We may have to talk about spaetzle. I wasn’t familiar with it but it looks like a great idea …..
How easy is it to eat? My teen is home after getting his wisdom teeth out and I’m trying to figure out meals he can eat. Pasta can go either way - macaroni is fine. Tortellini may be as soft but is too big for the tooth area he is comfortable using. Gnocchi is too chewy. If I don’t get a new pasta idea on the right side, it’s time to move into fish: salmon is flaky so should be good. Canned tuna is broken up but real tuna is too chewy. I wonder if cod is flaky enough
Spaetzle is generally chewy. Similar to dumplings in effort. Prob not what you're looking for.
My grandmother combined spaetzle with American chicken noodle soup. Made broth, thickened with flour, cut the spaetzle long and thick. It's amazing.
Sounds delicious. I’ll have to keep it in mind for later
I'm a 45yo truck driver tyvm!
I use arch btw.
For the first few months on the platform, I noticed these trends that I would end up agreeing with later on:
Liking, or straight up adoring Linux
Disliking, or straight up despising cars
Everyone is left-wing and liberal
Israel stinks
Rainbows galore
Big companies are cringe
Independent media is based
Products made by big companies are known to be spyware
The Chromium "open-source" browser, as well as the engine that it uses, is basically the reason why Firefox is dying out
Right-wing politicians are bad
Piracy is basically fighting for freedom of information on the internet, especially when big companies tend to be so overprotective of their intellectual property in situations where they don't really need to
Free, open source software is basically the future
The European Union is basically where everyone on Lemmy lives in real life, and if not, it's where everyone wants to live (which is my case given that I'm from Morocco)
Other very notable points that I have when comparing Reddit with Lemmy are the following:
The community is very passionate yet very small, it kinda feels like Animal Crossing
Goddammit, having multiple instances federating with each other is such an amazing thing that literally nobody can wholly own the thing and make crappy decisions that end up ruining the whole thing at once (cough cough Twitter)
API is free, API is free, API is free
Being such an obscure platform, it has helped me tremendously with cutting down on social media usage due to how insanely addicting it can be at times, sometimes in the worst possible scenarios, like when you have an exam tomorrow
I'm pretty grateful that I made the decision to ditch Reddit for good. I really like this place, and I mean a lot. I wouldn't be called "Resol van Lemmy" if it weren't for Spez being such an ass.
I came over during the Reddit migration but I'm so tired of every post either being about Israel/Palestine, late-stage capitalism, or femboys...
or worse - when the post is about something completely different but the comments are about Israel/Palestine, late-stage capitalism, or femboys...
I had somehow curated my Reddit to be mostly about the topics I wanted to read about, but I can't seem to get that to happen here. I've been blocking communities and instances but my feed is still mostly stuff I don't really want to read about...
I'm currently waiting to see what happens when Reddit IPOs but I doubt I'll go back there and will probably just stop coming to lemmy too.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
I'm not sure why that's been your experience. I avoid politics and news quite successfully around here.
Where are you seeing all these femboy comments? Is there a part of Lemmy I’m missing out on? All I see are the Linux/FOSS comments.
probably blahaj zone
My overall analysis is positive. Not a full perfect score, but better than Reddit. (Note: ++/+/=/-/-- indicated in comparison with Reddit, not in absolute terms.)
genetic fallacies?
A genetic fallacy is a claim that something is true/false based on its origin. It's a catch-all term for ad hominem, appeal to authority, appeal to novelty/tradition, etymological fallacy, so goes on.
Users in both Reddit and Lemmy really, really love to engage in this fallacy. I don't know why, but if I had to take a guess, it's because taking into account the origin of a claim in a non-fallacious way prevents them from voicing certainty on a matter, and plenty here/there have an irrational hatred against doubt.
Ah interesting, never heard that term. I was thinking it was believing that x race has a smaller brain or something, but I was gonna say I hadn't run across too many white supremacists on lemmy.
Yeah, the "genetic" there isn't related to our chunks of DNA, it's there for "origin". Think on it as "the fallacy of the genesis of the argument".
When it comes to racism Lemmy is way better than Reddit, since the typical user here has better reading comprehension. In Reddit you can outright say something racist and nobody will bat an eye, as long as you avoid easy-to-spot words like slurs; here it doesn't work. Same deal with transphobia, misogyny etc.
I am not sure if reading comprehension is the reason hate gets to stay on Reddit. I think it's genuine denial and/or acceptance from the mods, and especially acceptance from admin.
Seems to me that for validating information on subjects that one isn't an expert in, source would be important.
You can use sources to strengthen a claim in a non-fallacious way, through inductive² reasoning. However, most people in Lemmy and Reddit don't; they want to eat the cake (use deductive¹ reasoning) and have it too (use the origin of a claim as part of the argument), and that's the genetic fallacy.
And, if I had to take a guess on why they do it, it's probably because:
So inductive reasoning introduces a lot of complexity and doesn't let you vomit certainty. And yet both userbases are full of people who want to lie to themselves that they know something and that reality is simple.
And that's actually a big deal. Because, when you accept the genetic fallacy as solid reasoning (it isn't), you're opening the door to a lot of shitty manipulative tactics.
Notes/clarification:
I think I know what you're saying, though maybe an example might help. But we're talking about comments on the Web here, not a scientific paper. Most of us can not be subject matter experts and must use inductive reasoning to get by in life. And often have to depend on other sources like articles from trusted sources or scientific papers we're not very equipped to vet to shape our understanding of the world.
Just saying maybe your expectations are too high for a public Web forum.
If people were using inductive reasoning, that would be fine. They aren't - as I said they're trying to eat the cake and have it too: "expert said so, then it's true/false lol lmao".
And in the process they rush towards certainty on things that might be completely false, often because they're being manipulated to do so - because it's trivially easy to claim authority over a subject, or to stain someone else's authority over it.
My expectations - not just for web forums, but also for real life - is that, when we don't know something, we shouldn't claim that it's true or false. It's fine to conjecture, it's fine to say what you think/guess, but not to make a hard statement, unless you have good grounds to do so.
And inductive reasoning does not give you those good grounds to claim certainty.
However, I think that in web forums this rubs your typical user the wrong way. They want to believe that they know something, but aren't willing to spend the necessary effort to do so.
I would appreciate more people discussing things with these ideas in mind.
Between the echo chamber sentiment, and people's difficulty with empathy or accepting there could be other view points, it's hard to maneuver around hot topics and learn anything.
The extreme left sentiment has been repeatedly mentioned, but I'm honestly still hoping to learn other people's perspectives here.
I see what you mean. I'll try to give an example.
I tend to be skeptical of folks when I know they're incentivized monetarily, emotionally, or socially to believe a certain thing but I do my best not to discount them out of hand. I think most people have a tendency to write folks off completely when it's more useful to accept uncertainty. To know that a piece of information might be right even if it challenges my worldview. Unfortunately uncertainty is kinda hard work.
For instance, the US has a lot of incentive to make alternative economic systems seem awful. Anytime a pro US media source like Radio Free Asia says something negative about China. I have to accept that:
I have to accept that balance.
This works well for situations that don't effect me personally. On the other hand, if there's a person who has a predatory reputation in my friend group, I don't have the luxury of giving them the benefit of the doubt. They are a present danger to myself and the people around me.
I'm not sure I really get what you mean, could you give an example?
I'll use some silly examples.
Ad hominem - taking a claim as automatically false because of who said it:
Ad autoritatem - taking a claim as automatically true because of who said it:
Sometimes authorities are wrong. The likelihood of being wrong might be smaller than the one of a random nobody, but it's still there. You can't simply deal with it as "authority said so then it's true". (Check what I said about inductive logic in the other comment.)
There's more, but they all boil down to "you aren't analysing the claim, you're analysing where the claim is from".
Thanks for clarifying! :)
One example that happens quite often is "look, Uyghurs are in forced labour camps in China", and the genetic fallacy response is "nooo that was reported by the New York Times which is an organ of western imperialism so it's all bullshit you're a westoid goon"
I generally agree, but there is absolutely no way that witch hunting is worse here than on reddit. There was a shitton of doxxing and people being very aggressive over minor things, like YouTube drama. Also the Boston Bombing incident? It's not even close.
Most everything here seems spot-on, as to be expected from you who are careful with your words so that they can be relied upon:-).
But there is one aspect that doesn't mesh with my own experiences. I am not doubting that you are seeing it, but personally I have not seen much serious witch-hunting since leaving Reddit, or rather, since I blocked hexbear and lemmygrad.ml. Can you elaborate more on that? Is it limited more to certain communities, or certain instances? I wonder if I am merely leading a charmed existence here that differs from the norm, but even if so, that would mean that curation is possible to avoid that.
I did see a LOT of that in Reddit subs though, so it could be that my standard of comparison was perturbed from that side of the matter.
And Reddit did change me: I used to be proud of never blocking anyone at all, always ready for conversation with pretty much anyone who was even halfway trying, but now I do it and don't think twice when I realize that someone is not trying at all. So... perhaps I've blocked away this entire aspect of Lemmy, which if so, I will consider a success rather than its opposite:-).
I'll ping @[email protected], so I can address both comments together, OK?
I'm aware that this depends a lot on the sampling, and it's influenced by sampling biases*, but I do think that witch hunting has become a bigger problem here than it is in Reddit. Specially when it comes to two things:
I don't think that this is coming specially from Lemmygrad and Hexbear users; it seems to me like a more general problem.
Then there's the case of a certain admin team of a large instance, weaponising witch hunting to silence criticism against two governments (Russian Federation and The People's Republic of China) as if it was xenophobia (i.e. hostility geared towards people, not abstract structures of power), without explicitly saying "we won't tolerate criticism against certain governments here". That admin team is however a special case.
*in Reddit I was mostly hanging around small subreddits, where the problem doesn't seem as bad. In the meantime it's possible that I notice this more in Lemmy because, in other aspects, the userbase is better behaved. So yeah, I'm aware that this might not be accurate for other posters.
Thank you. Of course you are free to believe as you like but I did find your comment interesting and enjoy talking about it:-). Let's go from the bottom of your comment up towards the top: I agree that we tend to expect much more from those who act like adults than those who are already acting like children in every other way, so in that sense this would be a good problem to have, as in one source of bias in an otherwise highly agreeable experience, as opposed to Reddit where it's just one more splinter of shit.
Next, I thought the admin team that you mentioned was Lemmygrad? Which doesn't negate your point, it's just that my entire view of the Fediverse (lately) is without either that or hexbear, which explains why I am not seeing it as often, if indeed it is concentrated in such areas (who, like Reddit, seem to act more like children than adults). Although then, if indeed it is concentrated in a few areas, then it is possible for a user to avoid this source of bias. A known bias isn't the same as a non-existent one, but at least its being known allows for it to be controllable. I will be curious to hear how or if your thinking evolves as a result of us discoursing on this particular matter:-).
CP I have to (somewhat) disagree with you on: the definition of a "witch hunt" being "a campaign directed against a person or group holding unorthodox or unpopular views", which implies that a fully welcoming society should not do thus, i.e. that a person should be innocent until proven guilty. On the other hand, CP is literally a full-on actual crime in many countries, so a place sending content such as that out across the entire Fediverse can bring the unwanted attention of authorities not only to the place hosting that content but to any place federated with it as well. i.e. it seemed to me to be less of a "witch hunt" than a "self-policing" so that external authorities did not need to step in and pass regulations (or enforce existing ones) to shut down Fediverse servers, treating them like pirate seeding bays or such. Also, by definition they are not "innocent" if such content has already been shared that "proves their guilt" - the crossing of an actual, legal line really does make the situation different.
Therefore, you likely don't even mean that per se, and rather something one step removed, as in witch-hunting not actual CP but just people being nervous about anything that even remotely seems similar. That... seems understandable though? e.g. if your house was robbed, then you might spend extra time peeking out the window for awhile, for fear of it happening again. Especially if door locks haven't been implemented yet:-). Overall though, the Fediverse has to pick one side or the other there (of the law): either it is a pirate signal that attempts to evade detection and being shut down by authority structures, or else it cooperates with it. We seem to have decided (against the former and for the latter), hence people are understandably nervous about rogue entities that may jeopardize what we are building here. Especially since all a bully needs is an excuse to shut us down - e.g. Reddit, Meta, Twitter/X, etc. - and I would not put it past someone like Musk to intentionally share CP, then use that fact in a campaign to try and prevent his biggest rival (Mastodon) from competing with his profits. Thus, with the stakes being so very high (one morning we may wake up to find that all or a/some major instance(s) has(ve) been shut down?), and the existing amount of protection so low (as you say mod tools are next to nonexistent)... anyway, I would not call this "witch-hunting" then, b/c of the implication (in modern times at least) that the target is innocent in such situations (and I mean that entirely separately from morals, just in the sense of fulfilling the letter of the law). Though I am not sure what phrase would suit it better - something acknowledging that people performing actual crimes using the Fediverse, and which may cause the Fediverse to be shut down, is not good for the Fediverse as a whole? But maybe you meant something else entirely, in which case I hope all of this was at least somewhat interesting to read regardless:-).
Right-wingers... yeah that one I think you are probably right. And it goes along with politics bleeding into non-political matters too like cartoons and memes that specifically ask in the rules to be non-political (as distinct from the actual political memes communities - e.g. one on lemmy.world, another on lemmy.ca, and surely there are others). Fwiw, the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the USA, and the act of Brexit in the UK, really have people on edge lately - some people talking here may literally DIE, or lose their jobs, or some other huge life-altering effect as a result of politics not leaving them alone, even if they wanted to ignore politics. Ironically though, the extremeness of the irl events highlights all the more the dire need to have a place that people can come to get away from all of that, if they wish to escape that for just ONE MOMENT and, e.g., enjoy a Star Trek meme:-P.
That said, being a fairly centrist person myself, I tend to get reactions FAR more often from far-right-wingers accusing me of not being far-right-wing enough than from left-wingers doing similarly. Even in such meta-matters, of talking about how we all talk about such relevant matters, the two sides are FAR from equal. Though, it's also a LOT more common in X (I hear, I literally do not have an account there) and on Reddit than here inside the Fediverse. And yet, I can definitely see what you mean if you are comparing not to "Reddit as a whole" but "certain specific, smaller Reddit communities" - those two categories are LEAGUES apart from one another, the latter being a million times better (and entirely plausibly still worth visiting, even now?) while the former has devolved into a shitstorm that just is not worth going to, for an educated adult human person imho. So: mystery solved then!:-D
TLDR: witch-hunting exists here, and even if far less so than on general (not niche sub) Reddit, it is more noticeable b/c here we expect better. Though is a common problem across all social media, not specific to here. [Insert in-group membership signals here, to increase acceptance of and therefore maximize accrual of fake internet points?:-P]
The admin team* that I'm talking about is lemmy.ml's. It would be within its* moral rights as instance owners to say "we don't want criticism against the Russian Federation or the PRC here", but that is not what it's doing - instead it removes any sort of criticism against either, under allegations that it violates rule 1 (no bigotry), leading others to believe that the content was xenophobic, and that's what makes it witch hunting.
*note: I'm treating "the admin team" as a single entity to avoid naming the ones doing it.
The definition of witch hunting that I use is a bit more inclusive - it's "publicly accusing one or more people of belonging to a morally reprehensible group, without having grounds to do so". It doesn't require an organised campaign. That's relevant when it comes to the CP talk.
It's self-policing when it's targetting actual CP and their spreaders, like the guys in LW did. That's the right thing to do.
It starts being what I call witch hunt when pointing fingers at distasteful but not CP content, saying that "this is pedo shit". I've seen the later happening here a few times, not just from lemmy.ml admins but from other users.
(Now thinking, most of those users were from lemmy.ml, lemmygrad and hexbear. Perhaps it's a fair point that most witch hunting comes from LG/HB? I'm a bit biased towards both as a communist, perhaps I'm being unfairly lenient towards them.)
So it's closer to what you said about people being nervous about anything that even remotely seems similar. Being nervous is IMO understandable; accusing people is not.
Ah, the alt right bloody loves some witch hunt, too. For them everyone is a degenerate woke bluepilled whatever, unless you're actively spamming slurs. And it's kind of funny, because they talk all the time about how the left is "virtue signalling", but they do something similar all the time, to avoid being witch hunted by their peers.
Oh no, I must have misremembered the details about lemmy.ml and conflated the original developers of Lemmy as being in charge of lemmygrad, not lemmy.ml? (or perhaps it was... both? or something like that?) Thank you for setting me straight. Yes I am with you there... now:-).
Something that sets LG and HB apart from other places is not merely what was said, but the manner in which things are handled. e.g. I say one thing that merely doesn't support their world-view hard enough and even WEEKS later they barage my account endlessly with continued mockery. More importantly, not just once but as a firmly established pattern of behavior. That is just not how I want to spend my time, on the internet or irl. It is LEAGUES apart from this civil discussion format that you and I are having - each willing to bend, not so much to each other but to whatever the Truth happens to be. If I am correct (hey, even a stopped watch...), or if you are, or neither, or both - it is that chasing after TRUTH that concerns us, and unites us in our shared mission.
Neither admiration nor equality are mandatory there (e.g. a hypothetical discussion between an adult moderator and a child first-time lemmy-er), but respect is, being foundational to the communication process. B/c otherwise what good is "tRuTh" when it cannot be conveyed, due to corruption introduced by the message delivery method? i.e. a truthful message is no longer truthful when it becomes corrupted, either by the delivery method or by the deliver-er (the latter goes off on a tangent that could get quite a bit deeper but the short version being that the message thus proferred for deliver is no longer the real message - e.g. if the truth were 1+1=2 but the sender caused the addition of +1 to each element, then 2+2=3 is no longer an accurate representation of the TRUE original statement; nor even would 1+1+1=2+1, b/c while that one preserves the mathematical integrity, it still differs in other ways e.g. it would take more resources to store, or brush strokes and paint supplies to write down if it were intended to be represented in such a manner, etc.).
Getting back to how this relates to LG and HB: their lack of respectful forms of communication makes them "wrong", regardless of whether the message they were originally aiming to convey was correct or not. I do not care if you are a communist, anarchist, freedumb-loving bald-eagle slaying Americunt or whatever, you are respectful to people, and I love that about you. In case you are interested, imho they do NOT seem like "your people". That said, I acknowledge that I am VERY biased myself here, b/c I have judged them by the worst set of interactions that I have had with them... and yet, is that not mostly a fair way to do things? (someone who kills is usually called a "murderer", someone who steals is usually a "thief", and so on) I am aware ofc that not every single person on them is "that" way, nor do I particularly care b/c I had a problem with some large-ish fraction of their userbase, which I solved by blocking them, and now I am happily enjoying the Fediverse, whereas before I was not happy anytime I forgot and accidentally responded even to what may seem like an innocuous meme post on it. If that one simple action (well, that pair of blocks) can dramatically improve my Fediverse experience, then I am happy to think of LG and HB as "a place where people tend to be disrespectful" (surely not all, but enough of them that they warrant that description?). And unless someone convinces me otherwise, I am also happy to share that opinion, in case it may help others to similarly improve their own Fediverse experiences.
Likewise, it seems that you are suggesting that even if in a far more limited scope, lemmy.ml has a lot of similarities. To confirm your suspicion: yes I was thinking about the LW handling of the actual CP. And I guess I do not know about the lemmy.ml handling of it - though I would draw a distinction between some commenter filing a report saying "this is pedo shit" vs. an actual admin implementing a policy, whether written and agreed to in advance aka above-board or unwritten and enacted on the sly. Still, if enough of them do that then... yes, I see that you are correct, that's "witch-hunting".
Though I was pointing out how Reddit at-large was LEGENDARY for doing that, though typically more in the most popular (and therefore largest) centralized subs, while the smaller & more niche subs were able to get away from all of that and at least have a chance at a better mod team. At least, if they did not rock the boat too awfully hard during the protests that went on.
About right-wingers: every accusation is a confession, yeah. Though left-wingers do have a different set of issues, e.g. the ivory tower / walled-garden approach that aims to be "correct" even while not actually being thus, i.e. this witch-hunting that we are discussing now. Between the two though, the Left vs. Right, they do not love witch-hunging "equally": I would say that the Right uses that tactic far more often, at least in the sense that there are some few Leftists who do not use it, where I have yet to see a Rightist that does not.
So I think my point might be phrased as saying that it might not be fully fair to say that the Fediverse has a witch-hunt problem that is in excess of what was observed on Reddit. Though you have convinced me that it is significantly larger than I thought here, while I hope that in turn I have convinced you that it is also possibly less extensive that you thought here (being more concentrated in a few areas rather than baked in throughout the entire Fediverse) but more to the point that Reddit was far more so. Especially nowadays, where the mods are extremely often the literal scabs at best and at worst the very people who were banned from those subs previously for refusing to play nice, and who now enjoy lording their power over others in the same way that they choose to view how others previously treated them, i.e. unfairly, capriciously, etc.
I'm really starting to hate it, but really don't want to go back to Reddit. Every post about Israel and capitalism makes me want to quit. I wish there was a better alternative.
Me too, it feels like every post is about getting you to hate more.
i've been feeling the same way the last couple weeks. i like lemmy but there's nothing to see here if you don't want to talk about politics or linux, and it exhibits many of the same things i dislike about other social media platforms as well.
its also making me realize that maybe i don't want "reddit when it didn't suck so bad" but rather what would really bring me the happiness i'm seeking in reddit replacements is likely something entirely unrelated to social media.
Maybe it’s because there’s less comments, but it’s felt needlessly hostile. Even a small disagreement leads to this weird ‘well you’re obviously a fucking idiot that has nothing worthwhile to say’. I didn’t have that impression when I joined post API BS, but now that I’ve noticed it it’s hard to ignore. A lot of people just reading what they want to read, and drawing conclusions that don’t relate to the immediate action.
The self-righteous rage and indignation is completely off the charts here, I totally agree.
Whenever a genuinely obnoxious post is upvoted multiple times, I always wonder how many of those upvotes are from the pathetic author’s alts, and how many are from people who are just fellow assholes.
That’s unfortunate, because it’s the opposite of my experience. Maybe I just don’t care, and/or I’ve gotten better at spotting the warning signs of trivial bullshit and then ignoring it.
The trolls feel like insecure outsiders who haven’t matured enough to “get” Lemmy. It’s like they know they aren’t taken seriously, and want the imaginary clout they had on Reddit.
I get that, and I do my best not to feed the trolls, but it feels like they’ve been growing since I first joined. But just because I ignore it doesn’t mean I don’t notice it.
I’ve seen more sealioning than simple trolling. Sometimes, I can’t resist replying, because I’m not sure if they’re genuinely seeing things differently, or just because their games annoy me.
Speaking of proving the point lol
How are you not proving his point? The very first thing I said was “that’s unfortunate”, because I empathize. I also used the word “maybe” because I’m not omniscient and could very well be wrong. Describing my own experience is not “bragging” or “hostile”, and since it’s related to the topic at hand, certainly isn’t arbitrary.
Unlike you, I didn’t lead off with a paragraph of assumptions.
I’m not even touching that ridiculous “group dynamics” bullshit, or the personal insults. They speak for themselves quite well. Have you ever heard of giving someone the benefit of the doubt?
Don’t waste too much effort on your inevitable reply. I won’t be reading it.
I'll bite, I miss the sysadmin and msp communities. I didn't post much ever and won't ever, but I learned a lot there over years. I'm not getting that here, and it's pretty much why I was on reddit.
As a sysadmin, I handle windows, cloud, Linux, networks, BSD, and more daily. But the "Linux desktop is best" crew are more cult than community & my personal desktop is Linux, which I like, but it's not the answer for my parents, my partner or most of my friends or clients.
I gloss over American politics since I'm not American.
I don't hate cars. But I'm an advocate for walkable cities. I love cars in fact. I would quit my job if I could earn enough just restoring cars slowly all day.
But I'm still here. So that's also a statement.
I think "FuckCars" is meant to be "FuckCarDependence" but that's not as catchy. People in those communities are usually pretty open about the fact that cars have their purposes and aren't evil on their own.
Basically the same issue as r/FuckCars
Yeah, I am on team "Fuck Car Dependance" because I hate everything about em - driving, the ecological impact of cars and the society wide inequalities created and reinforces by designing space around them.
But I would be virtually unhirable in my field if I didn't drive... And there is zero way to fix that even if we managed to dismantle the system of strodes, massive parking lots, low density suburbs, inadequate public transit etc...
Oh yeah, delivering them poems while driving past would be pretty hard without a car ;)
Seriously right?!
What chances have I without
My motorized steed?
I know, it's really starting to get to be abit much. I get weird looks for liking Ubuntu, for example.
Also used to work for a MSP as well.
I've been in MSP for 15 years now and honestly it's so love hate. The variety and change is awesome but the cowboyism keeps me up at night in sweats.
I'd never be able to learn so much anywhere else, but because it's msp I've got no proof I know it (no training or non expired certs).
Its like floating on an inner tube down a slow meandering creek instead of holding on for dear life to a shitty wooden raft going down Niagara Falls forever.
Its a lot easier to get off and stretch my legs when I need to
I also wish there was more enterprise focused IT community.
The self host is not a replacement for homelab or sysadm.
I can't even get good information security discussions @infosec.pub. I was hoping there'd be some security ninjas running around. Just a news bot.
I even think about mentioning enterprise Microsoft products, get evil capitalism lectured. I can't personally change the business world's IT paradigm. Business world...more lecture coming
I can never read
And not lose it
Not sure where you're from, but I'm from Australia and so my experience in the 8 times I've been in Japan and 6 times in Taiwan, you don't need a car. A car can be pleasure. You can use a car, but to move millions of people a day, really good public transport is needed. Being able to walk to a interconnected grid of transport, that can link buses, trains and underground rail allows for better night life, better work balance with being able to study or watch entertainment in transit, and everything is open and accessible. Getting back to Australia with hundreds of in-build multi storey mixed commercial residential complexes but primarily cars to travel makes no sense. We have a housing crisis but no infrastructure to support the density needed where the people work and live. But a culture who remembers 30 years ago when the population density was lower, labour was more common at warehouses not as much knowledge work and were more disperse over space, everyone had backyards with hills hoists, and two car garage and a shed. Those days are gone but nobody wants the infrastructure noise or density, but it's too late. We have all that but without transport options.
Our trains are so bad that they need to be on 15 minute at rush hour intervals because schedules are hard and they'd crash otherwise. Japan has them coming every 2-3 minutes. Imagine going to the station not knowing the time table because at most it's 3 minutes to wait after work for the next one, if it's too packed, wait 2 more.
Your mileage my vary where you are, but in 10 years I can't see this population growth and density growth being solved with cars.
Yeah, i walked into this on my own
I meant walkable cities sound like an insult for fat people, your are overthinking this
Personally, i am for the concept especially since i don't plan to ever drive a car for personal reasons
I lived in Japan for a year. Travelled and set up a new vase of operations every 2 months or so... and I rode a car exactly 4 times over the full year. Once was in a single day there and back again during a company trip. Once was in a cop car when I got so very lost on my way to my destination in the boonies that the bus driver I was trying to talk to waved over the police who decided to just give me a lift... And once was a taxi I took because I just decided I was too tired to huff my 60 lbs worth of possessions to board a boat in Tokyo Bay.
It was brilliant. Now I am back in Canada and it's basically just Australia but cold.
I'm only here because of an unjust reddit ban, and I'm very sad to say that I still would prefer reddit to this. The shear scale of reddit means there was always something interesting me through the far more varied and active communities available there. Lemmy is great and all, but I feel way less engaged with anything going on
I was active, and even a recognized name on some subs where I was particularly active, but here, those same communities are either woefully underpopulated and inactive, or just straight up don't exist. When I need to ask questions or get a wide variety of opinions, or even share a story, I knew reddit had enough activity for me to get at least some traffic. Here, I haven't even made a post
Sorry, Lemmy, but we're only together because reddit left. You're my rebound
You should make a post, even if you don't think it's an amazing post. If you want to see more activity than get involved.
I imagine reddit was this small and niche at one point in time and it only grew because people posted whatever they liked instead of waiting for someone else to do it.
yeah reddit is just simply too big to failed and with how confusing using lemmy for non tech savy, it makes people feel reluctant to switch
Also here cause of an unjust ban (and because of the 3rd party app fiasco). I reported too many blatant advertisements as spam and got kicked out due to "report abuse". But anyway, this is why I split my time between Lemmy and Imgur now. Imgur is no better than reddit (at least when it comes to 3rd party apps), but at least it helps fill a void.
same, but got a new account on reddit that didn't get banned (after first rediculous ban I couldn't make new accounts without being autobanned) again so I spend more time there now. we shat on reddit a lot at the start but at least we can have actual discussions there that aren't just calling each other fascists and tankies
How long did you wait until getting a new account? After my ban, I was getting my new accounts autobanned within minutes
I had the same problem and gave up. Then a few months later I built a new PC, and thought I'd give it a go. worked fine and has ever since. I guess they fingerprint your browser maybe, you might be able to try uninstalling and re-installing browser? All just to participate in some hobby subs!
Same here.
(I'm making this post so that people who love Lemmy can help me understand, not to hate. I want to love Lemmy)
I've been on Lemmy since the reddit migration and every day I dislike it more.
I never understand what people are talking about when they say they like Lemmy for the "closer community", most posts I see barely have any comments, and the ones that are there mostly look no different to what I used to see on Reddit.
the smaller community results in less posts about less topics, so it's difficult for me to find anything I'm interested in. on Reddit I could join dozens of videogame-specific or niche hobby subs and they'd all be at least a little active, here it seems the only posts I can get to show in my feed are environmental and big tech doomerism and occasionally some Linux discussion, with very few memes or otherwise just funny/easy posts. I like talking about Linux, sure, but I don't want a sinking feeling in my gut every time I wanna scroll idly.
there just seems to be a lot of toxicity here on top of everything. I'm constantly seeing people arguing or being rude about Linux opinions, big tech/privacy topics, etc. I worry it's a bit more of an echo chamber than reddit ever was for me as well. I feel there are just a lot of perspectives I'm not getting here.
I left reddit because I hate the business decisions they're making, but every day I get closer to going back. I don't want to support such a shitty company that treats users more like cattle than customers, but I'm struggling to adjust to Lemmy even all these months later.
Really? That's most of what I see when browsing /all.
If you wanna go back to reddit and can use the app, then go and i am seriously, i browse and post on lemmy mostly but i still browse reddit on the web browser for the nicher staff, without an account
You shouldn't feel pressure to use something that is suppose to be for fun and downtime.
My grips with lemmy are mainly On the UI side, user a lot of client, like eternity(formerly infinity for reddit) had a lot of bugs and can't find a satisfactory client) but other than that i like lemmy
On reddit i felt too overwhelming with the amount of users, to post or comment or someone already said what i wanted to say
You could also take a break from lemmy weeks or even months and comeback with a fresh mind to see if your feelings on it changed
I'm less settled on Lemmy, but fully settled in the Threadiverse. Basically I see Lemmy like my current Linux distro: It's good and getting the job done, but I'm always watching the next iteration in the ecosystem.
That said, I feel like I've landed on a good host and alternate frontend that I like. And I LOVE that I can choose my host and frontend.
This is also a really good thing. The only problem I see is that it's a little more complicated if sites would change their backend.
Like, imagine in 10 years Lemmy isn't the hottest threadiverse backend any more and now it's something else. But what about the existing sites? It's infeasible for all users to manually migrate their accounts to other, newer instances and they might not want to either (they might like their current instance).
So given that situation, instances need a migration path to a newer backend. But that seems more complicated than switching a Linux distro for as a single individual.
Indeed. Data longevity is a concern for me in general. There have been enough Lemmy instances that have disappeared (including once I used to be on) that our ability to become a massive first-hand knowledge center (like Reddit) is endangered.
I know user portability is getting active attention. I'm hoping at some point there's a cohesive solution where all our data is in our own hands and we can plop it on to any instance of any service with a few simple steps.
I'm not so worried about this tbh. This is to be expected in the start when all instances were new. Something that's only a month old is not so likely to stick around. But as time goes on, lemmy instances will get more mature and established. Some will stand the test of time and users will go to those instances.
In 5 years, the instances that have been around since now will likely stick around for a long time more.
I hope we won't need users to move instances. Instances themselves need a migration path instead.
I actually see that as a positive. I don’t always want people to be able to drag up my comments from a decade or more ago. Just look at all the people who got in trouble for Twitter posts when the social winds shifted.
My comments are mostly for now, not forever.
It's already happening with discuss.online, they're building their own backend. It shouldn't be too hard to migrate but I agree that multiple backend would increase complexity
As you should be:-). Plus don't forget that you can host your own instance too - be it Lemmy, Kbin, Mbin, discuss.online's newer thing, or whatever.
And it's only 0.19.3 alpha software - there's so much room to contribute to it, or at least watch it grow:-).
Likewise as people get deeper into Linux, "distros" become far less relevant bc you no longer depend on others to make those decisions for you, and can make anything happen that you want, at any time.
I like it. Just wish niche communities were more active.
I’m starting to see the propaganda bots and spam creep in. I guess that means it’s reaching a certain popularity level.
Reddit but with less content (which is fine), I browse by top past 6 or 12 hours, and just check in once or twice a day.
Also I don't know about more mature... There's a lot more people here arguing and gatekeeping and generally being weird about Linux for some reason.
I mean, I like Linux, I use it a lot, but these people make it their identity, like it's an obsession, and they violently hate people who dare to use Windows.
...I get the impression these are actual grown adult men and women, acting like big babies :-P
There's a lot of people here engaging with Linux discussion in a normal healthy manner too of course, just the weird ones are the loudest, you know? It's off putting.
I get attacked by hyperfixated debatelords here just like reddit, 10/10 would recommend as reddit replacement.
Its also interesting that you can recreate an accurate miniature reddit with a fraction of the users, in that regard I guess its a more efficient reddit?
I'm digging it. It reminds of reddit when it was good, which was like digg when it was good, which was like /b/ when... wait, /b/ was never good.
I can handle the Linux fanboys because it's been my daily driver OS since 2003.
I do miss the driversity of topics. Yeah, I'm mostly about my computers and cars, but I like maintaining a surface knowledge of pretty much everything.
I've been hearing that a lot. I think it will happen as the Fedi gets larger over time and TBH less nerdy.
On Reddit I would feel like I was speaking to one individual all the time. All of the top comments were like they were written by the same person. Here I think everyone is unique
Huh, interesting that that's your experience. One of the things I've found myself disliking here is that the power users seem to drive even more of the conversation. I have never seen so much Star Trek content in my life because by chance two particularly active users happen to be big on Star Trek. I've got nothing against the Star Trek stuff but it catches my attention, you know?
I suppose it's possible that the reddit experience I'm comparing it to was quite different from the usual one. It's also possible there's just something else making me notice specific names more here than there. It's not the end of the world, and I'm much more likely to post comments than threads so I'm not doing a lot to help the situation anyway
You are not wrong - the entire experience in the Fediverse is foundationally different than Reddit. In the latter, you mostly would visit niche subs, and then supplement with the popular subs when you ran out of content there. Although in those, I mostly would avoid talking, bc it was so toxic (did you notice how defensive you became on Reddit? Yeah, we all were that way), and eventually got to where I could barely stand to read most content either bc it was just so freaking juvenile.
It would even be fun if it were like 1-5 comments and you just scroll on down to read the real stuff... but damn, soon enough it became pretty much all there was, period. HUNDREDS of them IN A ROW. Or at least 90%, with anyone deviating from that norm getting pounced upon, and thereby their subsequent obvious defensiveness and eventual demise painful to see (as every conversation simply wound down to the side not participating in group-think simply giving up and walking away).
When Reddit collapsed, I came here, but I was leaving Reddit either way. It just became un-fun.:-(
Anyway, whereas here, niche communities barely exist, getting a post a week perhaps rather than one per hour, just to throw out some numbers but ofc ymmv. So you do see more the finer grain details of individual posters, simply because of how much smaller the entire Fediverse community itself is. Which sort of gives it more character?:-D
And spending more time on All rather than the niche communities becomes more mandatory, plus spending less time here overall. Though I do not think of that as a bad thing at all - we should be doing things other than merely gabbing at one another, even if only in order to have more to talk about:-).
It's about the only place where you could post a photo of a houseplant or something equally random, and people will reply asking why it's not running fucking Linux.
More nerdy than Reddit, more of an emphasis on Star Trek (less Star Wars) and programming/linux memes than anything (at least when browsing Top/New posts). It's a bit higher brow I guess than Reddit, though not nearly as much content. In Reddit, I would very rarely see everything there was to see in a single day if I was looking at the Front Page. It's not too bad though. I'm not going back to Reddit, so I guess I have to smirk at all the Trek jokes now.
Otherwise, still seeing some of the same issues that affected Reddit and some that I never saw there, out-of-control mods, abandoned communities, seemingly intentional misunderstanding of blatant sarcasm, some rudeness (not as much though), and an overly Leftist worldview (I consider myself left-leaning, but it gets kind of ridiculous at times). It's just part of the whole social media thing I guess.
Like a lot of people, I came here around the API protests at Reddit. Back then Lemmy was filled with "fuck reddit" circlejerking which was made worse by the relative lack of other content. But I have watched this place grow and mature into something I would consider a suitable replacement for the most part. That said, the amount of content here still pales in comparison to Reddit back when I was actually there. As for all the complaints about the culture here, you get what you dont filter and I filter the trash out of my feed.
For non political content, not bad, of course a lot smaller than reddit, but it's a good start.
But the left wing populism echochamber is a bit annoying. It's ok to have an opinion, but all the silly so easy to refute things that get repeated here over & over again because it sounds nice & fits the agenda is just annoying... "Why do billionaires need more money?" because they're addicted to ego & power, it's not about the money. "The right wing are so violent, we are the good guys", every other thread: eat the rich, prepare the guillotines. -insert a not so common incident that supports an agenda- 'see, this happens all the time, we should do -insert short sighted measure that will just cause different problems-. etc...
I'd love all those topics to be actually seriously discussed here, but so far it feels like it's just edgy teens shouting whatever fits the popular narratatives...
Couldn’t have said it better.
There are a lot of angry 14 year olds here for sure
I wish that a lot of communities would consolidate. It seems like there was such a rush, and all these people trying to stake out their homesteading claim, that the community with a capital C wasn't able to develop. With reddit, subs would get big and shitty, then you'd see something like,"Hey, join us over at . It's like this sub, but with(out) ". And that spinoff had enough momentum from the start to keep going.
I'm not a sports guy, but it's like there are 30 NBA teams (I don't know the number, don't care, and irrelevant to what I'm attempting to stay). The first community should have been NBA@... until there are enough people visiting so that the fans of TEAMA can go create their own TEAMA@.... As things stand, instead of starting with 30 basketball fans having a common community to bullshit, we ended up with 30 communities with 1 person in each and often zero traffic.
The one thing I'd object to with the sports example is that I don't wanna see game day threads for teams I don't care about, but I'm totally open to general discussion of the league, including about teams I don't follow. If literally JUST the GDT were split off to the individual team communities I'd be cool with it.
But I totally agree with the over-fracturing of interests. Every now and then I'll see someone make a "spinoff" of a mostly dead community, just to post 2 or 3 things and stop. It'd be better if they just posted that in the existing community even though it only aligned 90% as well as they'd hoped.
Weren't a lot of the sports team communities started by one person just like a lot of the "Only X pornstar" communities?
The approach you describe is what Beehaw, where users cannot create new communities, is/was doing
Except that's not what happened. What you're describing was very rare. The vast majority of the time, terrible subs with terrible mods or user bases stayed entrenched, alternatives never took off. The main sub would always get recommended, it was the one Google would show, it was the one that hit the front page, the small subs just never got that exposure and most dwindled.
It was a big issue people didn't talk about much, and I like that Lemmy isn't worrying about consolidating.
Definitely needs more content, more active communities but on the whole it’s OK. It’s unrealistic to expect it to be as large as other platforms at this time. I’m doing my part by participating in threads that I usually wouldn’t jump into.
Thanks for your participation. I think every user's contribution counts.
Unpopular opinion: it’s very much like Reddit.
It has ridiculous memes that overwhelm the ‘verse.
It has niche subjects that overwhelm the ‘verse.
It has a hive mind that doesn’t like unpopular opinions even if they’re correct.
It’s like Reddit before it started clamping down on things that were distasteful when viewed by advertisers or the general public, which I like.
There’s lots of drama sometimes.
It has mod problems. Sometimes it’s the absence of mods.
It’s attracting bots and karma whores, even though it’s meaningless here. For now.
Sometimes people show up with an agenda and talk at you instead of with you.
Thank goodness asklemmy isn’t overrun with the same damn stupid sexy sex and other same old shit yet.
Overall I’d say it’s better. People realize it’s new and the growing pains that the newness means. People are happier to have a discussion and enjoy the growing variety of the fediverse. People are people, though, and some of the same old stuff is showing up.
There's a lot of IT/software engineer here. I'm fine with it, especially since I'm a software engineer myself, but it would be better if there's more variants of people here.
Even more US centric. This means that all the political posts are too US-centric, I'm fine with political discussion, but damn, I don't care about that country too much.
I got the opposite idea. I think this place is much less US-centric than Reddit. And actually, if you look at the servers' location, there's way more in Europe than in America. So it would be fair to assume that many users would pick a server near their location and thus be from Europe rather than America.
I just looked at All, and at least half of the post I see are specifically about US politics/news. It's strange, because (like you said) I don't think any of the big servers are from the US.
Huh. Different instances, I guess. I generally don't browse by all, but on my feed most news were non-US (mostly Europe although quite a few about Asia as well). But then again my instance is pretty tiny and definitely isn't federated with most large communities, so my perspective might be skewed.
To get a better view of the general content on Lemmy maybe we should look at the all feeds of lemm.ee or lemmy.world which, now that I look at them, are indeed quite US centric. So I guess it was just my perspective.
I appreciate that there's users and news that's not US. People here need more perspective than mainstream America.
It's about the same, but the lower pop moves the page at a glacial pace. One other major difference: less suspicious content. I left Reddit for two reasons. One, negative content experience crowding out the positive. Two, I loved rif. Since the APIcalypse I've bounced around a little bit looking to make a home somewhere. My experience is that tech is great but techies don't always share all the same interests as me. So it feels like there's just not enough diversity in interesting content.
I miss the tiny fan sub I used to run, but it would never take off here, on any instance. I could never go back- Reddit is broken. I just wish more of us left. I don't know that this place has matured, but where it's at right now is good enough to keep scratching my itch for sharing content and ideas online.
Technically speaking Lemmy's improved a fair amount since before it blew up in popularity (compared to pre-Reddit API shenanigans), but it's still lacking in a variety of other areas, e.g. moderation tools & lack of any sort of modmail to avoid having to coordinate off-site, user tools/settings related to privacy and federation such as hiding profile elements or the opposite like enabling a microblog-esque mode for federating with Mastodon/Misskey/etc., and some other odds and ends (like not being able to mute/disable notifications for posts/comments, sorry OP!).
Culturally speaking Lemmy has similar problems as other federated platforms in that to this day no one seems to have worked out a way to better communicate them so that they're more widely adopted and grow significantly beyond the early adopter Linux/techie crowds (Mastodon's very gradually been getting there though). Some people also much prefer that, which is part of why and how these platforms have remained that way, but they seem to forget that small communities can exist within larger communities, and with well-developed federated platforms, ideally one could better curate their spaces more than they ever could in more popular corporate platforms.
Also regarding content, it's in a weird spot. There's a decent amount of it, but part of the problem is that it's neither all that varied nor original. There's a glut of news, political/technology mainly, memes/shitposts, many of which being older and thus reposted, and some mix of technology posts in general, then there's kind of everything else. If we were to throw together BS percentages, I'd maybe guess at like 32/32/32 of news/memes/tech, with the remaining 4% being everything else.
The issue then is, much of that content you can easily find on more popular platforms with greater variety and also originality, with potentially timelier posting, so outside of principles, what's the draw of any of the Lemmy instances? I think there's greater potential with more topic-focused instances (e.g. programming.dev/ani.social/etc.) and original content. That is, compared to the corporate models of attempting to be everything for everyone but really no one, and in turn also opaquely barring/removing/demonetizing creative content due to some ambiguous advertiser/copyright compliance measures.
Unfortunately you hit a causal conundrum where there aren't enough people yet for others to justify contributing original material, and there's not enough original material to draw enough people here to justify creating it and on and on. Classic network effect situation, in other words, which in turn also affects variety and timeliness of posts, and leaves everything in an awkward limbo state until several somethings start to change.
I find it more neckbeard than Reddit, and I mean that in the most offensive way. Reddit was big enough that there were lots of places they either didn’t participate or were so rare as to not be annoying. They’re everywhere here on the big, fully federated servers.
By the same token, the semi-federated, more restrictive instances (yes, I mean beehaw) are actually quite nice places and really does feel like a mature place to casually discuss things.
In general, though, lemmy is a desert or ghost town of vibrant niche, non-IT focused communities with regular participation.
How are we defining "neckbeard" here? Actual assholes, bigots, angry hateful people? Or we just using that as a catch all for tech enthusiasts? I see a lot of conflating between the two.
The tech crowd is always there first. They're the early adopters, so yeah, place is gonna have a lot of those. That was true on Reddit in its early days too. That goes hand in hand with a move to a decentralized platform like this. I'm continually puzzled by people that seem to think this is unusual. We came here to escape a centralized, increasingly walled and corporate controlled space...so yeah, lots of tech enthusiasts, FOSS-heads, and Linux users will be here. Where else would they be?
I’m with my people—Linux nerds and fringe liberals. If the horde finally comes for us, I’ll be proud to stand with my Lemmings.
Plus, this place finally got me proficient with Docker, so that was nice.
It really is fantastic here. Lot’s of cool people with interesting nuanced perspectives. What I miss are the niche subs with solid activity and conversation.
It's super political and tech based. Feels like if you don't use Linux or Firefox you're an outcast. I still use it often just not as often as I did with reddit.
I like the smaller, early internet feeling, but miss the niche communities. Although Reddit is so damn huge that even the niche communities have so many comments that unless you catch something right when it's posted, anything you say gets lost in the flood.
Compared to Reddit, it's pretty empty still. On Reddit I literally never saw a post twice on my subscribed feed.
Now I'm subscribed to roughly the same number of communities and it takes 2-3 days for my feed to completely renew... Many of the subreddits I used to frequent still don't even exist on Lemmy, despite them being pretty popular over on Reddit.
There are pros and consc to having either large or small communities. Having many traffics is good to generate discussions. But then on the other hand, you encounter more idiots as a result.
Believe it or not but I didn't really encounter that many idiots in my time on Reddit. I wasn't part of any political subs, though.
To be honest, it's not particularly great. But it sucks less than Reddit, so....
WAY too far-left biased. It’s basically _TheDonald but for socialists.
Exactly. I’ve seen them whining about how bOtH siDeS are ruining America on articles that have nothing to do with politics at all. Like… even remotely.
Definitely not just you. However, be careful with who you argue with, there’s a lot of biased mods about that take sides and you can get banned for disagreeing with some of these people.
It's become the habit of leftist spaces since the first sign of the poisoning of a space by the right is usually in the humor. The cycle of "Oh I was just saying this racist thing to be edgy, I didn't mean to be serious!" to "Oh you're too sensitive you're ruining everyone's fun" to driving vulnerable minorities out of spaces because it's just bloody toxic to explain when something is sucky and courting vicious attacks for being "political" when trying to stick up for themselves thus making what remains hotbeds of ever deepening unironic racism/sexism/queerphobia etc... Yeah. It does mean that any spaces with leftists left in them tend to be very corrective in the way they engage with memes and jokes.
I suppose it's a little of a "this is how you get ants" situation in moderation.
General meme and news posts feel basically the same as Reddit. A lot more Linux circle jerking, probably a bit more left leaning. I do miss the days before I knew what ml's were though.
I actually appreciate the slower content on Lemmy. Keeps me from continually scrolling for that dopamine hit.
I miss the content and niche communities of Reddit. Remember you can still be in both as long as you'd like. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Edit: I also am sad that big news events like the Superbowl don't have nice vibrant live threads. Hopefully we have more good content for non Linux peeps.
I just got tired of finding new Microsoft products appear on my taskbar and the looming threat of having to sign into a Microsoft account.
Its aight. It reminds me of old web forums and BBS style conversation. There's a lot of passion and intelligence but also incredibly one-sided takes and an unwillingness to empathize or see another person's perspective. I mostly stay for the Picard Maneuver memes.
I'm enjoying it somewhat. It's much more populated by people with similar interests to mine, e.g. Linux and D&D, but it's also more populated by aggressive and ignorant commenters who are all too eager to be contrary and smug.
It needs to grow because right now its like 50% people who were banned from reddit because they dont socialize well
I like it but tbh I miss the NSFW Gifs/Videos. I also have learned some topics not to talk about. Like Windows/Linux, bashing furries, or anything that is not far left (gender stereotypes, guns, etc.).
I don't browse enough maybe to find active niche communities. Typically spend most of my time browsing all on top 6 hrs. Else I see the same posts for like 2-3 days.
It's a change but feels more like... I'm talking to real people instead of guessing who's a bot.
It's all right. But it's a ghost town compared to reddit.
Very few women
I’m not convinced of that. I know more female users of Lemmy in real life than I know male users, and I’ve seen other women on here plenty.
I think some people are assuming that all the Linux nerds are men, when there are a fair number of women in there who just aren’t identifying their gender in a post about ProxMox.
I just miss some of the niche female-centric subs from Reddit. Like the Lemmy communities for beauty-related topic only have 1-2 posts in them. I don't think we have a critical mass of women to sustain such communities, but I'm happy to be proven wrong.
(I use Arch btw - but I also wear makeup and get my nails done.)
Give it some time. Reddit didn’t start off with those communities either. It took them years to build to a point that there were active communities for everything.
I’ve been encouraged by how similar this place has seemed to when I first encountered Reddit way back in the dark ages. I still think it is likely to grow to similar levels of diversity with the added bonus of being decentralized so it can’t get morphed into an AI training company like Reddit has.
Rome wasn’t built in a day and a garden isn’t grown overnight. Keep posting in the communities you love. If you build it, they will come…eventually.
Idk i might be a women. All these other dudes could be women as well. Why does it matter anyways.
69bothnextdoor
I don't really care about the gender of commenters on here as they are literally just walls of text and nothing more to me anyway.
Very few women => discussions relevant to women are sparse => I have to go to other non-lemmy communities for such discussions
True ig, but if you also post the stuff on here then it'll be all the more reason for other women to come here 🤷
I'm really happy with it. People here are mostly thoughtful, smart, and post interesting content. Less fighting, less toxicity, no shills in political discussions because it's not big enough, no corporate astroturfing (the closest we come to that is adderall spam ha ha).
It feels healthier to me than reddit, which I think I had probably been addicted to. Being on Kbin I never have to run out of content because of the "microblogs" section which has Mastodon, and my multireddit style "collections" (like this news one). But I also find it easier to put my phone down.
Also I find it hilarious that although I do still see occasional screeching about US liberals, over here it's because the poster wants "the libs" to be more left wing not more right wing.
I'm really hoping that the smaller communities dedicated to a topic start getting more traction, although I'm not doing much myself to make them grow
To me, it feels like old Reddit, so it's very comfortable despite all the differences and initial growing pains picking an instance. Like finding an old friend and meeting up with them for lunch after many years.
I have noticed that many users are highly technical. I am not technical at all yet I am here because my technical friend showed me how to sign up and which app to use. I think people from marketing background should create guides / poster on how to use Lemmy for people like me who dont have a technical friends.
It's good, but I really don't want to see as much circlejerking as much as I do.
Unless you want to reduce your feed to the bare minimum, you need to see the the trinity of political posts, Linux conversations and memes.
I like it. It's a bit smaller, but that means I can actually read through most of the comments. It's very slightly left of me, which creates good food for thought as well.
It does run of the issue of having a heavier tankie and "both sides bad" presence, but that's preferable to the alternative. I also like that I recognize some users.
Most importantly? I feel like I'm contributing to a conversation here. On Reddit it was just like shouting my opinion into the void.
I miss the hyper niche communities and fandoms but other than that I enjoy it just as much if not more
I really enjoy that in small communities I can come across usernames I recognize and develope an idea of what kind of people they may be or be able to continue a bit that I'd started in another thread.
Honestly, not that great
It was really good at the start of the exodus, when I felt like I could write and be read, instead of missing the post by like an hour and being the 10,000th comment
And the community was good, too But now it seriously feels stagnant in an active way
I don't really know if it's because of Lemmy itself, or because "Eternity for Lemmy" was named after it's update schedule, but every day on this app feels completely identical to every other day Just politics, Linux, and bad memes That is basically the reddit experience, I will admit, but on here there are basically zero active niche communities, and basically deserts of fandoms
I think Lemmy did get a sort method to try and accommodate more niche communities, but like I said "Eternity" is the update schedule, so whatever that may be I don't have access to it
And I think that's a really big thing, actually My app of choice is abandonware compared to other clients, I've reported a bug that gets under my skin 6 months ago and there hasn't been a single update, so i have to live with accidentally opening posts all the time and I hate it
I really really like this client otherwise, but I might just move to a better client or a fork of the same project, I don't know
I also don't have instance blocking, either, so that's fun
I'm trying to like it more but it's just way more depressing than reddit, and the depressing news makes its way into most communities. Maybe I just need to cater my subs a bit more but I wanted like a little bit of news and politics to stay informed otherwise I went on reddit to have fun and destress. Can't really say I can do that here the way it is.
not a huge fan to be honest. the discourse has become very toxic, the reddit hivemind was silly but here don't you pretty much have to be an extremist or suffer all manner of rediculous replies. apparently taking a balanced view to literally any topic gives one the label of "fascist" around here, cheapening the word and killing legit discussion.
I liked it when it was mainly that picard dude posting memes
its not the site that's the problem. it's the "community"
Matured? Really? I guess you haven't had a taste of the defederation drama. Users are great, but discussion between admins feel like the constant bickering of small children. And I say this as an admin myself, who at times does take part in those discussions. I think we still have a long way to go, when it comes to being matured.
What is kind of putting me off Lemmy is the amount of tankies. I understand they are actually far left from Reddit who migrated, but they're just damn idiots and are simping for Putin (yes, I'm aware that some of them could be St Petersburg-based Russian trolls larping as tankies).
It’s like Reddit from 2007, if everyone were expecting it to be like Reddit from 2017. (E.g., creating fragmented, fine-grained sub-communities before the coarser-grained communities are saturated.)
Under populated, but I come here often!
Comfortable, but a little meh.
There's a handful of users I see posting and commenting. I read the Everything feed, but most of the posts are US politics, technology (with a FOSS/greybeard bent), or centre-left political takes.
There was a burst of activity during the Reddit exodus, but everything seems to be slowing down. I feel like I see fewer Canadian posts than the summer/early fall.
I appreciate
the handful of conservatives who are trying to build a community here. We aren't very forgiving to folks outside our Overton window, but it's nice to see other perspectives.
the Star Trek communities. I don't know if they're posting OC, but it's new to me.
PugJesus, the Picard Maneuver, and girlfreddy for their posts. Lemmy would be a quiet place without their content.
I actually just ended up blocking all the US-centered comms and most of the meme comms and I now see mostly news that is not just about the US and also some discussions and stuff from other comms. But it's just my preference.
That's a good preference. I enjoy the memes, and I don't have a problem reading US politics, so it works for me.
I spend too much time scrolling, so I appreciate the volume. I would like more content tho.
It certainly has its own distinct culture at this point, sometimes annoyingly so. Probably a consequence of the very skewed demographic still making up most of the people here. It also has less content, which is good for the comment quality but bad for scrolling.
Overall I like it here, though I often wish the memes were a bit better. Now I’m not a teenager myself but especially the more generic communities often have a distinct boomer and/or low effort flavor.
Same. A bit more mature user base (but not too mature. Poop!, teehee....). Plus I like that it's generally smaller, and therefore avoids a lot of the negative effects of huge communities.
It sucks up too much of my time. So it's working. 👍
It's less engaging, same stories hanging around active for days with minimal engagement.
It's just quieter here
It's a great place to wildly spout crazy nonsense and general gibberish with an underlying theme of overthrowing the system.
It’s mostly Linux and Politics, and most of my niche hobbies (and even most of the non-niche ones) are barely represented here, if at all.
It’s really disappointing. I have always been one to consume content, not create it, and it feels like if you’re not creating content there’s very little of interest. I want to like the app, but I find myself spending more time browsing Reddit in a web browser on my phone rather than using Lemmy.
I spent some time reading a significant number of the replies, so I'll offer this as a suggestion for some of the repeated themes regarding overbearing political stance, decisive topics, etc:
encourage and support people discussing matters from an open perspective, trying to take a less decisive stance, or being open to different sides
encourage people and participate in conversation with people who show compassion or agree to disagree rather than write people off
ask questions instead of assuming
sometimes, opinions don't have to be right/wrong
opinions aren't facts
Less content but the quality/shit ratio is higher here.
I have ended up in a "view all and block" mode rather than a "subscribe to a curated list" mode because of the smaller community. That means I need to block a lot more communities I am not interested in and users that are just... Outside my window of civility or politics that I can handle. Raging tankies, for example.
Most of the time is great, but there's hive mind here too. If you're against running closed captions on your TV for example. That was the most recent I got bombed for, but there have been other times.
Most of the time it's more adult, but sometimes it's just like Reddit.
Now I'm curious, can I see this example? I'm having a hard time believing people were "bombing" you for not liking closed captions if you're talking about watching things on your own.
Edit: nevermind I found it.
You basically said you won't turn captions on when you have guests over that need them because it ruins your enjoyment.
That's not a hive mind, bud. That's just normal people reacting normally. Denying an accessibility feature to people who need it because it annoys you is just being a jerk.
That is not at all what I said. I only spoke about my one relative who is pro-caption (the entire time). When they come over (not disabled in any way whatsoever), they feel the need to turn on the CC themselves or ask for it so we can somehow be enlightened after the 20th time of them attempting to convert us.
If I had/have anyone remotely disabled come over, I make every effort to ensure they have a comfortable stay.
Perhaps I could have worded it differently. I edited it for clarity, not that it really matters.
Try being supportive of Israel if you want a Really Good Time. jesus.
At least a bad votes/karma count doesn't mean that you loose rights/access to stuff, though you can still get banned.
I held back some opinions on Reddit, as the hive mind would have disagreed and thereby hurting my ability to post on other, unrelated, subreddits.
But yes, the hive ind is alive here too.
I love my closed captions but I'm also making everyone else deaf without them so I would never hate in not using them that's just silly lol.
Sort of like reddit. There's less content, but also less comments just replying "lol, so true" to a political meme. That said, there's also, for some reason, more rape apologism than on reddit. Maybe it's because lemmy is even more male dominated than reddit was or is.
I've started when lemmy.ml was the only instance, and stopped when !all was populated mostly by posts from lemmygrad.ml. I rejoined once Reddit cut off their API, and it certainly feels like the usual crowd has joined. So far, it has been a pretty effective Reddit replacement for the largest subreddits that migrated ([email protected], [email protected]), but it's still missing a lot of active smaller communities.
My main complaint is that the default sort type (Active) needs to be tweaked.
The best thing for me: I cut me sm consumption to a fifth of what it used to be. A few minutes Lemmy, a few minutes mastodon and I'm done. There is just enough stuff on here to scratch my itch for some content.
If I could just make a dumbass joke comment without someone trying to debate me on it (poorly) I would be sooooo happy.
That's funny, I'm 20 and to me it feels like mostly 45 year olds lol
I'm 45, and I agree with both of you. There seems to be a bimodal thing with lots of folks who are still young enough to think that screaming THE TRUTH(tm) to everyone they encounter will be what fixes the world, but a very large chunk of active posters who actually want to communicate seem to be a bit older. My personal theory is that the API exodus left year gathered in a lot of people who had seen previous social media sites (e.g. Digg) blow themselves up, and that by definition will skew older.
I like it better than Reddit. I don't feel as over-monitored and as censored if I say something in support of progressive ideals. That's what got me kicked off Reddit in the first place - having the audacity to say that I feel like the younger generation is more liberal and open minded. After posting that i got a permanent ban from Reddit. (And yes that literally is all that I posted, word for word).
I still encounter a lot of people on Lemmy calling me an idiot for daring to have an opinion that's new to them or different from their own. I think that's just base human behavior at its worst. When I disagree with someone, I try to simply say, "I disagree and here's why." But inevitably they come back with name calling.
So I just try to remember that often times I'm dealing with immature people on here. And they don't have a lot of worldly experience in some cases. But for the most part it's been a nice change and a much better platform that Reddit in almost every way.
It’s a bit like you read a news story about something that happened in Australia, and all the comments are about second amendment rights and the Supreme Court. So pretty much normal Internet.
It'll be interesting to see what happens on as the election season heats up in the US. Are smaller communities subject to astroturfing?
What stood out the most to me was when everybody left Reddit and came to Lemmy that everyone helped each other to get settled into Lemmy and the Fediverse - at least where I settled. Knowledge was passed down. More tech savy users answered the questions of new users patiently. Everybody was (and still is) polite in general and it is a pleasure to participate in such an enviroment.
I experienced (and I still do) much more "adult" behaviour within Lemmy, compared to Reddit. I barely have to downvote comments due to bad/ malicious behavior. I think I have had to downvote 3 times within the last 8 months - and one downvote was dedicated to a bot which summarized some news content wrong. Here you can have nice discussions and most comments actually contribute. Less "This"-comments.
I like that Lemmy in general is more left leaning, and also more tech savy. Also, I experienced less gatekeeping than on Reddit - at least, within my home instance. Your experience, however, may differ.
I wish there was a hide comment function. Other than that, it's fine.
Fucking A. A hide post function would be great too!
Overall it's ok. The quality of the comments on articles is way better.
The worst part for me as I've detailed in similar threads is that the goldrush to claim all the popular subreddit names makes all those places feel hollow. Most have very little in common with their namesakes and are "anything goes!" communities which leads to homogeny. This is made worse by the internet's apparent need to copy every post from reddit
The other "issue" I have is that with federation comes cross posts and that means seeing the same thing 5 times in a row while browsing All. I don't blame the posters here but it feels like a missed opportunity to properly implement crossposting (like....one post, multiple comment sections)
I enjoy it a lot. It feels very non toxic, and it has its own sense of humour.
I'm still put off by the sheer lack of comments on some communities like the main videos community on lemmy.world, where videos that'll have tens of thousands of comments on Reddit will have 100 votes, but 1-2 comments.
I miss a lot of niche subreddits like /r/HajimeNoIppo, /r/BJJ, and /r/IBS, but I can live without. What would be great is if the big communities had more engagement.
There also seems to be a lot of duplication of communities across instances. While I get the whole decentralised thing, it's pretty pointless to not have a mechanism to merge/join communities across instances that have the same topic. Why should lemmy.world and kbin have two competing pro-wrestling communities when neither gets a lot of posts/comments?
This wouldn't be an issue with more users overall, but more importantly, it's not "competition". I agree there should be something to help meld together similar communities, but what we don't want is there to be only one community. That was a huge problem with reddit: there was typically one sub, and that sub was as only as good as it's moderation, while none of the alternative subs would ever seriously grow. So terrible mods were entrenched in the big subs, while no one would ever get directed to the alternatives.
Hell, you want to talk about /r/videos, the moderation over there was absolutely terrible. They removed videos for any reason they felt like and curated a toxic community. But no alternative videos sub could ever take off, because /r/videos was always there, taking the traffic.
We don't want that here.
Communities need cross posting but they absolutely don't need consolidating.
The moderation is a separate concern, but I fully agree on cross-posting over consolidation, with moderation limited to wherever the initial posts were created. As someone that was a mod on a popular sub (/r/soccer) I can say that when you deal with those levels of traffic you absolutely need hard rules to ensure that only high-quality posts make their way through - and should Lemmy ever go through the same spike the same things will happen. You cannot just let people upvote/downvote as a quality filter because that's how to end up with bots winning, vote brigades, and content that focuses on the same shit. Some mods are useless, but I can happily say that /r/soccer was modded very well, despite insane challenges like users (literally) stalking mods, regular death threats, and some unhinged attempts to spam posts.
I have no idea how you avoid those kinds of issues. I don't think there is a solution, because no social network has solved this at scale. In terms of Lemmy, though, consolidation is absolutely required because many communities are dead.
Pros: Smaller, older, more reasonable userbase means participation is (for me at least) less intimidating and more meaningful. The atmosphere is very different and more pleasant. People are generally polite here. Comment fields have more interesting replies and less one-word comments and shit posts and memes and whatnot.
Cons: less content, not really feasible to endlessly scroll as an infinite distraction faucet. The userbase has clearly defined interests and certain fields such as sports don't have particularly good representation here, compared to tech fields for example. Comment fields are emptier.
I really like how when I post a comment on a thread it doesn’t get immediately buried.
It's quieter which I love and hate. I don't feel addicted to engaging here which is awesome for my mental health but it can also make it difficult to find instances. I'm still struggling there.
However, when I do comment I find the people to be much more open to discussion. There are actual engaging conversations to be had which has been a great change. It feels less like shouting into the vast nothingness of the internet here, more intimate like a club of people with similar interests. I don't feel scared I'm going to get dogged on, flammed, harassed, othered, or ostracized. There have been times I've shared my Native background when it was important to the convo and everyone's be so fucking cool just treating me like a human being or listening to what I have to contribute from my perspective. Doing that on Reddit was a mixed bag where I would have to worry about the possibility of a sleu of people PMing me or replying with just awful hateful small pp energy racist shit.
Honestly, the bar was in the deepest pits of hell so if Lemmy couldn't shuffle over it I would have lost all hope for humanity lol
As open as discussion seems, it feels like there are still certain opinions that can't be shared because they're simply not the majority, and not even talking about hateful or discriminating points of view.
The best thing is that there are much less repost bots (both for posts and comments)
I came here after the API falldown and I like how quiet and normal it feels. I like coming across people in different threads and topics and while sometimes I'd like to see/read more content, this also helps me put the phone down.
Small, fun community. Excellent shitposting experience. 7/10
I like it.
My impression is it's got promise but there are a lot of issues that aren't being acknowledged.
The way the federation works on Lemmy has some serious flaws that, until they're addressed, Lemmy will never work nearly as well as reddit did at aggregating content and cultivating a shared community.
That said, it's working fairly well for what it is, it just needs to grow.
Bear in mind lemmy.world is still on lemmy version 18.5, which is lacking some nice new features.
One of the features in 19.x is an option called 'scaled' view, which gives more weight to content from smaller communities and instances, which lets you see a much broader variety of content.
(I just realized you meant aggregating as in multiple communities under one mega communitie, I assume. Personally I see the lack of that as a feature, not a bug).
I first felt like I was missing on news for my niche hobbies but just started going sites directly for news (testing an rss reader this week for the first time in over a decade so that might change). Besides that just looking at the default hot or rising threads hit a lot of what I'm looking for with good discussions.
Seeing quite a few comparisons to reddit.
As someone who went to reddit when digg shit the bed all those years ago and in turn came here after the api debacle, this is how it always goes no?
-> Social site has cool features for awhile but is unheard of
-> social site gets adopted by more tech literate people (we are here)
-> social site gets noticed by corps, receives investment and becomes able to handle more people (threads is an attempt at this and what is next)
-> social site gets adopted by millions of average joes
-> enshitification begins as social site/corporations begin to extract money
-> other social sites form from people tired of the diluted content
-> tech literate people leave for smaller social site with cool features
-> cycle continues
I'm settling in just fine here. The people can be a little more on the tankie side in some places, but it's better overall.
I've already started to see posts like "People of Lemmy, blah blah" and posts about username meanings, so it's becoming Reddit. Get off my lawn.
I like it. I'm not much into the memes but the communities are much smaller so you get more personal discussions.
It's very much like reddit circa 2008 or so. It feels like the claws of marketing people have no presence here. I dare say the word, it feels like there is freedom of expression. To be free, at least partially, from corporate control.
I like it. Lots of memes, I'm learning a lot. Less people to help, tho.
Reddit where I can block people and without /as much/ absurd delusional nonsense.
I like a few of these communities, and I've had some nice conversations on some things I'm passionate about. But it seems like the population outside my small communities is dominated by violent wanna-be political activists competing for who can express the most outrageous sentiment.
Advocating against violence against one's parents in a hypothetical situation where a parent developed the wrong US politics not only got me downvoted, but also replied to by some asshole from Australia who wanted to rub it in that I was clearly in the out-group.
I don't normally reply when I see things like that, but after seeing so much vitriol I felt the need to leave a comment. I won't be doing it again.
I love it here but have one gripe… I can’t play videos in-app. (Maybe it’s just my app’s problem, but it’s a bummer for me.)
Lemmy is entertainment / social media for me, and I’d like to have something like Reddit’s TiktokCringe sub here. I don’t like Reddit and I don’t like Tiktok, but I do like funny videos that are presented to me because people think they are funny rather than because Youtube’s algo thinks it’ll boost an advertiser’s clout. Playing video without having to open another app would be nice.
Beyond that, I love it here. Conversations can actually happen here and I’ve even met people on Lemmy and continued to chat with them outside of the platform on other apps — I’ve never had that happen on any other social media. So cool.
I found a lot of people who are willing to put effort in posting and commenting.
When browsing the home page (this is just my subjective experience) I have to be more active in blocking political based communities (just not my thing, I like being happy) but if there happens to be a community for some niche topic that I'm interested in (it was pretty much guaranteed that there was one for everything on Reddit) the posts and comments are generally higher quality. Less reposts, less bots, etc.
Overall, a more enjoyable experience if I tailor it, but still too small for it to satisfy all of my niche fandom based needs. I'm choosing to stick with it and share it in the hope that it grows enough to do that.
I like how many of the users don't resort to memes or namecalling (not that there aren't a few here and there) and the replies are straightforward
I do like it here, but would like to see more activity in specific communities like automechanic help or RV repair.
Windows hate and politics. It's nothing like reddit imo but it's all I've got as I've abandoned reddit.
I like the folk here
lots of people viewing and few posting so posts get more attention but there's less stuff
also less complaining
I never had a reddit account so I used it's implosion as a push off to set me free from 4chan but also not going to that overly policed place.
I think Lemmy is a nice middle ground.
Actually, reading these comments, this place is starting to feel like reddit.
There's absolutely nothing more Reddit than people on Reddit complaining about Reddit and how everyone else on Reddit is shitty and unreasonable (without supplying any context).
So yeah, it seems Lemmy is right on track.
TL;DR; Three points:
I love the fediverse and especially the threadiverse. I'm okay with Lemmy specifically, but I prefer Kbin, and am looking forward to some entirely different option.
It's not as notable as it was in May or June, before the main Reddit exodus, but it still feels sort of like the early days of the internet here. People have to kind of go out of their way to be here, and the system's a bit wonky and obtuse, so there's a pleasant lack of lazy idiots. And I can actually interact with people who actually have things to say, rather than just wading through regurgitated memes and botspam.
It's much worse than reddit. Mods are total dictators. They ban without any reason, only based on their political views. You criticize Hamas? Banned from worldnews. You're free to spread antisemitic propaganda because it's fine for them. It's the opposite of how it should be in many ways