Probably bots. Reddit has been using them for some time, but recently got caught using chat gpt or something similar to argue against the blackouts.

Unfortunately there's probably a large amount of users who simply don't care.

But that's okay. What matters is content creators, not content consumers. Anyone with half a gram of decency and self integrity will have realized that they need to take steps to move away from Reddit.

Once - unfortunately - Apollo app will be down, in less than 2 weeks, I’m pretty sure Lemmy will surge and they will come complaining here 😅

Here's the thing - we've been raised from birth to think "people don't make things, companies do".

Most people have never used software that isn't company branded, they've never sat in a chair made by someone they know, they've never pulled food out of the ground. Almost all jobs set someone up doing a service with a supply chain behind them or doing one small step of something bigger.

It's learned helplessness. They don't have the concept of how they could do things outside of the hierarchy - solid chance they've tried, and since their skills are hyper-specialized and rely on big, expensive tools, they found they had a lot of gaps.

Anything you do outside of a company is a hobby to most people. And even then, people organize into sports leagues and buy fancy toys instead of just meeting up in the park with a ball... Do you really need to play by professional rulesets when you're just trying to exercise?

This time around, I didn't bother to explain why the decentralization is so important to my friends and family - even the technical ones are almost afraid of the idea of it.

Instead, I told them about the ways Reddit has picked up the harmful strategy that Facebook used, and that makes mobile gaming so addicting yet so unfulfilling: show them less of the content they want to change the reward schedule, training you to use the app longer for a smaller dopamine hit. Show you content that will make you feel angry, driving up engagement. And most importantly, always wave the promise of another dopamine hit.

The app is eggregious - it sprinkles in stuff from top communities I left a long time ago because they suck, it gives you suggestions for new communities and presents them like interaction from other users, and it sends you notifications to tempt you back in all the time.

And this is just the beginning, it's going to get a lot worse With all the other social networks eyeing their own strategies to squeeze their users, it's going to suck across the board, and good luck trying to build relationships outside these platforms

I think it's important to remember we're animals, and we're not just trainable, we're the most trainable by a large margin. The best of us have just a handful of moments where we see beyond our instincts and conditioning, and decide to train ourselves

This project is important, because it can give us back communities small enough to get to know each other, while providing a larger forum for ideas, and with a design that can shrug off attempts to control it.

It's going to fragment. Sections of it will break off into echo chambers, admins will sell out their users, and parts will offer a curated walked garden hosted. But it can survive all that because of one simple truth - unless one person captures the majority of the network, they're going to have to cut off the best part of the network. Social media can be profitable without sucking, but to rake in profits it has to suck - and even then, we can start up servers for friends and family, and rebuild the network organically

I'm working for an app streamlined enough I can send it to my mom and have her sign up without getting scared off, and I think I've got a solid idea of how to improve discovery of communities without becoming distributed rather than decentralized. Other people are building their own visions of what this can become, and a lot of people are writing impressive code (Lemmy has no business scaling as well as it has), and the beauty of it is that it all competes while adding to the whole.

I've been at it for 30 hours now, but I can't shake the feeling that me getting this out this out in the next few days is going to matter if this is going to become what I hope instead of another shard of Reddit.

But every time I step away to take a breather, I end up back on here and see a glimpse of what this could be

The only way to change the world is to release something self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing and intrinsically positive, and hope it grows

It's sort of an asshole problem. All the cool people are walking away from Reddit, or at the very least trying to support the blackout/boycott. So all that's left are the chronically online people, apathetic lurkers, and assholes who purposefully don't care. The assholes are now seeming more vocal because all the logical voices are burned out or gone. Provided the good contributors/commenters stay away. Eventually lurkers won't enjoy a ton of pissy comments on everything and look for more interesting discussion to peruse. Then the assholes will just be being assholes to each other, then be like man this place is full of assholes, and go look for a healthier community to be an asshole too because they don't want people who fight back like they do lol.

I haven't noticed that because I no longer look at reddit. I suggest you do the same.

Dude, you are recommending Pepsi in a Coca-Cola forum.

Lemmy isn’t ready yet to completely replace Reddit for most people, and that’s part of the fun!!

Lmao, who cares what they think?

But also, Lemmy isn't ready, which isn't a bad thing at all.

What it is, is viable. And that should scare the shit out of reddit

I think there's truth to some of the "not ready" claims... and this is coming from someone who really tried to get into Lemmy, ended up creating their own instance (as demonstrated by my user handle).

A few issues I think Lemmy dev team really need to address ASAP, from least technical (thus affecting most users) to more technical (this affecting less users) are:

1. UX/Discoverability -- Finding communities are a huge pain in the backend right now, and with multiple communities on different instances serving same purpose (i.e.: ![email protected] and ![email protected]). Sure, Reddit had same issues (the example I've heard is /r/meirl and /r/me_irl), but Reddit offered solution (multi on old reddit, community+community on new reddit). There must be a way to streamline it with meta-communities or lists on Lemmy such that the contents can be viewed in a unified fashion. I recommended !community@ (note the lack of domain) to streamline all of user's subscriptions with same name on different instances as an example; and perhaps we can use #[email protected] for users's maintained lists to unify [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc.).

2. Trigger happy defederation hubs -- a certain instance has unceremoniously de-federated a couple of other larger instances. This is not the way, but here we are, with users on those instances not able to access the broader Fediverse, and vice versa. Until discoverability gets taken care of, it will be challenging for users to find a good home -- this leads to next point:

3. Authentication -- The Fediverse at large needs to separate authentication out from instances. Instances may provide their own authentication, fine, but there needs to be better way to authenticate against something else other than an entire new instance of Lemmy. The ActivityPub protocol has clear definitions on what is an actor, and users shouldn't need to deploy a Lemmy instance to identify themselves, separately from a Mastadon instance to identify themselves, separately from a... etc. This is because frankly...

4. Deployment of Lemmy is utter garbage. The official documentation's getting started guide gets users setup with an instance where the UI container cannot talk to public, but the lemmy backend can? Why bother shipping an nginx container if the backend will just expose itself to the whole wide net? Also, let's just pretend postgres container isn't open to the whole world with a basic password... Trying to get it up and running with Traefik was a pain, just do a quick Google and see how many people have asked and gave up, as well as how many different ways people have tried to go at it (something something xkcd 927; I've contributed to a new one of my own per linked post on top!), and the dev basically just straight up going 'we don't support traefik'... also, each approach is not without problems...

5. Federation is a bitch. I am pretty proud of the way I've used override to not edit original docker compose, and locked my setup down a little. But, I'm not ready to have the instance open to the whole wide web without CloudFlare in front... but allegedly, Federation doesn't work with CloudFlare... why? Good luck trying to get to even a popular sub's scale without getting hit with DDOS when someone disagrees with something someone else posted.

There's many more problems, and I genuinely want Lemmy to work. But, Lemmy is, lack of better words, "not yet ready" for prime time. It is thrown into the spotlight with Mastadon (which feels a bit more mature, at least from reading the docs) because of bad leadership at mega techs... It will take a lot of work for Lemmy to evolve and mature, before it can be "ready" to really absorb the mass of Redditors leaving Reddit.

Lemmy is pretty dense to a newcomer, especially one who is used to the centralized web. But that's okay - we don't need Lemmy to replace Reddit. Just like Mastodon, this 'temporary exodus' is only beneficial for this platform.

Even when the drama 'blows over' and Reddit is back to its usual status, we will have gained a huge amount of new users interested in a decentralized web. As long as there are enough users for Lemmy, I think that's okay.

Neoliberals and saying "there is no alternative", name a more iconic duo

"Don't attribute malice when you can attribute stupidity."

I would not be surprised at all if that user was not aware of which instance they opened or tried after opening join-lemmy.org. Many people are not very mindful or thorough or intentional in how they use technology or software or services. They probably do not even know what an instance is - and so linked the lemmy website.

Of course there’s no viable alternatives to Reddit. Why would someone create another dumpster fire?

I think the majority of those people just don't care and are against change.

I can say that to the non-technical person, Lemmy would be a bit confusing due to having to pick a server. However, once you get past that point, Lemmy is a perfectly viable alternative to Reddit, as long as the user base remains active.

Some subreddits are also using automod to remove comments linking to Lemmy.

I hope journalists will put a spotlight on the deceptive tactics Reddit is using.

My two cents: good! Let the shitty people stay on reddit. I'm loving the respectful communities here on lemmy, and don't really want those clowns coming over and messing it up for us.

The people who like it are here. The people that don't are still there. Not that complicated.

Just seems like insecurity. Reddit has some staying power but when the people who do free work don't wanna do free work anymore, it all starts to crumble.

I came here to look to see if this topic was covered. I just checked my mod queue and every single post made by my automod OR other users about Lemmy was reported multiple times for "harassment" with 40+ down votes as well. I've literally never had a full mod queue that was more than 6 things before and I had 30 or more posts to approve with 3 being actual things. What the fuck.

Dunno if you were around then, but people on Digg acted the same way toward Reddit before Digg crashed.

If we stay on this platform and continue to grow and create content, then when Reddit again does something to annoy its years (they probably will), we can be here to take advantage.

The downside is that every great growth in users will affect the platform/site culture, not always for the better. It depends on the users and the size of the migration.

It's too tiring going back and forth with these types of Reddit users. I gave up and just chill here

Reddit is known for it's use of bots. Bots helped Reddit grow in its early days. I'm not surprised that bots are being used now. As more people leave, I'm sure more bots will get used to give the impression of an active community. Just lie they did in those early days.

No, I wouldn't notice because I don't use reddit anymore.

First, they ignore me...
Then they laugh at me...
Then they try to fight me...
And then I win.

As a tech savy person, I can confidently say lemmy is not a viable reddit alternative at this stage for an arbitrary reddit user. The UI and clients are just terrible and full of small bugs, annoyances and inconsistencies. Sure, it will eventually get there, but negative opinions about lemmy are not completely unmerrited. Just as I'm typing this, I get screen tears and flickering elements. It's just very, very bleeding edge and I can absolutely see how someone trying it for 5 minutes would be turned off. If you want to capture the masses, the user experience has to impeccable.

PS: my first try at submitting this response timed out. This is my second try.

Trolls will troll. I for one am not going to hold my breath for people to switch over. I do feel that you have to be at least a little bit dedicated and willing to give up some convenient features of a platform that has been heavily developed for 10 plus years to make the switch. That is going to cause some vitriol, there is just no way around it. I'm not even mad at it to be honest.

At the end of the day, all I wanted was to have a place to talk to strangers on the internet without seeing ads in good faith. And thanks to Lemmy we have that. I personally don't care if Lemmy "wins" or whatever. People have to choose to participate. And they are! But millions aren't going to make the switch all at once.

I wouldn't be surprised if reddit admin are inflating upvotes on pro reddit comments or have an army of bots defending reddit.

It’s frustrating that these trolls keep contributing to the big lie that “Lemmy is not ready yet” and that there’s “no viable alternative to Reddit”.

That's not frustrating at all! That's GOOD! It's proof they see Lemmy as a threat, and right now, it is!

It wouldn't surprise me, a lot of people don't care or just aren't interested in change.

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you”

Honestly, it would not shock me if Reddit HQ was amplifying these comments. They are going to do everything they can to ensure that their IPO goes well. All we can hope for is for someone to blow the whistle.

I don't think it's necessary for them to be trolls, I think some people want to believe that there is no alternative, since that means they don't have to change anything. The guilty conscience for supporting something they know is bad can be rationalized away by external factors.

I suspect people are that aggressive because they have to explain themselves, towards each other and towards themselves why they're staying.

Yeah it's good that this type of comments are being left there and not here.
Also I don't think is a good idea that an user that's looking for reddit 2 comes to lemmy or kbin just to shit on it cause is not reddit 2.

So what are the odds those are spez-trained bots?

This place is becoming an echo chamber.

I don't doubt that there are bots in the comments on Reddit (as if that can even be disputed) but pretending like nobody could possibly just not be interested in moving to lemmy is wrong. There's lots of teething troubles here still which need to be resolved before most people will consider it. Whinging about astroturfing comment sections isn't gonna make dankmemes or pcmasterrace come to lemmy.

The comments/replies to my comments that really chapped my ass were when someone was defending ads and trying to claim they didn't even know there were third party apps and we were just being babies. I don't want to have to watch two unskippable ads like YouTube just to see a meme or comment in an AskReddit or be bombarded with gas pill ads between every front page post because I typed "why am I farting more than normal?" In a toolbar five years ago, and I'm not being a baby because I don't want to give up my working product for a shit alternative that turns me into a product. I feel like Reddit is Pied Piper from 'Silicon Valley' where they hired a shit load of trolls in an office in New Delhi to gaslight us and drive up support for a highly disliked business path.

Well as long as people are talking about Lemmy, that's good for us. Any publicity is good publicity.

redditors always find another way to disappoint. whether it's going back to use the site after 2 days of "protest", or the moderators giving in to reddit admin pressure instead of resigning.

Not related to the trolls like comment you described, but lemmy really does not present it well.

In this Reddit post comments are very reasonable: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lemmy/comments/14cl0up/lemmy_is_way_more_complicated_to_use_than_reddit/

That's what it felt like for me after I posted anything lol. But is it bots, is it Reddit themselves?

There's definitely corpo sockpuppets and bots involved, some of which have even straight up posted AI bot warnings about not being able to generate offensive content (oops!) but there's plenty of ignorant people too.

That said, I'm kind of OK with them staying on reddit because people like that had been making reddit progressively worse for years and years at it gained popularity. Hopefully the relative obscurity of Lemmy will prevent that from happening for a while yet.

Are the reports of warnings for posting Lemmy links true?

One of these guys asked me to think about reddits revenue… very strange

I reckon it's mostly bots set up by Reddit admins and sad-sack mods who consider Reddit moderation to be a full-time job

As long as they do it on Reddit I really don‘t care anymore. Probably with the IPO Reddit will run all sorts of "opinion forming" bots and ban dissidents and so on to make sure they seem like they got the community behind them.

I just hope they leave us alone here and mostly anti-spez people come to form new communities here.

The bits have been unleashed.

I went to have a look back in United Kingdom sub and seemed even more right wing and the think-tank bots paid posts than normal.

It was a matter of time. They'll give us a stupid name to refer to us from now on soon enough too.

Reddit HQ, or an apartment block in Russia, or a warehouse in turkey, or a basement in Saudi Arabia..

I just deleted all my posts, comments and my account on Reddit. No need to get frustrated over people who wants to be a part of that shit show. Also you can't be sure that they are real people and not paid trolls to discourage people. At this point anything is possible with Reddit.

@AlmightySnoo "Bots brigading against Lemmy"

FTFY

Wouldn't care to be honest. Let reddit be shit, all sorts of slander origi ate from there anyway.

If they want to gate-keep themselves then fine by me.

I legit joined this instance yesterday because I'm not going to trust the claims of randos (who are now very easy to see as frauds) and although I agree that Lemmy needs some work, it's responsive and reasonably usable. I'm impressed at how well it's handling the massive Reddit migration.

I've seen users against the blackout get downvoted but at the same time suggesting or even asking about Lemmy also gets you downvoted.

I haven't noticed.

However, something I have noticed about people is that they justify their behaviour.

So if they buy a Toyota and Dad has a Nissan, he'll ask them why they didn't buy a Nissan... If they buy a Nissan and Dad has a Toyota, they'll similarly be able to fight for their corner.

What people don't do is to buy a Nissan and say 'sure, I bought the dogshit car because I'm stupid'.

Something that's true is that Reddit aggregated a lot of behaviour on internet, and so it's obviously true that Lemmy cannot compete with that - not even close. For many use-cases, there are no viable alternatives.

The best thing that will come of this is that people become aware that they have alternatives to Youtube/Google, Reddit, Facebook, Chrome etc.

People need to work to build an independent internet and not allow this shit to happen.

They need to stop signing TOS agreements that they can't even read through or comprehend.

Let them stay there then. We can't force people to join us here. If they choose to believe those kind of brigading comments then they do not have the level of critical thinking to become a meaningful contributor to any site. Those who wanted to move have already moved. Those remaining there are those who chose to ignore the issue, or support reddit.

Well, to be fair, I do think that people have a point when they say Lemmy isn't ready or yet on scale of reddit to be equal competition. Lemmy doesn't have a userbase as large, even throughout all instances, and it also probably wouldn't be able to sustain if everyone left reddit and came here, which means less content.

But who cares? I certainly don't want all redditors to leave and come here. I do think reddit itself is probably sabotaging discussions of alternatives but there are plenty of real users who would say the exact same things. Corporate actions aside, reddit also sucked because of its users and the culture created there. Not all users add value. If those trolls, Right-wingers, and shills all came here, then it would replicate the garbage. There are some aspects of reddit I'll miss, or may sometimes dip into in the future for a transaction, like a Criterion film marketplace, but I'm otherwise happier here. If those things from reddit that I miss or want are eventually replicated on Lemmy then I'll never in any form go back to reddit. If redditors are happy with their shitposts and bot-populated or meme-speak comments on reddit but think Lemmy is the dogshit, then all the better.

They could be legit users, FWIW, and just not understanding Lemmy enough to know what an "instance" is. Nowhere else on the internet (except Mastodon) is it a "thing" to have different instances of the same site iteracting.

Half of my comments are about Lemmy not being ready yet, or a viable alternative to Reddit. It's not a "big lie". I'm currently relying on the hover-over text to know where the icons are, brcause they're not loading for some reason. I'm confident that decentralised social media will never take off, brcause the point of social media is to bring people together rather than stick them on different servers.