It's just as bad of an echo chamber as other sites. I have to actively "stop" browsing lemmy after a bit because I get annoyed at the repetitive nature of everything.
I've very much tried in the last few years to limit social media. I think it's been a benefit for me. I like social media, but having "stops" makes it more enjoyable and prevents the doom feelings.
I don't think that in itself if the problem. anyone can host an instance. The problem is lemmy.ml being the apparent default instance, advertising itself as an instance for privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, and not mentioning seemingly anywhere in the description/rules that only red flavour authoritarian dogma is allowed in political discussion.
"America bad, therefore former 'communist' russia and current 'communist' china good."
Edit: it's not featured as prominently as it used to be on join-lemmy.org so things may be improving. they should still mention in the description that western viewpoints on many issues are not allowed due to "rule 1"
I realized .ml was fucking insane and delusional when they glorified Stalin and refused to recognize the atrocities he committed.
No matter what your political stance is, as soon as you deny negative facts and exclusively push the "positives" it becomes a problem and may radicalize you (if that isn't already the case).
What happened to nuanced moderate politics? It seems people unconditionally put the "left" or "right" label on themselves. And ironically these blind followers will have the audacity to call anyone close to the political center, or people who are honest with themselves, cowards.
I was on .ml first after leaving reddit, because I didn't know this was the case, until I called out straight up state propaganda and defended capitalism with social and ethical policies once. You can imagine how they responded to that.
yea I visited the instance index some time ago because I had to pick a replacement for lemm.ee (rip in peace), saw the description under lemmy.ml and wondered whether they were being intentionally or accidentally misleading.
They certainly mislead me. My first year or so was on lemmy.ml @[email protected]
After repeated bans i decided to move to a more relaxed instance. i still interact with lemmy.ml because some of the bigger open source communities are there, but .ml admins now cannot block me from accessing the full lemmyverse, only their diminishing corner of it
im glad i blocked that instance, i was accidentally engaging into too many .ml posts there were mirror image of how conservatives posts, just whining and chastising opinions.
well tbf they are the two most active servers there though. not sure why .world isnt on there though. maybe removed temporarily so that newbies filter out to smaller instances
Tankies on their way to hate private ownership and dictatorship of the bourgeoisie so much that they begin to love state ownership and dictatorship of the bureacracy
This is exactly why I don't use Reddit on the side. When I run out of content on Lemmy, there's no choice but to do something productive instead. Had to go 100% cold turkey on Reddit to make that work though.
Exactly. I have a 1.5 hour daily time limit on Voyager, my Lemmy client, and I hit it every day, no problem. I do miss some of the niche subs but, every time I go back to ask a quick question, so many people are just so goddamned mean that I'm still very happy I left.
Oh yeah the community is 1000% better and healthier, I don't miss Reddit at all. Plus I'm a child of the 70s, I grew up with limited content. It's good for you.
Sports is like the most mainstream of interests, and lemmy still doesn't have a critical mass of sports discussion in general, much less specific sports/leagues, specific teams, specific games/matches, or specific players.
So I keep my reddit sports account.
I also keep an account for my local city subreddit, and one for my career field, because Lemmy doesn't have those either.
Hell even [email protected] (as far as I can tell, the biggest one on the platform) only has like 10k subs, like a dozen posts today, and basically all of the posts were people just advertising music. Zero discussion.
Even for things i would think are big, the communities here are still vanishingly small. I joined reddit in like 2014 and even back then it was more popular than Lemmy is now
Not really into music myself, I guess the issue might be that it's too generic? Even on Reddit I don't think /r/music was that busy, too many different genres
Niche communities. Large spaces are built of small niche interest groups. The tooling around small spaces needs to be first class if we want the larger space to be healthy
same, certain things location based subs are not found on lemmy, and youtuber channel based discussions also not found here. plus things like like health, medical,,,etc. movies/entertainment has enough to satisfy people, but not to the extent as on reddit.
"If you don't support Russia then you just don't understand geopolitics" ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/27352415
And a long list of bans/censorship and allowing the proliferation of known propaganda and misinformation outlets clearly demonstrating use of their instance and recognition to force a political narrative
I am currently working on a report on vote manipulation and the early results are showing clear signs of the some most prolific .ml accounts participating in brigading and vote manipulation.
I can't count the number of times I made a comment way deep in a chain that conflicts with .ml dogma, and after the first downvote, there are suddenly 5 more within minutes
I think the parent comment is talking about piefed the software, compared to Lemmy the software, not the specific piefed.social instance they're posting from.
The developers of the Lemmy software are the admins of the lemmy.ml instance and are problematic. The complaint is that the software itself can't be separated from the priorities of the .ml instance.
Piefed doesn't have the same issue, even if the flagship instance federates with .ml
Duplicate communities posting the same content over and over again.
Communities are tied to an instance. How many communities will die because lemm.ee is shutting down? There is a slightly mad rush to migrate communities already.
Lemmy should have used usent style naming for communities.
How does piefed handle when communities have the same name but different purposes? Like 'conservative' being a 'satire' community on one instance and a breitbart repost community on another?
I'm on mobile, so usually if I have a doubt (![email protected] vs ![email protected] have the some icon) I use my mouse to hover and see what community it is.
the architecture of lemmy, both socially and technically, is not working as hoped and it's likely it will suffer an effective death before it evolves sufficiently to enable distributed communities
the federated model is too lumpy and fragmented at the same time
Communities are tied to an instance. How many communities will die because lemm.ee is shutting down? There is a slightly mad rush to migrate communities already.
This is what the Piefed community migration system is designed to mitigate. It makes communities completely modular, allowing a community to move their entire posting history to another instance. As soon as it can pull subscribers automatically, it'll be as if nothing happened.
Or if instances used the word “Lemmy” in their domain names. I can say “go to Lemmy.world or Lemmy.zip or Lemmy.cafe” but if I tell someone to go “sh.itjust.works” they will get confused and wonder why “that site is not Lemmy?”
I advocate the opposite. Because people then see "lemmy.world" and immediately associate it with the rumours about the devs being tankies even though .world and the lemmy devs are unrelated
I don't think we want that. It sets some weird precedent that instances need to be lemmy-dot-something, which is both untrue and restrictive on server hosts as a barrier for entry if that becomes the universal convention.
The lack of content compared to reddit. If you look at ![email protected] for example, there is only one post this week, and 4 posts this month. How is it that, with all the web developers and AI vibe coding shit, no one is actually asking questions?
When I was on reddit, I had to hide posts because there were 10 or 20 interesting questions every day.
It's a negative feedback loop. There is a good chance programmers asking questions NEED the answer (homework, work-work) so they don't risk asking in low pop forums, making the forum low pop because there are no questions.
If people are interested in that topic (or any other), they can join [email protected]. That community regroups people trying to grow communities, and the issues they face.
Yep, I had same reaction. Since there are so many tech nerds on here, as most early adopters are, I thought that community would have a lot more content. But I'll be adding to it soon enough since I just started to learn programming! :)
It’s just as much a left-wing echo chamber as Truth Social is a right-wing one - and that’s a problem in both cases. Some might say it’s fine because we’re on the right side of history and they’re not, or something along those lines - but the people on Truth Social think the exact same thing. No one’s views ever change that way.
The right wing instances are just defederated from this larger federated group because the people on them were unable to follow the rules of other instances. Repeatedly, they would throw tantrums and create loads of dupe accounts to spam shit when people downvoted their shitty views or their accounts got banned. If they were capable of behaving with civility and following the rules, they'd still be here.
No idea how active that corner of the Lemmyverse is these days, but they have repeatedly chosen to behave in a way that leaves instance administrators with little choice other than defederation.
The solution is to behave with civility online and you don't get banned. No one needs to break instance rules.
If someone is incapable of doing that, why should they get to participate?
The fact that they happen to predominantly come with right wing view points is, frankly, secondary. It's literally the bare minimum amount of effort in life to simply not be a nuisance.
I think Lemmy just don’t tolerate that view point. I see plenty of hard leftism being tolerated by mods when they shouldn’t. But hey, none of them are my instance. It’s grossly lopsided.
The two main "hard left" instances have been defederated from LW too (hex and grad)
LML is ostensibly a general instance with a strong left wing slant. So I'm assuming those are the users you're referring to. Every time I've personally seen a LML user step over the line for a given community's rules, they have been banned for it.
Predominantly though, those users are capable of understanding rules and following them.
That's literally all anyone needs to do.
It's not really about political views. It's simply about not being an asshole.
The right wing instances are just defederated from this larger federated group because the people on them were unable to follow the rules of other instances.
I don't think it's just that. I have seen plenty of people say that no conservative content should be allowed on Lemmy. At all.
Go post a conservative article in c/politics and see what happens. Some of the DM's you'll get are actually reportable to the FBI. The anti-conservative streak here is extreme. I've reported some of the DM's I get to the police, and I'm not even conservative, but just because I advocate 3-party voting. People on here can be insane.
I've seen plenty of pitchforks go after posters. Even when it's a neutral article that talks about something positive a conservative politician did or said.
I don't think there is such a thing as a left wing echo chamber. We bicker incessantly. The other day I was making a joke at the expense of the car-brain mentality and someone came at me for ableism.
I'm not mad at them, it's just illustrative of my point. We don't take shit from each other, and we take each other to task over jokes. The right will, meanwhile, forgive literal pedophilia, rape, and murder of each other. I'm sure as hell not saying we should, but we will never create an echo chamber as good as they do because of that.
There is also a dearth of cannibalistic viewpoints here. And Zoroastrians are woefully underrepresented.
I don't come here to change my views (though it happens from time to time), and neither do they. I'm not ignorant of their thoughts; I'm inundated with them every day. I don't need to interact with assholes here. I don't want to come here and watch people scream back and forth at each other, and I definitely am not interested in participating—there is a reason I've left other social media.
You don't have to subscribe to political communities if you don't want to see political discussion. But the dearth of genuine political discussion here is a problem for the people who do want it, that can't be fixed by individual action.
What is genuine political discussion? How do you moderate it? Who is going to come when it's moderated? How do you deal with both legitimate and legitimate complaints about biased moderation?
I just don't think it's a thing on social media. I think it can happen in private conversations, but as soon as it becomes more about winning an argument or posturing for readers, I think any hope of earnest discourse is lost. The more public a conversation, the worse it is. It's like trying to argue with a bully in front of their friends. You might be able to reach the humanity in them, but not in that moment.
It used to be, in the early days of mass social media (and it was widespread on forums)
Moderation isn't easy but it also needn't be fraught - set standards of civility (strict or loose) and basic rules about hate speech, and let people take themselves out of discussions that are within the rules that they nevertheless don't like.
It works a lot better in small communities where you talk to the same people - you can ignore people you don't like and not have the same conversation over and over.
But the dearth of genuine political discussion here is a problem for the people who do want it
It's not genuine if we don't want to constantly have to expose ourselves to toxic bigots or "smooth" manipulators who think it's not really toxic bigotry if they are "just asking questions?"
It's not genuine if we don't want to start every single discussion of something bad Trump did with rebutting a half dozen versions of "but whatabout that time when dems..."?
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
I will not be shamed into allowing toxicity into my life, on social media or otherwise, in the name of "avoiding an echo chamber." NOTHING is stopping a conservative from coming here and making cogent, factual arguments, aside from their own fragility.
The conservatives who "can't" post to Lemmy are the ones who don't know how to have an actual conversation and get banned. What fraction of conservatives that represents is an excercise left to the reader. But I've got my own opinion on that number for sure.
The fact that you characterise natural ways of engaging in a discussion negatively doesn't mean it's not genuine, and it doesn't mean you're forced to look at it if it's available.
NOTHING is stopping a conservative from coming here and making cogent, factual arguments, aside from their own fragility.
The structure of vote-based social media makes it difficult, and the people who, rather than remove themselves from places where arguments happen, shout down the people having the arguments, stops this from happening.
You'd be right to point out that conservative-majority spaces are just as, if not more guilty of this, but that doesn't make it less true.
The conservatives who “can’t” post to Lemmy are the ones who don’t know how to have an actual conversation and get banned.
That's true but it's not the only thing that's going on.
Edit: And frankly, having to explain that in regard to my comment above is precisely what I love not having to constantly do at Lemmy. (Because people both understand the difference, and don't pretend not to.)
it doesn’t mean you’re forced to look at it if it’s available.
The case being made here is that this is a left wing echo chamber, and that I am not interested in genuine discussion if I either don't think it is, or don't care that it is.
I have provided examples of trolling, toxic behavior.
I do not want trolling, toxic behavior here. It is not welcome by me in the community, whether I'm forced to look at it or not.
I'm also not supporting (and nor am I aware of any such thing existing) some kind of a blanket ban on conservatives. They are the folks always telling people to man up, grab themselves by their bootstraps, have the courage of their convictions, etc etc. Guess they need to take some of their own advice if it's a little rough sometimes trying to push authoritarianism and bigotry in some spaces. And if they get banned because they have forgotten how to talk to people who don't already agree with them, I can't find it in me to care.
I will not be shamed into allowing toxicity into my life, on social media or otherwise, in the name of “avoiding an echo chamber.”
Yeah, but if you go in saying that this is the inevitable result of having conservatives discuss politics here, I am suspicious that your threshold for those terms is waaayy lower than mine.
The person I replied to originally wasn't talking about trolling or toxic behaviour, they were talking about conservative viewpoints (likening them to cannibalism, I might add) so, if you want to chip in that trolling isn't welcome then I'll certainly agree with that, but there's a reason I'm not really talking about that.
These are two of the the primary things gone from my life now that I've cut every conservative I can from it. It's glorious.
So if you want me to support some kind of outreach for conservatives (who apparently can't post anywhere they aren't overtly welcomed and that's a problem the rest of us need to fix) I need some understanding of what you think the upside is.
I haven't seen that.
I've seen scolding people for not wanting to surround themselves with people who have had years and years to demonstrate what they are like and what they support. The only thing new about modern conservatism is how it no longer bothers trying to pretend it's not hateful.
As I have said repeatedly, nothing stops a conservative from coming here and communicating like an adult.
NOTHING is stopping a conservative from coming here and making cogent, factual arguments, aside from their own fragility.
Except for all the Lemmys saying that no conservatives should be allowed on Lemmy. I have seen conservatives try to ask a question. Then so many immediately jump to calling the poster a sealioning nazi, that they just get run off. Lemmy is one of the more hateful places I have seen.
I'm not conservative by the way, so you all don't have send me nazi dm's.
You don’t have to subscribe to political communities if you don’t want to see political discussion.
True but it seems like the majority of Lemmys like attaching anything and everything to something political. I saw some post about a squirrel or something, just chiling in the heat. Supposed to be cute. Immediately devolved into how fat the squirrel looked and how it must be a MAGA squirrel. Then the conversation just devolved into "cheeto man"(stupidist overused Lemmy term ever!) jokes over and over.
Also, Lemmy: why the fuck do you all think saying "cheeto man" is so hilarious? It's something that 2nd graders would snicker at. Once. And you all say it over and over. WTF?! No wonder you all can't get girlfriends.
Yeah this is something that has got way worse over time. It used to be that most forums would default to "no politics" and then there were discussion areas set aside for that. And now if you criticise someone for bringing politics into something where it doesn't belong, you will get angry responses declaring that you're burying your head in the sand. No, I just don't want lowest-hanging-fruit political comments on every cat picture.
I think the main problem is that there isn't much besides politics and memes. Most communities that aren't politics seem to devolve into meme communities.
It's probably an issue with vote-based discussions full stop. Post something funny and it'll get votes because of the laughs; post something everyone in your echo-chamber agrees with and it'll get votes because it's right-on.
Forums still exist, but I hard agree with you. I was so excited when the lemmy devs were considering hiding votes counts from the frontend by default. Unfortunately (imo) it got shot down by the community pretty quickly.
I think "likes" as a socials concept are part of a dark engagement pattern we've willfully brought over from the mainstream, and we won't be able to be much better than them until we're rid of it.
Yeah, I am on... two forums. I think the issue is that it's not where the people are any more.
I actually think the problem with voting is that the way it's used to promote threads instead of doing it on a time basis. It's part of a way of engaging with a site which punishes long-running conversations.
Agree that it's hard to find really long running conversions (like what you see on forums), unless you happen to be going back and forth with one other person (notifications pull you back in).
Yes, and just like Trump, I'm not speaking of the white nationalists and nazies.
"So you know what, it’s fine. You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people -- and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists -- because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.
"Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people. But you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets, and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group."
Uh huh, and I'm sure we can take him at his word. It's not like he's ever lied. He never gave a nod to nazis ever, like telling the proud boys to stand by. Yup, good old not racist donnie, I'm sure he totally hates white supremacists.
You wanna talk bad faith, believe anything that comes out of his orange piehole.
Misrepresenting what someone says is a textbook example of bad faith so doing that in a discussion about bad faith is ironic to say the least. What he actually thinks is unrelated to this discussion as it's about what he said. You'd call people out for twisting your words so hold yourself to the same standards.
Not believing lying sociopaths is not bad faith, and I'm having trouble accepting that you'd actually think it is. I'm not sure why you're so hung up on mango mussolini anyway, as this discussion started when I claimed that the right lied way more than the left. The president wasn't responsible for all the lies the GOP has told for the past 50 years, although he sure does have more than his fair share.
Note that this is the second statement he made, which he had to make after being called out by the media for seemingly supporting the neonazi protestors. Which, given his history at that point and subsequently, it's pretty obvious that the media was right and he was just back tracking due to bad publicity.
Yeah, and it specifically ignores that the statement you posted was the second, clarifying statement days later. Snopes is going off what he said he meant, not actually what he said. Check the United the Right wiki page for the actual timeline.
Stop letting other people think for you.
Trump did not respond to the torchlight parade on Friday night or the demonstrations on Saturday morning until 1:19 pm on Saturday, August 12, when he tweeted, "We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!"[284][33]
At the bill-signing ceremony, Trump said that "we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides".[284][33][288][289] He added that it had been "going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. A long, long time" and that "a swift restoration of law and order" was now vital.[289]
A statement attributed to an unnamed White House spokesperson was released the next day, asserting that "The President said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry, and hatred. Of course that includes white supremacists, KKK, Neo-Nazi and all extremist groups. He called for national unity and bringing all Americans together
...
After the backlash for his remarks, Trump read a statement from a teleprompter two days later at the White House.[310][292] He said that "anyone who acted criminally in this weekend's racist violence, you will be held fully accountable."[287] and that "[r]acism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the K.K.K., neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans."[311]
The closest they have is the unattributed statement, again after the fact, trying to clarify what he said wasn't what he meant. Like they always do.
Every last one of them who voted for trump has decided that bigotry (of multiple sorts) and steamrolling our constitution in the name of authoritarianism are somewhere between just what they wanted and not a dealbreaker.
Heh, I'm sure they are much better people than US conservatives, but I'll quote myself from elsehwere.
The conservatives who “can’t” post to Lemmy are the ones who don’t know how to have an actual conversation and get banned. What fraction of conservatives that represents is an excercise left to the reader. But I’ve got my own opinion on that number for sure.
Maybe you should re-read my original comment? Because unless you think that Lemmy is not a left wing echo chamber then I have no clue what you're arguing about here exactly.
Maybe I misread you. I think I'm being told not only that it is an echo chamber, but that I'm supposed to be bothered by it.
Meanwhile I haven't seen an argument for what we'd gain by having more conservatives here, or what's stopping those unicorn conservatives who aren't raging assholes from posting.
OK, have crawled up the context tree, and don't see where you think I've misunderstood your point. You think it's an echo chamber (I do not) and you think that's bad (I do not) and apparently I'm supposed to feel a little sheepish about not wanting shitty people with shitty behavior here at Lemmy. (I do not.)
Some might say it’s fine because we’re on the right side of history and they’re not, or something along those lines
I say it's fine because if there's one thing I've learned repeatedly since about 2017, it's that the single most effective thing I can do to reduce toxicity in my life is to reduce my interactions with conservative family members, coworkers, 'friends', and social media accounts.
It's remarkably effective. I interact with no conservative or known trump voter more than work or family obligations require. Haven't for years. Best mental health step I've taken in my adult life.
Not my fault they have all forgotten that "loudest asshole in the room" isn't a personality.
It’s just as much a left-wing echo chamber as Truth Social is a right-wing one - and that’s a problem in both cases.
Very much so. And it seems to be getting even worse lately. I mostly post socialist and third party stuff, but if I dare say I don't like a democrat or something, I get automatic "YOU'RE ACTUALLY A TRUMPER!! MAGA-NAZI!!!"
Bans and hateful DM's. All because I don't like the 2-party system. lol
The real mystery to me is what value the echo-chamber residents get out of it. Why would someone join a group of people they already agree with, just to be told that their opinions are correct, and to shout down any interloper who contradict them? How is that not a boring waste of time? Is it that most people are insecure in their views and need validation, perhaps? It's a phenomenon I still don't understand.
People often accuse me of being a troll because I tend to voice views that are unpopular on this platform. Personally, I just don’t see any point in talking about things we all already agree on. I’d much rather try to change the views of those I disagree with - or have them try to change mine.
I find I don't agree with a lot of people, though there is at least a higher chance that someone, especially from my instance, will share my values and at least be willing to hear dissenting opinions without going right to insincere strawmaning.
Yes, it's a matter of gradation. It's not an echo chamber for me because so many of you have different opinions, but generally we all care about what is true and the future of life on this planet.
So it's easier to have discussions around the parts we disagree over.
generally we all care about what is true and the future of life on this planet
But (to stay true to the spirit of debate I just defended) is this not itself a straw man? Do you think, say, religious conservatives would say that they don't "care about what is true and the future of life on this planet"?
Good question, and they might. In which case it would be easier to have a discussion with them.
However, I think much of the time they cleave to a more Kantian morality, where acting correctly / virtuously in accordance with an identifiable authority. They may also believe that the future of life on this planet is trivial when compared to quality of life on some metaphysical plane.
I have this discussion with my neighbour constantly who is nice, but she keeps saying I've "got to have faith" and that "they have a plan to fix all this when the time is right" all while real people are suffering and dying, and their suffering is indelible — it can never be made to have not happened — and they will never be coming back.
It's really hard to have a real discussion about reality with someone like that.
Fair enough about literal religious nuts people of firmly held religious convictions. This side of the pond there are very few of those, fortunately. My basic point is that plenty of people who vote "wrong" (Trump, for example) would actually agree with you on most of your vision of the good society. The questions are mainly over how to get there. This IMO is the tragedy of democratic politics today, and specifically the USA. An almost absolute breakdown in communication.
Issues that would be solved by time/gaining more users
Not nearly enough people to cover all the niche interest communities that Reddit does. At Reddit you find an expert on almost any topic to help you with your problems and you'll find information on pretty much anything. Lemmy isn't there yet.
Not nearly enough history. A lot of content is still good and informative after many years. Lemmy doesn't have a library of old-but-still-relevant content to search.
Issues independent of user count
Search sucks. Reddit's search does too, but reddit is easily searchable via Google. Lemmy isn't.
Onboarding is difficult, because you have to choose an instance, which is hugely important, but a newcomer has no idea what makes/is a good community to join
Issues that get worse with more users (aka, the potentially deal-breaking issues)
Lemmy scales terribly. Every larger instance needs to retain a copy of pretty much all other content out there, and each comment/like/delete/update/... needs to be propagated to every other major instance out there. Adding more instances thus increases complexity and cost instead of decreasing it. Running a major lemmy instance is already prohibitively expensive now, with just about 50k monthly active users. If Lemmy was to scale to Reddit numbers (1.1 billion monthly active users, roughly 22 000x the number of users), everything would just break down.
Moderation work scales just as terribly. Not only does an admin need to make sure the communities on their instance are moderated, but they also need to moderate all other communities on all other instances.
Related to the last point, there's some legal issues as well if an admin doesn't moderate all other instances. Since content is copied from other instances to your instance, illegal content (e.g. illegal pornography, copyrighted works, ...) are also copied to your own server without your active participation. That makes it legally mandatory to moderate all other communities.
Legal pitfalls in general. If lemmy becomes sizeable enough, all sorts of laws in regards to social media platforms will apply. That's one thing if the social media platform is run by a huge corporation with a legal department, but it's an entirely different story for a tiny group of non-profit idealists running the social media platform.
Onboarding is difficult, because you have to choose an instance, which is hugely important, but a newcomer has no idea what makes/is a good community to join
It's not exactly at a place where someone joins lemmy. Most people likely join via downloading an app, and if they are lucky that app links them to join-lemmy.org, and more often than not, it doesn't link them anywhere and just asks them to either select an instance from a dropdown without further information or it asks them to enter an instance name from memory.
The advice is very questionable and not really helpful without context.
Lemmy.world is too big
There are Lemmy-reasons for why that's a problem, but in any other context, the biggest is the best. And even in regards to lemmy, bigger instances have a higher chance to remain, to be decently moderated and to be decently stable. Before joining Lemmy.world, I was on Feddit.de, and we all know how that ended. And even before they vanished without a warning or an explanation, Feddit.de servers were always outdated, slow and unreliable, and moderation was arbitrary at best and non-existent at worst.
That's a somewhat decent reasoning, though not immediately understandable as a new user. And not relevant anymore because Lemm.ee will shutdown within a week or so from now.
sh.itjust.works names contains “shit”, which can deter users
Thanks, I'm adult enough to know whether I'm offended by the word "shit".
lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric
feddit.org, is German-centric, but technically English speaking too
programming.dev is topic-centric
blahaj is queer-focused
infosec.pub is topic-centric
aussie.zone is country-centric
midwest.social is region-centric
None of that really matters thanks to federation.
dbzer0 federates hexbear
Like Lemm.ee, apart from the fact that it still exists
beehaw is way outdated
That's some relevant reasoning.
sopuli.xyz (neutral name
See also:
discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name
Sopuli.xyz isn't any easier than discuss.tchnics.de, and jet discuss.tchnics.de was excluded for the name only.
While down in the comments it says
Sopuli doesn’t support gifs
Which is a really hard reason to avoid that instance, much more so than "has a difficult name". That's got much more practical implications.
But what's left regardless is: Even that link that is supposed to make instance selection easier isn't exactly easy to understand for a newcomer.
ut what’s left regardless is: Even that link that is supposed to make instance selection easier isn’t exactly easy to understand for a newcomer.
Newcomers are supposed to just read
"
Lemmy has 47k monthly active users
https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
https://vger.app/settings/install if you want an app
Feel free if you have any questions
"
The rest was up for debate, feel free to copy paste your comment in that thread so that other people can see it as well
As everyone has pointed out, people and content. Its good in some ways since not every post is drowned out with one thousand replies nobody will ever see, but at the same time, you're not getting much of anything at all sometimes. Not even very niche ones either. Even groups that represent entire states has limited info or replies still. If it can grow to that size and see some more unique and local content more I think even that would be a much better place for it to be.
Yeah this is my issue with it. I can find all the arts, Linux, and political stuff just fine. Sports, music, and places communities are seriously lacking. They exist, but are a shell of what you'd hope they'd be. Engagement is so low, it's not worth bothering. The sports and music communities being so small and sparse is a real bummer.
To be frank, in many cases communities were simply picked up by the wrong people who proceeded to not actively feed it with content. So they simply die.
The lack of continuous and backlogged content. For some this is a benefit because it gives them a reason to stop scrolling, but for others who come here to look for answers, find entertainment, or anonymously voice their opinions, this can be something of a downside.
Of course this platform is as anonymous as you make it, but I've seen some people say they refrain from commenting more often because they don't want to be known as a regular, instead wanting to "blend in to the crowd" as one would on more populous sites like Reddit or Twitter.
The same issue Bluesky and other app-killer platforms have/had at the start: momentum. Momentum explains everything else. If you leave out the vapid content on Reddit, it's still the premier place for asking questions and getting them answered by enthusiastic amateurs or actual experts in the field. The moment Lemmy gets the same quality tech support and DIY responses, it will have its place. Or, like with Bluesky, Reddit needs to become as alienating and disgusting as X became after the Elon takeover.
That's the beauty about Lemmy, it's not too reliant on momentum as it doesn't need graphs to go up at all times. The fediverse will always be a refuge when other platforms crumble. We'll just have to be patient and make sure the platform and the communities are as good as they can be at that point in time.
i usually search for what has been asked and answered, asking questions now in many subs, is only inviting trouble from gatekeepers, know it alls , and lastly astroturfing.
Niche communities. Also, attempts at niche communities getting dogpiled by everyone else (no, “this administration” really doesn’t have anything to do with the pedestrianisation of Norwich city centre.)
User volume and diversity is probably the main thing right now.
We just need more people posing shit, the fact that one or two users can dominate my feed if they choose to is not ideal. (Though often I appreciate the content anyway)
The diversity aspect is around how we have a lot of people in a small handful of demographics on here. It's getting better every day, but the thing that made Reddit great before they ruined it was everything you could think of had a community of people posing stuff about it, doesn't matter how niche.
One leads to the other though, more users naturally will mean increasingly diverse interests in our userbase.
It's about time Reddit fucked something else up anyway, it's been a few months
I have trouble finding um what are they called here... Communities?... for the subjects I'm interested in. When I search, all I find is old posts or unrelated posts.
My first try at the Fediverse, I didn't know how important it is to instance-hop so when mine was down a lot more often than it was up, I temporarily went back to Reddit.
It's pretty much a symptom of having a small userbase. The most niche thing that can maintain activity isn't very niche yet. I hope and expect it will improve over time, and in the meanwhile I'd like to see the attitude to Reddit repost bots to soften.
Beehaw being defederated from LW and SJW prevents around 30% of the people on the platform of seeing that community. Have you considered maybe posting to a community on an instance that is more accessible?
Look I get what you trying to say, but we need to pick one, and there are not a lot of communities to do that(without making a new one). check this one ![email protected] but I believe the first one was ok.
It's just a community in the end, we should leave politics aside on this IMO.
Yeah same, the only solution is for you yourself to post in those niche communities more often, making them more active and thus more attractive for other users.
Smaller user base. It is both good and bad but the community for my city is dead (probably there were only like 8 of us on here).
Am old enough to know from experience that the early people on any platform are the computer geeks so expect the tech communities to thrive first - but as someone else said, music communities die, sports, arts, things that are pretty widely popular. Honestly happy with the slow and steady growth of the [email protected] so if it's an indicator, the general interest people are joining just not quickly but some must be sticking. I would guess at some point it will be perfect then too big but who knows?
Personally I also miss the nonsexual nudes threads like nakedprogress and normalnudes. Again that's a lack of users issue, you need a lot of people willing to post, to have even a few willing to post nude.
I do want to see the content and community, just once though. I don't even mean the same story being posted multiple times, but I think I see the exact same post multiple times.
It’s too difficult to block huge swaths of things you’re not interested in. Like sports, or memes, or music. You block one community and 99 more about the same subject appear in your feed.
Adding some sort of Usenet-style organization or sublemmy tagging might help.
Yeah, I spent a little time cultivating the communities that I subscribed to when I first got here, and now the Subscribe feed is what I use 95% of the time.
Same here! And on a slow day when I finally managed to get through the whole Subscribed feed, there's still the All feed to tackle. I really like that system.
I know that Reddit doesn't outright ban Lemmy talk, but on my reddit profile, I updated it with my Lemmy username link. I got banned from reddit a couple of hours later. No reason given. And I hadn't made any recent posts. Ban reason was "violating rules." lol
Reddit was shit to begin with. It was a dumbed down forum site for people who found sites like Plastic or Kuro5hin too intimidating or complicated(!).
Slashdot-style upvoting would instantly solve a lot of "Reddit"-type problems, because instead of just good/bad, or like/dislike, the reason for the vote is noted, such as "insightful", "funny", etc., and you can then filter and sort comments much easier. Just filtering out "funny" comments saved soooooooo much time.
Another thing: Why don't creators of threads have the option to admin their own threads? It's their thread! It wouldn't be appropriate for discussion threads (for obvious reasons), but for interpersonal posts and questions, it makes perfect sense for the creator to be able to have control over what appears in the thread to keep it on topic and the trolls at bay. It's pretty rare to see a post where someone asks a question that doesn't quickly devolve into an offtopic mess, and the creator is usually attacked for trying to bring it back on topic. This has made Reddit useless for question-answering (and besides, the most upvoted answer is almost always wrong.)
Is the purpose of these forums to enable authentic conversation, or just to farm content regardless of quality (to be sold to AI companies, presumably)?
Another thing: Why don’t creators of threads have the option to admin their own threads? It’s their thread! It wouldn’t be appropriate for discussion threads (for obvious reasons), but for interpersonal posts and questions, it makes perfect sense for the creator to be able to have control over what appears in the thread to keep it on topic and the trolls at bay. It’s pretty rare to see a post where someone asks a question that doesn’t quickly devolve into an offtopic mess, and the creator is usually attacked for trying to bring it back on topic. This has made Reddit useless for question-answering (and besides, the most upvoted answer is almost always wrong.)
This would probably quickly devolve into OP removing any comments they disagree with
Another thing: Why don't creators of threads have the option to admin their own threads? It's their thread! It wouldn't be appropriate for discussion threads (for obvious reasons), but for interpersonal posts and questions, it makes perfect sense for the creator to be able to have control over what appears in the thread to keep it on topic and the trolls at bay.
How do you determine if a threads an interpersonal question and post as opposed to a general topic-related post?
Lemmy devs - they are a curse and a blessing. A blessing that they worked on lemmy before reddit exodus. A curse as it's hard to contribute to the codebase and related components.
At least we have mbin and piefed to federate with.
Also in the 2 years since, the culture has shifted. There is less: "This is a new place. let's make it enjoyable for everyone" and more "I am right, everyone is wrong, and I will ruin your day", but that could be just my perception and not enough blocking.
People here are way bigger smug assholes than even Reddit.
Sense of invulnerability and mod neglegence just because Lemmy is defederated. People naively think that makes it invulnerable to similar issues as Reddit (like toxicity/hivemind/bad modding.)
Back in 2023 I joined Lemmy because Reddit got rid of 3rd party apps. At first I was extremely impressed with the content here. While the community was small, meme channels were hilarious and had fantastic content. Same with the nsfw communities. However, now all the communities are filled with AI slop, political ragebait posting, onlyfans subsciption bait posts, and various other trash. So as far as I'm concerned Lemmy seems to be circling the drain. I can't in good faith tell anyone I know to switch to Lemmy. If a friend were to ask me "hey man, how's Lemmy?" My honest answer would be that it kinda fucking sucks.
People here are way bigger smug assholes than even Reddit.
Yep, and I am legit shocked about that. I still have a burner reddit account that I go to, and honestly, as much crap as reddit gets, I see way more assholes and ban-happy people here. On reddit someone gets mad at you or your opinion, and they just block you.
Here, a lot of posters who dislike ya will refuse to block you. Instead they'll follow you and downpost every single post you make. I never had stalkers like that on Reddit.
Like you, I was an early fan. And even tried to talk my gf into getting on Lemmy. The other day, she finally decided to, and I talked her out of it and told her to just stick with Reddit. lol
Some Communities are still controlled by people with absurd egos and overconfidence. Most of them hate people too, which is fun for a community manager.
I think it mirrors real life though, the type of people who want to be leaders tend to be assholes, and the ones who would be good at leading won't volunteer to do it.
for me, no option to follow posts / comments, mostly to see new comments / replies and create proper aggregation of responses, any opinion dynamics and so on — this makes everything very temporary / short lived
Lemmy was architected by people whose philosophical intentions are out of alignment with the software they cloned.
That system was designed to invite as many idiots as possible, to bait as much engagement as possible, with virtually no controls on quality or intelligence.
Well congratulations Lemmy, you've made the next Reddit. There's no reason to be here, it's just a pile of morons for the most part.
The default home feed: out of the box, it puts too much shit in the face of newcomers.
Once filtered out, it's great but one must first learn to filter the noise out which, I'm pretty sure, is dissuasive to a lot of non-geek users like myself.
The people on Lemmy are mostly weird obsessive leftists who have little interest in talking about anything else and disagree with each other for having nearly identical views in the grand scheme of things. I still like Lemmy but it can get tiring talking about anything especially if you mention something that people have decided is evil like AI.
It's easier to make a community here than on reddit, not to mention here its easier to moderate.
I think this page might help, but remember some instances might restrict community creation, meaning that you have to speak with admin.
https://support.lemmy.world/quickstart/#creating-communities
that is true, because reddit currently makes it very hard to even moderate a sub reddit, they ban new ones very easily, if not immediately. the only problem is lemmy doesnt have the traffic that reddit has for a specific niche.
Mods acting capriciously and according to how mad they feel - banning you across multiple communities at once because you hurt their feelings - honestly this is Mickey Mouse as hell, but we are ruled by these people. *typo
Number of users. Takes a lot of users to keep all the small niche communities alive.
Political skew. You don't benefit from being in an echo chamber. It will also drive away people you don't agree with politically but do enjoy the same niche hobbies. Not sure about you but I'm much more interested in my hobbies than politics.
The fact instances can be closed on users. I’m in EE I’m fairly new and now my instances will be closed, it’s pretty insane my content and account can be unilaterally destroyed by someone entirely out of my control
The smallness isn’t too bad if you hide read posts, hide posts you don’t care about and subscribe to a lot of different things but things showing up in my feed for days if I don’t hide them is obnoxious to me
The tankies are far and away the largest problem. It's the number one reason why lemmy hasn't grown. Even when I signed up years ago from the reddit exodus every post I saw was heavily cautioned with "it's filled with tankies". And now every mention of it is being scrubbed for that reason. The second problem is the smaller size but see reason 1 for that.
Third problem is the sign up process being so excruciating. I understand it's to prevent bots but for every 2 bots it's preventing it's probably also preventing 1 actual user from signing up. I love this place despite the small size, because I can just sequester off all the tankies entirely on Connect, but if the creators don't realize they're actively standing in the way of growth by the actions they're taking and step away from all their moderation actions to focus on administration and development instead the outlook doesn't look too great.
I may not understand how all this works but the very first page is mostly stuff that is 24 hours old or older. Maybe I am sorting it wrong or something but looking for the latest news is not easy. There should be a way from things that are older than 24 hours to fall off the front page. Also something like reddit enhancement suite would be nice.
Communities: People complaining about niche communities, yet they don't make or promote them. Create a community, promote it, share it with other users, share content.
Politics: I came here to discuss about everything, but I only see new and dead communities, being overtaken and post daily politics.
This is what I have blocked so far, yet more communities are being made, and one article goes on and on and on and on......
Not just Lemmy, but all Fediverse frontends: it's confusing and cumbersome. I've been here for 2 years and I still find that it's very much lacking in the "user experience" department. I have add-ons and scripts to 'patch' things that ought not to need patching. I don't know if it's possible for this to happen given the nature of Fedi, but it should be the case that a new user would find it works more or less the same as non-Fedi software and not have to juggle instances and type hideous and long URLs into the search bar. Instance names and stuff like that should be available to people who want to see them, but by default there's little reason to frighten new users with it. Make it be under-the-hood type stuff. One follow button that works for your home instance regardless of where you are on the Fediverse would be a nice start.
Also, privacy needs to be handled better. Again, not sure if that's possible because of the nature of Fedi, but Lemmy should make users feel more secure than reddit or Twitter, not less. Like, it's bizarre that reddit protects my privacy more than Lemmy does, given that reddit doesn't really protect my privacy much at all.
Instance names and stuff like that should be available to people who want to see them, but by default there’s little reason to frighten new users with it.
Arguably, lemmy is going to be more private than reddit because your data are being queried, refined, quantified and categorised by reddit to be sold off to the highest bidder. If a different actor is just scraping activitypub they need to do all of that themselves.
More generally, I'm not sure if we should ever think about something posted online as being private. You can post form data that is secured to your bank or whatever but they are analysing all of that data on their side. Similarly the large email providers are aware of the contents of all your emails.
I get your point that reddit nominally has more privacy. I only said "arguably" because I think privacy is an illusion in both cases (which, admittedly, is a bit of an orthogonal take). If there isn't true privacy anywhere then there is the additional downside of reddit data being actively marketed/presented to 3rd parties.
The irrationality and hyper emotional state of a lot of commenters. Not saying there isn’t due cause these days* but people GET. A. GRIP. and control yourself. You aren’t helping others or yourself with that behavior. It’s super immature.
*I’m not talking about being angry. I’m talking about how do I go on living emotional responses.
The downvote button. It's a hobby horse of mine. Slashdot got it right: if you're going to tell someone to shut up, there should be a small price to pay.
PS: to the inevitable downvoters. Let's be clear that you are not just saying "I disagree". You are helping to hide my comment; you're literally telling me to shut up. Would you do that in person, without so much as lifting a finger to justify yourself ? Of course you wouldn't. In person you would have manners. This is the problem I have with the downvote button. It incites people to behave like uncivilized infants.
But downvoting doesn't mean that. At all. Not even sure how you got that idea. It's also not hiding your comments, it's sorting them. And the reader get's to select the sort order (some which entirely ignore votes).
I'm getting downvotes because people don't like being told they're behaving obnoxiously. That's all. I didn't downvote you or anyone else. I respect all of your opinions.
Yes yes, I take the point about the sorting-algo choices and karma absence and so on. I acknowledged it in another comment.
My fundamental point (which you are ignoring) concerns the motivations and incentives for downvoting. My contention is that downvoting thoughtful and well-expressed opinions is always (always) toxic and unhealthy. Others don't see it that way. So be it.
Not trying to start anything, I’d just like to point out that there seems to be a disturbingly large group (and growing) that wouldn’t have any problem telling you to shut up to your face. It seems that rude, obnoxious, selfish behavior has become more and more prevalent, and appears to be getting normalized.
That's interesting. But I don't know how you can be sure of that. My own theory (not exactly original) is that text communication - without voices, without faces - encourages people to be worse versions of themselves. When there's ambiguity, the temptation for many is to see bad faith. It takes effort and self-discipline to overcome that, and most (or many) people just don't have that.
Since karma isn’t tracked, I don’t think it’s a real big deal having a negative score comment. But since there are people who care anyways I think the downvote does exist, it can suppress people posting certain points of view lest you anger the tankie triad
Some third party apps do track Lemmy downvotes though. And I've seen plenty of obnoxious posters bring up someones "downvote count" in conversation--just so they can try to win their argument.
On the contrary, in real life I remove myself from conversations where people have nothing worthwhile to say every day. Half my job is judging when that's the case so I can prioritize the interactions where people are ready to be cogent and concise.
It's a reply to your comment about downotes. The point of votes is to rank threads, and the point of ranking threads is to promote cogent comments and avoid irrelevance, misinformation, and malice. I do this in real life and I do it here.
And I'd say this is your convenient retrofitting of an optimistic rational theory onto what is in fact almost always much simpler and more brutish: "I had a negative response to this because it contradicts my beliefs and gave me cognitive dissonance", regardless of its objective merits. You must know this. Anyway, we'll agree to disagree.
Same as with every other social media ... the people.
I'm not your friend, buddy!
I'm not your buddy, guy!
Im not your guy, pal!
I'll be your pal
It's just as bad of an echo chamber as other sites. I have to actively "stop" browsing lemmy after a bit because I get annoyed at the repetitive nature of everything.
I've very much tried in the last few years to limit social media. I think it's been a benefit for me. I like social media, but having "stops" makes it more enjoyable and prevents the doom feelings.
lemmy.ml and its admins being the developers at the same time.
I don't think that in itself if the problem. anyone can host an instance. The problem is lemmy.ml being the apparent default instance, advertising itself as an instance for privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, and not mentioning seemingly anywhere in the description/rules that only red flavour authoritarian dogma is allowed in political discussion.
"America bad, therefore former 'communist' russia and current 'communist' china good."
Edit: it's not featured as prominently as it used to be on join-lemmy.org so things may be improving. they should still mention in the description that western viewpoints on many issues are not allowed due to "rule 1"
I realized .ml was fucking insane and delusional when they glorified Stalin and refused to recognize the atrocities he committed.
No matter what your political stance is, as soon as you deny negative facts and exclusively push the "positives" it becomes a problem and may radicalize you (if that isn't already the case).
What happened to nuanced moderate politics? It seems people unconditionally put the "left" or "right" label on themselves. And ironically these blind followers will have the audacity to call anyone close to the political center, or people who are honest with themselves, cowards.
Yeah, well the guy who runs it is a notorious tankie.
You either tow the pro stalinist line or you are punished
I was on .ml first after leaving reddit, because I didn't know this was the case, until I called out straight up state propaganda and defended capitalism with social and ethical policies once. You can imagine how they responded to that.
yea I visited the instance index some time ago because I had to pick a replacement for lemm.ee (rip in peace), saw the description under lemmy.ml and wondered whether they were being intentionally or accidentally misleading.
They certainly mislead me. My first year or so was on lemmy.ml @[email protected]
After repeated bans i decided to move to a more relaxed instance. i still interact with lemmy.ml because some of the bigger open source communities are there, but .ml admins now cannot block me from accessing the full lemmyverse, only their diminishing corner of it
im glad i blocked that instance, i was accidentally engaging into too many .ml posts there were mirror image of how conservatives posts, just whining and chastising opinions.
Huh, just checked out the ranking on join-lemmy.org. The default setting is "random", which might be why it's not featured up top.
But what's weird is that lemmy.world isn't in the ranking at all.
If you sort by active, the top two are lemmynsfw.com, followed by lemmy.ml.
well tbf they are the two most active servers there though. not sure why .world isnt on there though. maybe removed temporarily so that newbies filter out to smaller instances
IIRC it is intentional that world isn't there to help spread out users to other instances.
Good, because .world is one of the more toxic ban-happy instances in the fediverse.
Lemmy.ml needs to be defederated from all other instances. It's literally an extremist instance of hate and bigotry.
Tankies on their way to hate private ownership and dictatorship of the bourgeoisie so much that they begin to love state ownership and dictatorship of the bureacracy
Switch to PieFed and this issue goes away.
A few options
Not enough people for even slightly niche communities. Wanna talk about smash brothers ? 732 people, only 2 posts in the last month.
This is why people still use reddit on the side.
This is exactly why I don't use Reddit on the side. When I run out of content on Lemmy, there's no choice but to do something productive instead. Had to go 100% cold turkey on Reddit to make that work though.
Exactly. I have a 1.5 hour daily time limit on Voyager, my Lemmy client, and I hit it every day, no problem. I do miss some of the niche subs but, every time I go back to ask a quick question, so many people are just so goddamned mean that I'm still very happy I left.
Oh yeah the community is 1000% better and healthier, I don't miss Reddit at all. Plus I'm a child of the 70s, I grew up with limited content. It's good for you.
Every time my kids say they’re bored I tell them that being bored is a useful skill.
Summer was not meant for being productive.
Sports is like the most mainstream of interests, and lemmy still doesn't have a critical mass of sports discussion in general, much less specific sports/leagues, specific teams, specific games/matches, or specific players.
So I keep my reddit sports account.
I also keep an account for my local city subreddit, and one for my career field, because Lemmy doesn't have those either.
I'm the main poster on [email protected]. Most popular post on the planet.
I guess people on Lemmy just don't like sports.
I'll subscribe, since it's about the real kind of football (the one that's played with your feet, and a ball. Not an egg, and your hands)
I've been trying to get into sports. Always enjoyed parricipating sports, never tried watching.
Welcome!
Hell even [email protected] (as far as I can tell, the biggest one on the platform) only has like 10k subs, like a dozen posts today, and basically all of the posts were people just advertising music. Zero discussion.
Even for things i would think are big, the communities here are still vanishingly small. I joined reddit in like 2014 and even back then it was more popular than Lemmy is now
I see good discussions on
Not really into music myself, I guess the issue might be that it's too generic? Even on Reddit I don't think /r/music was that busy, too many different genres
[email protected] only has 11 posts in the last 24 hrs and [email protected] only has 7...
Not sure why you referenced the LW version when I mentioned the piefed.social ones, but
Number of posts themselves isn't really that relevant, comments are usually a more interesting metric.
Why not create a community? We even have a community to promote communities https://lemmy.ca/c/communitypromo and we have couple others too.
Niche communities. Large spaces are built of small niche interest groups. The tooling around small spaces needs to be first class if we want the larger space to be healthy
same, certain things location based subs are not found on lemmy, and youtuber channel based discussions also not found here. plus things like like health, medical,,,etc. movies/entertainment has enough to satisfy people, but not to the extent as on reddit.
The lemmy.ml instance not being treated the same as the rest of the Triad in regards to defederation
Some highlights from the link:
I am currently working on a report on vote manipulation and the early results are showing clear signs of the some most prolific .ml accounts participating in brigading and vote manipulation.
I can't count the number of times I made a comment way deep in a chain that conflicts with .ml dogma, and after the first downvote, there are suddenly 5 more within minutes
that was so pervasive on reddit, you either get banned, or ended up arguing more and then get banned.
PieFed doesn't have any of these issues
It does, since it still federates with lemmy.ml...
I think the parent comment is talking about piefed the software, compared to Lemmy the software, not the specific
piefed.socialinstance they're posting from.That would explain. But that comment is in answer to the top-level comment about the lemmy.ml instance.
The developers of the Lemmy software are the admins of the lemmy.ml instance and are problematic. The complaint is that the software itself can't be separated from the priorities of the .ml instance.
Piefed doesn't have the same issue, even if the flagship instance federates with .ml
i block the whole instance, so i dont have to deal with any of those posts, but the single .ml accounts can still be problematic.
Duplicate communities posting the same content over and over again.
Communities are tied to an instance. How many communities will die because lemm.ee is shutting down? There is a slightly mad rush to migrate communities already.
Lemmy should have used usent style naming for communities.
I think there is a feature request to allow communities to subscribe to other communities so that their posts and comments are synced.
Great, so the duplication happens automatically! This is solving the wrong problem, IMHO...
Piefed solves that issue: https://piefed.zip/post/100161
All comments from 5 crossposts in a single view
A few options
Active communities have moved elsewhere:
Inactive communities weren't active in the first place.
How does piefed handle when communities have the same name but different purposes? Like 'conservative' being a 'satire' community on one instance and a breitbart repost community on another?
Usually they have different icons.
I'm on mobile, so usually if I have a doubt (![email protected] vs ![email protected] have the some icon) I use my mouse to hover and see what community it is.
the architecture of lemmy, both socially and technically, is not working as hoped and it's likely it will suffer an effective death before it evolves sufficiently to enable distributed communities
the federated model is too lumpy and fragmented at the same time
This is what the Piefed community migration system is designed to mitigate. It makes communities completely modular, allowing a community to move their entire posting history to another instance. As soon as it can pull subscribers automatically, it'll be as if nothing happened.
Lemmy uses ActivityPub, so that can't really be done in line with the spec.
Onboarding. I think it'll be better if people promoted individual instances instead of Lemmy as a whole. As a whole, it seems vague.
Or if instances used the word “Lemmy” in their domain names. I can say “go to Lemmy.world or Lemmy.zip or Lemmy.cafe” but if I tell someone to go “sh.itjust.works” they will get confused and wonder why “that site is not Lemmy?”
I advocate the opposite. Because people then see "lemmy.world" and immediately associate it with the rumours about the devs being tankies even though .world and the lemmy devs are unrelated
Maybe. Some people might not even know what a tankie is until they start using Lemmy.
I didn't. Tankie was a completely new word to me when I started here.
i heard it first on reddit funny enough, but usually referring to same type people as on lemmy
I had no idea what a tankie was until I started using Lemmy. lol
I don't think we want that. It sets some weird precedent that instances need to be lemmy-dot-something, which is both untrue and restrictive on server hosts as a barrier for entry if that becomes the universal convention.
https://piefed.social/ has real good onboarding
The lack of content compared to reddit. If you look at ![email protected] for example, there is only one post this week, and 4 posts this month. How is it that, with all the web developers and AI vibe coding shit, no one is actually asking questions?
When I was on reddit, I had to hide posts because there were 10 or 20 interesting questions every day.
It's a negative feedback loop. There is a good chance programmers asking questions NEED the answer (homework, work-work) so they don't risk asking in low pop forums, making the forum low pop because there are no questions.
Mods seem inactive.
If people are interested in that topic (or any other), they can join [email protected]. That community regroups people trying to grow communities, and the issues they face.
Yep, I had same reaction. Since there are so many tech nerds on here, as most early adopters are, I thought that community would have a lot more content. But I'll be adding to it soon enough since I just started to learn programming! :)
It’s just as much a left-wing echo chamber as Truth Social is a right-wing one - and that’s a problem in both cases. Some might say it’s fine because we’re on the right side of history and they’re not, or something along those lines - but the people on Truth Social think the exact same thing. No one’s views ever change that way.
The right wing instances are just defederated from this larger federated group because the people on them were unable to follow the rules of other instances. Repeatedly, they would throw tantrums and create loads of dupe accounts to spam shit when people downvoted their shitty views or their accounts got banned. If they were capable of behaving with civility and following the rules, they'd still be here.
No idea how active that corner of the Lemmyverse is these days, but they have repeatedly chosen to behave in a way that leaves instance administrators with little choice other than defederation.
That’s what happened. It’s not the solution.
The solution is to behave with civility online and you don't get banned. No one needs to break instance rules.
If someone is incapable of doing that, why should they get to participate?
The fact that they happen to predominantly come with right wing view points is, frankly, secondary. It's literally the bare minimum amount of effort in life to simply not be a nuisance.
I think Lemmy just don’t tolerate that view point. I see plenty of hard leftism being tolerated by mods when they shouldn’t. But hey, none of them are my instance. It’s grossly lopsided.
The two main "hard left" instances have been defederated from LW too (hex and grad)
LML is ostensibly a general instance with a strong left wing slant. So I'm assuming those are the users you're referring to. Every time I've personally seen a LML user step over the line for a given community's rules, they have been banned for it.
Predominantly though, those users are capable of understanding rules and following them.
That's literally all anyone needs to do.
It's not really about political views. It's simply about not being an asshole.
I’m definitely not seeing that on the instances I’m following. Ex. Calls for murdering the rich are not okay regardless of how someone feels.
I don't think it's just that. I have seen plenty of people say that no conservative content should be allowed on Lemmy. At all.
Go post a conservative article in c/politics and see what happens. Some of the DM's you'll get are actually reportable to the FBI. The anti-conservative streak here is extreme. I've reported some of the DM's I get to the police, and I'm not even conservative, but just because I advocate 3-party voting. People on here can be insane.
I've seen plenty of pitchforks go after posters. Even when it's a neutral article that talks about something positive a conservative politician did or said.
I don't think there is such a thing as a left wing echo chamber. We bicker incessantly. The other day I was making a joke at the expense of the car-brain mentality and someone came at me for ableism.
I'm not mad at them, it's just illustrative of my point. We don't take shit from each other, and we take each other to task over jokes. The right will, meanwhile, forgive literal pedophilia, rape, and murder of each other. I'm sure as hell not saying we should, but we will never create an echo chamber as good as they do because of that.
There is also a dearth of cannibalistic viewpoints here. And Zoroastrians are woefully underrepresented.
I don't come here to change my views (though it happens from time to time), and neither do they. I'm not ignorant of their thoughts; I'm inundated with them every day. I don't need to interact with assholes here. I don't want to come here and watch people scream back and forth at each other, and I definitely am not interested in participating—there is a reason I've left other social media.
Zoroastrians for the win. I never thought I'd see that word mentioned on here!
Saw a documentary on them ages ago and they've always stuck with me for some reason.
You don't have to subscribe to political communities if you don't want to see political discussion. But the dearth of genuine political discussion here is a problem for the people who do want it, that can't be fixed by individual action.
What is genuine political discussion? How do you moderate it? Who is going to come when it's moderated? How do you deal with both legitimate and legitimate complaints about biased moderation?
I just don't think it's a thing on social media. I think it can happen in private conversations, but as soon as it becomes more about winning an argument or posturing for readers, I think any hope of earnest discourse is lost. The more public a conversation, the worse it is. It's like trying to argue with a bully in front of their friends. You might be able to reach the humanity in them, but not in that moment.
It used to be, in the early days of mass social media (and it was widespread on forums)
Moderation isn't easy but it also needn't be fraught - set standards of civility (strict or loose) and basic rules about hate speech, and let people take themselves out of discussions that are within the rules that they nevertheless don't like.
It works a lot better in small communities where you talk to the same people - you can ignore people you don't like and not have the same conversation over and over.
It's not genuine if we don't want to constantly have to expose ourselves to toxic bigots or "smooth" manipulators who think it's not really toxic bigotry if they are "just asking questions?"
It's not genuine if we don't want to start every single discussion of something bad Trump did with rebutting a half dozen versions of "but whatabout that time when dems..."?
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
I will not be shamed into allowing toxicity into my life, on social media or otherwise, in the name of "avoiding an echo chamber." NOTHING is stopping a conservative from coming here and making cogent, factual arguments, aside from their own fragility.
The conservatives who "can't" post to Lemmy are the ones who don't know how to have an actual conversation and get banned. What fraction of conservatives that represents is an excercise left to the reader. But I've got my own opinion on that number for sure.
The fact that you characterise natural ways of engaging in a discussion negatively doesn't mean it's not genuine, and it doesn't mean you're forced to look at it if it's available.
The structure of vote-based social media makes it difficult, and the people who, rather than remove themselves from places where arguments happen, shout down the people having the arguments, stops this from happening.
You'd be right to point out that conservative-majority spaces are just as, if not more guilty of this, but that doesn't make it less true.
That's true but it's not the only thing that's going on.
It's natural to ask questions. It's natural to point out hypocrisy.
JAQing off and Whataboutism are not those things.
Edit: And frankly, having to explain that in regard to my comment above is precisely what I love not having to constantly do at Lemmy. (Because people both understand the difference, and don't pretend not to.)
The case being made here is that this is a left wing echo chamber, and that I am not interested in genuine discussion if I either don't think it is, or don't care that it is.
I have provided examples of trolling, toxic behavior.
I do not want trolling, toxic behavior here. It is not welcome by me in the community, whether I'm forced to look at it or not.
I'm also not supporting (and nor am I aware of any such thing existing) some kind of a blanket ban on conservatives. They are the folks always telling people to man up, grab themselves by their bootstraps, have the courage of their convictions, etc etc. Guess they need to take some of their own advice if it's a little rough sometimes trying to push authoritarianism and bigotry in some spaces. And if they get banned because they have forgotten how to talk to people who don't already agree with them, I can't find it in me to care.
Yeah, but if you go in saying that this is the inevitable result of having conservatives discuss politics here, I am suspicious that your threshold for those terms is waaayy lower than mine.
The person I replied to originally wasn't talking about trolling or toxic behaviour, they were talking about conservative viewpoints (likening them to cannibalism, I might add) so, if you want to chip in that trolling isn't welcome then I'll certainly agree with that, but there's a reason I'm not really talking about that.
These are two of the the primary things gone from my life now that I've cut every conservative I can from it. It's glorious.
So if you want me to support some kind of outreach for conservatives (who apparently can't post anywhere they aren't overtly welcomed and that's a problem the rest of us need to fix) I need some understanding of what you think the upside is.
I haven't seen that.
I've seen scolding people for not wanting to surround themselves with people who have had years and years to demonstrate what they are like and what they support. The only thing new about modern conservatism is how it no longer bothers trying to pretend it's not hateful.
As I have said repeatedly, nothing stops a conservative from coming here and communicating like an adult.
Except for all the Lemmys saying that no conservatives should be allowed on Lemmy. I have seen conservatives try to ask a question. Then so many immediately jump to calling the poster a sealioning nazi, that they just get run off. Lemmy is one of the more hateful places I have seen.
I'm not conservative by the way, so you all don't have send me nazi dm's.
True but it seems like the majority of Lemmys like attaching anything and everything to something political. I saw some post about a squirrel or something, just chiling in the heat. Supposed to be cute. Immediately devolved into how fat the squirrel looked and how it must be a MAGA squirrel. Then the conversation just devolved into "cheeto man"(stupidist overused Lemmy term ever!) jokes over and over.
Also, Lemmy: why the fuck do you all think saying "cheeto man" is so hilarious? It's something that 2nd graders would snicker at. Once. And you all say it over and over. WTF?! No wonder you all can't get girlfriends.
Yeah this is something that has got way worse over time. It used to be that most forums would default to "no politics" and then there were discussion areas set aside for that. And now if you criticise someone for bringing politics into something where it doesn't belong, you will get angry responses declaring that you're burying your head in the sand. No, I just don't want lowest-hanging-fruit political comments on every cat picture.
I think the main problem is that there isn't much besides politics and memes. Most communities that aren't politics seem to devolve into meme communities.
I feel like that's an issue that's exacerbated by the predominance of image posts over text posts, and text post only communities.
It's probably an issue with vote-based discussions full stop. Post something funny and it'll get votes because of the laughs; post something everyone in your echo-chamber agrees with and it'll get votes because it's right-on.
Maybe I just want to go back to forums.
Forums still exist, but I hard agree with you. I was so excited when the lemmy devs were considering hiding votes counts from the frontend by default. Unfortunately (imo) it got shot down by the community pretty quickly.
I think "likes" as a socials concept are part of a dark engagement pattern we've willfully brought over from the mainstream, and we won't be able to be much better than them until we're rid of it.
Yeah, I am on... two forums. I think the issue is that it's not where the people are any more.
I actually think the problem with voting is that the way it's used to promote threads instead of doing it on a time basis. It's part of a way of engaging with a site which punishes long-running conversations.
What do you mean on a time basis?
Agree that it's hard to find really long running conversions (like what you see on forums), unless you happen to be going back and forth with one other person (notifications pull you back in).
Votes and vote manipulation are destroying Lemmy.
[email protected] has a pinned post for communities that are not politics or memes
The problem is the right no longer argue their points in good faith.
“The right” consists of individuals, just like “the left” does - and there’s plenty of bad faith to be found on both sides.
Is this like plenty of fine people on both sides? In aggregate, one side is far more egregious and it's not even close.
Speaking of bad faith..
Yes, and just like Trump, I'm not speaking of the white nationalists and nazies.
Source
Uh huh, and I'm sure we can take him at his word. It's not like he's ever lied. He never gave a nod to nazis ever, like telling the proud boys to stand by. Yup, good old not racist donnie, I'm sure he totally hates white supremacists.
You wanna talk bad faith, believe anything that comes out of his orange piehole.
Misrepresenting what someone says is a textbook example of bad faith so doing that in a discussion about bad faith is ironic to say the least. What he actually thinks is unrelated to this discussion as it's about what he said. You'd call people out for twisting your words so hold yourself to the same standards.
Not believing lying sociopaths is not bad faith, and I'm having trouble accepting that you'd actually think it is. I'm not sure why you're so hung up on mango mussolini anyway, as this discussion started when I claimed that the right lied way more than the left. The president wasn't responsible for all the lies the GOP has told for the past 50 years, although he sure does have more than his fair share.
Note that this is the second statement he made, which he had to make after being called out by the media for seemingly supporting the neonazi protestors. Which, given his history at that point and subsequently, it's pretty obvious that the media was right and he was just back tracking due to bad publicity.
This is where the "fine people on both sides" quote originates from.
Snopes article on the matter.
Yeah, and it specifically ignores that the statement you posted was the second, clarifying statement days later. Snopes is going off what he said he meant, not actually what he said. Check the United the Right wiki page for the actual timeline.
Stop letting other people think for you.
...
The closest they have is the unattributed statement, again after the fact, trying to clarify what he said wasn't what he meant. Like they always do.
Thank god you can point to ONE SINGLE instance where Trump isn't actively supporting white nationalist christofascism.
Every last one of them who voted for trump has decided that bigotry (of multiple sorts) and steamrolling our constitution in the name of authoritarianism are somewhere between just what they wanted and not a dealbreaker.
What else do I need to know about them?
https://www.project2025.observer/
That people identify on the political right outside of US as well?
Heh, I'm sure they are much better people than US conservatives, but I'll quote myself from elsehwere.
Maybe you should re-read my original comment? Because unless you think that Lemmy is not a left wing echo chamber then I have no clue what you're arguing about here exactly.
Maybe I misread you. I think I'm being told not only that it is an echo chamber, but that I'm supposed to be bothered by it.
Meanwhile I haven't seen an argument for what we'd gain by having more conservatives here, or what's stopping those unicorn conservatives who aren't raging assholes from posting.
OK, have crawled up the context tree, and don't see where you think I've misunderstood your point. You think it's an echo chamber (I do not) and you think that's bad (I do not) and apparently I'm supposed to feel a little sheepish about not wanting shitty people with shitty behavior here at Lemmy. (I do not.)
I say it's fine because if there's one thing I've learned repeatedly since about 2017, it's that the single most effective thing I can do to reduce toxicity in my life is to reduce my interactions with conservative family members, coworkers, 'friends', and social media accounts.
It's remarkably effective. I interact with no conservative or known trump voter more than work or family obligations require. Haven't for years. Best mental health step I've taken in my adult life.
Not my fault they have all forgotten that "loudest asshole in the room" isn't a personality.
Very much so. And it seems to be getting even worse lately. I mostly post socialist and third party stuff, but if I dare say I don't like a democrat or something, I get automatic "YOU'RE ACTUALLY A TRUMPER!! MAGA-NAZI!!!"
Bans and hateful DM's. All because I don't like the 2-party system. lol
Agreed on all counts.
The real mystery to me is what value the echo-chamber residents get out of it. Why would someone join a group of people they already agree with, just to be told that their opinions are correct, and to shout down any interloper who contradict them? How is that not a boring waste of time? Is it that most people are insecure in their views and need validation, perhaps? It's a phenomenon I still don't understand.
People often accuse me of being a troll because I tend to voice views that are unpopular on this platform. Personally, I just don’t see any point in talking about things we all already agree on. I’d much rather try to change the views of those I disagree with - or have them try to change mine.
This exactly where I am on all counts. Stick with it!
I find I don't agree with a lot of people, though there is at least a higher chance that someone, especially from my instance, will share my values and at least be willing to hear dissenting opinions without going right to insincere strawmaning.
To be clear, you join the echo chamber because you won't be judged there and also because you want to dissent from its party line?
Yes, it's a matter of gradation. It's not an echo chamber for me because so many of you have different opinions, but generally we all care about what is true and the future of life on this planet.
So it's easier to have discussions around the parts we disagree over.
But (to stay true to the spirit of debate I just defended) is this not itself a straw man? Do you think, say, religious conservatives would say that they don't "care about what is true and the future of life on this planet"?
Good question, and they might. In which case it would be easier to have a discussion with them.
However, I think much of the time they cleave to a more Kantian morality, where acting correctly / virtuously in accordance with an identifiable authority. They may also believe that the future of life on this planet is trivial when compared to quality of life on some metaphysical plane.
I have this discussion with my neighbour constantly who is nice, but she keeps saying I've "got to have faith" and that "they have a plan to fix all this when the time is right" all while real people are suffering and dying, and their suffering is indelible — it can never be made to have not happened — and they will never be coming back.
It's really hard to have a real discussion about reality with someone like that.
Fair enough about
literal religious nutspeople of firmly held religious convictions. This side of the pond there are very few of those, fortunately. My basic point is that plenty of people who vote "wrong" (Trump, for example) would actually agree with you on most of your vision of the good society. The questions are mainly over how to get there. This IMO is the tragedy of democratic politics today, and specifically the USA. An almost absolute breakdown in communication.Issues that would be solved by time/gaining more users
Issues independent of user count
Issues that get worse with more users (aka, the potentially deal-breaking issues)
https://lemmy.world/post/25308391
That's honestly not very helpful.
There are Lemmy-reasons for why that's a problem, but in any other context, the biggest is the best. And even in regards to lemmy, bigger instances have a higher chance to remain, to be decently moderated and to be decently stable. Before joining Lemmy.world, I was on Feddit.de, and we all know how that ended. And even before they vanished without a warning or an explanation, Feddit.de servers were always outdated, slow and unreliable, and moderation was arbitrary at best and non-existent at worst.
Lemmy.world is stable and works just as expected.
That's a somewhat decent reasoning, though not immediately understandable as a new user. And not relevant anymore because Lemm.ee will shutdown within a week or so from now.
Thanks, I'm adult enough to know whether I'm offended by the word "shit".
None of that really matters thanks to federation.
Like Lemm.ee, apart from the fact that it still exists
That's some relevant reasoning.
See also:
Sopuli.xyz isn't any easier than discuss.tchnics.de, and jet discuss.tchnics.de was excluded for the name only.
While down in the comments it says
Which is a really hard reason to avoid that instance, much more so than "has a difficult name". That's got much more practical implications.
But what's left regardless is: Even that link that is supposed to make instance selection easier isn't exactly easy to understand for a newcomer.
Relevant XKCD:
Newcomers are supposed to just read
" Lemmy has 47k monthly active users
Feel free if you have any questions "
The rest was up for debate, feel free to copy paste your comment in that thread so that other people can see it as well
As everyone has pointed out, people and content. Its good in some ways since not every post is drowned out with one thousand replies nobody will ever see, but at the same time, you're not getting much of anything at all sometimes. Not even very niche ones either. Even groups that represent entire states has limited info or replies still. If it can grow to that size and see some more unique and local content more I think even that would be a much better place for it to be.
Yeah this is my issue with it. I can find all the arts, Linux, and political stuff just fine. Sports, music, and places communities are seriously lacking. They exist, but are a shell of what you'd hope they'd be. Engagement is so low, it's not worth bothering. The sports and music communities being so small and sparse is a real bummer.
This is more to do with most Lemmy users being shut-in nerds not inclined to sports tbh.
Totally this. The amount of shut-in nerds on here, with strange obsessive habits of stalking people who disagree with them, is wild.
I've seen people mention wanting to talk more sports on here, and some of the hate and downvotes those posts get is insane.
To be frank, in many cases communities were simply picked up by the wrong people who proceeded to not actively feed it with content. So they simply die.
Yeah the North Carolina community has 383 subscribers and the last post was 9 days ago.
Surprisingly better than I would have expected for a community about a state.
The lack of continuous and backlogged content. For some this is a benefit because it gives them a reason to stop scrolling, but for others who come here to look for answers, find entertainment, or anonymously voice their opinions, this can be something of a downside.
Of course this platform is as anonymous as you make it, but I've seen some people say they refrain from commenting more often because they don't want to be known as a regular, instead wanting to "blend in to the crowd" as one would on more populous sites like Reddit or Twitter.
The same issue Bluesky and other app-killer platforms have/had at the start: momentum. Momentum explains everything else. If you leave out the vapid content on Reddit, it's still the premier place for asking questions and getting them answered by enthusiastic amateurs or actual experts in the field. The moment Lemmy gets the same quality tech support and DIY responses, it will have its place. Or, like with Bluesky, Reddit needs to become as alienating and disgusting as X became after the Elon takeover.
That's the beauty about Lemmy, it's not too reliant on momentum as it doesn't need graphs to go up at all times. The fediverse will always be a refuge when other platforms crumble. We'll just have to be patient and make sure the platform and the communities are as good as they can be at that point in time.
This is how I see it too. Freedom from the toxic ad-supported business model is a slow-burning superpower.
Until the people hosting the servers need money to run them, usually the problem when these kinds of idealistic websites grow
Reddit is useless for questions. If you're a subject-matter expert in something, find the subreddit for it and prepare to be horrified.
i usually search for what has been asked and answered, asking questions now in many subs, is only inviting trouble from gatekeepers, know it alls , and lastly astroturfing.
Niche communities. Also, attempts at niche communities getting dogpiled by everyone else (no, “this administration” really doesn’t have anything to do with the pedestrianisation of Norwich city centre.)
User volume and diversity is probably the main thing right now.
We just need more people posing shit, the fact that one or two users can dominate my feed if they choose to is not ideal. (Though often I appreciate the content anyway)
The diversity aspect is around how we have a lot of people in a small handful of demographics on here. It's getting better every day, but the thing that made Reddit great before they ruined it was everything you could think of had a community of people posing stuff about it, doesn't matter how niche.
One leads to the other though, more users naturally will mean increasingly diverse interests in our userbase.
It's about time Reddit fucked something else up anyway, it's been a few months
That's because so many on Lemmy would rather downvote than post anything.
I have trouble finding um what are they called here... Communities?... for the subjects I'm interested in. When I search, all I find is old posts or unrelated posts.
That's my biggest problem
FYI, your instance is shuttting down soon: https://lemm.ee/post/67603898
To find communities, [email protected] is usually a good place
Oh, brilliant. Thanks.
My first try at the Fediverse, I didn't know how important it is to instance-hop so when mine was down a lot more often than it was up, I temporarily went back to Reddit.
not enough of my niche interests from reddit moved here. also the sports communities are a little bit like ghost towns
It's pretty much a symptom of having a small userbase. The most niche thing that can maintain activity isn't very niche yet. I hope and expect it will improve over time, and in the meanwhile I'd like to see the attitude to Reddit repost bots to soften.
Welcome to my world! I try to post sports I watch on ![email protected] as much possible as I can. Same goes for ![email protected] and for ![email protected]. Lately is more politics and memes.
Pleasantly surprised to see a football community that is actually about the game where you kick a ball with your foot.
Beehaw being defederated from LW and SJW prevents around 30% of the people on the platform of seeing that community. Have you considered maybe posting to a community on an instance that is more accessible?
I didn't even know that they were defederated, I will thanks for the info!!
Happy to help, let me know once you settle for a community, I can help try to post there too!
I see ![email protected] this ![email protected] and this ![email protected] The first one looks active, we can post news there.
Thank you for the list!
For the first one, the main mod and poster there seems quite active on ![email protected] https://thelemmy.club/u/[email protected]
Their modlog https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/modlog?userId=157506
I'm not the biggest fan of feddit.org since https://feddit.org/post/12529640 and https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/44422088
https://lemmy.org/ seems to be a one-admin thing, they wanted to sell the domain name for 20k https://lemmy.org/post/90035
Seems like we might have to start a new community x)
Look I get what you trying to say, but we need to pick one, and there are not a lot of communities to do that(without making a new one). check this one ![email protected] but I believe the first one was ok.
It's just a community in the end, we should leave politics aside on this IMO.
Yeah same, the only solution is for you yourself to post in those niche communities more often, making them more active and thus more attractive for other users.
Smaller user base. It is both good and bad but the community for my city is dead (probably there were only like 8 of us on here).
Am old enough to know from experience that the early people on any platform are the computer geeks so expect the tech communities to thrive first - but as someone else said, music communities die, sports, arts, things that are pretty widely popular. Honestly happy with the slow and steady growth of the [email protected] so if it's an indicator, the general interest people are joining just not quickly but some must be sticking. I would guess at some point it will be perfect then too big but who knows?
Personally I also miss the nonsexual nudes threads like nakedprogress and normalnudes. Again that's a lack of users issue, you need a lot of people willing to post, to have even a few willing to post nude.
I was a very early reddit user and this just feels like Reddit twenty years ago
Make sure to sort your all feed by hot instead of active.
I'll try that, thanks!
Piefed solves that issue: https://piefed.zip/post/100161
All comments from 5 crossposts in a single view
A few options
I instantly disliked that when I joined Lemmy. This could totally be solved in the frontend by storing hashes of pictures I've seen before.
Block the person or the community.
I had this problem with US politics, same most multiple times, blocking communities did work for me.
I do want to see the content and community, just once though. I don't even mean the same story being posted multiple times, but I think I see the exact same post multiple times.
Some of the lemmy front ends have an option to hide posts you've already seen. I know connect does.
It’s too difficult to block huge swaths of things you’re not interested in. Like sports, or memes, or music. You block one community and 99 more about the same subject appear in your feed.
Adding some sort of Usenet-style organization or sublemmy tagging might help.
You could just use the Subscribe feed, no?
Yeah, I spent a little time cultivating the communities that I subscribed to when I first got here, and now the Subscribe feed is what I use 95% of the time.
Same here! And on a slow day when I finally managed to get through the whole Subscribed feed, there's still the All feed to tackle. I really like that system.
Piefed has a built-in keyword filter
A few options
Voyager just started supporting it today: https://lemmy.world/post/31839818
We need more users, to do that we need more advertising.
I was waiting to leave reddit for like a year before i found out about lemmy.
There's no way the twitter clone Bluesky should have absorbed the fleeing reddit users instead of this space that functions just like reddit.
I know that Reddit doesn't outright ban Lemmy talk, but on my reddit profile, I updated it with my Lemmy username link. I got banned from reddit a couple of hours later. No reason given. And I hadn't made any recent posts. Ban reason was "violating rules." lol
I had accounts banned for no reason after recommending lemmy to people, or makikg a username with lemmy in it.
Pretty sure they have a filter setup that automatically bans you.
Trying to be a Reddit clone.
Reddit was shit to begin with. It was a dumbed down forum site for people who found sites like Plastic or Kuro5hin too intimidating or complicated(!).
Slashdot-style upvoting would instantly solve a lot of "Reddit"-type problems, because instead of just good/bad, or like/dislike, the reason for the vote is noted, such as "insightful", "funny", etc., and you can then filter and sort comments much easier. Just filtering out "funny" comments saved soooooooo much time.
Another thing: Why don't creators of threads have the option to admin their own threads? It's their thread! It wouldn't be appropriate for discussion threads (for obvious reasons), but for interpersonal posts and questions, it makes perfect sense for the creator to be able to have control over what appears in the thread to keep it on topic and the trolls at bay. It's pretty rare to see a post where someone asks a question that doesn't quickly devolve into an offtopic mess, and the creator is usually attacked for trying to bring it back on topic. This has made Reddit useless for question-answering (and besides, the most upvoted answer is almost always wrong.)
Is the purpose of these forums to enable authentic conversation, or just to farm content regardless of quality (to be sold to AI companies, presumably)?
This would probably quickly devolve into OP removing any comments they disagree with
How do you determine if a threads an interpersonal question and post as opposed to a general topic-related post?
Lemmy devs - they are a curse and a blessing. A blessing that they worked on lemmy before reddit exodus. A curse as it's hard to contribute to the codebase and related components.
At least we have mbin and piefed to federate with.
Also in the 2 years since, the culture has shifted. There is less: "This is a new place. let's make it enjoyable for everyone" and more "I am right, everyone is wrong, and I will ruin your day", but that could be just my perception and not enough blocking.
Not enough people.
People here are way bigger smug assholes than even Reddit.
Sense of invulnerability and mod neglegence just because Lemmy is defederated. People naively think that makes it invulnerable to similar issues as Reddit (like toxicity/hivemind/bad modding.)
Back in 2023 I joined Lemmy because Reddit got rid of 3rd party apps. At first I was extremely impressed with the content here. While the community was small, meme channels were hilarious and had fantastic content. Same with the nsfw communities. However, now all the communities are filled with AI slop, political ragebait posting, onlyfans subsciption bait posts, and various other trash. So as far as I'm concerned Lemmy seems to be circling the drain. I can't in good faith tell anyone I know to switch to Lemmy. If a friend were to ask me "hey man, how's Lemmy?" My honest answer would be that it kinda fucking sucks.
Yep, and I am legit shocked about that. I still have a burner reddit account that I go to, and honestly, as much crap as reddit gets, I see way more assholes and ban-happy people here. On reddit someone gets mad at you or your opinion, and they just block you.
Here, a lot of posters who dislike ya will refuse to block you. Instead they'll follow you and downpost every single post you make. I never had stalkers like that on Reddit.
Like you, I was an early fan. And even tried to talk my gf into getting on Lemmy. The other day, she finally decided to, and I talked her out of it and told her to just stick with Reddit. lol
Duplicated fragmentation
Piefed solves that issue: https://piefed.zip/post/100161
All comments from 5 crossposts in a single view
A few options
Some Communities are still controlled by people with absurd egos and overconfidence. Most of them hate people too, which is fun for a community manager.
I think it mirrors real life though, the type of people who want to be leaders tend to be assholes, and the ones who would be good at leading won't volunteer to do it.
for me, no option to follow posts / comments, mostly to see new comments / replies and create proper aggregation of responses, any opinion dynamics and so on — this makes everything very temporary / short lived
Piefed allows to follow posts or comments.
https://piefed.zip/ is managed by the lemmy.zip team
Lemmy was architected by people whose philosophical intentions are out of alignment with the software they cloned.
That system was designed to invite as many idiots as possible, to bait as much engagement as possible, with virtually no controls on quality or intelligence.
Well congratulations Lemmy, you've made the next Reddit. There's no reason to be here, it's just a pile of morons for the most part.
one of us... one of us... one of us
No and you can see from my comment history that once .ee shuts down I'm gone. This place is just idiotville and I don't consider myself one of you.
don't let the door hit you on the way out
The default home feed: out of the box, it puts too much shit in the face of newcomers.
Once filtered out, it's great but one must first learn to filter the noise out which, I'm pretty sure, is dissuasive to a lot of non-geek users like myself.
PieFed's onboarding solves this
The people on Lemmy are mostly weird obsessive leftists who have little interest in talking about anything else and disagree with each other for having nearly identical views in the grand scheme of things. I still like Lemmy but it can get tiring talking about anything especially if you mention something that people have decided is evil like AI.
lack of communities, not found on lemmy, but is active on reddit. even some mirrors are rarely have new posts. more pros than cons though.
Communities are so easy to make on Reddit, I’ve looked into making one on Lemmy but I have no idea how to do it, it’s so much less accessible
It's easier to make a community here than on reddit, not to mention here its easier to moderate.
I think this page might help, but remember some instances might restrict community creation, meaning that you have to speak with admin. https://support.lemmy.world/quickstart/#creating-communities
that is true, because reddit currently makes it very hard to even moderate a sub reddit, they ban new ones very easily, if not immediately. the only problem is lemmy doesnt have the traffic that reddit has for a specific niche.
Mods acting capriciously and according to how mad they feel - banning you across multiple communities at once because you hurt their feelings - honestly this is Mickey Mouse as hell, but we are ruled by these people. *typo
Number of users. Takes a lot of users to keep all the small niche communities alive.
Political skew. You don't benefit from being in an echo chamber. It will also drive away people you don't agree with politically but do enjoy the same niche hobbies. Not sure about you but I'm much more interested in my hobbies than politics.
The fact instances can be closed on users. I’m in EE I’m fairly new and now my instances will be closed, it’s pretty insane my content and account can be unilaterally destroyed by someone entirely out of my control
The smallness isn’t too bad if you hide read posts, hide posts you don’t care about and subscribe to a lot of different things but things showing up in my feed for days if I don’t hide them is obnoxious to me
The tankies are far and away the largest problem. It's the number one reason why lemmy hasn't grown. Even when I signed up years ago from the reddit exodus every post I saw was heavily cautioned with "it's filled with tankies". And now every mention of it is being scrubbed for that reason. The second problem is the smaller size but see reason 1 for that.
Third problem is the sign up process being so excruciating. I understand it's to prevent bots but for every 2 bots it's preventing it's probably also preventing 1 actual user from signing up. I love this place despite the small size, because I can just sequester off all the tankies entirely on Connect, but if the creators don't realize they're actively standing in the way of growth by the actions they're taking and step away from all their moderation actions to focus on administration and development instead the outlook doesn't look too great.
Tankies are ableist and don’t ever let them forget it
I actually think Lemmy has grown. Although data on it hasn't been kept.
Piefed has a different dev team
The negatives of a social site combined with the negatives of an unpopular social site.
I may not understand how all this works but the very first page is mostly stuff that is 24 hours old or older. Maybe I am sorting it wrong or something but looking for the latest news is not easy. There should be a way from things that are older than 24 hours to fall off the front page. Also something like reddit enhancement suite would be nice.
You can switch to "Top of 6h", "Top of 12h", or "New comments"
I like the scaled sort option when I notice that.
The backend is weirdly sluggish, and it's probably because of the database code.
Communities: People complaining about niche communities, yet they don't make or promote them. Create a community, promote it, share it with other users, share content.
Politics: I came here to discuss about everything, but I only see new and dead communities, being overtaken and post daily politics.
This is what I have blocked so far, yet more communities are being made, and one article goes on and on and on and on......
https://piefed.ca/ has keyword filters. Those are pretty good to filter some of the political stuff.
the population is 99% children. Dumb, reactionary etc.
some of them are moderators
It's complicated. I've been here about a year and I'm still not sure how to use it properly.
From what I've heard, some instances can be really slow or break often
Not just Lemmy, but all Fediverse frontends: it's confusing and cumbersome. I've been here for 2 years and I still find that it's very much lacking in the "user experience" department. I have add-ons and scripts to 'patch' things that ought not to need patching. I don't know if it's possible for this to happen given the nature of Fedi, but it should be the case that a new user would find it works more or less the same as non-Fedi software and not have to juggle instances and type hideous and long URLs into the search bar. Instance names and stuff like that should be available to people who want to see them, but by default there's little reason to frighten new users with it. Make it be under-the-hood type stuff. One follow button that works for your home instance regardless of where you are on the Fediverse would be a nice start.
Also, privacy needs to be handled better. Again, not sure if that's possible because of the nature of Fedi, but Lemmy should make users feel more secure than reddit or Twitter, not less. Like, it's bizarre that reddit protects my privacy more than Lemmy does, given that reddit doesn't really protect my privacy much at all.
https://piefed.social/ hides the instance name of communities in the feed
Arguably, lemmy is going to be more private than reddit because your data are being queried, refined, quantified and categorised by reddit to be sold off to the highest bidder. If a different actor is just scraping activitypub they need to do all of that themselves.
More generally, I'm not sure if we should ever think about something posted online as being private. You can post form data that is secured to your bank or whatever but they are analysing all of that data on their side. Similarly the large email providers are aware of the contents of all your emails.
I get your point that reddit nominally has more privacy. I only said "arguably" because I think privacy is an illusion in both cases (which, admittedly, is a bit of an orthogonal take). If there isn't true privacy anywhere then there is the additional downside of reddit data being actively marketed/presented to 3rd parties.
Any talk of religion in a non-negative way and the pitchforks come out.
The irrationality and hyper emotional state of a lot of commenters. Not saying there isn’t due cause these days* but people GET. A. GRIP. and control yourself. You aren’t helping others or yourself with that behavior. It’s super immature.
*I’m not talking about being angry. I’m talking about how do I go on living emotional responses.
UI/intercations not enough different from reddit, so doesn't make it popular
Moderators .
The people that get their fee fees hurt from seeing opinions they disagree with, cf all the whinging abt tankies in the comments.
The downvote button. It's a hobby horse of mine. Slashdot got it right: if you're going to tell someone to shut up, there should be a small price to pay.
PS: to the inevitable downvoters. Let's be clear that you are not just saying "I disagree". You are helping to hide my comment; you're literally telling me to shut up. Would you do that in person, without so much as lifting a finger to justify yourself ? Of course you wouldn't. In person you would have manners. This is the problem I have with the downvote button. It incites people to behave like uncivilized infants.
But downvoting doesn't mean that. At all. Not even sure how you got that idea. It's also not hiding your comments, it's sorting them. And the reader get's to select the sort order (some which entirely ignore votes).
So yeah, you're not making any sense here.
It doesn't?
Really? At all?
Hmm. You mean you don't have perfect insight into other people's minds? Admittedly that's odd.
And you're coming across as the kind of sanctimonious interlocutor that I can't be bothered to answer properly.
Yeah. Sometimes I can't resist. Sorry.
I'm getting downvotes because people don't like being told they're behaving obnoxiously. That's all. I didn't downvote you or anyone else. I respect all of your opinions.
Yes yes, I take the point about the sorting-algo choices and karma absence and so on. I acknowledged it in another comment.
My fundamental point (which you are ignoring) concerns the motivations and incentives for downvoting. My contention is that downvoting thoughtful and well-expressed opinions is always (always) toxic and unhealthy. Others don't see it that way. So be it.
Not trying to start anything, I’d just like to point out that there seems to be a disturbingly large group (and growing) that wouldn’t have any problem telling you to shut up to your face. It seems that rude, obnoxious, selfish behavior has become more and more prevalent, and appears to be getting normalized.
That's interesting. But I don't know how you can be sure of that. My own theory (not exactly original) is that text communication - without voices, without faces - encourages people to be worse versions of themselves. When there's ambiguity, the temptation for many is to see bad faith. It takes effort and self-discipline to overcome that, and most (or many) people just don't have that.
It can be both. Some need to be told to shut up.
Since karma isn’t tracked, I don’t think it’s a real big deal having a negative score comment. But since there are people who care anyways I think the downvote does exist, it can suppress people posting certain points of view lest you anger the tankie triad
Technically it is. All votes are tracked and karma is just all the votes you got, tallied up.
It's just that, by default, lemmy doesn't sum them up and display them. But the information is there and could be shown with 3rd party apps.
Some third party apps do track Lemmy downvotes though. And I've seen plenty of obnoxious posters bring up someones "downvote count" in conversation--just so they can try to win their argument.
I agree this is an important counter-argument. My other points stand.
On the contrary, in real life I remove myself from conversations where people have nothing worthwhile to say every day. Half my job is judging when that's the case so I can prioritize the interactions where people are ready to be cogent and concise.
This seems to be a reply to another comment.
It's a reply to your comment about downotes. The point of votes is to rank threads, and the point of ranking threads is to promote cogent comments and avoid irrelevance, misinformation, and malice. I do this in real life and I do it here.
And I'd say this is your convenient retrofitting of an optimistic rational theory onto what is in fact almost always much simpler and more brutish: "I had a negative response to this because it contradicts my beliefs and gave me cognitive dissonance", regardless of its objective merits. You must know this. Anyway, we'll agree to disagree.