How do you feel about the current state of Lemmy?
I come on here every so often to see what's going on, and every time I leave disappointed. This is my top 3 grievances at the moment:
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This place feels dead. It's usually quite, but lately it really feels like a ghost town. Idk what the actual stats say, but I feel like the amount of comments, posts, and variety seem to have gone down quite a bit over the past few months.
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The amount of genuinely hateful content has gone up. I feel like Lemmy as a whole used to have better moderation even just last year compared to now. Every time I get on here, I'm seeing more and more gross content that's either racist or bigoted or just downright gross. This content doesn't get taken down even when reported. As horrid as Reddit's moderation is, it's still not this bad.
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Outside of the tech communities, there's no information hygiene anywhere in sight. The news subs publish the most questionable of sources, sometimes outright misinformation... and nobody cares? People don't criticize weak sources or call out false claims or even value accuracy. I've seen multiple instances of users saying something false and getting upvoted for it and a person correcting them getting downvoted for it. Like, what's even happening?
I don't know, I feel like when I joined a couple of years ago Lemmy was so much better. It felt more active, the community felt more down to earth, kind, and friendly, and the content was higher in quality. There was much optimism surrounding the Fediverse that's not there anymore. Now it feels like a more left wing version of Voat than a genuine Reddit alternative. Am I the only one feeling this way or do other people feel the same?
That's not how I experience it. A few key blocks and I'm not seeing a bunch of assholery. Content isn't endless, but there's almost always something to talk about.
I suspect it depends a great deal on subs, interests, and sort order.
OP has commented 800+ times though, which, is modders of magnitude more than 99% of people in the world.
Maybe there was a less spiky way of making your point?
I'm absolutely guilty of it too so this as much for me as you but if we want more folks to engage, maybe we ought to try to be kinder to those who actually do.
My account is nearly 3 years old. I have 1.2k comments, 15 posts, and I created two communities. I only come on this place like twice a week, and I always try to leave something. But that's kind of the issue, it feels like most of the active users are only active for the seek of keeping this platform on life support.
The place has a much smaller population, of which an even tinier amount is active. So there is much less content published. One solution is to participate more but too few people seem willing to do it. An other solution would be to make the space more attractive to more users but, like you noticed...
I've been saying it since I first joined the Fediverse: default experience is... trash, unless you're looking for some echo chamber for your pre-existing biases that is. Some may enjoy that experience, I certainly did not, and most people won't either.
Personally, I have had a real nice and pleasant experience browsing Piefed because I learned to use those tools: 1) limiting my home page to 'Subscribed' only (filtering out all political/memes/low effort content, because 2) I carefully select the communities I'm subscribed to, 3) Piefed making it so simple to filter out keywords and annoying users alike, I never hesitate to use that and, no, I don't care to block them even if we're already short on users: my time is too precious to waste it with serial haters and complainers, or self-proclaimed white knights for such or such 'noble cause'.
I've never seen much of any kind of (an information) hygiene, anywhere online. Certainly not on Reddit... save on very few selected subs... exactly like I can see here.
But once again, one can easily filter the worst offenders in a matter of seconds. Then, it's up to anyone to stick to it: once I blocked them, I certainly don't 'check from time to time' to see if they're getting any better. I let them play in their shit pool to their heart's content, throwing more of it at one another: it doesn't concern me anymore. And for that I must say I quite like the filtering tools piefed gives us.
It depends where you look at. When I joined (two or three years ago? I was on Lemmy, before switching to Piefed) the amount of sheer hate that was expressed and that I witnessed was... disturbing, to say the least. I don't think it has become worse but I could not tell since I learned to filter the sources out.
I wish for the devs to more seriously consider the out of the box experience for a new user and, maybe, consider that not all new users will share their political/personal/philosophical values or biases. I certainly don't agree with many of the ideas I can see expressed around here, but I'm also old enough to be fine with people having different opinions, and patient enough to see if I can make the tool work more like I want it to and reduce what I consider noise.
edit: typos.
Genuine question: is there a moderation or federation difference between Lemmy and PieFed? Because I don’t feel like Lemmy is dead or racist. Idk maybe I just blocked a bunch of communities and forgot. I think it probably because discuss.online is doing it right.
Yes there is. Check this out - https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
It's up to the instance admins to make use of those but I certainly have on https://piefed.social/. I have no qualms about banning negative, bad-faith or douchy losers to save people from blocking them. And if a community is bad enough, I'll ban the whole community.
Also by deciding what to include in the starter-packs used during onboarding the admin can encourage people to join good communities while leaving toxic ones harder to find.
Thousands of disinfo websites are blocked out of the box and I've manually added warnings onto dozens more that are frequently posted on Lemmy.
There's more, way more. But you get the idea.
This is excellent. I've never understood the attitude that people should tolerate arseholes, because of what, free speech? Nah, bugger off with that silliness. I've moderated some places over the years and I've been told that I ban people too easily, but I've also been told how nice and wholesome the places were. Its pretty clear to me that having a low tolerance to arseholes is positive for the community.
Because people are different and enjoy different things.
I like to ride my bike. Lots of people think I'm an asshole for doing that. I don't drive around in a giant 3 row SUV, I think people who do that are assholes.
Who is is positive/negative in this dispute? Nobody, it's just two opposing viewpoints that are mutually hostile.
Lots of people will think your an asshole for doing or thinking or talking differently than they do. Personally I find people who are 'nice and wholesome' to be really offputting and downright creepy, and largely a facade in my life experience, and if you look beyond the facade a lot of 'wholesome' people are anything but.
If I were a moderator and saw someone call you an asshole for riding bikes, I'd ban that person. They can argue that cars are better, bicycling is stupid but if they attack you personally, they are getting a ban.
Same goes for you, if you call someone an asshole for driving a car, I don't need that in my space either. You can tell them why you think its not good to drive that car, but just calling them an asshole for driving a car is not good.
However, if they are being an asshole about it and you call them an asshole. Thats fine.
this is an interesting point, I think my /all was much better before cm0002 made an account on my instance an pulled in a lot of marginal communities
Will I get a warning if I mention the Hannibal Directive?
discuss.online is doing it right. There is a significant overlap between discuss.online and lemmy.world's admin teams, and I generally think they handle it about as well as could be expected of a general-purpose instance of their scale.
As for piefed, I think the primary things that help users filter their experience are the additional blocks that are at their disposal; blocking communities with a word in their name, blocking posts that match keywords, blocking posts that point to certain domains, etc. However, it can only help if a user actually goes through the effort of setting them up.
I could not tell. For me Piefed is just an entry point to the Fediverse, the same Fediverse with the same users we’re all part of. What I can say is that, back then at least, Piefed seemed more intuitive to use the way I wanted to.
I don’t either. Like I said, I filter out the noise and crap and have a nice experience. The sad thing being that I first had to learn to filter that noise out which, based on what I can hear, does turn off quite a few new users.
My issue is not just with racists or the right, or the fascists (if that was what you meant to say). I consider the most excited leftists around here at least as toxic (and stupid), and as… fascists, btw. No matter how hard some are trying to convince us of the contrary, fascism was never limited to right/racism. And fascism should always be opposed, no matter the flag its waving.
It's fine. There's enough activity to keep me in content (as much as I need content), and I don't see the hate as much as you report.
The only thing wrong with it from my perspective is that Trump and American politics is poisoning it, but they're poisoning the entire world so...
I've actually been having a pretty good time lately. I like that the communities are smaller and more personal (especially compared to coming from reddit where some of the communities I was in were massive).
Depends where you're looking. It's not as active as Reddit for sure, but it also has far fewer non-humans too which seems to be the majority of Reddit these days - either repost bots or even comment bots so the activity isnt real, it's a mere simulation. I don't fear that here. PugJesus is real. 😃
I see this thread has many people saying that they don't see a problem and it must be because of the local and personal blocklists.
I see comments saying it's because they are using Lemmy or Piefed.
I've blocked nothing. I scroll through /c/all every day and I don't feel like there is a hate or dodgy content problem.
Likewise. I think people are forgetting what it was like on reddit. Shits kind of popping here now and running into the odd tankie or chudd is nothing like having them in a full brigade or admin team like reddit
I feel like the voting culture of Lemmy is not conductive to good conversation or anything more than blind agreement. It's certainly helped by the fact that Lemmy's algorithm is more willing to show newer posts and comments (as opposed to merely popular ones), but people on Lemmy seem to be very willing to downvote content that they don't agree with, or downvote news that they don't like (regardless of the informative quality of said news), or just downvote anything that may contradict their pre-existing notions of how stuff works. It's more hostile than Reddit, and it seems like everyone, especially in the political communities, is wanting to start an argument here, sometimes over the dumbest things. Look in your average Reddit comment thread, and you see pages of jokes, memes, people sharing stories, and just generally having a good time. Look in your average Lemmy comment thread, and you see two people arguing over a dumb political point.
I don’t like reading a lot of the defeatist, angry, antisocial type comments on here, but I feel like if I start blocking that stuff (like a lot of the political comms, but it’s also everywhere…), it’s going to feel too quiet😭
Those people most reply to ragebait. If you can avoid the bait you will not see a lot of it.
they also predominately come from the extremist instances, so you can just block those instances. for ever .world user who is like that, there seem to be dozens of .ml users who are like that, for example.
I think all the negative things you said are true of the other place as well, you just can’t see it.
Lemmy communities (at least by default), don’t rely on votes but on recency and activity.
It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.
As some others of said, I block communities that are not for me.
It's like Reddit a long, long time ago before it started going to absolute shit.
So I'm liking it.
Personally, I'm experiencing the opposite as far as activity. I joined about 1.5 years ago and there's definitely been a noticable increase in activity in that time. I'm seeing more upvotes and comments than when I joined.
I feel like your comment of (2) contradicts (3) to some degree. I agree the wider culture of lemmy is progressive/left, but that at least indirectly contradicts the prominence of racist content that you claim exists.
There are too many unhinged nut jobs who are only here to cause drama and stir controversy, and way too much emphasis on their pet issues. They suck and if you get in their cross hairs they will harass you for days due to their intensive sense of personal victimhood and moral righteousness.
I want more reasonable laid back people with interesting things to say who are decent to each other. But it doesn't seem like the numbers of those folks are growing, more just a consistent number who probably have massive block lists or have de-federated from the problematic/extremist instances.
There is also a new influx of really really dumb people who spam stupid content, who on the surface seem to be teenagers? I don't know what is up with that. I have blocked a bunch of accounts that are doing this, who ask this community and others like it, really dumb stuff like 'why doesn't my poop smell?' 6x a day.
I basically feel the same. Not sure if it's just a side effect of how scary things are in the world right now, but I feel like the amount of escapist content has dropped a lot lately. By escapist I mean enjoyable things that aren't focused on the real issues of the day. We all need that kind of thing to stay sane, and it's in shorter and shorter supply on here I find.
The amount of politics leaking into every sub is also increasing rapidly it feels like. I block accounts that only ever post doom scroll content, but some of the bigger meme/entertainment posters have also started to mix in more politics and doom scroll lately.
I'd love to see more regular people on here with diverse interests, but I imagine it's not going to increase due to the prevailing types of posts these days. I've honestly considered stepping away from here myself, but I don't have another place in mind to go to yet.
It's an affect of people's warped social media brains that think nobody else can be different than them or think different than them. Who read everything through a distorted lens due to their anger issues.
I mean, I can't even say 'The Jewish population of the USA is 7.5 million'. Without random people telling me that is anti-semantic, and others saying it's pro-genocide, and both groups reporting the comment until it gets removed. That's how messed up these folks are, that they can't even allow statements of basic facts.
Or they will say it's 'fake' or 'conspiracy' information... lol
The bad news is this predates social media. The even worse news is social media makes it louder.
Eh, in my 20s in the 2000s it was surprisingly chill in my life experience. People didn't really care about politics or your skin color or any of the shit they freak out about today. But it was brief and it came roaring back in the mid 2010s.
The oligarchs freaked the fuck out after OWS and ruined everything with an insane brainwashing campaign.
I think it's a reaction to feelings of powerlessness and frustration at the world. Social media is an easy way to get that energy out, even if it's a very toxic way of doing it.
Major issues and inequality aren't new, but our ability to get a 24/7 fire hose of info about it is. I don't think anyone's figured out how to healthily handle it yet. Consuming it all the time destroys our mental, but hiding under a rock isn't great either I feel. I've been struggling to find that balance more and more these days.
the irony is you can 24/7 fill your life with stuff that isn't that, but people choose to do so.
Just like you can be informed with a quick google query, but people totally ignore that option and embrace ignorance.
I think you're right, but it's also true that it's much easier to find the bad stuff. News in general reports bad news much much more frequently than good news, even though good news is happening too.
There's a newsletter I subscribe to called Fix the News that only reports good news, and it's kind of startling how major some of the stuff on there is each edition, things I don't hear about at all outside of it.
So I think you're right that people should try and seek out better stuff, but also I have a lot of empathy for not doing so because the machine wants us to be sad and hopeless, and you really have to try to avoid that trap.
The hate is definitely spreading, and nuance is going out the window.
Threads about some subjects legit scare me, with the rabid hate and demand for ideological purity that oozes out of the comment section.
I left [email protected], [email protected] & [email protected] and noticed an instant improvement! YMMV
Yep, avoiding politics-focused communities helps a lot.
Personally, I haven't noticed a decrease in content, but I have noticed a significant dropoff in quality of content, and in it's place, has mostly grown toxicity. None of the racism, or anything that extreme (although, from what I've seen, my instance moderators have been doing a good job,) but so much of the content is insults, unhelpful snark, doomerism, elitism, and just general bad-faith arguments. It feels like all those who wantted to be helpful or supportive have given up or left, meaning no high-quality content and no meaningful discourse.
That said, it also feels like a wider cultural shift thats happened in the last year or so. Online culture as a whole feels more toxic, with fewer places to go for positivity or constructivity, and far more hate and abuse.
I feel this. I've been feeling like I'm getting less and less enjoyment out of my time here. It's hard to even think of another place to go though. Like you said every platform is a mess these days in one way or another it seems like.
It feels like activity has dropped off a bit since the last Reddit exodus. And I worry that this platform is never going to see the kind of critical mass I'd want out of it, to be big enough that I can use it to discuss more niche topics and fandoms than what's currently on offer here. I see communities get made and die off on the regular from people who want to use this platform they way they used Reddit but quickly realize they can't.
I'm still here because I believe in the ideals of a federated platform, but I just don't know what the future holds at this rate.
I don't really see the widespread racism you claim exists here, with Lemmy being one of the least racist Western online spaces I've ever been in...
And idk what you mean by dead. Compared to what? I feel like I see the same usernames pop up often, because we have a community of regulars. I don't think I need it to be more "active", and it certainly beats the more bot-infested "larger" online communities.
Also, if you really dislike the "leftist" population/takes on Lemmy, why don't you just go back to Reddit? Like, in earnest, they have a lot of uhh "right wing" stances and all big subreddits support the American empire and silence anyone who disagrees. Just make a new account and resettle there, it'll be more to your liking!
Your last paragraph is probably what OP was writing about. You don't have to be right-wing to dislike Hezbollah, Hamas, the Ayatollahs, Chavez and Maduro, and the Castros. But you'll get shit on quite a lot here for that. "Centrists just enable fascism" is a common take.
I meant it. And I'm sure you have valid reasons to support/like your own corrupt and bloodthirsty leaders and policies before these folks, lol. If being a "centrist" means you support the status quo of Western dominance, you're just a shy "right winger". Regardless of these somewhat nebulous labels, countless innocents have died and continue to die to feed the American empire and the Western war machine, you simply can't be a good person and support the status quo.
Yes actually you do kinda have to be right wing to oppose any political project that resists western aggression, because that is literally the only thing those groups have in common.
Thank you. I thought I might be hallucinating.
From the communities ive interacted with, defs feels dead compared to other places. Does suck when scrolling through the news feed and getting caught up way too quickly.
But there seems to be a fair chunk of aussies on here thats kept me on here
I've been here every day for the last few years and it doesn't really feel that way.
I haven't really encountered any "hateful" content. There is however a lot of far left teenage dweebs who can be just relentless. Over time I've become more trigger-happy with the block button.
I suspect you may have encountered this on posts from some of the instances I have blocked. They're very well known and many instances have defederated from them. the news communities on lemmy.world don't seem terrible ?
All of that said ...
I don't particularly like the fediverse myself. I find I spend an equal amount of time on a redlib (reddit) instance. There's more content, it's more engaging, and news seems to drop there first.
As a tangentially related aside... switch over to piefed. The lemmy devs are supporting all three problems you've mentioned IMO.
I'd say it's sort of the opposite. When I first looked into the Fediverse, Lemmy.ml was the juggernaut sub. They were and sort of still are filled with tankies (literally stands for Marxist Leninist). Now there is more variety of instances, Piefed has better moderating tools and combines cross post comments which is why I used that, and user base is slowly growing over time as Reddit and everyone else continue to fuck up. Sure there is still a lot less content, but that's infinitely more preferable to liking a comment and then someone pointing out the comment was stolen from an 11 year old post by a bot.
Building critical mass is difficult because people created communities that have barely any activity.
The way you build a platform is to encourage less categorization until a specific topic needs to be split off.
It's not bad! But it requires a learning curve to actually find stuff vs having the algorithm find stuff for you.
But without active community posts and stuff, it does feel more slower paced. But the price of no corporations and ad free experience is hard to beat.
I'm surprised there aren't more links to substacks. I don't expect lemmy to be a news aggregator but to be more like a source of opinions instead.
Cant expect a reddit alternative without corporate interests involved.
Im seeing unique things with different perspectives here.
Maybe try looking at different communities?
I think this place starts to feel dead when atrocities are committed, then we get zillions of the same posts, rightfully so because these things should not be ignored, but then it seems like nothing else is really happening here.
I agree with you on the shitty sources. The ones that spread misinfo will spam a wall of text with links to 'sources' and trying to call them out becomes an overwhelming chore. Then the extremely toxic 'did you read the article??!?' when the source is just some shitty opinion blog. It's exhausting, which is why they do it.
My two main issues are that I don’t want to keep seeing the same post repeated again and again as I scroll, and I want to be able to find a topic and not have to wrestle with all the different communities around the same thing. I just search for a simple topic and often there’s 20 with the same name and I have to find the one that everyone’s using.
It is definitely less active than I want it to be. I use Lemmy once or twice a day, but sometimes the posts from the previous day are still the active ones.
Sounds like you should adjust your subscriptions?
So how often do you post and make the change you want to see?
Hmm.
Can you give an example of this "weak source or false claims" in the news here? I see the usual suspects when I look: Reuters, guardian, AP, BBC, Al Jazeera, etc.
I never browse all though, I only go to the 50 or so groups I belong to, and remember to sort by scaled once in a while.
I do believe there are more bots or at least propaganda accounts, or maybe people causing friction. Don't know if its state sponsored or just a sign of the times.
I use feeds, instead of just looking at "all":
God forbid you tell anyone you used to be in the police.
I've spent close to three years now blocking the worst users and communities, tweaking my mile-long list of content filters - and even after all that, this site is barely usable.
It's honestly staggering how much content gets voted to the front page that doesn't interest me at all. Even when something does catch my eye, I close the thread after 10 seconds of reading the comments. There's just no point in trying to have any honest discussion here.
I simply have no theory of mind for the kind of person who actually enjoys the "default Lemmy experience." Sometimes when I browse someone's profile, wondering whether to block them, I see that virtually every single one of their replies is in threads whose headlines contain terms that trigger my filters. It's bizarre. It's almost like some people enjoy being angry all day every day - or if not, at least feel obligated to be.
Tech communities make sense. That's where a lot of it started on other sites (Slashdot, Digg, Reddit) and the first user-base I'd expect to move. The rest will likely stay where they're "comfortable" until the water gets too hot
It is old enough to have niche communities but they are very rare. It is still dominated by memes, politics and the bad side of tech
Eh. It only feels dead if you let it.
I think it's in a great position and only needs more instances that respect freedom of speech.
Probably my biggest complaint is users saying there should be more censorship. You have the block button, use it.
Sad.
Feels dead.
Just like my will to live...
Might pick up ham radios as a hobby if I wasn't so scared and introverted to talk to old white dudes in America... yea that'd feel weird... most ham radio people are right wing libertarians... not my cup of tea... also not white... which might be weird when they start asking what my favorite sports team is or what my favorite music is... not American enough to answer those questions lmfao...
if this can help: you and I we've been chatting around here, and I'm a old white dude (just from France) ;)
BTW, I'm also an introvert too, the thing that helped the most live with it is to... accept it (aka, to stop wishing I was not an introvert) and be ok with feeling awkward when I'm with people.
I think the worst part would be "What do you do for a living"...
Um... sweats profusely I'm a financial consultant and a paralegal for a relative's bussiness? (not entirely false, my mom asks for a lot of help with her stuff)
Like what else am I supposed to say? I'm a loser who is dealing with depression, dropped out of college, unemployed, living with parents...
Might as well as just shoot myself the 'Murican style
(On the other hand tho... I could be very interesting and unique since I was born in a foreign country...)
Why are you looking for the approval of people you haven't even met yet?
All those "where are you from, what do you do for a living, what do you do for fun" type questions are just to establish a common ground. You don't have to take them so seriously.
And like, you're already going to share at least one common hobby of being into HAM at the very least. Ask questions, engage in conversation and dont be super introspective about whether your conversation was optimal.
Depends what you want.
Do you think you should be the person they want you to be? Then, yes, their opinion matters. If no, why give a crap about their opinion?
Many, many years ago, I quit my dream job.
It was the job I dreamed of doing since I was a teen, a job I was quite good at with reasonable successes, earning decent money with even some ‘prestige’ associated to it... but it was also a job that was quickly killing me, literally. It was not just grinding my soul to dust, it was destroying my body to the point that, one morning, I died (I was dead and would have stayed so had my spouse not been there). We decided I had to quit, to let go of the ‘dream’, the money and the perks associated with it. We've watched the vast majority of our 'friends' turn their back on us the moment I stopped being useful or valuable to them. Had it not been so sad to witness it would have been hilarious, they left en masse (it was more useful for my spouse and I to realize how poorly we had made friends so far, real precious lesson). We’ve also heard a lot of talks, most being mean spirited. So what? I don't give a crap what anyone can think: it's not them I'm married with ;)
I'm now much older and still much poorer than I once was. But I also live a much happier life. My spouse and I, we've been through all the hardship together and we're still holding fine after 25+ years together.
Take that for someone that was once dead : it’s probably not worth it. Your time on this planet is already very limited, it’s the most valuable gift you were ever given. Use all of it, don’t waste it.
If something is sour in your life, it’s probably worth fixing it, one way or the other. Even if it’s painful.
I'm in a similar boat re ham radio. It seems like a cool hobby, I'm into the idea of building and running radios. Even better if you add backpacking, DX-ing, "fox hunting" or other ham radio games. But the culture is a little off for my taste. People are generally polite and friendly enough on short contacts but you can hear some bad takes if you chat long enough. It would be cool to see younger, diverse, more left leaning new hams, it would get me more interested in going on air.
oooh another how is lemmy doing post
meh it's ok, look at the graphs the numbers are massively down but making a very slow recovery maybe
so there's about 40k active users, so it's quiet
There's so many variables to each persons threadiverse experience that its difficult to quantify another's experience. I don;t think there is an objective default experience. It depends on what instance your on, which also might dictate which software as the two main players don;t have feature parity, it then depends on how you use the available tools each software type has, how you sort your feeds, which communities you're subbed to, how willing you are to simply block and move on, what your own beliefs are and what sort of experience you expect.
You'll only think its a ghost town if you are someone who spends the majority of their time on social media. The flip side of that is that there's also a sizeable amount of people who might simply check in once or twice a day. To them, its not a ghost town at all.
You'll only think its full of hate if you're not prepared to be on an instance that curates the hate away and you combine that with liberal use of blocking tools when some gets through.
And there are lots of other wider societal issues going on too - Westernised countries (which includes the majority of users I see on here) are largely descending into right-wing, xtian-fuelled, uber-capitalism, bigoted hellscapes and lots of people are understandably scared and angry about that. Scared and angry people lash out. Doesn't excuse it a as behaviour but I don't think growing fear and anger is a threadiverse-specific issue at all.
The answer is that there is no one-sized fits all answer beyond finding the best fit for yourself in terms of instance/software/tools/feeds and posting/commenting on more of what you personally enjoy and maybe lessen the time you spend on here and social media generally. It doesn't have to be always on, just something you do alongside other things like reading a book, going for a walk etc.
Imagine social media as an upsidedown parabola (like an arc), where the x axis is time, and the y axis is quality.
The start of a new social media platform would be towards the bottom left. As they grow and add new features, their quality improves. Over time, however, they will 'peak' in quality. Then, they begin to introduce anti-consumer practices, such as API restrictions, ads, sponsored posts, etc. Their quality dwindles until either the platform shuts down or becomes a horrible echo chamber.
Using this analogy, Reddit right now would be in the latter half of the graph, as it has become an echo chamber filled with bots, ads, and API restrictions.
Lemmy currently is more like approaching the peak for the parabola. It's great for now.
Sure Lemmy is open-source, self-hostable, but it's potential downfall would be its userbase. It's starting to have the same issues as Reddit: Don't comply with every else's opinions, get downvoted to oblivion. Of course, downvotes don't mean much on here, but getting banned would.
In its own way, Lemmy is starting to become an echo chamber for tech/Linux enthusiasts, radicals, and those exiled from Reddit.
The issue I'm starting to get, which drove me off reddit, is the stalkers. People who go around stalking your posts not only to downvote, but to repeatedly reply and report and try and ban you because they believe you are their enemy, or took your comment on their comment as some sort of personal insult/attack.
Sure you can block, but the determined ones will have alts and just will take your block as further fuel to harass you.
God on reddit I had people do this crap to me for just talking about my cat, or playing ps5, or whatever they found offensive and they would just spend hours targeting me for the 'offense'. Or once when I cracked a joke about trendy IG travel destinations and one of the mods DM'd me about it and then banned me for not deleting the comment because they had just traveled to Santorini to take IG pics and i was a total horrible asshole for making fun of that trend.
I have only encountered number 3 but I don't really use this or any social media as a news source. For me its like hanging at a bar and maybe someone has something interesting and maybe then I might look into it.
Unsubscribe from every community and build your feed again
Yes, that's why I joined PieFed instead.
and how does that really help, it is the same content on piefed
This isn't the flex you think it is. In fact it makes no sense.
yeah i don't get the 'my instance is cooler than your instance' BS. But see it on every other thread, esp the PieFed is better people.
Same energy as the Linux nutjobs arguing over their distro being best.