Redditors brigading against Lemmy

AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.ml – 72 points –

I don't know if you've noticed this, but threads or comments about Lemmy or the Fediverse get downvoted a lot on Reddit and trolls who claim that it's "dogshit" and "not going anywhere" get systematically upvoted.

Some of those trolls get then exposed when you ask them what Lemmy instance they tried and one of them with whom I had a surreal exchange answered with something like "yeah ofc I used Lemmy, this is the instance: join-lemmy.org" 🤦‍♂️

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

This and the overwhelming number of comments being "against the mod protests" just prompts me to question whether there isn't some brigading being organized straight from the Reddit HQ.

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

The majority aren‘t bots. Most of them are legit no lifers to whom Reddit going down the drain would be a huge blow. I mean you work full time as a cashier for taco bell and you are not really happy with that situation. Some people go to school again, learn a skill… others spend all their time one Reddit stockpiling karma. Those are the people who really hate lemmy and anything that could remotely make Reddit worse, because they are heavily invested in the platform for the wrong reasons.

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

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

When the content creators leave and go to Lemmy/Kbin, eventually those content consumers will leave and go with them too. Will be a bonus for the Fediverse

We need to ask Louis Rossmann to join the fediverse. He's been super critical with Reddit on YouTube.

I'm sure he's already aware and will make an account if he wants to.

There's no point in shoving the Fediverse in someone's face.

I care and I’m here. I count as do all of us! Fuck ‘em!

Exactly. Let the milquetoast mouth-breathers stay behind. With sufficient brain-drain, Reddit will eventually look like Quora.

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

Maybe. It's not like there's a Lemmy app that's as good as Apollo.

Have you tried Jerboa for Lemmy? It is not Apollo but it is comfortable and ads free

Memmy is in TestFlight if you fancied being a tester.

Same with mlem. It’s a little ahead of memmy in development right now.

Beta full unfortunately at the moment it seems

Mlem has become really good since they updated the app two days ago.

They really need to fix some of their accessibility issues. Comment text cannot be resized which makes it impossible for me to use the app. Memmy respects the dynamic text sizing in iOS, so I’m using it for now. It’s not up to feature parity with Mlem but the developer is doing a great job with adding features.

Memmy also works natively on iPad. Mlem has just a zoomed iPhone version.

I miss Apollo everyday. I haven’t used it since the blackout in solidarity.

I'm already seeing an increase in trolling and spam across the Lemmy and Kbin instances. Hopefully the mods can handle the influx.

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

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

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

Amen, if Reddit ever died it would probably survive living rent free in Lemmy users’ heads.

Also, people have a natural tendency to form "teams." Even if they don't particularly like what Reddit's admins have been doing they may identify as part of "team Reddit" and so see other teams as the enemy.

Besides, the way to convert isn't by arguing. You do it by providing a good platform (not there yet), good content (not there yet) and good community (kinda there?).

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

Lmao, who cares what they think?

My biggest issue with Lemmy is lack of userbase... which is fixable by signing up for Lemmy.

Figured best case scenario other people make the switch, worst case I'll forget this service even exists.

Also does anyone know how to enable dark mode, or if there is a dark mode?

yeah that's what I'm struggling with too, like it'd be great if we could encourage people to try these, but at the same time I don't want to give them a bad first impression to turn them off forever if they can not stand it's still a baby project (understandable). I honestly don't think it's that hard to start using these fediverse products though, and I feel like the posts saying "lemmy will never take off", "kbin is too hard to use" only gave me barriers to start using it. And then when I did start, I was like oh this is great, everyone's talking, it's a close community

The biggest issue is how easily people are taken "off-site" when linking to another instance, leaving them essentially logged out and unable to subscribe or otherwise participate. Users should be presented an option to be redirected to the relative view within their instance or go external. With the "external" link in much smaller font below the preferred option. Kind of like how Steam or Discord has a pop-up asking if you "trust this site" whenever you leave their spaces.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  1. That certain community is beehaw.org by any chance? They also ask you to write pretty much an essay to join, and didn't accept mine.

Regarding #2, I think not defederating might be an easier sell if users had the ability to block instances. Right now it's just users and communities. Hate lemmygrad? You can block its communities one by one, but it's kind of a pain. So instances only have the option of a full block.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The thing is, there are pretty much two distinctly separate reddits, new and old. New reddit is flashy with live videos and more media than text, and old is very text based. And then if you are using an app like RIF, you don't even have chat. For me, old reddit is very much like browser lemmy and going from RIF to Jerboa was very seemless. It's almost the same thing. But if someone actually likes new reddit and their app(I saw a graph that like 80% of users use it) lemmy is not going to cut it.

But imo lemmy is in a great spot right now. It could definitely be better but it's growing a lot. I'm liking it at least.

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

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

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

Kind of. I'm glad that I'm not seeing quite so much of "they're all a bunch of tankies over there". I make sure to mention both Lemmy and Kbin when I'm mentioning alternatives as an attempt to head that one off at the pass a bit.

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

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

I keep seeing posts about how Lemmy isn't an alternative because of the main developer's political views. Like this one: https://teddit.net/r/APIcalypse/comments/140qymq/lemmy_is_not_a_viable_reddit_replacement/

What does it even matter? It's open-source.

Also, Lemmy is a great alternative, simply because regardless of the devs political views, literally anyone can fork it on GitHub, make Lemmy2, and link it up with OG Lemmy and Kbin.

damn i clicked that link expected that the main dev is like a fashist or something....turns out he is a communist yay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Little pockets of culture can exist in the cracks of society. Kudos to all involved. I'm not sure I can meaningfully contribute as of yet due to family/time constraints but I'm here to comment and upvote.

Is there a Lemmy c/bestof somewhere yet?

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

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

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

Thing is; I don't want the "arbitrary reddit user". I want the low-effort user to get irritated and leave.

That would likely also err content creators to leave, just because fewer people would be available to see the posts.

There certainly can (and should) be places that your typical user doesn't want to go to, but if there's nowhere for them to go then it will cause a hard stop on fediverse adoption.

Plus, it's not like many of these issues wouldn't affect non-arbitrary users. just they're willing to put up with it. And that's not a sign of a good site.

It doesn't have to be impeccable. It doesn't need corporations to buy ads. It just has to keep getting better and not die. Look at Linux. It never did overtake MacOS & Windows on desktops. But it keeps getting better and it didn't die and it took over server rooms. Look at Mastodon. It's nowhere near as popular as Twitter and maybe never will be, but it's 5 years old and is steadily growing. I like hanging out there. Oak trees start as acorns.

That's the thing though, criticism of lemmy does not necessarily mean hate. We can acknowledge and be honest about the problems without shitting on the platform. My experience over the last week with kbin would have been way beyond the technical know-how of say, my sister. It's not ready for the average user. It will be, devs are kicking ass, but we're not there yet and that's okay. I would rather people know what they're in for here than to show up expecting a polished, bug-free interface.

Here's an example: how can I subscribe to the topics I want to follow? I don't want to see the 198 or whatever it is posts. Nor programmer humour. Lemmy has a great community of fans and users but if I can't see only what I want I'm not going to use it.

I don't know about lemmy but I'm using kbin and it's pretty easy to subscribe to magazines (aka communities) and block the ones I don't want to see

If you are not subscribing to anything, then the only two “walls” you can see is “local” and “all”. “Local” showing posts from communities on your Lemmy server and “all” showing posts from every known Lemmy server.

"Oh no ... my very new free software that's not selling my data and run by VC overlords has some bugs"

I know I'm being an asshole there, but this is about more than usability, it's about values and speaking with your feet. Not that your comments about usability and bugs don't matter ... they do! My issue is that it is way too normal to put convenience and usability front, center and above everything else.

So many conversations with intelligent people about things like this end with "but is it as convenient!?" If that's all we care about, then we don't really deserve anything better. In the mean time, we can try to adjust what we and others care about.

I could really care less if it's a part of something "good". I just want somewhere to kick back and relax, maybe learn something or gain a new perspective. For that purpose convenience is king. In any case the better the product the more others will use federated alternatives and better/more diverse the content would be. And yeah, I already threw money at the devs to show my appreciation for what's been built so far.

I mean, I'm willing to subscribe to a Reddit service, too, if their in-house app wasn't hot shit.

I definitely get where you're coming from and at least you're giving alternatives a shot. Don't abandon Reddit just yet, just use both even if that means Reddit is still your main.

Unfortunately no one can compete with the big tech companies anymore both in scale and user experience. The most you can hope for is to keep alternatives afloat as a solid secondary option and hope they gradually improve. If only tech savvy people hang out here then a lot of the UI jank will go uncontested and unnoticed.

you only need to move the more techie knowledgeable user base here. The ones that mod and post content.

The average user provides nothing to the site but dead traffic. They'll come when the content is here.

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

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

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

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

This place is becoming an echo chamber.

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

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

Are the reports of warnings for posting Lemmy links true?

Haven't encountered any so far, mostly just getting systematically downvoted for mentioning Lemmy and then getting attacked by trolls like the one I mentioned, who without surprise always get upvoted.

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

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

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

Years ago reddit put aside a cardinal rule of the internet: Don't feed the trolls.

It was worse off for it from a user perspective. It's been great for investors though.

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

The wheel of history will succumb redditors who refuse to accept that their system will pass just as all other before it have.

Bruh you know your name is fucking snoo, right? Might wanna figure out your own loyalties lol

No I haven't noticed that because I haven't gone back to reddit since I left. I don't give a shit what people are saying there, that's why I'm not fuckin' there anymore. Besides, lemmy isn't ready. All of this is a very long way from being a finished product. That's not an attack on the platform or the devs making it happen, it's just reality. You're not helping anyone by pretending lemmy is something that it isn't.