It completely replaced Reddit for me. I love the project. It is getting better and better.
same :)
For better or worse, me too.
People singing praises, but it needs to improve, i shouldnt need another website to find communities; also the state of fractured communities with same name that dilute content.
On the flip side, major communities being hosted on defederated instances is a concern.
Which ones are those? Maybe I can't even see them
I know beehaw defederated from lemmyworld and they have some pretty big communities on there. That's just an example that I know of because my first account was beehaw. I'm sure there are others.
Ah makes sense
I can still see beehaw content because they didn't defed with lemmy.ca, but I've avoided posting to their communities. They feel like gated communities, which wasn't productive to community building.
i just blocked beehaw communities because i don't want to accidentally get into a discussion there. If they want to isolate themselves, that's fine, they can exist as their own little thing.
Which is great to do, we can like something and want it to improve at the same time.
Better blocking feels like a priority for me because it would quell most of the defederation issues.
instance only defederates from illegal content / scams
users block instances, communities, and users they don't want
recommended block lists that users can import (from the instance, from somewhere else, etc.)
This also reminds me that Lemmy needs better mod tools. I think that's part of the reason Beehaw defederated
Oh for sure, I think the only reason some communities are clean is because they aren't that big yet.
I've only had a handful of threads spiral out of control, and it was a mess to clean up each one. The button to remove something is right next to the button to make someone a mod. Also once something is removed, it's inaccessible to everyone including the mods. At one point I removed something and couldn't ban the user because the comment was gone. It was a spam bot though so I got them a little while later.
Another issue: blocking users will block all their content, even if they post in comms that you moderate. So if you're a mod you need to avoid the feature, otherwise the user that you blocked might go rogue in the comms that you mod and you'll only see it after it's too late.
This also reminds me that Lemmy needs better mod tools.
What if "we" (users in general, specially mods) created some communal wishlist in some highly visible space, exclusively for mod features? Not just for the Lemmy devs, but for anyone who wants to code a third party tool.
Beehaw did that in one of their pinned local posts
Beehaw is fairly isolated from other instances, so odds are that the visibility wasn't that great, but I'll give it a check.
Im going to say it. I'm going to plug sync, again. Sync has this cool feature where it includes a list of instances and communities on them. It's a very cool and handy option.
I'm finding new communities just fine via the All feed
As others have said, it doesn't quite have the user base to reach critical mass. A lot of my old favorite subs aren't here.
Also...the user base isn't as diverse. I used to click through to see the comments on Reddit to find those comments that provided fresh perspective, gave more context, or explained nuance. You'd click on some thread about Trump's latest legal troubles and get some real information about why things are moving slowly or why the defense made a particular choice. Or go into a thread about some upcoming video game being cancelled, or Google plan being changed or whatever, and get an actual analysis about how the financials don't work, or maybe how the market changed, or how some users were abusing the system.
On Lemmy, I often find myself just skipping the comments. They seem much more uniform, all just repeating the popular line: variants of "Ha, fuck Trump!" "Lol, Russia sucks!" "Company X doing this should be against the law!" etc. I can usually predict what the comments are going to be without bothering to read them, and rarely do I come out with new information. It feels much more like an echo chamber.
Part of it is just that there's not as many users, I think, so there's just not as many posts and thus fewer 'gems'. Also, I think that the users who made the effort to migrate from Reddit probably skew younger, tend to be more uniformly left-leaning, and a larger share will be students or programmers as opposed to lawyers or carpenters or auto mechanics.
The especially annoying thing is that the same thing seems to have happened on Reddit. Yeah, I still moonlight there when I run out of content on Lemmy. And the number of comments seems to have dwindled, and the viewpoint diversity seems to have narrowed there, too. Maybe the normies just gave up and left.
A lot of us have tried out Mastodon and it seems like a pretty great alternative to both Reddit and Twitter, due to the user base.
I do wish it handled threads better though. It’s still as screwed up as Twitter when it comes to that.
Even the memes here, which accounts for like 90% of the everything feed, are the same 3-5 ideas recycled in different formats. I agree with most of the people here, but I miss that I didn't on Reddit.
To add to this: there is a not insignificant chance that the posts you see come from The_Picard_Maneuver, every time.
This might sound weird but there are a lot more assholes here than reddit.
On Reddit you can expect some percentage of the people to be assholes because some percentage of the population are assholes... but here, heaven forbid you go against the grain of the narrative.
As opposed to reddit, where most of the people are nice and some are assholes, here only some are nice and the majority are assholes.
People are a little too enthusiastic about their opinions here. It's kind of not great. I'm just here to enjoy myself and pass the time.
I envision a reddit clone with a "Live and let live" ethos where the only voting options you have are "Meh" and "That's just like your opinion man."
You're absolutely right! And people keep saying that they're nicer here which is not the case at all!
Counterpoint. It depends massively on what communities you use. So there’s a not so small possibility that both you and the people you disagree with are right.
I would normally agree with you, but I usually see this in communities like ask Lemmy. And it's not usually about disagreements. Most of it is people just being complete assholes because they misunderstood something. Now, I know assholes are every where, and that's not the problem. It just annoys me when I see comments like "everyone is more friendly here".
That's true. Some of the communities are great... but there were way way more, way larger, way more active communities on Reddit that were great in the same way too.
My experience is the opposite. Both platforms are full of assholes tbh, but reddit is like nothing but, here you can occasionally have actual discourse, though I assume that will change before long.
I think it's a numbers thing. The larger the user base, the more the average skews towards being mellow/nicer.
That is interesting.. I don't have the same experience, at all. Quite the opposite really.
For now, I find it kind of boring. On reddit, I used to spend more time in comment sections than regularly scrolling. Now I don't really do that, because there are either no comments or the comments are the same.
When I started using lemmy with the default sorting option ('active' i think?), I would see the same posts for days, now I use top 6 hours and that problem is fixed, but lemmy now feels like a news site with comments. Also I am European, but it feels like 50% of content is some local American politics. I don't care about my own town's politics, so I don't care about that guy from Minnesota either.
A post from asklemmy hasn't shown up in my feed in a long time and I kind of forgot it existed, but looking into it, looks like one of the only interesting places here, so I guess, I have visit it more often.
Curating a good subscribed feed and community blocklist has been my trick.
Linux/FOSS Bros are ruining it for me more and more every day.
Not even with my comments, but others. I'm so sick of seeing basic comments extremely downvoted because "ThaTs NoT OpeN sOurCe".
Like a post a was reading a few minutes ago about Microsoft Paint being updated, and someone said it was Windows 11 exclusive, and the other guy said Windows 11 isn't half bad. The comment is super downvoted, because Linux best, Windoze BAD!
You're going to drive away people who just want to have a conversation if you guys don't learn how to be normal, holy shit. I'm a tech bro and you're driving ME away.
Open source, left is good, right is not, there is no center, eat the rich. Oh and because I can't buy a house the world is fucked. Fucking billionaire landlords.
With the Reddit migration, Lemmy has been primarily liberal, not left.
I think it's inevitable that lemmy attracts these kinda people. At least for me, I got out of Reddit not just because of the API decisions, but because I just don't like the idea of having 0 control over my services. The API thing was just a wakeup call.
I'd say that I'm "part of the problem" in terms of shilling for FOSS software, but I was the same back on Reddit. So it's gonna be my type of people that come in here.
Either that or tankies
I think many people don't understand this is the entire point of being on Lemmy. They just want Reddit without ads, but without FOSS we would sooner or later become Reddit. So of course we are going to care about FOSS.
It's the same with people who use Linux but say they don't care about FOSS. Linux is Linux because it's FOSS. Otherwise it would just be Chrome OS or Android.
That last sentence is so true. I love FOSS and tech, but there are cases where proprietary software is better, and that’s okay. Let’s be objective, not an echo chamber.
Discussion is difficult. This place feels like a club sometimes, and if you don't subscribe to the exact same ideals, you just get shouted down. I'm here for discussion, and dissenting opinions, but it just isn't allowed to exist here.
To add on to this; Smugness is rampant. It reminds me of Linux user Groups in college. More than half the time was spent shitting on Windows (Reddit), and if you dared to ask a question you were ridiculed for not knowing it, or people who put more effort into telling you to look it up yourself than it would take to answer you in the first place. I can echo the same club mentality as I’ve on more than one occasion described why a particular political idea isn’t viable based on votes in Congress only to be dismissed without any counter argument as “I don’t understand _____”. So there really is no discussion, it’s essentially just shitposting and piling on, and if I liked that I would have stayed on Facebook.
We need more kind diverse people.
At this point, I don't even care if they're kind, I just want discussion.
I often delete comments before I even post them, knowing that it just isn't worth it most of the time.
I cringe when I see new messages. Aw fuck, who did I piss off now?
This comment chain has given me multiple bouts if anxiety for the exact same reason. Thankfully everyone is being nice so far.
Yeah I had a few times where I'd take a week off just because I didn't want to be angry looking at my inbox full of furious 18 year old trans tankies defending Stalin/Xi
Deleting before I post is something I’ve done too. Sometimes you just need to type it up, but it doesn’t need to be sent. I get it.
shitting on Windows
Let's start. Windows 2000 when came out had more scalable networking than Linux.
To be fair that was true on Reddit too. And is true on spaces such as twitter as well. I think it’s just a symptom to anonymity that people treat each harshly and consider others’ views less than their own. There are just trigger topics you have to avoid because there doesn’t exist an online platform where productive discourse is going to happen.
It was similar, but on reddit there was enough people to occasionally get someone interested in genuine discussion. This comment chain is the most productive conversation I've had on Lemmy. In fact it's the only one.
It's a solid meh.
I came for a reddit replacement and instead I found an interesting subset of what I got at Reddit. And it is not better content or engagement wise. It's useful but niche, and therefore less useful overall than Reddit was.
I wish some of the niche communities were more active but overall I like it very much. It's my go to diversion.
It's organic, and full of Internet weirdos, feels like reddit of decades ago, except everyone kinda knows each other here.
Sometimes the reddit circlejerks do flare up though.
Meh. Its slow, and the politics are more extreme. I've spent a good portion filtering most politics that I can out of my feed.
It's alright here. There's enough to keep me off reddit and not enough to keep me on my phone constantly.
I LOVE the idea of Lemmy and the decentralized web and people coming together to forge our own way. But there's a far too high ratio of elitism, smugness, arrogance and belittlement to people that just want to discuss the things we enjoy. It is just really unfortunate. I don't engage very much, or at all really so I understand part of that is on me, but every discussion I find I'd like to chime in on is already polluted by assholes. It's just disheartening.
It's really incredible how many savage assholes there are around here. My theory is they're bots designed to encourage engagement by enraging us. It's pretty effective.
As one of said assholes, the biggest problem I have with Lemmy is that it's stuck trying to be both the Old Internet in which directness was prized and encouraged no matter how acerbic, and Comfort Internet for nonpartisans.
When these two crowds mix there's going to be discomfort.
And freedom from participation in politics is hiding in privilege to some very real extent, so in some ways I don't know how to be sympathetic to your plight.
But all politics is ragebait, isn't it? I've come back to this general feeling that we need more rage, not less.
The doctrinal conflicts on the Internet are yet to be resolved. We still have the disaffected rightwing types who haven't really had it sink in yet that they failed and their loser is and was always a loser. We still have moderate idiots who think that 'both sides' need to curtail their extremists.
It's an irony that one of the Left's strengths is dogmatism, because I do think there's dogmatic leftists here that I find insufferable. I didn't used to dislike male feminists as much as I do now, but let women represent women's issues.
In the meanwhile, the leftist dogma of No Platforming Stupid Rightwing Shit needs to be more formidably advanced.
I'm getting very tired of the privacy nuts. I get that it's important, but I don't want to hear about it all the fucking time. I also miss my city subreddit, but I'd rather hear about how Google's fucking me over for bajillionth time than use the Reddit app.
Agreed. Foss, privacy, Linux. Topics that are too high a proportion of all Lemmy posts.
Yes, reading Lemmy you’d think Linux has a 90% market share.
Outside of amd64 desktops it kind of does.
I mean, Lemmy itself is FOSS, and the vast majority of instances are running on Linux. The main reason I am here and not on Reddit is that Lemmy is FOSS.
Lemmy wasn't specifically built for being primarily a platform for discussing the things it was built on. It makes sense there's a nice lively community for all of those topics, but they are so out of whack proportion wise with the types of content I want to see.
Yeah, some made paranoia going on in some communities. The amount of people telling me I shouldn't use the apps on my smart TV due to privacy yesterday was mental.
I got into a similar situation ower my bedside lamp... I perfectly understand what you mean.
I wonder if this is what the internet was like in the 90s when everyone on it was lien the Lone Gunmen from the X-files?
I find a lot of the people here to be extremely bitter resentful people. But I'm willing to give it a chance.
I had originally upvoted this comment but then I saw this gem you posted below:
Give me a break and stop huffing your own farts please.
Really classy.
acting like going through post history is discourse, like this, should merit a sitewide ban for 36 hours
I literally saw it three or four posts lower and recognized the name. I didn't go through their history stalking them.
It's good but it doesn't feel like there are many vibrant communities with their own subculture. I know I'm part of the problem. I've heard people say 90% are lurkers, 9% are posters, and 1% are content creators. I'm clearly in that second category.
Better than me! I'm the 90%, but have found myself wishing more people posted, so.....
I like Lemmy, but I do have some problems with it. Based on my experience.
All the big Lemmy instances is biased for the Left wing, like Reddit is.
If you go against the popular opinion. You will get dogpiled. To be fair, this happens everywhere. But I was hoping Lemmy will be different. So it's mainly on me for hoping.
The niche communities are dead or dying. This a population problem, but it still sucks.
They need to give us (the users) the ability to block instances.
Outside that stuff, I like Lemmy.
When you say "left wing". I assume you use the US political reference, right?
Just so you know, in a lot of places, "US left wing" is further right than the most (non-fringe) right wing party there is.
And as such, the perception of politics in the US goes from "insane but maybe a step in the right direction" to "absolute evil and/or destructive/immoral"
My point, which I'm not trying to make to annoy or offend you, but you might want to reflect on: A lot of what is considered "political left wing" in the US, is "common sense" elsewhere.
So, you running into discussion forums is not necessarily that they are "left wing", but rather not deprived of morality, and share a different set of common sense values of creating a society that is fair, the vulnerable and sick are taken care of, no one is exploited, etc etc. That just happens to be "socialism" according to Americans, and otherwise the full political spectrum in my country as to the nuances on how to best achieve that.
I think the problem here is often not the ideology, but the way people go about it. I'm left-wing but I basically can't stand to talk to other left-wingers about politics as they're so sanctimonious, disrespectful, and hypocritical online. So the problem isn't that a platform is left-wing, but rather that there's left-wingers on it if you follow that logic. Please note I said if you follow the logic, not if you agree with it......before I get dog-piled on for saying something non-flattering about liberals.
Then there's Lemmygrad…
And Hexbear
Yea, it's a problem with most people who're heavily into politics these days I think. They're more concerned with dunking on the people that don't follow their beliefs than they are actually discussing issues. If they run into someone that isn't part of their echo chamber they can't handle it and start throwing insults.
Bingo. This is exactly the issue for me. The militant and intolerant attitudes and name calling. It's deeply disappointing.
This is a weird way to cope with the fact that this place is filled with unbearably smug leftists. There are also a lot of places that are way more right wing than america. I.e. a lot of the muslim world, India, etc... I think it's telling you pretend those places don't exist and I'd argue you have a eurocentric world view.
discussion forums is not necessarily that they are “left wing”, but rather not deprived of morality, and share a different set of common sense values of creating a society that is fair, the vulnerable and sick are taken care of, no one is exploited, etc etc
Give me a break and stop huffing your own farts please.
It depends on the topic. What right-wing views of the Muslim world, India, etc. are we talking about? Women’s rights, other human rights issues aren’t going to go over well in any mainstream western focused site. US right-wing views are just a bunch of bad faith arguments. The smugness is one thing, but we don’t have to be tolerant of intolerance.
US right-wing views are just a bunch of bad faith arguments
There are plenty of good faith arguments on the right, just because you don't agree with them doesn't make them bad faith. I'm sick of that phrase being thrown around at points people personally disagree with. It's made the phrase meaningless.
Find me one that isn’t based on a lie. It’s been a long time since it was just a matter of disagreement. I’m not throwing the term out, it’s true.
Border control is a big one. There is a strong push amongst actual leftists to open our borders completely while simultaneously pushing for serious social programs. I hope I don't have to explain the issue with that. "No Borders, No walls, No deportations at all" and all that.
Another one would be the police abolition movement. I think there is good reason why every functional country on earth has a police force.
FWIW, I agree with you on both points. I also think the right has a huge issue with "bad faith" arguments though (way more so than the left).
e.g. the decade long "replacement for Obamacare" that's so much better and perpetually going to be released just after X. This is before Trump even entered the picture.
I'll give you another example, guns. I think the right has a point that it's a mental health issue, but they're not actually willing to change policies in a way that makes mental health care more accessible, so it's an incomplete solution/there's no way to actually get the job done.
Election fraud is another. I'm all for ensuring elections are done with integrity; however, when the efforts to "fix election fraud" aren't supported by real issues when they enter a court of law (where there's real skin in the game, not just words), and when these efforts are targeted at disenfranchising democrats and changing little in rural areas that's a huge red flag. For a specific example, see 1 ballot box per county during COVID (an urban county with over a million people could have the same number of ballot drop boxes as a rural county with a few thousand). Another example would be the absurdly long polling lines in Georgia and the laws attempting to ban people from even giving folks waiting in those lines water.
Independent state legislature theory was also another hellish policy idea out of right wing think tanks that would allow state house legislatures to outright negate votes (fortunately the US supreme court killed that -- but it should give you an idea for how dirty Republican reps are willing to be and where their moral compass is resting).
i.e., there are potentially interesting policy points in the right's voting base. However, the right's politicians are completely off the rails (and operating in a way that I don't believe any American should support -- both in demeanor and policy).
My honest response to some of these points
I’ll give you another example, guns. I think the right has a point that it’s a mental health issue, but they’re not actually willing to change policies in a way that makes mental health care more accessible, so it’s an incomplete solution/there’s no way to actually get the job done.
I don't think throwing money and psychiatrists is a solution to the mental health problem plaguing society today (declining mental health is an issue far beyond a couple of wackos shooting up a school). Guns are part of American life for a lot of people, it's enshrined in the constitution. Argue about interpretations if you want but that doesn't change the fact that there are people in America who are willing to take the negatives of gun ownership so they can have the positives. People don't like feeling helpless and for some gun ownership is the most important thing when it comes to protecting their family.
The truth is mental health will not improve until material conditions improve. Mental health counseling is not going to do squat to a continuously discouraged populace. I also think "mass shootings" as we know them today are a uniquely modern phenomena that is influenced by the modern media landscape. People idolize going out guns a blazing on their own terms and the media circus encourages the next one. I am willing to live with the consequences of gun ownership if it means I have a gun to protect myself, especially as things go further south.
I do agree that the right does not have many good politicians. I feel a bit politically homeless sometimes because of how bad things are. But the elected officials do not always accurately represent the voting base, we simply vote for who we are supposed to just like people on the left do. I think you have to either be crazy or financially motivated to get into politics in the first place so that really only leaves weirdos. The most successful people on the right are running businesses and feeding their family, not playing the dirty game of electoral politics. I think the left wing politicians are just as corrupt though, but people just look past it because its their side. Check out Nancy Pelosi's amazing stock trading performance as an example.
Guns are part of American life for a lot of people, it’s enshrined in the constitution.
I know, I have friends with like 30+; I honestly don't care that they have them. I've increasingly seen an appetite from Democrats I know to just drop the damn guns thing. We really don't care about "taking all the guns", we just want people to stop shooting up school buildings and random public events in our cities. I don't think that's a big ask.
Here's where Republicans fall short. They give no potential solutions. If mental health isn't solved by "money and psychiatrists", why not? What will solve "metal health"? There's a fine line between yelling "IDK look over there" and making a quality suggestion. People love to talk about both sides and debates ... but there hasn't been a serious policy debate in this country at the national stage in years because one side decided to start yelling something with the substance of "DDDDURRRRRRRRRRRR DDURRRRRR DDDDDURRRRRR" (typical about "woke", "radical", "socialist", etc) rather than making actual points.
I can't even tell you why Trump's Obamacare replacement plan is or isn't a bad idea, because (again) he never presented one. He just said "there will be one". I don't vote for promised plans, if you want my vote you better have a plan. The Democrats do have (even if flawed) thought out plans; the Republicans (increasingly) don't.
The truth is mental health will not improve until material conditions improve.
I can't tell you what Trump's plan for this is either, because while you tie the gun and mental health crisis together and link them to the economy, the Republican party as a whole doesn't. There's not a policy position arguing "we're going to solve the gun problem by doing X". Here's the Republican platform for 2016, reused for 2020: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2016-republican-party-platform. I challenge you to find anything in there stating how they're going to address the left's concerns about gun violence.
This is the Democrat platform for 2020, see "Ending the Epidemic of Gun Violence" (and yes it includes a real plan for how to solve the migration/border problem by attacking it at the roots not "building a wall" -- which the cartels just dug tunnels under and cut through): https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2020-Democratic-Party-Platform.pdf
You're welcome to disagree with parts of the gun plan, or the plan in its entirety, but it's a starting point. In a functioning Democracy, Republicans would come back with a serious proposal for "here's how to improve this situation in a way that protects gun rights." They have done no such thing. It would be one thing if this was "just" about guns, but it's not, they do this all the time.
I feel a bit politically homeless sometimes because of how bad things are. But the elected officials do not always accurately represent the voting base, we simply vote for who we are supposed to just like people on the left do.
This to me is missing the forest for the trees. Sure, there are definitely corrupt politicians on both sides. However, what are they getting done and who are they serving at the end of the day?
Again, Trump promised to "repeal Obamacare and replace it with something so much better" (loose quote). Republicans before him like Paul Ryan made the same bogus claims. They all said "we'll get it out right after we repeal Obamacare". That's not a plan, that's a literal death sentence for some number of Americans (I won't make up an internet statistic). Hell no I'm not voting for that, and I immediately am going to question your motive as a politician for suggesting the moral equivalent of "take the worn tires off the car and only then check to see if there are even any other tires to put on the car" (carrying the metaphor further, people have places to be and things to get done, they don't need you breaking their cars in the middle of their day to day lives with no fix in sight).
Meanwhile, Joe Biden promised to make progress on the country's aging infrastructure and followed through with the infrastructure bill.
I am a policy and action oriented person, and the policies and actions of Republican politicians I find reprehensible and at times completely counter productive.
I'd encourage you (and your friends) to pay attention to the Democrats running in your area, and their actual policy stances. There is variance in the Democrat's platform (especially at the primary stage), and there is an appetite for compromise (they do it constantly, the infrastructure bill was passed because of compromise; it was not everything the majority of the party wanted -- far from it -- but it was what they could get done now). I'm willing to let guns go for other priorities, personally guns are not a "hell no" issue for me, and I know many other Democrats that agree. The country hasn't lost its mind, but the Republican party has, and their false compromise, hostage taking, and political theater is making it REALLY hard to get shit done.
You seem to give the benefit of doubt to Republicans, and then assume the worst of Democrats. We can provide Receipts of Republicans breaking the law, having massive conflicts of interest etc but that's ignored while Gossip about Democrats is treated as cold hard fact. This was rampant during 2016. Look at the Clinton Foundation vs The Trump Foundation. One of those is a real charity, the other is a grift. But the Real one was the one to get heavily scrutinized.
I dislike the republican establishment greatly. They are filled with people just as corrupt as the left. Does that answer your question? The Clinton foundation is far from innocent either, you're not making the distinction you think you are. The Clintons are extremely corrupt, I think an honest person would be able to come to terms with that.
You dislike them, yet you’re repeating their talking points. The GOP is corruption personified. The left isn’t in the same stratosphere. It was the Republicans whose refused to vote on Judges during the Obama administration so they could stack the courts with questionable Judges. It’s the Republicans who fabricate voter fraud with no evidence to pass their voting restrictions that unfairly target legal voters that just happen to vote against them. It’s the Republicans who start up endless investigations without knowing what they are looking for. That’s three odd the top of my head. They’ve been up to it for forty years and recently straight up gave up creating a platform with any sort of governance instead just using wedge issues and fabricated culture war issues to make you think they’re doing anything for you. They aren’t, and they will turn on you the very second it benefits them because. If you haven’t noticed all the old reasonable Republicans are gone. The grifting crazies are the only ones left.
I don’t care to get into another Clinton conversation. I know how this goes. Laundry list of accusations with discredited evidence or implications that go nowhere because the vast majority of them stem from Republican strategists in the 90s who had a vested interest in defeating the Clintons.
Border control...There is a strong push amongst actual leftists to open our borders completely
Who is saying that? Right-Wing Media? There is no significant movement to completely open our southern border, nor is it something the current administration is demonstrably moving toward. What is happening is right-wing media creating a strawman in bad faith to misrepresent liberals opinions on the southern border. For example, not wanting to build a border wall doesn't not equate wanting an open border. Just like not wanting to buy a Suburban doesn't mean I want to walk to work. The border wall has been a thirty year grift that Republican politicians use to line the pockets of their donors through bloated contracts. Republicans have controlled the Presidency for 12 years over the last two decades. Why wasn't it already done? If you look into it, you'll find significant logistical issues including there being a river and terrain that isn't friendly to construction. There are areas where an existing wall cuts off US Citizen's farms and ranches, and where Border Control can't easily get to. Then there's the topic of Circular migration where preventing some migrants from leaving would double-down on your social services problem you mentioned.
Another one would be the police abolition movement. I think there is good reason why every functional country on earth has a police force.
This one again is not in any supported by any politicians or most people. "De-fund the Police" is a poor slogan any way you look at it. Yes, there are people that mean in literally. I can't blame them. The truth is there are areas of this country where the Police act more similar to organized crime than a protection force. This is not literally true the vast majority of the time, but you can't go 2 days without hearing about a situation where there's corruption, or unneeded escalation that causes another civilian death. The movement I'd like to see is to Reform the Police, but that doesn't really sound great in a protest march does it? Police should de-escalate situations, not escalate them. We hear these stories of mentally ill people who are not violent getting shot because someone calls the police to get them help, and the responding officer starts yelling with their gun out making everyone nervous and the mentally ill person gets shot. Or we see stories of overreacting to children, even arresting them for minor disobedience. We see an "us vs them" mentality coming out of the Police where they refuse to hold their own accountable. All of these things should be agreed upon universally imo. I've said this to some Gun-Loving friends before. Why should "he had a gun" be a reason for a cop to shoot you dead without getting your day in court? Last I checked conservatives are way into the 2nd Amendment, so this universal love for the Police, especially when they do wrong is puzzling to me.
I have a lot of leftist friends and they vehemently defend open borders. I remember all the marches during trump era that explicitly said "Immigrants are welcome here". I can obviously only speak from my experience but I think you are underplaying the lefts lack of hard line stance on border control. They actively fight defend illegal immigrants taking American jobs. I think lax border control is a pretty common part of leftist belief in USA as of late.
Same thing goes for the defund police movement. Here are articles reflective of that sentiment at the time https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html I don't really know how you can deny this line of thought exists in the modern political environment. Don't blame me when all the messaging is "ACAB" and people are yelling "Abolish the police" in their marches. They often argue reforming the police is impossible and that total abolition is the only way forward.
Last I checked conservatives are way into the 2nd Amendment, so this universal love for the Police, especially when they do wrong is puzzling to me.
The two things don't really have much to do with another. Nobody likes when the police do wrong. There are obviously nuanced situations where the right may downplay officer misconduct for narrative purposes but that doesn't mean the right wants the police to be a mafia. There are a lot of people on the right who like police but dislike bad policing. I don't think it's that hard to understand.
I can’t take you seriously when you say “leftist” it’s straight out of right-wing propaganda. So I doubt you have “leftist friends” at all. You’re even saying the quiet part out loud. Trump immediately banned everybody from coming into the country from Muslim countries regardless of the reason. I don’t think you understand how difficult the Immigration process is. These people spent all the time and money to come here, were approved and were literally on planes when this happened. That’s some heartless xenophobic bullshit and idk how you could support that.
Migrant workers don’t take American jobs. This has been proven so much it’s not even much of a current Republican talking point. Southern states that have enacted strict immigration laws ended up having farms with no one to harvest as Americans didn’t want those jobs, for they pay that was offered at least. If you’re conflating this with people who immigrate legally taking jobs, that’s a different issue and American companies are the ones you should be mad at. It’s not as simple as you think, often it costs the company a lot and it would have been cheaper to hire an American.
Those protest movements have no elected power. This is a situation where systemic issues in policing really present two different outcomes. If your community was treated the same as the communities that these people are apart of, I’d wager the rhetoric would be similar or even more violent. Anti-Police rhetoric on the right was rampant in the 90s. Current conservatives care more about treating people they don’t like bad, so they are Pro Police every time an incident happens with a black person. We all should be calling for reform when a cop becomes Judge, Jury, and, executioner just because they think the person has a weapon. How 2nd Amendment advocates aren’t just as upset at the police as the community that is victimized by them is extremely telling imo.
You are easily the most bad faith person I've had a discussion with on here so far. I'm just expressing my opinion and you are accusing me of faking having leftist friends for some reason despite knowing that a lot of people hold the views I discussed. Not really worth responding to your novels, sorry.
I’ve run into you in other threads. Your expressed opinions are all conspiracy theories or right wing talking points. Your account is a couple days old. There’s nothing showing me you aren’t a troll. And if you’re not it makes no difference if everything you post is the same. 🤷♂️
I disagree that those two things have nothing to do with each other.
You have a constitutional right to bear arms right? If so, why does the possibility of you using that right give Carte Blanche to a Police Officer to shoot you dead and get away with it? I always hear that the right to bear arms is about standing up to tyranny… seems relevant to me. When Pro-Gun groups didn’t fight for Philando Castile it became crystal clear they are all full of shit.
It's not really "coping". Other than that, you are right about a lot of points. I am providing a Eurocentric point of view, as you put it. I have no other perspective or insight to share.
US politics are certainly lacking in morality relative to European farts. If listening to 5 seconds of Trump doesn't convince you, or the recent Republican debate... No rational mind or argument will.
"We must eat the billionaires. This is all the fault of capitalism. No wonder that's how they make their profit."
This sort of thing is 'leftist' everywhere.
Yeah, the US version.
My point, which I’m not trying to make to annoy or offend you, but you might want to reflect on: A lot of what is considered “political left wing” in the US, is “common sense” elsewhere.
the 'right wing' believes climate change is a hoax. you're struggling with a failed conception of 'both sides' politics. please receive a plot update.
You're straw manning the hell out of anyone you don't perceive to be on your side, you're the average leftist lemmy shitposter people are complaining about in this thread.
i wish there were more people on here, i feel like i'm talking to a wall
i'm pretty sure i'm basically the only poster on r/hongkong and i'm not even a mod there (which would be a valid reason for being the only poster)
Its kinda lacking a pulse and the people here are no different than on reddit.
There were two or three weeks were it felt pretty good but now it's just reddit with less upvotes/comments.
Also, some days ago, some mod just deleted one of my posts without any notification. I just had to notice it was gone 🤷♂️. At least on reddit I was always notified about that and got an explanation (even though it was stupid a lot of times).
Well, yes. People are people, on Reddit or elsewhere.
There are fantastic people on Lemmy, just like there are fantastic people still on Reddit.
I mean why would they be ? Lemmy litteraly grew from Reddit people coming here
Well no lemmy grew from reddit people who were tired of reddits bullshit. But when they found a lack of witty memes they got bored.
Buggy and full of loud ignorant assholes. So pretty in-brand with my decades of experience online.
Way better the Reddit, just wish my city subreddit would move over.
I'm glad mine didn't. r/chicago is cesspool of casual racism.
You can encourage a parallel/sister community setup :)
Some of these communities won't move over completely, but over time you can grow the more open & accessible choice
Good aside from all the repetitive content. One of the problems with federation, I suppose. Someone sees an article they like and they feel they have to post it on every community related to politics on every instance they can find, for example. Mostly a politics problem, but also memes and gaming and technology. Okay, not mostly a politics problem.
I think the same problem exists in reddit as well. There's a lot of sub with slight variation so the same content will show up again and again because i subbed to multiple of those sub. (eg: holdmybeer and holdmyredbull)
If you use the browser UI, the ui will group all those crosspost together.
I think a good client could solve the repetitive content problem. For example, if a link shows up in more than one community, have it posted once with a divider above it saying where it's been posted.
I've been finding the same and have just started using the filter option in my client lately. It's not ideal but the alternative is that I get bored of seeing it and stop using Lemmy altogether.
I do worry that the repetitive content will drive new users away
I'm on kbin, so no client yet, but it'll get there.
It’s alright. Doesn’t replace what I got from Reddit but I also use it less and it’s only form of social media so that’s a plus.
The political environment is rough. Lemmygrad and hexbear are toxic cesspools, which is unfortunate because I would genuinely like to engage with their political ideology more seriously but it’s inevitably drowned out by… well… them.
I’ve blocked most of the top posters over there and things are much more peaceful, if quiet.
There’s still a lack of content creators out there, which is an issue. Growth is going to be a problem because, to be blunt? Lemmy is dogshit before you block all the spam, political shitposting, and those fucking Reddit repost bots.
Until the new user experience is cleaned up I don’t expect Lemmy to gain users on average. I’ll probably spin up my own instance in AWS at some point to play with it, or self host on some inexpensive hardware.
Tl;Dr: I get what I want from it but don’t see it having healthy long term growth
I'm in the same boat. I like it but unlike Reddit, I feel like closing the app after 10 minutes of scrolling because I either keep seeing the same posts or the posts have no comments to interact with.
Seriously though, they act just like the T_D crowd from reddit, but at least there it was easier to avoid them (and they actually started banning them eventually). I am legitimately convinced that there is a huge overlap in members, they never cared about politics just about being hateful, they wore a right wing mask on reddit and they wear a left wing mask here.
It's ok. Lots of very young people talking a lot about things they don't understand like its a fact.
There however a lot of fun when they give relationship advice to people that has been married for longer that they have been alive and acting like it is the same as braking up with you maybe partner of less then a week.
Kinda tired of hearing about Linux tbh
There is a lot of it, probably because the people tempted to join Lemmy/the fediverse are more technologically literate. I'm more tired of the constant "I like Lemmy" and "Reddit bad" stuff. I've seen basically this exact thread probably a dozen times already.
Technically literate and anti-authority. Good mix for being pro Linux.
Only a dozen?
I like the idea of Linux, but am not computer literate enough to mess with operating systems. I finally blocked LinuxMemes and that was like 90% of the Linux material in my feed.
I don't mind hearing about Linux - I use it daily - but the constant low tier memes make me want to block those communities.
Join other different community and stay in your local feed!
You're on a FOSS platform, wtf do you expect.
I feel like Lemmy is on its way and its main benefit is that it's not as cynical as Reddit to EACH OTHER.
So many people on reddit gripe about the smallest shit, especially the Steam Deck reddit, that conversations become either you're with my ideas or you're against my ideas. Like even though you're just trying to help others play a game, "I'm insulting you for free because of the way you said lowest fps is 33 with drops down to 29. I don't think it means what you think it means." (of course shoving a meme in there because that's their identity at this point)
I clearly meant average, but oh here comes -20 comment score when I explain that.
I see nicer comment chains from people on opposing political sides here even though I know a usual reaction these days would be to tear at each others' throats. Lemmy isn't devoid of it, but Jesus at least it isn't like how Reddit predictably uses a scalpel on your comments to find something to complain about.
But I think this might be the result of tailoring my experience over time with instances I want to see from and communities. That level of customization is awesome. But it does suck to see so many instance drama things happening in a much more rapid pace than reddit.
I actually experience the opposite. Others have posted about it in this thread as well. If your views deviate slightly on some topics it's way worse here than on reddit. The Tech Bros / Open Source Stan's here are insufferable. There was a post yesterday that said it should be illegal for video games to not distribute their source code... And the opinion that companies should be able to own the thing they made was heavily downvoted and ridiculed.
Great for daily mindless scrolling.
Still has a ways to go before it's as useful as reddit was for searching for specific information tho.
The people here are my people. However, Lemmy needs a bigger user base, and at the same time I fear that Eternal September
It's boring enough so i don't get addicted. I got clean from Reddit and I don't need another endless scroller.
Same here. I am interested in stuff people talk here but it gets boring when everything is about FOSS, privacy and news. The comment threads on Reddit felt endless but here they are much shorter which I would guess is better for having an actual discussion. So Lemmy is interesting but I don't spend much time on it.
My exact thoughts
I like it. No FREAKING ADS disguised as posts/comments. I was late to know third party apps exists for lots of things, so being aware of lemmy has changed my browsing habits on other platforms i.e looking for alternatives that work or have a model that I don’t feel too conflicted about (which honestly makes me happier). It’s the right amount of silent and busy for me. I’m just hoping for elephant-obsessed people (among other niche communities) to exist/gain a medium level of traction (frankly, even a basic amount would be okay). I also like that its name sounds like LET ME/ LEMME (lemme do what anything I want as long as it doesn’t harm the next person).
not nearly enough niche content like reddit because of the sheer lack of users, but browsing all is ok. except the content on all is lacking too its usually a linux post, an old meme, or biden in some capacity.
ahem and the porn sucks
i can only use the reddit app for like 5 minute intervals so u can extrapolate what i use it for
The only thing I miss from Reddit is the saved hentai posts I have.
It needs more memes and less edgy teenagers screaming about politics (that they clearly don't understand and take way too seriously).
Seriously I come to websites like this to get a mix of news and humour, not get yelled at by children who advocate for totalitarian regimes to "own the libs", I am on the verge of changing instances because lemm.ee won't let me block all of the two offenders at once, and I have to constantly remove every bullshit new sub they create, not to mention them infesting the comments section of anything news related to scream about "libs".
Literally they are indistinguishable from reddits T_D crowd, they act just as hateful and use the same language, they seem more concerned with "the libs" than any other political group, and they worship mass murdering dictators while being holocaust deniers / apologists. They can call themselves leftists as much as they want, all I see from them is hatred so they might as well be Trump Qanon Cultists.
I love it tbh. Even when people disagree with me it doesn't feel like I'm being attacked. On Reddit it feels like I'm being attacked even when someone agrees with me.
I disagree with you, but I still love you.
Always loved those replies where they say the exact same thing I said, but are "disagreeing" with me and being very angry and rude about it.
I like it, it's just missing some niche communities.
But overall, I get more response in "populated" communities compared to popular subreddits which is neat.
Overall I like Lemmy, but there's also a lot of doomers on here that do everything they can to make everyone feel miserable. I had to trim out a lot of communities that they tend to infest, so now I'm not getting as much interaction and have moved some of my traffic back to Reddit to have enough things to browse
cough cough Politics cough cough
Cool. I just really wish there was more people on !amateursatellites@lemmy.world . Currently there's just one more person it seems.
That looks like a cool community. I really wish there was some other means of discovering cool communities like this one.
It's definitely not a replacement for Reddit, and a lot of assholes have come over.
Absolutely! I've noticed some unprovoked snide remarks and mean comments. That's something that I do not miss from Reddit.
I like that it is a lot more independent but I also miss a lot of niche communities. Overall I still like it a lot .And there really is no going back since reddit has completely gone to shit. I now take more time off from social media.
I've read 4 books over the last couple of weeks. It's been great!
Yeah me too I just read now during my commute instead of scrolling social media.
Yeah, I've just been doing more productive shit. It's nice.
Hell yeah! I feel like a chill new pub opened up in my neighborhood. I found a new place where I belong
With sync, it was a pretty easy transition from reddit to here, though there are obviously differences in size and functionality. Overall, though, l'm happy to report that I can doomscroll and be just as miserable here as I could on reddit.
It's alright. It could definitely use some more growth, and it's been a bumpy road with it being Beta software and with the federation issues, but I've enjoyed my experience overall.
Growth and deep conversations is what I miss most about Reddit.
The posts where you have thousands of comments to read through where you could easily spend an hour or more just reading through comments of a single post.. I really miss that aspect.
Indeed. The main thing I miss is the wealth of storytelling content, it felt like Reddit had millions of stories for me to read and Lemmy doesn't have the same breadth of content.
Yeah, I agree. Hopefully it'll get closer each day.
It's no Reddit.... And thank goodness!
It aiight. Too many assholes sometimes but these kinds of people run rampant on the internet so I don't blame it. I only wish that the UI got a little more love but it works just fine.
What are you using to run it? I'm on connect for lemmy and it feels pretty close to reddit is fun on android.
I'm on the native web UI and Jerboa. Funnily enough, I'm trying out the other apps, so I guess Connect is now top of the list lol Thanks
Oh wow, I greatly enjoy the standard web Lemmy UI, it's so beautiful and wonderfully simplistic!
Oh, I don't hate it at all, it's perfectly functional. I only have the feelings that it could look better if a UI/UX designer went for the polish. I wish I had those skills so I could give it a shot myself.
It great for me it’s better than Reddit it has that small internet feeling
Like the entire fediverse, I also feel like it's much easier to reach other people here. What you write actually gets read. On Reddit, you either piggy back off one of the top comments, comment on a thread within minutes from it being posted or you are basically shouting into the void
I love how both liked and dislikes are visiable. Feels less one sided than reddit.
It didn't use to be that way on reddit. People generally disliked that change when they rolled it out.
I love it.
I have accounts on a dozen or so instances, though I'm only really active on maybe half of them. That gives me a fair amount of variety (every instance is different, depending on who they're federated with and what communities the users have subscribed to), and makes it so that if one of them is having issues, all that means is that I won't be using that particular account.
The relative lack of users doesn't bother me in the long run - yeah, it's sort of unfortunate that there aren't enough people to maintain really narrow communities, but I much prefer a thread here, on which there might be only three responses but they're all trying to actually communicate ideas, as opposed to a thread on Reddit, where there's 100 responses and 99 of them are just regurgitating memes.
Really, my biggest problem with the threadiverse is all of the people who want to make it into something it's not - who want to centralize and streamline and homogenize it so it'll have more appeal to easily-confused, meme-regurgitating idiots. I like it pretty much the way it is (with minor improvements around the edges of course), and would much rather that it be left to just slowly and surely draw in people who actually appreciate it for what it is.
I like it. Left reddit a while ago and this fills that spot.
It's a better setup being free of corporate ownership, and it's slowly growing, but I wish we could get the word out somehow.
I'm really loving it.
Same shit different platform. Dumb that people keep bringing up Reddit though. I don't have an app though so I still use Reddit on my phone. Sometimes porn.
I like it. Sucks that the more niche communities are not very active but hopefully they will continue to grow.
They are there the more you participate in them the more they will grow.
I like the format but I'm having a hard time finding the time to curate my own feed so I can see something other than the same rephrased headlines for a mile of scrolling.
I like it a lot, enough to stay through the tumult of figuring out issues like CSAM, spam, federation inconsistencies, and an inability to block instances at a user level. It’s small and doesn’t have many active niche communities, but Reddit had the same issue in the beginning. Honestly I like the small size of Lemmy, there’s enough content to keep me interested but isn’t so crowded that it feels like I’m shouting into the void.
It's good so-far, & I hope it continues to grow & improve. I've seen some communities partially shift to Lemmy, which is good, & I hope more of them come over. There are/were some thriving niche communities on Reddit which might be better served on an open platform like Lemmy. We already have c/vexillology for instance, but it's still relatively small & inactive compared to the old r/vexillology. I've got some stuff I've been working on myself which I hope to help contribute to this project.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !vexillology@lemmy.world
Noted. Good bot.
It’s not bad and has improved rapidly. It still needs a lot of growth. It has most of the main topics covered like news and politics, but what’s really missing are all the niche interests. Reddit still has all the small topics. It’s going to take time to build that here. Although federation is cool, it doesn’t help that an interest might be split across several communities. For instance, there are several steam deck communities. It makes it hard to build the user base large enough to get good, consistent content.
It lacks the critical mass of users needed to make even moderately niche communities feasible; basic examples are: City communities, State communities, communities based on car make/model - these are types of communities that Reddits excels at having and it's because of the size of the user base. The only point I'm making with this is that Lemmy is a very long way off from being a viable replacement for Reddit.
Next big problem is: Lemmy has a HORRIBLE new user experience...which I'm sure is significantly responsible for slowing Lemmy adoption. Single biggest issue is content discovery (which is just-ok if you got lucky and joined a super-massive Lemmy instance when you first joined, all the way to an atrocity if you got unlucky and joined a small instance when you first joined.
There's also a lot of complicated activities needed just to be a functional Lemmy user: like regularly backing up your user/instance preferences (including subscriptions) and replicating those preferences into another account/instance in case something happens to your current account/instance or your instance becomes temporarily or permanently inaccessible. This is asking too much of your common non-technical user, but it's still currently necessary just because of how often instances have problems. Think about all the user accounts on all the .ml instances that had to be re-created from scratch because there's no built-in way for users to do it. Users should be able to sync their user accounts similarly to how instances sync their content with each other.
For the record, the first instance I created an account on (when I was a brand new Lemmy user months ago) was a very small instance (but recommended on the very first page of the official join-lemmy.org site), and there just wasn't functional content discovery at all on that instance. It was a barren wasteland. The fact that servers aren't even aware of what content is out there on federated systems until some user on that system already happens to know about the content/community and subscribe to it is setting a lot of new users up for failure. Once I realized that it sucks being on a small instances, the second account I created was on Lemmy.world, but that instance suffers from it's popularity and is the frequent target of DDOS and was going down for me several hours a day. So, there's also a penalty for joining a big instance. I ultimately had to create numerous accounts on numerous instances and then try to keep the user preferences in sync across multiple accounts on multiple instances so that I can easily swap to a different account when an instance had problems.
Elitist user base: I swear, some lemmy users are worse than the old BSD forums and worse than stack exchange when it comes to taking criticism about the platform. Guaranteed, this comment will get downvoted, and I'll be mansplained about how content discovery is facilitated through having to have foreknowledge about some 3rd party websites that keep track of communities (which don't always work because not all instances can be indexed yet do to a laundry list of other problems), and what an idiot I am for not knowing this, etc, etc.
Having to go to this length just to use a reddit alternative - that's unacceptable to most non-technical users. Lemmy doesn't stand a chance of gaining momentum until these issues are solved.
I completely agree, especially on the account backup and migration. I know there is some Github program to help and while I would be able to use it as long as I finger out how to open/download it. It needs to be done on a computer and I never use Lemmy on my computer. So it suddenly becomes a much bigger step just because you need a 3th party program, especially as I just don't hang around on my computer, when I'm on it I have something in mind.
I enjoy all of Mötorhead, not just Mr. Killmister.
Oh wait, that's not the Lemmy you ment.
I still see and experience blind down voting and people missing each other's points, but much less than on Reddit. Overall I'm more aligned with the viewpoints shared here, especially because the vibe on the other site has really changed a lot after over 10 years.
I definitely use lemmy a lot less for mindless scrolling, due to the lack of content, which is great to be honest.
I spend more time researching stuff through articles, forums, YouTube, and yes, also the other site still when it's through specific Google searches.
I still see way more US centric content than I'd like but there's definitely a good European presence, and it's also on me because I'm still browsing basically the whole unfiltered feed at this point.
The only thing missing is a large contingent of sports fans to populate game threads and it’s perfect
I agree. The sports communities have not really take off yet. But have you checked out the fanaticus.social instance? It is devoted entirely to sports, and there is at least some level of conversation there.
Oh I have and regularly comment there with a different account. It has the potential to be exactly what I am hoping for, but the comments are still pretty sparse in comparison to what I have grown accustomed to. It doesn’t have to rise to that level, and I think once Lemmy creates flairs it’ll take off a bit more
It's okay. I'm certainly not going back to reddit, but Lemmy has its own share of problems. I feel we need better protections with defederating and banning. It is far too easy to get stuck on a dead-end server or have some aspect of Lemmy irrevocably ruined due to minor political squabbles between servers. We are still far too centralized, and lemmy.world/lemmy.ml/beehaw.org/etc control a lot of the Lemmy experience with their defederation posture.
Just today, a community had to do an impromptu shut-down because the lemmy.world admin decided to permaban the main mod for trivial/subjective/biased reasons (read the comments).
One of the larger instances recently defederated another smaller instance and now Lemmy is effectively ruined for those users. It's already annoying enough for normies to sign up for Lemmy and get the hang of it, and now they need to be worried about switching instances every 2 months when some admin decides to effectively wipe out a smaller server because of something out of the users' control. The smaller instance in question had NSFW communities that the larger instance got annoyed by, so the larger instance decided to defederate every community and user from that smaller instance.
I feel we need some sort of infrastructure to limit the effect of these types of things on different parts of Lemmy (users/communities/instances). Users shouldn't be lumped in with communities when defederating (at least not by default). Having an escape plan for communities also seems like it's very important. What if lemmy.world announced it was shutting down tomorrow? All those communities will be gone in the blink of an eye. Maybe we should be able to export communities to other servers somehow, so we can be more decentralized against failures of specific servers and admins.
Even a single community being inaccessible to a certain user can really destroy their experience - the problem isn't fully solved by breaking up "mega-servers" like lemmy.world. What if I couldn't access the main Linux community anymore? Guess I'm fucked? Make a new account somewhere else? Is that really the best solution we can come up with?
I think it's good for broad, serious/informative discussion but lacking for more niche or casual stuff. Niche is just because there's not enough users. Casual is probably partially that, but also because Lemmy just attracts a more serious crowd. Even the general gaming communities disproportionately trend towards serious discussion of industry problems. And a Lemmy that's better for casual stuff is probably worse for serious stuff.
It replaces most of my Reddit time. I still find myself going to some subreddits that have activities wince several here that are more niche have zero activity.
The UI is nice, although seeing duplicate posts can be annoying. Pagination could use some improvement. When browsing by new, new items posted seem to push the list so you could see the same items over and over it enough new items are posted. Adding some kind of timestamp and better list filtering could improve the experience.
The people here tend to be nice. Conversations have been mostly pleasant.
Overall, I have enjoyed it.
Its decent for me. As others have said it's still got a long way to go but it works for what I use it for. I'll likely be sticking around here unless something better pops up or lemmy goes the way of the dinosaurs.
Me too! In the beginning, I wondered how I would fit in, but that's not a worry anymore.
I kinda like it, it's a bit lonely here though. Lot of improvement needed still.
Honestly, I miss reddit. Lemmy is kinda good, but just doesn't do it for me.
Also the fucking leftists, I swear. Reddit has their share but you could block them without losing 90% of the site.
I feel the exact opposite. Reddit has turned into a MAGA hell hole. It’s totally unbearable and might as well be X now.
What subs in particular? To me it's almost indisputable that reddit is overtaken by your run of the mill performative lib. I really can't imagine someone saying they are MAGA and getting upvoted for it
Mostly more mainstream subs like r/damnthats interesting. Regardless, I feel there’s a good balance on Lemmy. I feel like it’s more palatable here. Someone disagrees and moves on. That’s how it should be. It’s no Kumbaya, and that fine. I just feel people move on here and won’t downvote you to oblivion on Lemmy. Anyway, we may disagree and that’s okay. Nice to have you here. I feel like this is the more adult place.
Can you provide a single example of someone proclaiming MAGA beliefs and getting upvoted significantly on that subreddit? Sorry but I find that very hard to believe.
I think the guy's personal overton window has shifted to the left.
Thats surprising, reddit always felt like /atheism but for left wing politics.
If you’re not a leftist, then I don’t want to talk to you anyway.
Yay, let's get this country together and fix thing-NO!
The way in which right-wingers want to "fix" things is wrong.
I really think you should turn off the internet and go talk to real people. This attitude is toxic.
I actually do talk to real people. Most of my family are right wingers. They’re wrong. Sorry.
I never said they were right.
You heavily implied it.
This is a good point to stop and reflect if you are projecting a lot of qualities unto others before you know anything about them. The ability to listen compassionately will take you far in life but you have to be willing.
The attitude that people can be "talked" out of their political views over the course of a single conversation is ludicrous.
A single conversation? Very unlikely. Over several? Yes, absolutely.
To add something that I haven't yet seen mentioned (didn't read the whole thing), porn. It hasn't taken off like it did on reddit, and I do miss that. I don't want my feed covered in porn, but I would like to have quality porn properly covered in an adult instance. Pornlemmy and lemmynsfw just doesn't cut it.
Im on infinity, and I don't love that there's little to no support for popup gifs and videos on the feed, I mostly have to go into a post whose title may catch my attention then wait for something to load (or not to load, redgifs has been incredibly hit or miss for me as of late, lots of forbidden requests and failed playbacks due to it). Idk, it's not the experience or the content that you'd expect on reddit using any reddit 3rd party app.
Other than that particular thing, it's been getting very us-centric, with political memes or stuff that only us people would care about. I might have to try other instances.
Other than that, I appreciate Lemmy, it made me mostly drop reddit except for Google searches, and I feel comfortable interacting with people here.
I think about it daily.
I like it so far. I wish niche communities were more active in comments (I see plenty of upvotes). Beyond that I'd love to see less copy posts but I guess it hard to pick who wins unless it's just some first come first serve for "front page?"
I'm enjoying it. It has a "not yet critical mass" feel to it. There are a few features I'd like to see (Hide Thread, something like RES, etc) and there could be more traffic, but I genuinely don't miss Reddit.
It's good enough to be part of my username.
I still use reddit for my city subreddit and some niche things but overall it's decent. We've come far from Facebook haven't we?
I was told there would be baguettes, however I'm not sure what a baguette is so I don't know what I'm looking for and I think there may be a notable nudist commune or three around here.
I see what's happened here. You've confused Lemmy with France. It's a very common mistake, but you can tell which one you're in by the smell.
Wait, what's LeScent?
LePew.
I like it a lot. I check it every day, several times a day
I like it a lot and it's still early days.
Will done Devs.
Can't wait for the rest of the Reddit subs to come over.
I'm liking it. The one thing I think is missing is it is sorta difficult to get critical mass for a community. It would be nice if we could have "meta" communities which just combine every instances community with the same name. It would likely be very problematic moderation wise but it would help get critical mass in a lot of places.
he was a great musician🤘
Definitely room for improvement but has that old reddit feel, I like it!
Full of commie rats
But what about ponies?
Agreed. I'm a liberal and I wouldn't consider myself a "moderate liberal" in every respect either (I support universal healthcare and think public universities should be free), but lefties who think communism is actually a good idea mystify me. Every single country that's gone down that road has devolved into a dictatorship, and that's by design, not merely a flaw in execution. Communists are as bad as fascists; they both aim for authoritarian rule.
Don't confuse communism with the tankies, as much as the tankies would like you to.
A tankie once told me that "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" was problematic. That's when you know you aren't dealing with a real communist and are in fact dealing with a Red Fascist.
I’m not. I know what communism is and why it sucks ass. Tankies are another breed altogether.
Why does communism(not tankies) suck and why are your politics better?
I believe I already explained that. Give me an example of a country going communist and not becoming a dictatorship.
My politics are better because they don’t result in that.
Every major power is sinking into dictatorship. Every major power is contributing to climate change, which will result mass deaths and displacements.
Oh, please, that's got to be the biggest false equivalence I've heard in a while now. Every single communist nation has rapidly become a dictatorship, because that's literally what's supposed to happen in the transition phase. That's totally different from real democracies being eroded by far-right extremists—and plenty of the world's democracies are still fighting those extremists and their democracies are still alive. Stop hand-waiving away these stark differences with bullshit generalizations like that.
Nice though it has already gone off to political fringes to the point I avoid the comments for many news and political postings
It seems just somewhat useful for tech news and discussion. For everything else I still use Reddit.
I don't like it. The meme communities are political, and not funny
I'm pretty left leaning, and I agree. It was already burning me the fuck out on reddit, and now the whole "USA politics everywhere" thing is picking up pace here. Even if it's not us politics, it can get tiresome after a while when politics bleeds through communities, or when us politics/news bleeds through world politics/news communities. We get it, America number 1, now let me look at some beans.
Become the change you wish to see?
I think the issue with trying to apply that logic is you have an echo chamber already forming/formed. If you don't agree with the majority or go with the flow you'll either be downvoted or ignored.
It is great since there is not a lot of content , I've had a lot free time for me to learn new things.
How do you get not enough content? I can scroll for hours.
I can scroll for hours on all or something, but when it comes to subbed magazines/communities I'm actually interested in, and then content within those I'm truly interested in engaging in, it gets trimmed down significantly
What i do is use Subscribed New and then once i am done with that i go to All Top past 12 hours to get a gist of what everyone else is talking about.
Not content that I care and I only use the subscribed and I am okay with it. I am not complaining.
I like it. I'm glad most of the chaff that cluttered up Reddit stayed on Reddit.
I just joined yesterday after repeatedly getting permabanned from Reddit for reporting pedos, and I think I like it here. Compared to the amount of content on Reddit it's quite anemic here but that's to be expected given how long the platforms have been online, respectively.
Way too much propaganda.
Meaningless vague blanket statement
Politics flow out everywhere. 'Republicans did that, (some other politic word) did that' etc. Compared to reddit, at least my feed was from things I enjoy, not some ass-ham complaining about his problems.
Everything is political. "Apolitics" is apathy, which accepts the status quo, which is a political position.
I am suprised, this is so overran by communist scum. Not much different from reddit.
Lemmy is all about community, most people here are from middle or lower class family and they don't like riches bcz they have seen exploitation by them(mostly by big tech company), that's why they oppose capitalism and hate capitalists but saying them communist(in the bad sense like the gov in russia and china) i think is wrong.
You can say us communist if you want to show the good things from communism ideology like caring about labor(all the hard working people) and stopping few people from gathering all the money and power(this is where russia and china failed).
Look, if i said about what was happening in my country during socialism, which we had before 89, I have got downvoted by butthurts that are ignoring history and facts. That regime lived of oppression of other people and anyone who defend it is communist scum. If i say I am againist any kind of racism, and that includes any color of skin, black, yellow, red, white, hell, even green, I am for them one that is racist, without any further evidence, because "racism against white people isnt possible, because it lack systematic oppression". Hell no, they are again some neo marxist scum and therefore included in first category. I get they are usually just entitled ignorant american brats, but it is, what it is.
It completely replaced Reddit for me. I love the project. It is getting better and better.
same :)
For better or worse, me too.
People singing praises, but it needs to improve, i shouldnt need another website to find communities; also the state of fractured communities with same name that dilute content.
On the flip side, major communities being hosted on defederated instances is a concern.
Which ones are those? Maybe I can't even see them
I know beehaw defederated from lemmyworld and they have some pretty big communities on there. That's just an example that I know of because my first account was beehaw. I'm sure there are others.
Ah makes sense
I can still see beehaw content because they didn't defed with lemmy.ca, but I've avoided posting to their communities. They feel like gated communities, which wasn't productive to community building.
i just blocked beehaw communities because i don't want to accidentally get into a discussion there. If they want to isolate themselves, that's fine, they can exist as their own little thing.
Which is great to do, we can like something and want it to improve at the same time.
Better blocking feels like a priority for me because it would quell most of the defederation issues.
This also reminds me that Lemmy needs better mod tools. I think that's part of the reason Beehaw defederated
Oh for sure, I think the only reason some communities are clean is because they aren't that big yet.
I've only had a handful of threads spiral out of control, and it was a mess to clean up each one. The button to remove something is right next to the button to make someone a mod. Also once something is removed, it's inaccessible to everyone including the mods. At one point I removed something and couldn't ban the user because the comment was gone. It was a spam bot though so I got them a little while later.
Another issue: blocking users will block all their content, even if they post in comms that you moderate. So if you're a mod you need to avoid the feature, otherwise the user that you blocked might go rogue in the comms that you mod and you'll only see it after it's too late.
What if "we" (users in general, specially mods) created some communal wishlist in some highly visible space, exclusively for mod features? Not just for the Lemmy devs, but for anyone who wants to code a third party tool.
Beehaw did that in one of their pinned local posts
Beehaw is fairly isolated from other instances, so odds are that the visibility wasn't that great, but I'll give it a check.
Im going to say it. I'm going to plug sync, again. Sync has this cool feature where it includes a list of instances and communities on them. It's a very cool and handy option.
Which website are you using to find communities?
Lemmyverse.net
I'm finding new communities just fine via the All feed
As others have said, it doesn't quite have the user base to reach critical mass. A lot of my old favorite subs aren't here.
Also...the user base isn't as diverse. I used to click through to see the comments on Reddit to find those comments that provided fresh perspective, gave more context, or explained nuance. You'd click on some thread about Trump's latest legal troubles and get some real information about why things are moving slowly or why the defense made a particular choice. Or go into a thread about some upcoming video game being cancelled, or Google plan being changed or whatever, and get an actual analysis about how the financials don't work, or maybe how the market changed, or how some users were abusing the system.
On Lemmy, I often find myself just skipping the comments. They seem much more uniform, all just repeating the popular line: variants of "Ha, fuck Trump!" "Lol, Russia sucks!" "Company X doing this should be against the law!" etc. I can usually predict what the comments are going to be without bothering to read them, and rarely do I come out with new information. It feels much more like an echo chamber.
Part of it is just that there's not as many users, I think, so there's just not as many posts and thus fewer 'gems'. Also, I think that the users who made the effort to migrate from Reddit probably skew younger, tend to be more uniformly left-leaning, and a larger share will be students or programmers as opposed to lawyers or carpenters or auto mechanics.
The especially annoying thing is that the same thing seems to have happened on Reddit. Yeah, I still moonlight there when I run out of content on Lemmy. And the number of comments seems to have dwindled, and the viewpoint diversity seems to have narrowed there, too. Maybe the normies just gave up and left.
A lot of us have tried out Mastodon and it seems like a pretty great alternative to both Reddit and Twitter, due to the user base.
I do wish it handled threads better though. It’s still as screwed up as Twitter when it comes to that.
Even the memes here, which accounts for like 90% of the everything feed, are the same 3-5 ideas recycled in different formats. I agree with most of the people here, but I miss that I didn't on Reddit.
To add to this: there is a not insignificant chance that the posts you see come from The_Picard_Maneuver, every time.
This might sound weird but there are a lot more assholes here than reddit.
On Reddit you can expect some percentage of the people to be assholes because some percentage of the population are assholes... but here, heaven forbid you go against the grain of the narrative.
As opposed to reddit, where most of the people are nice and some are assholes, here only some are nice and the majority are assholes.
People are a little too enthusiastic about their opinions here. It's kind of not great. I'm just here to enjoy myself and pass the time.
I envision a reddit clone with a "Live and let live" ethos where the only voting options you have are "Meh" and "That's just like your opinion man."
You're absolutely right! And people keep saying that they're nicer here which is not the case at all!
Counterpoint. It depends massively on what communities you use. So there’s a not so small possibility that both you and the people you disagree with are right.
I would normally agree with you, but I usually see this in communities like ask Lemmy. And it's not usually about disagreements. Most of it is people just being complete assholes because they misunderstood something. Now, I know assholes are every where, and that's not the problem. It just annoys me when I see comments like "everyone is more friendly here".
That's true. Some of the communities are great... but there were way way more, way larger, way more active communities on Reddit that were great in the same way too.
My experience is the opposite. Both platforms are full of assholes tbh, but reddit is like nothing but, here you can occasionally have actual discourse, though I assume that will change before long.
I think it's a numbers thing. The larger the user base, the more the average skews towards being mellow/nicer.
That is interesting.. I don't have the same experience, at all. Quite the opposite really.
For now, I find it kind of boring. On reddit, I used to spend more time in comment sections than regularly scrolling. Now I don't really do that, because there are either no comments or the comments are the same.
When I started using lemmy with the default sorting option ('active' i think?), I would see the same posts for days, now I use top 6 hours and that problem is fixed, but lemmy now feels like a news site with comments. Also I am European, but it feels like 50% of content is some local American politics. I don't care about my own town's politics, so I don't care about that guy from Minnesota either.
A post from asklemmy hasn't shown up in my feed in a long time and I kind of forgot it existed, but looking into it, looks like one of the only interesting places here, so I guess, I have visit it more often.
Curating a good subscribed feed and community blocklist has been my trick.
Linux/FOSS Bros are ruining it for me more and more every day.
Not even with my comments, but others. I'm so sick of seeing basic comments extremely downvoted because "ThaTs NoT OpeN sOurCe".
Like a post a was reading a few minutes ago about Microsoft Paint being updated, and someone said it was Windows 11 exclusive, and the other guy said Windows 11 isn't half bad. The comment is super downvoted, because Linux best, Windoze BAD!
You're going to drive away people who just want to have a conversation if you guys don't learn how to be normal, holy shit. I'm a tech bro and you're driving ME away.
Open source, left is good, right is not, there is no center, eat the rich. Oh and because I can't buy a house the world is fucked. Fucking billionaire landlords.
With the Reddit migration, Lemmy has been primarily liberal, not left.
Unfortunately
Indeed
I think it's inevitable that lemmy attracts these kinda people. At least for me, I got out of Reddit not just because of the API decisions, but because I just don't like the idea of having 0 control over my services. The API thing was just a wakeup call.
I'd say that I'm "part of the problem" in terms of shilling for FOSS software, but I was the same back on Reddit. So it's gonna be my type of people that come in here.
Either that or tankies
I think many people don't understand this is the entire point of being on Lemmy. They just want Reddit without ads, but without FOSS we would sooner or later become Reddit. So of course we are going to care about FOSS.
It's the same with people who use Linux but say they don't care about FOSS. Linux is Linux because it's FOSS. Otherwise it would just be Chrome OS or Android.
That last sentence is so true. I love FOSS and tech, but there are cases where proprietary software is better, and that’s okay. Let’s be objective, not an echo chamber.
Discussion is difficult. This place feels like a club sometimes, and if you don't subscribe to the exact same ideals, you just get shouted down. I'm here for discussion, and dissenting opinions, but it just isn't allowed to exist here.
To add on to this; Smugness is rampant. It reminds me of Linux user Groups in college. More than half the time was spent shitting on Windows (Reddit), and if you dared to ask a question you were ridiculed for not knowing it, or people who put more effort into telling you to look it up yourself than it would take to answer you in the first place. I can echo the same club mentality as I’ve on more than one occasion described why a particular political idea isn’t viable based on votes in Congress only to be dismissed without any counter argument as “I don’t understand _____”. So there really is no discussion, it’s essentially just shitposting and piling on, and if I liked that I would have stayed on Facebook.
We need more kind diverse people.
At this point, I don't even care if they're kind, I just want discussion.
I often delete comments before I even post them, knowing that it just isn't worth it most of the time.
I cringe when I see new messages. Aw fuck, who did I piss off now?
This comment chain has given me multiple bouts if anxiety for the exact same reason. Thankfully everyone is being nice so far.
Yeah I had a few times where I'd take a week off just because I didn't want to be angry looking at my inbox full of furious 18 year old trans tankies defending Stalin/Xi
Deleting before I post is something I’ve done too. Sometimes you just need to type it up, but it doesn’t need to be sent. I get it.
Let's start. Windows 2000 when came out had more scalable networking than Linux.
To be fair that was true on Reddit too. And is true on spaces such as twitter as well. I think it’s just a symptom to anonymity that people treat each harshly and consider others’ views less than their own. There are just trigger topics you have to avoid because there doesn’t exist an online platform where productive discourse is going to happen.
It was similar, but on reddit there was enough people to occasionally get someone interested in genuine discussion. This comment chain is the most productive conversation I've had on Lemmy. In fact it's the only one.
It's a solid meh.
I came for a reddit replacement and instead I found an interesting subset of what I got at Reddit. And it is not better content or engagement wise. It's useful but niche, and therefore less useful overall than Reddit was.
I wish some of the niche communities were more active but overall I like it very much. It's my go to diversion.
It's organic, and full of Internet weirdos, feels like reddit of decades ago, except everyone kinda knows each other here.
Sometimes the reddit circlejerks do flare up though.
Meh. Its slow, and the politics are more extreme. I've spent a good portion filtering most politics that I can out of my feed.
It's alright here. There's enough to keep me off reddit and not enough to keep me on my phone constantly.
I LOVE the idea of Lemmy and the decentralized web and people coming together to forge our own way. But there's a far too high ratio of elitism, smugness, arrogance and belittlement to people that just want to discuss the things we enjoy. It is just really unfortunate. I don't engage very much, or at all really so I understand part of that is on me, but every discussion I find I'd like to chime in on is already polluted by assholes. It's just disheartening.
It's really incredible how many savage assholes there are around here. My theory is they're bots designed to encourage engagement by enraging us. It's pretty effective.
As one of said assholes, the biggest problem I have with Lemmy is that it's stuck trying to be both the Old Internet in which directness was prized and encouraged no matter how acerbic, and Comfort Internet for nonpartisans.
When these two crowds mix there's going to be discomfort.
And freedom from participation in politics is hiding in privilege to some very real extent, so in some ways I don't know how to be sympathetic to your plight.
But all politics is ragebait, isn't it? I've come back to this general feeling that we need more rage, not less.
The doctrinal conflicts on the Internet are yet to be resolved. We still have the disaffected rightwing types who haven't really had it sink in yet that they failed and their loser is and was always a loser. We still have moderate idiots who think that 'both sides' need to curtail their extremists.
It's an irony that one of the Left's strengths is dogmatism, because I do think there's dogmatic leftists here that I find insufferable. I didn't used to dislike male feminists as much as I do now, but let women represent women's issues.
In the meanwhile, the leftist dogma of No Platforming Stupid Rightwing Shit needs to be more formidably advanced.
I'm getting very tired of the privacy nuts. I get that it's important, but I don't want to hear about it all the fucking time. I also miss my city subreddit, but I'd rather hear about how Google's fucking me over for bajillionth time than use the Reddit app.
Agreed. Foss, privacy, Linux. Topics that are too high a proportion of all Lemmy posts.
Yes, reading Lemmy you’d think Linux has a 90% market share.
Outside of amd64 desktops it kind of does.
I mean, Lemmy itself is FOSS, and the vast majority of instances are running on Linux. The main reason I am here and not on Reddit is that Lemmy is FOSS.
Lemmy wasn't specifically built for being primarily a platform for discussing the things it was built on. It makes sense there's a nice lively community for all of those topics, but they are so out of whack proportion wise with the types of content I want to see.
Yeah, some made paranoia going on in some communities. The amount of people telling me I shouldn't use the apps on my smart TV due to privacy yesterday was mental.
I got into a similar situation ower my bedside lamp... I perfectly understand what you mean.
I wonder if this is what the internet was like in the 90s when everyone on it was lien the Lone Gunmen from the X-files?
I find a lot of the people here to be extremely bitter resentful people. But I'm willing to give it a chance.
I had originally upvoted this comment but then I saw this gem you posted below:
Really classy.
acting like going through post history is discourse, like this, should merit a sitewide ban for 36 hours
I literally saw it three or four posts lower and recognized the name. I didn't go through their history stalking them.
It's good but it doesn't feel like there are many vibrant communities with their own subculture. I know I'm part of the problem. I've heard people say 90% are lurkers, 9% are posters, and 1% are content creators. I'm clearly in that second category.
Better than me! I'm the 90%, but have found myself wishing more people posted, so.....
I like Lemmy, but I do have some problems with it. Based on my experience.
All the big Lemmy instances is biased for the Left wing, like Reddit is.
If you go against the popular opinion. You will get dogpiled. To be fair, this happens everywhere. But I was hoping Lemmy will be different. So it's mainly on me for hoping.
The niche communities are dead or dying. This a population problem, but it still sucks.
They need to give us (the users) the ability to block instances.
Outside that stuff, I like Lemmy.
When you say "left wing". I assume you use the US political reference, right?
Just so you know, in a lot of places, "US left wing" is further right than the most (non-fringe) right wing party there is.
And as such, the perception of politics in the US goes from "insane but maybe a step in the right direction" to "absolute evil and/or destructive/immoral"
My point, which I'm not trying to make to annoy or offend you, but you might want to reflect on: A lot of what is considered "political left wing" in the US, is "common sense" elsewhere.
So, you running into discussion forums is not necessarily that they are "left wing", but rather not deprived of morality, and share a different set of common sense values of creating a society that is fair, the vulnerable and sick are taken care of, no one is exploited, etc etc. That just happens to be "socialism" according to Americans, and otherwise the full political spectrum in my country as to the nuances on how to best achieve that.
I think the problem here is often not the ideology, but the way people go about it. I'm left-wing but I basically can't stand to talk to other left-wingers about politics as they're so sanctimonious, disrespectful, and hypocritical online. So the problem isn't that a platform is left-wing, but rather that there's left-wingers on it if you follow that logic. Please note I said if you follow the logic, not if you agree with it......before I get dog-piled on for saying something non-flattering about liberals.
Then there's Lemmygrad…
And Hexbear
Yea, it's a problem with most people who're heavily into politics these days I think. They're more concerned with dunking on the people that don't follow their beliefs than they are actually discussing issues. If they run into someone that isn't part of their echo chamber they can't handle it and start throwing insults.
Bingo. This is exactly the issue for me. The militant and intolerant attitudes and name calling. It's deeply disappointing.
This is a weird way to cope with the fact that this place is filled with unbearably smug leftists. There are also a lot of places that are way more right wing than america. I.e. a lot of the muslim world, India, etc... I think it's telling you pretend those places don't exist and I'd argue you have a eurocentric world view.
Give me a break and stop huffing your own farts please.
It depends on the topic. What right-wing views of the Muslim world, India, etc. are we talking about? Women’s rights, other human rights issues aren’t going to go over well in any mainstream western focused site. US right-wing views are just a bunch of bad faith arguments. The smugness is one thing, but we don’t have to be tolerant of intolerance.
There are plenty of good faith arguments on the right, just because you don't agree with them doesn't make them bad faith. I'm sick of that phrase being thrown around at points people personally disagree with. It's made the phrase meaningless.
Find me one that isn’t based on a lie. It’s been a long time since it was just a matter of disagreement. I’m not throwing the term out, it’s true.
Border control is a big one. There is a strong push amongst actual leftists to open our borders completely while simultaneously pushing for serious social programs. I hope I don't have to explain the issue with that. "No Borders, No walls, No deportations at all" and all that.
Another one would be the police abolition movement. I think there is good reason why every functional country on earth has a police force.
FWIW, I agree with you on both points. I also think the right has a huge issue with "bad faith" arguments though (way more so than the left).
e.g. the decade long "replacement for Obamacare" that's so much better and perpetually going to be released just after X. This is before Trump even entered the picture.
I'll give you another example, guns. I think the right has a point that it's a mental health issue, but they're not actually willing to change policies in a way that makes mental health care more accessible, so it's an incomplete solution/there's no way to actually get the job done.
Election fraud is another. I'm all for ensuring elections are done with integrity; however, when the efforts to "fix election fraud" aren't supported by real issues when they enter a court of law (where there's real skin in the game, not just words), and when these efforts are targeted at disenfranchising democrats and changing little in rural areas that's a huge red flag. For a specific example, see 1 ballot box per county during COVID (an urban county with over a million people could have the same number of ballot drop boxes as a rural county with a few thousand). Another example would be the absurdly long polling lines in Georgia and the laws attempting to ban people from even giving folks waiting in those lines water.
Independent state legislature theory was also another hellish policy idea out of right wing think tanks that would allow state house legislatures to outright negate votes (fortunately the US supreme court killed that -- but it should give you an idea for how dirty Republican reps are willing to be and where their moral compass is resting).
i.e., there are potentially interesting policy points in the right's voting base. However, the right's politicians are completely off the rails (and operating in a way that I don't believe any American should support -- both in demeanor and policy).
My honest response to some of these points
I don't think throwing money and psychiatrists is a solution to the mental health problem plaguing society today (declining mental health is an issue far beyond a couple of wackos shooting up a school). Guns are part of American life for a lot of people, it's enshrined in the constitution. Argue about interpretations if you want but that doesn't change the fact that there are people in America who are willing to take the negatives of gun ownership so they can have the positives. People don't like feeling helpless and for some gun ownership is the most important thing when it comes to protecting their family.
The truth is mental health will not improve until material conditions improve. Mental health counseling is not going to do squat to a continuously discouraged populace. I also think "mass shootings" as we know them today are a uniquely modern phenomena that is influenced by the modern media landscape. People idolize going out guns a blazing on their own terms and the media circus encourages the next one. I am willing to live with the consequences of gun ownership if it means I have a gun to protect myself, especially as things go further south.
I do agree that the right does not have many good politicians. I feel a bit politically homeless sometimes because of how bad things are. But the elected officials do not always accurately represent the voting base, we simply vote for who we are supposed to just like people on the left do. I think you have to either be crazy or financially motivated to get into politics in the first place so that really only leaves weirdos. The most successful people on the right are running businesses and feeding their family, not playing the dirty game of electoral politics. I think the left wing politicians are just as corrupt though, but people just look past it because its their side. Check out Nancy Pelosi's amazing stock trading performance as an example.
I know, I have friends with like 30+; I honestly don't care that they have them. I've increasingly seen an appetite from Democrats I know to just drop the damn guns thing. We really don't care about "taking all the guns", we just want people to stop shooting up school buildings and random public events in our cities. I don't think that's a big ask.
Here's where Republicans fall short. They give no potential solutions. If mental health isn't solved by "money and psychiatrists", why not? What will solve "metal health"? There's a fine line between yelling "IDK look over there" and making a quality suggestion. People love to talk about both sides and debates ... but there hasn't been a serious policy debate in this country at the national stage in years because one side decided to start yelling something with the substance of "DDDDURRRRRRRRRRRR DDURRRRRR DDDDDURRRRRR" (typical about "woke", "radical", "socialist", etc) rather than making actual points.
I can't even tell you why Trump's Obamacare replacement plan is or isn't a bad idea, because (again) he never presented one. He just said "there will be one". I don't vote for promised plans, if you want my vote you better have a plan. The Democrats do have (even if flawed) thought out plans; the Republicans (increasingly) don't.
I can't tell you what Trump's plan for this is either, because while you tie the gun and mental health crisis together and link them to the economy, the Republican party as a whole doesn't. There's not a policy position arguing "we're going to solve the gun problem by doing X". Here's the Republican platform for 2016, reused for 2020: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2016-republican-party-platform. I challenge you to find anything in there stating how they're going to address the left's concerns about gun violence.
This is the Democrat platform for 2020, see "Ending the Epidemic of Gun Violence" (and yes it includes a real plan for how to solve the migration/border problem by attacking it at the roots not "building a wall" -- which the cartels just dug tunnels under and cut through): https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2020-Democratic-Party-Platform.pdf
You're welcome to disagree with parts of the gun plan, or the plan in its entirety, but it's a starting point. In a functioning Democracy, Republicans would come back with a serious proposal for "here's how to improve this situation in a way that protects gun rights." They have done no such thing. It would be one thing if this was "just" about guns, but it's not, they do this all the time.
This to me is missing the forest for the trees. Sure, there are definitely corrupt politicians on both sides. However, what are they getting done and who are they serving at the end of the day?
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/biden-promise-tracker/ https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/
Again, Trump promised to "repeal Obamacare and replace it with something so much better" (loose quote). Republicans before him like Paul Ryan made the same bogus claims. They all said "we'll get it out right after we repeal Obamacare". That's not a plan, that's a literal death sentence for some number of Americans (I won't make up an internet statistic). Hell no I'm not voting for that, and I immediately am going to question your motive as a politician for suggesting the moral equivalent of "take the worn tires off the car and only then check to see if there are even any other tires to put on the car" (carrying the metaphor further, people have places to be and things to get done, they don't need you breaking their cars in the middle of their day to day lives with no fix in sight).
Meanwhile, Joe Biden promised to make progress on the country's aging infrastructure and followed through with the infrastructure bill.
I am a policy and action oriented person, and the policies and actions of Republican politicians I find reprehensible and at times completely counter productive.
I'd encourage you (and your friends) to pay attention to the Democrats running in your area, and their actual policy stances. There is variance in the Democrat's platform (especially at the primary stage), and there is an appetite for compromise (they do it constantly, the infrastructure bill was passed because of compromise; it was not everything the majority of the party wanted -- far from it -- but it was what they could get done now). I'm willing to let guns go for other priorities, personally guns are not a "hell no" issue for me, and I know many other Democrats that agree. The country hasn't lost its mind, but the Republican party has, and their false compromise, hostage taking, and political theater is making it REALLY hard to get shit done.
You seem to give the benefit of doubt to Republicans, and then assume the worst of Democrats. We can provide Receipts of Republicans breaking the law, having massive conflicts of interest etc but that's ignored while Gossip about Democrats is treated as cold hard fact. This was rampant during 2016. Look at the Clinton Foundation vs The Trump Foundation. One of those is a real charity, the other is a grift. But the Real one was the one to get heavily scrutinized.
I dislike the republican establishment greatly. They are filled with people just as corrupt as the left. Does that answer your question? The Clinton foundation is far from innocent either, you're not making the distinction you think you are. The Clintons are extremely corrupt, I think an honest person would be able to come to terms with that.
You dislike them, yet you’re repeating their talking points. The GOP is corruption personified. The left isn’t in the same stratosphere. It was the Republicans whose refused to vote on Judges during the Obama administration so they could stack the courts with questionable Judges. It’s the Republicans who fabricate voter fraud with no evidence to pass their voting restrictions that unfairly target legal voters that just happen to vote against them. It’s the Republicans who start up endless investigations without knowing what they are looking for. That’s three odd the top of my head. They’ve been up to it for forty years and recently straight up gave up creating a platform with any sort of governance instead just using wedge issues and fabricated culture war issues to make you think they’re doing anything for you. They aren’t, and they will turn on you the very second it benefits them because. If you haven’t noticed all the old reasonable Republicans are gone. The grifting crazies are the only ones left.
I don’t care to get into another Clinton conversation. I know how this goes. Laundry list of accusations with discredited evidence or implications that go nowhere because the vast majority of them stem from Republican strategists in the 90s who had a vested interest in defeating the Clintons.
Who is saying that? Right-Wing Media? There is no significant movement to completely open our southern border, nor is it something the current administration is demonstrably moving toward. What is happening is right-wing media creating a strawman in bad faith to misrepresent liberals opinions on the southern border. For example, not wanting to build a border wall doesn't not equate wanting an open border. Just like not wanting to buy a Suburban doesn't mean I want to walk to work. The border wall has been a thirty year grift that Republican politicians use to line the pockets of their donors through bloated contracts. Republicans have controlled the Presidency for 12 years over the last two decades. Why wasn't it already done? If you look into it, you'll find significant logistical issues including there being a river and terrain that isn't friendly to construction. There are areas where an existing wall cuts off US Citizen's farms and ranches, and where Border Control can't easily get to. Then there's the topic of Circular migration where preventing some migrants from leaving would double-down on your social services problem you mentioned.
This one again is not in any supported by any politicians or most people. "De-fund the Police" is a poor slogan any way you look at it. Yes, there are people that mean in literally. I can't blame them. The truth is there are areas of this country where the Police act more similar to organized crime than a protection force. This is not literally true the vast majority of the time, but you can't go 2 days without hearing about a situation where there's corruption, or unneeded escalation that causes another civilian death. The movement I'd like to see is to Reform the Police, but that doesn't really sound great in a protest march does it? Police should de-escalate situations, not escalate them. We hear these stories of mentally ill people who are not violent getting shot because someone calls the police to get them help, and the responding officer starts yelling with their gun out making everyone nervous and the mentally ill person gets shot. Or we see stories of overreacting to children, even arresting them for minor disobedience. We see an "us vs them" mentality coming out of the Police where they refuse to hold their own accountable. All of these things should be agreed upon universally imo. I've said this to some Gun-Loving friends before. Why should "he had a gun" be a reason for a cop to shoot you dead without getting your day in court? Last I checked conservatives are way into the 2nd Amendment, so this universal love for the Police, especially when they do wrong is puzzling to me.
I have a lot of leftist friends and they vehemently defend open borders. I remember all the marches during trump era that explicitly said "Immigrants are welcome here". I can obviously only speak from my experience but I think you are underplaying the lefts lack of hard line stance on border control. They actively fight defend illegal immigrants taking American jobs. I think lax border control is a pretty common part of leftist belief in USA as of late.
Same thing goes for the defund police movement. Here are articles reflective of that sentiment at the time https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html I don't really know how you can deny this line of thought exists in the modern political environment. Don't blame me when all the messaging is "ACAB" and people are yelling "Abolish the police" in their marches. They often argue reforming the police is impossible and that total abolition is the only way forward.
The two things don't really have much to do with another. Nobody likes when the police do wrong. There are obviously nuanced situations where the right may downplay officer misconduct for narrative purposes but that doesn't mean the right wants the police to be a mafia. There are a lot of people on the right who like police but dislike bad policing. I don't think it's that hard to understand.
I can’t take you seriously when you say “leftist” it’s straight out of right-wing propaganda. So I doubt you have “leftist friends” at all. You’re even saying the quiet part out loud. Trump immediately banned everybody from coming into the country from Muslim countries regardless of the reason. I don’t think you understand how difficult the Immigration process is. These people spent all the time and money to come here, were approved and were literally on planes when this happened. That’s some heartless xenophobic bullshit and idk how you could support that.
Migrant workers don’t take American jobs. This has been proven so much it’s not even much of a current Republican talking point. Southern states that have enacted strict immigration laws ended up having farms with no one to harvest as Americans didn’t want those jobs, for they pay that was offered at least. If you’re conflating this with people who immigrate legally taking jobs, that’s a different issue and American companies are the ones you should be mad at. It’s not as simple as you think, often it costs the company a lot and it would have been cheaper to hire an American.
Those protest movements have no elected power. This is a situation where systemic issues in policing really present two different outcomes. If your community was treated the same as the communities that these people are apart of, I’d wager the rhetoric would be similar or even more violent. Anti-Police rhetoric on the right was rampant in the 90s. Current conservatives care more about treating people they don’t like bad, so they are Pro Police every time an incident happens with a black person. We all should be calling for reform when a cop becomes Judge, Jury, and, executioner just because they think the person has a weapon. How 2nd Amendment advocates aren’t just as upset at the police as the community that is victimized by them is extremely telling imo.
You are easily the most bad faith person I've had a discussion with on here so far. I'm just expressing my opinion and you are accusing me of faking having leftist friends for some reason despite knowing that a lot of people hold the views I discussed. Not really worth responding to your novels, sorry.
I’ve run into you in other threads. Your expressed opinions are all conspiracy theories or right wing talking points. Your account is a couple days old. There’s nothing showing me you aren’t a troll. And if you’re not it makes no difference if everything you post is the same. 🤷♂️
I disagree that those two things have nothing to do with each other.
You have a constitutional right to bear arms right? If so, why does the possibility of you using that right give Carte Blanche to a Police Officer to shoot you dead and get away with it? I always hear that the right to bear arms is about standing up to tyranny… seems relevant to me. When Pro-Gun groups didn’t fight for Philando Castile it became crystal clear they are all full of shit.
It's not really "coping". Other than that, you are right about a lot of points. I am providing a Eurocentric point of view, as you put it. I have no other perspective or insight to share.
US politics are certainly lacking in morality relative to European farts. If listening to 5 seconds of Trump doesn't convince you, or the recent Republican debate... No rational mind or argument will.
"We must eat the billionaires. This is all the fault of capitalism. No wonder that's how they make their profit."
This sort of thing is 'leftist' everywhere.
Yeah, the US version.
No problem, no foul. We good.
the 'right wing' believes climate change is a hoax. you're struggling with a failed conception of 'both sides' politics. please receive a plot update.
You're straw manning the hell out of anyone you don't perceive to be on your side, you're the average leftist lemmy shitposter people are complaining about in this thread.
you're simplifying a complex situation
i wish there were more people on here, i feel like i'm talking to a wall
i'm pretty sure i'm basically the only poster on r/hongkong and i'm not even a mod there (which would be a valid reason for being the only poster)
Its kinda lacking a pulse and the people here are no different than on reddit.
There were two or three weeks were it felt pretty good but now it's just reddit with less upvotes/comments.
Also, some days ago, some mod just deleted one of my posts without any notification. I just had to notice it was gone 🤷♂️. At least on reddit I was always notified about that and got an explanation (even though it was stupid a lot of times).
Well, yes. People are people, on Reddit or elsewhere.
There are fantastic people on Lemmy, just like there are fantastic people still on Reddit.
I mean why would they be ? Lemmy litteraly grew from Reddit people coming here
Well no lemmy grew from reddit people who were tired of reddits bullshit. But when they found a lack of witty memes they got bored.
Buggy and full of loud ignorant assholes. So pretty in-brand with my decades of experience online.
Way better the Reddit, just wish my city subreddit would move over.
I'm glad mine didn't. r/chicago is cesspool of casual racism.
You can encourage a parallel/sister community setup :)
Some of these communities won't move over completely, but over time you can grow the more open & accessible choice
Good aside from all the repetitive content. One of the problems with federation, I suppose. Someone sees an article they like and they feel they have to post it on every community related to politics on every instance they can find, for example. Mostly a politics problem, but also memes and gaming and technology. Okay, not mostly a politics problem.
I think the same problem exists in reddit as well. There's a lot of sub with slight variation so the same content will show up again and again because i subbed to multiple of those sub. (eg: holdmybeer and holdmyredbull)
If you use the browser UI, the ui will group all those crosspost together.
I think a good client could solve the repetitive content problem. For example, if a link shows up in more than one community, have it posted once with a divider above it saying where it's been posted.
I've been finding the same and have just started using the filter option in my client lately. It's not ideal but the alternative is that I get bored of seeing it and stop using Lemmy altogether.
I do worry that the repetitive content will drive new users away
I'm on kbin, so no client yet, but it'll get there.
It’s alright. Doesn’t replace what I got from Reddit but I also use it less and it’s only form of social media so that’s a plus.
The political environment is rough. Lemmygrad and hexbear are toxic cesspools, which is unfortunate because I would genuinely like to engage with their political ideology more seriously but it’s inevitably drowned out by… well… them.
I’ve blocked most of the top posters over there and things are much more peaceful, if quiet.
There’s still a lack of content creators out there, which is an issue. Growth is going to be a problem because, to be blunt? Lemmy is dogshit before you block all the spam, political shitposting, and those fucking Reddit repost bots.
Until the new user experience is cleaned up I don’t expect Lemmy to gain users on average. I’ll probably spin up my own instance in AWS at some point to play with it, or self host on some inexpensive hardware.
Tl;Dr: I get what I want from it but don’t see it having healthy long term growth
I'm in the same boat. I like it but unlike Reddit, I feel like closing the app after 10 minutes of scrolling because I either keep seeing the same posts or the posts have no comments to interact with.
Seriously though, they act just like the T_D crowd from reddit, but at least there it was easier to avoid them (and they actually started banning them eventually). I am legitimately convinced that there is a huge overlap in members, they never cared about politics just about being hateful, they wore a right wing mask on reddit and they wear a left wing mask here.
It's ok. Lots of very young people talking a lot about things they don't understand like its a fact.
There however a lot of fun when they give relationship advice to people that has been married for longer that they have been alive and acting like it is the same as braking up with you maybe partner of less then a week.
Kinda tired of hearing about Linux tbh
There is a lot of it, probably because the people tempted to join Lemmy/the fediverse are more technologically literate. I'm more tired of the constant "I like Lemmy" and "Reddit bad" stuff. I've seen basically this exact thread probably a dozen times already.
Technically literate and anti-authority. Good mix for being pro Linux.
Only a dozen?
I like the idea of Linux, but am not computer literate enough to mess with operating systems. I finally blocked LinuxMemes and that was like 90% of the Linux material in my feed.
I don't mind hearing about Linux - I use it daily - but the constant low tier memes make me want to block those communities.
Join other different community and stay in your local feed!
You're on a FOSS platform, wtf do you expect.
I feel like Lemmy is on its way and its main benefit is that it's not as cynical as Reddit to EACH OTHER.
So many people on reddit gripe about the smallest shit, especially the Steam Deck reddit, that conversations become either you're with my ideas or you're against my ideas. Like even though you're just trying to help others play a game, "I'm insulting you for free because of the way you said lowest fps is 33 with drops down to 29. I don't think it means what you think it means." (of course shoving a meme in there because that's their identity at this point)
I clearly meant average, but oh here comes -20 comment score when I explain that.
I see nicer comment chains from people on opposing political sides here even though I know a usual reaction these days would be to tear at each others' throats. Lemmy isn't devoid of it, but Jesus at least it isn't like how Reddit predictably uses a scalpel on your comments to find something to complain about.
But I think this might be the result of tailoring my experience over time with instances I want to see from and communities. That level of customization is awesome. But it does suck to see so many instance drama things happening in a much more rapid pace than reddit.
I actually experience the opposite. Others have posted about it in this thread as well. If your views deviate slightly on some topics it's way worse here than on reddit. The Tech Bros / Open Source Stan's here are insufferable. There was a post yesterday that said it should be illegal for video games to not distribute their source code... And the opinion that companies should be able to own the thing they made was heavily downvoted and ridiculed.
Great for daily mindless scrolling.
Still has a ways to go before it's as useful as reddit was for searching for specific information tho.
The people here are my people. However, Lemmy needs a bigger user base, and at the same time I fear that Eternal September
It's boring enough so i don't get addicted. I got clean from Reddit and I don't need another endless scroller.
Same here. I am interested in stuff people talk here but it gets boring when everything is about FOSS, privacy and news. The comment threads on Reddit felt endless but here they are much shorter which I would guess is better for having an actual discussion. So Lemmy is interesting but I don't spend much time on it.
My exact thoughts
I like it. No FREAKING ADS disguised as posts/comments. I was late to know third party apps exists for lots of things, so being aware of lemmy has changed my browsing habits on other platforms i.e looking for alternatives that work or have a model that I don’t feel too conflicted about (which honestly makes me happier). It’s the right amount of silent and busy for me. I’m just hoping for elephant-obsessed people (among other niche communities) to exist/gain a medium level of traction (frankly, even a basic amount would be okay). I also like that its name sounds like LET ME/ LEMME (lemme do what anything I want as long as it doesn’t harm the next person).
not nearly enough niche content like reddit because of the sheer lack of users, but browsing all is ok. except the content on all is lacking too its usually a linux post, an old meme, or biden in some capacity.
ahem and the porn sucks
i can only use the reddit app for like 5 minute intervals so u can extrapolate what i use it for
The only thing I miss from Reddit is the saved hentai posts I have.
It needs more memes and less edgy teenagers screaming about politics (that they clearly don't understand and take way too seriously).
Seriously I come to websites like this to get a mix of news and humour, not get yelled at by children who advocate for totalitarian regimes to "own the libs", I am on the verge of changing instances because lemm.ee won't let me block all of the two offenders at once, and I have to constantly remove every bullshit new sub they create, not to mention them infesting the comments section of anything news related to scream about "libs".
Literally they are indistinguishable from reddits T_D crowd, they act just as hateful and use the same language, they seem more concerned with "the libs" than any other political group, and they worship mass murdering dictators while being holocaust deniers / apologists. They can call themselves leftists as much as they want, all I see from them is hatred so they might as well be Trump Qanon Cultists.
I love it tbh. Even when people disagree with me it doesn't feel like I'm being attacked. On Reddit it feels like I'm being attacked even when someone agrees with me.
I disagree with you, but I still love you.
Always loved those replies where they say the exact same thing I said, but are "disagreeing" with me and being very angry and rude about it.
I like it, it's just missing some niche communities.
But overall, I get more response in "populated" communities compared to popular subreddits which is neat.
Overall I like Lemmy, but there's also a lot of doomers on here that do everything they can to make everyone feel miserable. I had to trim out a lot of communities that they tend to infest, so now I'm not getting as much interaction and have moved some of my traffic back to Reddit to have enough things to browse
cough cough Politics cough cough
Cool. I just really wish there was more people on !amateursatellites@lemmy.world . Currently there's just one more person it seems.
That looks like a cool community. I really wish there was some other means of discovering cool communities like this one.
!trendingcommunities@feddit.nl
I just subscribed to that one. I dont work the birds often, but they are fun to work.
It's definitely not a replacement for Reddit, and a lot of assholes have come over.
Absolutely! I've noticed some unprovoked snide remarks and mean comments. That's something that I do not miss from Reddit.
I like that it is a lot more independent but I also miss a lot of niche communities. Overall I still like it a lot .And there really is no going back since reddit has completely gone to shit. I now take more time off from social media.
I've read 4 books over the last couple of weeks. It's been great!
Yeah me too I just read now during my commute instead of scrolling social media.
Yeah, I've just been doing more productive shit. It's nice.
Hell yeah! I feel like a chill new pub opened up in my neighborhood. I found a new place where I belong
With sync, it was a pretty easy transition from reddit to here, though there are obviously differences in size and functionality. Overall, though, l'm happy to report that I can doomscroll and be just as miserable here as I could on reddit.
It's alright. It could definitely use some more growth, and it's been a bumpy road with it being Beta software and with the federation issues, but I've enjoyed my experience overall.
Growth and deep conversations is what I miss most about Reddit.
The posts where you have thousands of comments to read through where you could easily spend an hour or more just reading through comments of a single post.. I really miss that aspect.
Indeed. The main thing I miss is the wealth of storytelling content, it felt like Reddit had millions of stories for me to read and Lemmy doesn't have the same breadth of content.
Yeah, I agree. Hopefully it'll get closer each day.
It's no Reddit.... And thank goodness!
It aiight. Too many assholes sometimes but these kinds of people run rampant on the internet so I don't blame it. I only wish that the UI got a little more love but it works just fine.
What are you using to run it? I'm on connect for lemmy and it feels pretty close to reddit is fun on android.
I'm on the native web UI and Jerboa. Funnily enough, I'm trying out the other apps, so I guess Connect is now top of the list lol Thanks
Oh wow, I greatly enjoy the standard web Lemmy UI, it's so beautiful and wonderfully simplistic!
Oh, I don't hate it at all, it's perfectly functional. I only have the feelings that it could look better if a UI/UX designer went for the polish. I wish I had those skills so I could give it a shot myself.
It great for me it’s better than Reddit it has that small internet feeling
Like the entire fediverse, I also feel like it's much easier to reach other people here. What you write actually gets read. On Reddit, you either piggy back off one of the top comments, comment on a thread within minutes from it being posted or you are basically shouting into the void
I love how both liked and dislikes are visiable. Feels less one sided than reddit.
It didn't use to be that way on reddit. People generally disliked that change when they rolled it out.
I love it.
I have accounts on a dozen or so instances, though I'm only really active on maybe half of them. That gives me a fair amount of variety (every instance is different, depending on who they're federated with and what communities the users have subscribed to), and makes it so that if one of them is having issues, all that means is that I won't be using that particular account.
The relative lack of users doesn't bother me in the long run - yeah, it's sort of unfortunate that there aren't enough people to maintain really narrow communities, but I much prefer a thread here, on which there might be only three responses but they're all trying to actually communicate ideas, as opposed to a thread on Reddit, where there's 100 responses and 99 of them are just regurgitating memes.
Really, my biggest problem with the threadiverse is all of the people who want to make it into something it's not - who want to centralize and streamline and homogenize it so it'll have more appeal to easily-confused, meme-regurgitating idiots. I like it pretty much the way it is (with minor improvements around the edges of course), and would much rather that it be left to just slowly and surely draw in people who actually appreciate it for what it is.
I like it. Left reddit a while ago and this fills that spot.
It's a better setup being free of corporate ownership, and it's slowly growing, but I wish we could get the word out somehow.
I'm really loving it.
Same shit different platform. Dumb that people keep bringing up Reddit though. I don't have an app though so I still use Reddit on my phone. Sometimes porn.
I like it. Sucks that the more niche communities are not very active but hopefully they will continue to grow.
They are there the more you participate in them the more they will grow.
I like the format but I'm having a hard time finding the time to curate my own feed so I can see something other than the same rephrased headlines for a mile of scrolling.
I like it a lot, enough to stay through the tumult of figuring out issues like CSAM, spam, federation inconsistencies, and an inability to block instances at a user level. It’s small and doesn’t have many active niche communities, but Reddit had the same issue in the beginning. Honestly I like the small size of Lemmy, there’s enough content to keep me interested but isn’t so crowded that it feels like I’m shouting into the void.
It's good so-far, & I hope it continues to grow & improve. I've seen some communities partially shift to Lemmy, which is good, & I hope more of them come over. There are/were some thriving niche communities on Reddit which might be better served on an open platform like Lemmy. We already have c/vexillology for instance, but it's still relatively small & inactive compared to the old r/vexillology. I've got some stuff I've been working on myself which I hope to help contribute to this project.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !vexillology@lemmy.world
Noted. Good bot.
It’s not bad and has improved rapidly. It still needs a lot of growth. It has most of the main topics covered like news and politics, but what’s really missing are all the niche interests. Reddit still has all the small topics. It’s going to take time to build that here. Although federation is cool, it doesn’t help that an interest might be split across several communities. For instance, there are several steam deck communities. It makes it hard to build the user base large enough to get good, consistent content.
It lacks the critical mass of users needed to make even moderately niche communities feasible; basic examples are: City communities, State communities, communities based on car make/model - these are types of communities that Reddits excels at having and it's because of the size of the user base. The only point I'm making with this is that Lemmy is a very long way off from being a viable replacement for Reddit.
Next big problem is: Lemmy has a HORRIBLE new user experience...which I'm sure is significantly responsible for slowing Lemmy adoption. Single biggest issue is content discovery (which is just-ok if you got lucky and joined a super-massive Lemmy instance when you first joined, all the way to an atrocity if you got unlucky and joined a small instance when you first joined.
There's also a lot of complicated activities needed just to be a functional Lemmy user: like regularly backing up your user/instance preferences (including subscriptions) and replicating those preferences into another account/instance in case something happens to your current account/instance or your instance becomes temporarily or permanently inaccessible. This is asking too much of your common non-technical user, but it's still currently necessary just because of how often instances have problems. Think about all the user accounts on all the .ml instances that had to be re-created from scratch because there's no built-in way for users to do it. Users should be able to sync their user accounts similarly to how instances sync their content with each other.
For the record, the first instance I created an account on (when I was a brand new Lemmy user months ago) was a very small instance (but recommended on the very first page of the official join-lemmy.org site), and there just wasn't functional content discovery at all on that instance. It was a barren wasteland. The fact that servers aren't even aware of what content is out there on federated systems until some user on that system already happens to know about the content/community and subscribe to it is setting a lot of new users up for failure. Once I realized that it sucks being on a small instances, the second account I created was on Lemmy.world, but that instance suffers from it's popularity and is the frequent target of DDOS and was going down for me several hours a day. So, there's also a penalty for joining a big instance. I ultimately had to create numerous accounts on numerous instances and then try to keep the user preferences in sync across multiple accounts on multiple instances so that I can easily swap to a different account when an instance had problems.
Elitist user base: I swear, some lemmy users are worse than the old BSD forums and worse than stack exchange when it comes to taking criticism about the platform. Guaranteed, this comment will get downvoted, and I'll be mansplained about how content discovery is facilitated through having to have foreknowledge about some 3rd party websites that keep track of communities (which don't always work because not all instances can be indexed yet do to a laundry list of other problems), and what an idiot I am for not knowing this, etc, etc.
Having to go to this length just to use a reddit alternative - that's unacceptable to most non-technical users. Lemmy doesn't stand a chance of gaining momentum until these issues are solved.
I completely agree, especially on the account backup and migration. I know there is some Github program to help and while I would be able to use it as long as I finger out how to open/download it. It needs to be done on a computer and I never use Lemmy on my computer. So it suddenly becomes a much bigger step just because you need a 3th party program, especially as I just don't hang around on my computer, when I'm on it I have something in mind.
I enjoy all of Mötorhead, not just Mr. Killmister.
Oh wait, that's not the Lemmy you ment.
I still see and experience blind down voting and people missing each other's points, but much less than on Reddit. Overall I'm more aligned with the viewpoints shared here, especially because the vibe on the other site has really changed a lot after over 10 years.
I definitely use lemmy a lot less for mindless scrolling, due to the lack of content, which is great to be honest.
I spend more time researching stuff through articles, forums, YouTube, and yes, also the other site still when it's through specific Google searches.
I still see way more US centric content than I'd like but there's definitely a good European presence, and it's also on me because I'm still browsing basically the whole unfiltered feed at this point.
The only thing missing is a large contingent of sports fans to populate game threads and it’s perfect
I agree. The sports communities have not really take off yet. But have you checked out the fanaticus.social instance? It is devoted entirely to sports, and there is at least some level of conversation there.
Oh I have and regularly comment there with a different account. It has the potential to be exactly what I am hoping for, but the comments are still pretty sparse in comparison to what I have grown accustomed to. It doesn’t have to rise to that level, and I think once Lemmy creates flairs it’ll take off a bit more
It's okay. I'm certainly not going back to reddit, but Lemmy has its own share of problems. I feel we need better protections with defederating and banning. It is far too easy to get stuck on a dead-end server or have some aspect of Lemmy irrevocably ruined due to minor political squabbles between servers. We are still far too centralized, and lemmy.world/lemmy.ml/beehaw.org/etc control a lot of the Lemmy experience with their defederation posture.
Just today, a community had to do an impromptu shut-down because the lemmy.world admin decided to permaban the main mod for trivial/subjective/biased reasons (read the comments).
One of the larger instances recently defederated another smaller instance and now Lemmy is effectively ruined for those users. It's already annoying enough for normies to sign up for Lemmy and get the hang of it, and now they need to be worried about switching instances every 2 months when some admin decides to effectively wipe out a smaller server because of something out of the users' control. The smaller instance in question had NSFW communities that the larger instance got annoyed by, so the larger instance decided to defederate every community and user from that smaller instance.
I feel we need some sort of infrastructure to limit the effect of these types of things on different parts of Lemmy (users/communities/instances). Users shouldn't be lumped in with communities when defederating (at least not by default). Having an escape plan for communities also seems like it's very important. What if lemmy.world announced it was shutting down tomorrow? All those communities will be gone in the blink of an eye. Maybe we should be able to export communities to other servers somehow, so we can be more decentralized against failures of specific servers and admins.
Even a single community being inaccessible to a certain user can really destroy their experience - the problem isn't fully solved by breaking up "mega-servers" like lemmy.world. What if I couldn't access the main Linux community anymore? Guess I'm fucked? Make a new account somewhere else? Is that really the best solution we can come up with?
I think it's good for broad, serious/informative discussion but lacking for more niche or casual stuff. Niche is just because there's not enough users. Casual is probably partially that, but also because Lemmy just attracts a more serious crowd. Even the general gaming communities disproportionately trend towards serious discussion of industry problems. And a Lemmy that's better for casual stuff is probably worse for serious stuff.
!casualconversation@lemmy.world
I love it.
It replaces most of my Reddit time. I still find myself going to some subreddits that have activities wince several here that are more niche have zero activity.
The UI is nice, although seeing duplicate posts can be annoying. Pagination could use some improvement. When browsing by new, new items posted seem to push the list so you could see the same items over and over it enough new items are posted. Adding some kind of timestamp and better list filtering could improve the experience.
The people here tend to be nice. Conversations have been mostly pleasant.
Overall, I have enjoyed it.
Its decent for me. As others have said it's still got a long way to go but it works for what I use it for. I'll likely be sticking around here unless something better pops up or lemmy goes the way of the dinosaurs.
Me too! In the beginning, I wondered how I would fit in, but that's not a worry anymore.
ha
good but mapping communities lacking alot
I like
Same for Kbin
Lemmy has its own cuddly places
I kinda like it, it's a bit lonely here though. Lot of improvement needed still.
Honestly, I miss reddit. Lemmy is kinda good, but just doesn't do it for me.
Also the fucking leftists, I swear. Reddit has their share but you could block them without losing 90% of the site.
I feel the exact opposite. Reddit has turned into a MAGA hell hole. It’s totally unbearable and might as well be X now.
What subs in particular? To me it's almost indisputable that reddit is overtaken by your run of the mill performative lib. I really can't imagine someone saying they are MAGA and getting upvoted for it
Mostly more mainstream subs like r/damnthats interesting. Regardless, I feel there’s a good balance on Lemmy. I feel like it’s more palatable here. Someone disagrees and moves on. That’s how it should be. It’s no Kumbaya, and that fine. I just feel people move on here and won’t downvote you to oblivion on Lemmy. Anyway, we may disagree and that’s okay. Nice to have you here. I feel like this is the more adult place.
Can you provide a single example of someone proclaiming MAGA beliefs and getting upvoted significantly on that subreddit? Sorry but I find that very hard to believe.
I think the guy's personal overton window has shifted to the left.
Thats surprising, reddit always felt like /atheism but for left wing politics.
If you’re not a leftist, then I don’t want to talk to you anyway.
Yay, let's get this country together and fix thing-NO!
The way in which right-wingers want to "fix" things is wrong.
I really think you should turn off the internet and go talk to real people. This attitude is toxic.
I actually do talk to real people. Most of my family are right wingers. They’re wrong. Sorry.
I never said they were right.
You heavily implied it.
This is a good point to stop and reflect if you are projecting a lot of qualities unto others before you know anything about them. The ability to listen compassionately will take you far in life but you have to be willing.
The attitude that people can be "talked" out of their political views over the course of a single conversation is ludicrous.
A single conversation? Very unlikely. Over several? Yes, absolutely.
To add something that I haven't yet seen mentioned (didn't read the whole thing), porn. It hasn't taken off like it did on reddit, and I do miss that. I don't want my feed covered in porn, but I would like to have quality porn properly covered in an adult instance. Pornlemmy and lemmynsfw just doesn't cut it.
Im on infinity, and I don't love that there's little to no support for popup gifs and videos on the feed, I mostly have to go into a post whose title may catch my attention then wait for something to load (or not to load, redgifs has been incredibly hit or miss for me as of late, lots of forbidden requests and failed playbacks due to it). Idk, it's not the experience or the content that you'd expect on reddit using any reddit 3rd party app.
Other than that particular thing, it's been getting very us-centric, with political memes or stuff that only us people would care about. I might have to try other instances.
Other than that, I appreciate Lemmy, it made me mostly drop reddit except for Google searches, and I feel comfortable interacting with people here.
I think about it daily.
I like it so far. I wish niche communities were more active in comments (I see plenty of upvotes). Beyond that I'd love to see less copy posts but I guess it hard to pick who wins unless it's just some first come first serve for "front page?"
I'm enjoying it. It has a "not yet critical mass" feel to it. There are a few features I'd like to see (Hide Thread, something like RES, etc) and there could be more traffic, but I genuinely don't miss Reddit.
It's good enough to be part of my username.
I still use reddit for my city subreddit and some niche things but overall it's decent. We've come far from Facebook haven't we?
I was told there would be baguettes, however I'm not sure what a baguette is so I don't know what I'm looking for and I think there may be a notable nudist commune or three around here.
I see what's happened here. You've confused Lemmy with France. It's a very common mistake, but you can tell which one you're in by the smell.
Wait, what's LeScent?
LePew.
I like it a lot. I check it every day, several times a day
I like it a lot and it's still early days.
Will done Devs.
Can't wait for the rest of the Reddit subs to come over.
I'm liking it. The one thing I think is missing is it is sorta difficult to get critical mass for a community. It would be nice if we could have "meta" communities which just combine every instances community with the same name. It would likely be very problematic moderation wise but it would help get critical mass in a lot of places.
he was a great musician🤘
Definitely room for improvement but has that old reddit feel, I like it!
Full of commie rats
But what about ponies?
Agreed. I'm a liberal and I wouldn't consider myself a "moderate liberal" in every respect either (I support universal healthcare and think public universities should be free), but lefties who think communism is actually a good idea mystify me. Every single country that's gone down that road has devolved into a dictatorship, and that's by design, not merely a flaw in execution. Communists are as bad as fascists; they both aim for authoritarian rule.
Don't confuse communism with the tankies, as much as the tankies would like you to.
A tankie once told me that "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" was problematic. That's when you know you aren't dealing with a real communist and are in fact dealing with a Red Fascist.
I’m not. I know what communism is and why it sucks ass. Tankies are another breed altogether.
Why does communism(not tankies) suck and why are your politics better?
I believe I already explained that. Give me an example of a country going communist and not becoming a dictatorship.
My politics are better because they don’t result in that.
Every major power is sinking into dictatorship. Every major power is contributing to climate change, which will result mass deaths and displacements.
Oh, please, that's got to be the biggest false equivalence I've heard in a while now. Every single communist nation has rapidly become a dictatorship, because that's literally what's supposed to happen in the transition phase. That's totally different from real democracies being eroded by far-right extremists—and plenty of the world's democracies are still fighting those extremists and their democracies are still alive. Stop hand-waiving away these stark differences with bullshit generalizations like that.
Nice though it has already gone off to political fringes to the point I avoid the comments for many news and political postings
It seems just somewhat useful for tech news and discussion. For everything else I still use Reddit.
I don't like it. The meme communities are political, and not funny
I'm pretty left leaning, and I agree. It was already burning me the fuck out on reddit, and now the whole "USA politics everywhere" thing is picking up pace here. Even if it's not us politics, it can get tiresome after a while when politics bleeds through communities, or when us politics/news bleeds through world politics/news communities. We get it, America number 1, now let me look at some beans.
Become the change you wish to see?
I think the issue with trying to apply that logic is you have an echo chamber already forming/formed. If you don't agree with the majority or go with the flow you'll either be downvoted or ignored.
It is great since there is not a lot of content , I've had a lot free time for me to learn new things.
How do you get not enough content? I can scroll for hours.
I can scroll for hours on all or something, but when it comes to subbed magazines/communities I'm actually interested in, and then content within those I'm truly interested in engaging in, it gets trimmed down significantly
What i do is use Subscribed New and then once i am done with that i go to All Top past 12 hours to get a gist of what everyone else is talking about.
Not content that I care and I only use the subscribed and I am okay with it. I am not complaining.
I like it. I'm glad most of the chaff that cluttered up Reddit stayed on Reddit.
I just joined yesterday after repeatedly getting permabanned from Reddit for reporting pedos, and I think I like it here. Compared to the amount of content on Reddit it's quite anemic here but that's to be expected given how long the platforms have been online, respectively.
Way too much propaganda.
Meaningless vague blanket statement
Politics flow out everywhere. 'Republicans did that, (some other politic word) did that' etc. Compared to reddit, at least my feed was from things I enjoy, not some ass-ham complaining about his problems.
Everything is political. "Apolitics" is apathy, which accepts the status quo, which is a political position.
I am suprised, this is so overran by communist scum. Not much different from reddit.
Lemmy is all about community, most people here are from middle or lower class family and they don't like riches bcz they have seen exploitation by them(mostly by big tech company), that's why they oppose capitalism and hate capitalists but saying them communist(in the bad sense like the gov in russia and china) i think is wrong.
You can say us communist if you want to show the good things from communism ideology like caring about labor(all the hard working people) and stopping few people from gathering all the money and power(this is where russia and china failed).
Look, if i said about what was happening in my country during socialism, which we had before 89, I have got downvoted by butthurts that are ignoring history and facts. That regime lived of oppression of other people and anyone who defend it is communist scum. If i say I am againist any kind of racism, and that includes any color of skin, black, yellow, red, white, hell, even green, I am for them one that is racist, without any further evidence, because "racism against white people isnt possible, because it lack systematic oppression". Hell no, they are again some neo marxist scum and therefore included in first category. I get they are usually just entitled ignorant american brats, but it is, what it is.