The “Not enough mod tools” complaint is valid and I hope that improves as the platform moves forward.
I DO NOT get the disdain for the Lemmy userbase. I’ve been here for the past 4-5 months and can say I’ve had so many more meaningful and fulfilling conversations here on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit in the 10 years I was there.
I think it’s the same situation as between a small town and a big city. Reddit is huge and with a large number of people; you’re going to statistically get a larger number of assholes. Not to mention there are tens of thousands of people commenting on anything that hits r/all, so there’s no chance someone else is going to read your 1 comment that is drowning in a sea of other comments.
Lemmy feels more like a small town. Things move a little slower here, but there’s less competition to have your voice heard, and I end up seeing some of the same users time and time again across the Fediverse. I think that smaller feel means more people have a chance to see your content without it getting drowned out by the masses, which means more opportunity to make connections.
Some people suck, but Lemmy has been fucking awesome for me so far and I love this place because of that.
Idk. It seems like that was a bot trying to dissuade people from leaving Reddit.
One of the reasons we left Reddit was bc of the bots.
I had that kind of “astroturf-y” feel from the Reddit comment as well, but their opinion about mod tools is not entirely wrong.
The fear-mongering about CSAM being all over the place hasn’t been my experience, though. I’ve never come across CSAM here on Lemmy (sorry to those who have), but I don’t tend to keep NSFW posts on because I cruise Lemmy at work.
I think CSAM isn't prevalent here because the groups posting it know that they will get nuked from orbit by every other instance for doing so. I think there is still plenty of CSAM content posted on lemmy, but not on the main federated net/web, instead on a private net/web (you can whitelist federate instances, which would likely be what any group of instances handling illicit material would opt for)
CSAM isn't tagged as NSFW, because it's trolls (criminals) posting it. I think the admins have been pretty on the ball with removing it though
I can definitely say that I have enjoyed interacting with folks on Lemmy more than on reddit. Lemmy has felt like small subreddits even in the larger communities.
Every place on the internet is gonna have people that suck but the vast majority of my interactions here have been nice.
I’ve had so many more meaningful and fulfilling conversations here on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit in the 10 years I was there.
For one thing, it feels there is so much stronger of a push here to read the article instead of just the headline. Especially appreciated when someone adds the article to the post or leaves it in a comment. TLDR bot isn't for me but it helps.
There's also so much less of a push to be that meme comment that hits the top. There are still jokes but it's not this barrage of people trying to be the class clown at the expense of meaningful conversation.
But especially the bots. Holy crap the bots were making it such a headache. The same comment slightly adjusted then posted over and over as replies to top comments for karma farming. The same stolen repost on 20 slightly similar subreddits and it doesn't really belong on half of them. Not that Lemmy would be immune to this if it were as big as Reddit but sheesh I wish Reddit cared about the quality of content. They're fine with whatever keeps people coming back and I guess that kind of content appeals to the most people.
Same here.
I have had better experience here than reddit.
Much fewer one line / meme responses and more actual discussion on a topic.
I DO NOT get the disdain for the Lemmy userbase. I’ve been here for the past 4-5 months and can say I’ve had so many more meaningful and fulfilling conversations here on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit in the 10 years I was there.
Personally I have to disagree when anyone says how much nicer, better, greater the community here is. From my experience its pretty much the same as on Reddit by now. You got nice people and you got people who just like to argue for no good reason. But I think thats just how it is online these days and I don't see it as a bad thing. Just disagree that community-wise this is so much better than Reddit. But I guess thats an unpopular opinion.
I’m glad you shared your experience, honestly.
I’m happy with what I’ve seen here, but I’ll also say that I didn’t hang out in too many smaller subreddits. Even when I did, I saw some vitrol come out on the regular. Maybe the vibe on smaller subreddits is better than Lemmy?
Either way, I’m glad you’re here.
I definitely get the small town feel. Like I regularly run into the same users, even from different instances.
No one here tries to be a jerk, at least from what I've seen. And when you create content, people actually look and care.
A lot of it is also the instance you are on. Having my account on Lemmy.world I do not have to deal with hexbear for example. They don't have downvotes on their instance and have a totally different culture from the other instances.
Also, know that a lot of people that ended up on Lemmy are actually the banned rejects from reddit. And maybe seeing they don't get their "free speech" here either is what made them not believe in the platform.
I have very much been enjoying my time here, most people have been wonderful.
Agreed wholeheartedly. The Lemmy community has been wonderful. People here actually have good conversations, even if they take a few days to do so, unlike the folks on Reddit. Reddit comments were more meme-y and less substantive.
Yeah this is basically like reddit prior to the DIGG migration. People are much nicer here.
Redditalternatives has two types of folks who visit it, the smaller one thinks reddit is shit because of the choices the employees make. The larger one thinks reddit is shit because spooky woke moralist SJW shills paid by George Soros are censoring free speech via coordinated downvote, report, and ban campaigns.. Sometimes a person occupies both groups.
The former group likes Lemmy et. al. The latter gets on here, sees a pro union post top of all, shits themselves dehydrated, and leaves to write screeds like that one.
The former group likes Lemmy et. al. The latter gets on here, sees a pro union post top of all, shits themselves dehydrated, and leaves to write screeds like that one.
So you're saying we should upvote even more pro union content.
I'm doing my part!
Is this collective action to force change?
We have to take a first step if we're ever going to reach our fully automated luxury gay space communist goals.
One can dream... in the meantime the agenda's on industrial sabotage and unionizing
shits themselves dehydrated
You have a real way with words. Definitely stealing this one
As a 10+ year reddit user who has switched 98% to Lemmy, only checking reddit on my computer every couple days: Lemmy is completely fine, and I have seamlessly transitioned from Reddit.
Its userbase is more technical than Reddit's, and there's not as much content. But it is a perfectly good Reddit alternative. I find it isn't as addictive as reddit, which is awesome. I just wish there were more educational communities akin to AskHistorians, AskScience, etc.
I’m a 15-year user of Reddit. Lemmy right now is very similar to very early Reddit. Reddit’s users were more technical back then, too. I’m betting the early adopters of places like this are usually the technical types.
Another nice thing about Lemmy is that a lot of the low-effort, casual users on Reddit haven’t gotten here yet. Interaction here is definitely a lot more pleasant.
Also 15 year account and 100% agreed.
It's very akin to reddit ~10 years ago. Grammar nazis, "um actually" and pedantic debates are everywhere. You just have to not engage and consistently remember the other guy is probably a sweaty nerd who cares way more than you do.
The worst part is the pedants aren't even right most of the time. I've seen so many people complaining about perfectly acceptable sentence structure.
I tell myself they're just younger folks that have been failed by their schools, but then I get sad that they're younger folks that have been failed by their schools.
Actually, it's not always young kids, we all suck at grammar and that's okay. If clear communication took place, who cares?
The problem is that they're not recognizing clear communication and yet assume anything that confuses them is a mistake made by another.
Let's be honest - we're all sweaty nerds here
I actually have a sweating disorder where I sweat all day. I'm also a software engineer.
Ditto. No issues with Lemmy here. I mean, there were a couple of annoying communities (to me anyway) but it was easy to block them.
Generally I’ve not noticed any toxic behaviour otherwise. At all.
In fact I was somewhat taken aback at the quality of responses to my last post. It’s going to take me days to research all the options and advice I was given. And from what I could see, most if not all the comments were informative and interesting.
The signal to noise ratio here is excellent, even if the numbers of comments etc are lower.
The only toxic I got was when I accidental posted in a conservative thread without realizing what it was. Basically like /r/conservative. Fortunately I was able to block the instance and move on.
mmmm askhistorians was one of my favourite late night prowls.
Its* userbase.
That is an incomplete sentence.
“sentence fragment”
“‘sentence fragment’ is also a sentence fragment.”
“must conserve battery power”
closes eyes
It's not a sentence. Checkmate!
(I upvoted you.)
Big oof. Corrected, to my great and utter shame. I am debased before you, o grammar sage!
Lotta people coming here from Reddit expecting 1:1 replacement, and then get pissy that the 2 man dev team that's just trying to keep up with this sudden burst in activity isn't at parity with the multi-million dollar company that's been developing their site for almost 2 decades.
Honestly, I'm just tired of the constant comparison. Lemmy can be it's own thing. It's a work in progress and it has a lot of promise, but for anyone looking for their reddit experience, there's really only one place to get that.
I don't want Lemmy to be as big as reddit. When it does it's guaranteed to be enshittified.
It’s an open source project. It has no investors driving it toward user hostile profit seeking which is the primary force behind enshittification. A large user base doesn’t cause it, merely triggers it where the cause is already present.
I'm aware, that doesn't mean it's impossible though.
Enshitified is the wrong word imo. Reddit went downhill long before the API changes. Most popular subreddits were filled with karma farming bots spamming the same shit over and over.
By the end I only used reddit for news and niche hobbies.
"Enshittification" is the wrong word for everything. It is both often used incorrectly for what it means, and doesn't even represent what it means well. People just like it because it has the word shit in it. It's a bad term and I can't wait for it to fall into obscurity.
Say we're going to leave Reddit if the API changes go through
Actually leave Reddit
Refuse to elaborate
Get called toxic by the people who chose to stay
Honestly glad I left. For now at least when I see that new message number I'm not terrified of what I'll find inside
Yup, I haven't even bothered deleting my account. I'll get to it eventually, but I just don't go to Reddit anymore. I've been hereb since the API announcement (didn't wait for it to take effect), and I've been reasonably happy here.
I will say that lemmy seems a bit more leftist than Reddit, at least in the communities I visit. On Reddit, you'll get Bernie bros and whatnot, whereas on lemmy there's a lot of literal socialists/communists. But at least there are fewer far right folks baiting people into one sided debates. I find the socialists and communists easier to detect, so I think lemmy so far wins.
Lemmy isn't perfect, but it at least doesn't have ads and I can use why client I want, or build my own. So I'll stay until I find or build something better (I'm working on an experimental, distributed link aggregator).
I'm a bit of a Bernie bro but some of the communities on here aren't just left but like extreme left which is.. different for sure. They're at least more tolerable than the "We support free speech but not leftist speech" Republicans and the communities that are too much I can just block and never interact with. While I'm sure I'd still enjoy Reddit if I logged on or went back to the subs I used to be on, I refuse out of principle. I even feel gross when I need to visit subs to get niche tech answers. I won't ever trust Reddit again and we've got some solid meme communities here. It does enough for what it is, I only hope we grow as Reddit continues to burn.
Yup, agreed on most counts.
I consider myself a left leaning libertarian, and I generally feel more welcomed here than on Reddit. I still get lots of down votes for mentioning libertarianism (apparently that's associated with facism somehow? Not my fault right wing nutjobs tried to steal the term), but I at least get decent discussion about actual policies, especially when I'm left of both major parties. That was a bit more rare on Reddit.
But even if lemmy was actually way worse than Reddit, I'm not going back, that bridge has been burned. If I ever needed to leave lemmy, I would pour more time into my decentralized link aggregator project.
if you're deleting your Reddit account, you should make your past content all garbage by using Powerdeletesuite
Same, I haven’t logged in since Apollo shut down. I occasionally check my small country’s sub through browser, as it’s not active enough on lemmy, but that’s it. I’m super happy with lemmy.
Its interface is ugly as sin. There are fewer users there and they're all pretentious, extremely liberal, and anti American."
-Some Digg user circa 2008/2009 (probably)
and anti American
Based
One day I will wake up, realize 'based' went the way of 'tubular' and probably still not have an objective definition.
"Tubular" I can at least trace where it came from. It's surfer lingo. Sometimes when you catch a wave, the wave crests all the way over you and encloses into a tube. Surfing through that is supposedly the most euphoric thing about the sport. "Tubular" is thus "anything that makes you feel the way a surfer surfing through a tube-shaped wave feels". Thrill, wonder, excitement, etc.
I have no idea where tf "based" came from. Wiktionary suggests that it ultimately comes from the chemical definition of "base" (i.e. the opposite of an acid). "Freebasing" is a way of converting certain drugs, particularly cocaine, into smokable form by converting them from acid to base. Rapper Lil B. is alleged to have coined "based" to describe his lifestyle as someone who is unafraid to be himself as an individual (which, I guess, included smoking crack). This supposedly filtered into 4chan to become an alt-right slogan for "admirable person who bravely maintains alt-right opinions in spite of adversity" ("based and redpilled"), and later was claimed by groups outside the alt-right to simply mean, "someone with admirable opinions".
It definitely started gaining traction from based god lil b lol
I think the funniest part about it is how obviously over the top and ridiculous lil b would be, then yeah the alt right tried to take it over but now it's basically back to the lil b style meaning.
I'm not into the culture so I didn't want to lean too heavily on this one source. It's good to have some corroboration!
he talks about it in this interview from 2010, a little more than halfway through the article. afaik, his use is where the slang originates.
Pretentious and extremely liberal still fit perfectly for reddit today. They definitely aren't anti-american though. They have an unquestioning bloodlust for every US state department adversary
They have an unquestioning bloodlust for every US state department adversary.
Meaning Russia and China, I assume?
replace American with Russian/Chinese and you have modern day Reddit accurately described to a T
The only times I've seen toxicity like this is ironically whenever there is a big wave of reddit user influx, things usually settle down for a while as they adapt to the cultures here (or get banned), it's not as much of an Eternal September as much as it is a Irregularly Scheduled September.
Most of the active comms here are smaller but better quality than their subreddit equivalent. You even get good discussions here on memes sometimes. (Politics and News here still could be better, though.)
For someone who's been very unhappy with the state of social media for quite a while, Lemmy is a breath of fresh air, even though there are definitely growing pains.
I'd rather deal with this supposedly "toxic" lemmy userbase than sift through a thousand comment post where 900 are bot reposts on reddit
This feels like it was written by someone who has never been on Lemmy because that has not been my experience at all.
Reddit is fucking full of bots astroturfing right wing political nonsense and we’re not getting that on Lemmy because those instances are often defederated.
Or, you know, he’s one of those guys who signed up for world when he should have gone to exploding heads.
This. I have much more quality discussions here than I ever did on Reddit. Not sure wtf they are on about.
I’d say it’s roughly my experience with Lemmy as well tbh.
There are some good discussions to be had here, but I don’t think they’re necessarily wrong about the issues, just a bit overblown.
I think Reddit’s far worse in general though. I think it’s gotten particularly worse over the past few years, it’s almost Facebook levels of people looking at stuff just to make themselves angry.
Half of the /all feed is about obnoxious people and fights these days.
The r/Canada subreddit was taken over by far right wing mods and astroturfed to all hell with Conservative nonsense and Convoy support. I found myself speaking up more and more there because it was full of homophobic, racist antivaxxers and that is not an exaggeration.
Didn't help that most of us gave up and stuck to /r/onguardforthee
~~I don't see those fights you speak of, maybe I managed to avoid them ? Genuinely curious. ~~
Edit: I am a moron and cannot read. Thought the poster above was talking about Lemmy...
Half was a ridiculous over exaggeration, but I see so much /r/crazyfuckingvideos and /r/fightporn, /r/imthemaincharacter is another awful subreddit.
Recently people were getting whipped up about that YouTube prankster who got shot, it was posted a ridiculous number of times.
I am sorry I misread your post and thought you talked about lemmy... Haven't been to Reddit in ages...
It can also depend on the time of day if browsing All or which communities you're in. Lemmy does have a lot of folks who were banned from various subreddits, but they're a minority.
Lol, the user doesn't seem to realize that if everywhere you go and comment, if absolutely everyone is an asshole, then maybe it's you that's the problem...
There's also a chance everyone else is actually an asshole, but here that almost definitely isn't it.
True.
Yes I was thinking in those lines. If they deliverd garbage and then was annoyed that they got garbage back.
Guy is hundred percent right. Lemmy is a echo chamber for a certain demographic as vast majority of users are in it.
We either have tech, or politics. Literally every topic ends up in either. We also don't have the differing opinions aspect as just about every debater talks like they're just the different shade of the same color.
Even spicy news that would make any other site a warzone of opinions just echo chambered here. Literally everyone agrees on one conclusion and random two comments that disagree with that having at least -15 points.
Yeah reddit is already a tiny bit of an echo chamber (tech savvy, frequently online folks). Lemmy is worse (every other post is "big tech bad, Linux good, privacy ftw). Not that these are necessarily bad things, they're just not representative of the general population.
I would love to get the opinions of people who fall for Nigerian Prince scams, or people who actually click the ads that say "There are hot singles in your area" just to diversify my niche online social group.
Reddit has echo chambers in the different subreddits, and they can be about as vicious or more than Lemmy instances.
they're just not representative of the general population.
Good. If I wanted the general population, I'd scroll Facebook
The general population:
::: spoiler spoiler
:::
To name a few (note, I am only refering to the loud obnoxious minority, not the majority who are mostly cool)
Linux: too over the top fanboying a times, and the distro war can be absurd here; this coming from me, a full-time Linux user
Vegan: no, bashing meat eaters won't make them stop eating them, they'll just hate you more
American Politic: no, not everything is about your shit, that orange business man/ex-president in an orange suit doesn't affect the rest of the world
Atheism: yes, I know religion is stupid; but you know what else is stupid, trying to force feed your opinion; I mean, we can’t even joke about church wifi name here
Sure you can. Look again at your link. You linked straight to one heavily down voted comment thread under that post. Click the view all comments link and you can see that virtually all the other comments there are positive, mainly, other funny wifi names. If you find one negative post, already heavily down voted, to be too much negativity for you then you are not going to be happy anywhere on the internet.
Yes, you are right, it has become more positive recently. When I first saw this, the comment in question had a positive point. Perhaps due to different timezone (some would be asleep while others awake)?
Also: look at the number of people who upvotes that shit.
This is what 35 years of right-wing talk radio turning any cultural event into a political crusade has gotten us. The right wing echo chamber has brain-poisoned so many Americans, that they no longer have any non-political schemata for interpersonal interaction on any topic.
Want to talk about how to keep the Internet fast and secure? That's political now.
Want to talk about the science behind the causes of climate change? That's political now.
Want to talk about making anyone's life better in any material way, other than a blood-sucking c-suite executive? That's political now.
Want to talk about medicine? Oh you betcha that's political now.
Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, and Fox News have caused this. And I have no problem calling them out for it. Think saying-so is "political?" Screw off. I don't care if your politics get in the way of everything that's interesting to discuss. Deal with it, or move to Saudi Arabia where conservatives would be happiest.
The idea that something that affects society can be nonpolitical is just your bias towards the status quo.
Everything was always political, and the status quo has always depended on hordes of lumpen trained to identify with their own oppressors over their own interests.
Before there were networks of right-wing radio and websites distributing right-wing talking points, they just used TV, newspapers, mailing lists, posters, etc. The effect was still 100 million Americans cheering when the national guard shot students protesting against the state sending their friends to die while participating in atrocities in Vietnam.
Similar sentiments spring up after the civil war regarding edible gardening and use of fruiting trees in urban planning, for fear that black people will live off foraging instead of working.
People that act like the media landscape was better or people more informed overall when everyone got their news from the same big 3-4 networks and 2-3 newspapers BLOW MY FUCKING MIND. Like, please read Manufacturing Consent once.
This take that things only got "political" when conservative talk radio got popular...I honestly can't.
Right, and to some people of a certain temperament, being aware of, and concerned about a vast range of entirely different issues, all of which can be engaged with on a number of levels that build on your knowledge and understanding, all of that is just an "echo chamber".
The echo chamber argument doesn't account for the fact that people can have shared fundamental values and nevertheless have constructive valuable informative conversations that engage in nuanced analysis. Being concerned about climate change, for instance, you can have all kinds of productive conversations about new research showing how hot September was, or how to make cities more walkable, or any number of things, and those are valuable conversations where describing them as echo chambers is silly. They're actually good conversations where we gain something from having them. If your primary test of a community is whether it does or doesn't have echo chambers, it doesn't have meaningful things to say about cases like this.
There are so many "Well Acshually" people here. It's insane.
Well Actually not enough. Debate things till the end and know what is right.
We need some form of wiki to manage those debates so that we only have them once.
We either have tech, or politics.
You forgot about Star Trek memes. Although often those are about tech and politics.
Star Trek memes are the only things keeping me on platform lmao
Seems like this person's main problem is that they went to lemmy.world, which does basically seem like a collection of all the worst redditors.
I'd say a lot of users, perhaps even most, on lemmy.world are just fine, but I've seen some wildly bad behavior from their mods (e.g., one of their politics mod making a mod-flaired comment about how "The United States is not a racist nation," like what)
(e.g., one of their politics mod making a mod-flaired comment about how "The United States is not a racist nation,"
Lmao what? The heart of the global empire is somehow not racist now, despite all the evidence to the contrary? After all the police killings of unarmed black men, how can anyone believe that?
Probably the same type of person who'd complain about reddit being too "left leaning." We're not talking about people with a reasonable or healthy array of takes.
one of their politics mod making a mod-flaired comment about how "The United States is not a racist nation,"
ngl incredibly glad we're not federated with those guys
I mean, is it? Because I've found it to be an overall better experience so far. Am I just not going to the right instances/communities? I mean, I get that there are some fucked up places in the Fediverse, but I haven't been actively looking for them, and I haven't accidentally stumbled across anything so far.
Yeah I think we're on the good lemmies 😁
Redditors complaining about CSAM? Last I checked Reddit had a subreddit called r/18_19 (a porn subreddit for adult teenagers aged under 20) with over 1.5 million subscribers. I sorry, but there is no way that all the posters there are over 18, given Reddit's lax verification practices on NSFW instances. That's some "trust me bro" nonsense. Reddit had r/jailbait and violentacerz not even a decade ago. Spez was there back then too.
I have never seen any CSAM on Lemmy. If it's an issue, it should be dealt with the utmost urgency and concern though.
Some people really hate lemmy. There was another post in that subreddit with a screenshot of some csam instance with the title what is wrong with Lemmy. This is enough for people who is looking for a reason to not leave Reddit. Another talking point of these people are the political leaning of Lemmy devs. E.g. See this thread https://mstdn.social/@PVTejas/111022248039156302
I really don't get why people care so much about the political opinions of the devs, you're just using the software they're making and not hanging out with them or something
i mean, when the revolution comes *checks calender* sometime in Q3 next year, i expect post screenshots across the lemmyverse to appear in multiple kangaroo trials and summary executions. But of course the same is true of Reddit, so who cares.
Knowing reddit, I'm willing to guess they weren't even talking about actual CSAM either, but instead whining that a certain instance allows lewd drawings of certain fictional characters that are "totally equivalent to real kids being abused!!1!" according to them
downside of lemmyverse: you will get death threats for being a lolicon
upside of lemmyverse: you can send death threats to lolicons
eh, reddit leans left but there's a good chunk of far right extremists that have infiltrated a lot of subs especially politics ones and turned them to shit.
lemmy leans left but instead of the extreme right we have lots of extreme left and tankies,namely from 2 particular instances.
both kinds of extremists never make any sense, are complete snowflakes, and live in some sort of weird alternate reality where in some cases I can't even tell of they are extreme left or right, they both trend towards extreme levels of authoritarian dick sucking
reddit leans left
lol
Reddit leans "acceptable" left, which is basically what the yanks allow.
It creates an environment where you can call out billionaires/gun nuts/anti vaxxers/homophobes/Saudis/etc and get upvotes, but it won't let you create an actual opposition to the problem.
Like, surely you have heard about atrocities committed by Saudi Arabia or Israel or other US allies? They get maybe half a day on r/all, compared to any demonstrably less deadly event in Iran/China/Russia that hangs in news subreddits for weeks? Even if it isn't a left wing bias, it's definitely a right wing bias.
The left-right spectrum isn't a helpful model (Piped link) on an international forum. As you've seen in all the replies, people have very different ideas on what is left and what isn't... there is actually no true definition. Many people will, for example, argue that liberalism is the status quo and therefore centrist since the advent of socialism/anti-capitalism and fascism. This is especially true outside of the Five Eyes countries (US, UK, AUS, etc.) where the political atmosphere is clearly different for historical and cultural reasons. On top of that, reddit is so huge that different communities have noticeably different leanings, so naturally someone will object when any generalization is made.
they both trend towards extreme levels of authoritarian dick sucking
Congratulations, you just pissed off all the anarchists lol
The political compass is a better representation purely because it acknowledged that political ideals aren't a linear spectrum, but it still misses the mark because a plane isn't sufficient either.
Politics is such a complex topic and any simple representation of it will lead to what would appear to be contradictions in a person's beliefs.
Politics is such a complex topic and any simple representation of it will lead to what would appear to be contradictions in a person’s beliefs.
Absolutely. And certainly with this kind of geometric modelling, with a spectrum or plane where these broad and complex concepts are ordered more-than or less-than others.
The political compass is a better representation
I disagree with even this. It's not better, it's equally inappropriate.
The political compass is adding an extra idealist axis to an undefined axis (the linked video explains this in more proper detail). It's just digging further into a hole in an attempt to make it work, when the whole paradigm is wrong. And this is bad, because the compass model has rationalized that undefined, subjective linear spectrum. It helps delude people.
I miss the random non tech centric communities from Reddit. The userbase here, across the fediverse as a whole gravitates towards more tech focused aspects and while that's fine, you miss out on the random topics / subreddits you'd find on Reddit.
(The answer isn't also 'just start that community here', specially I miss randomly getting topics from subjects I wouldn't even search for, but just get surfaced because of the shear amount of content and users Reddit has)
Maybe I'm just weird but I think the tech focus is better.
Like that's where all this started. Kevin Rose wanted a better version of Slashdot, a tech news aggregator, so he created Digg.
And Digg was about tech news for several years before going to a general format, at which point it became trash.
And then Digg's redesign killed the site and everyone flocked to a Digg clone called reddit, even though reddit was a clone of post-shittification Digg, not pre-shittification Digg.
Being tech-focussed really does help. I'd sooner deal with Well Actually neckbeards than the average Facebook user, even if I'm not just interested in tech news.
Check the top hour filter of all instances. That's where other content surfaces.
TL;DR: no. Definitively no.
NTL;R: Okay... let me chew on this.
Lemmy as a whole is definitively more toxic than Reddit
For me, at least, non-contributive ("toxic") [see footnote*] behaviour would be: assumptions (including witch hunting), decontextualisation, "didn't read but still replying lol lmao", insults, "I dun unrurrstand", whining + entitlement, and "chrust me" = "I take you for gullible". And those things happen far, far less in Lemmy than in Reddit.
For the poster complaining about Lemmy, "toxic" would be, instead:
pedants - pedants are fine as long as context-aware. And even then, I don't recall a single pedant screeching at my L3 broken English here, unlike in Reddit.
purity testers - this can be interpreted 1000 ways.
concern trolls - yet another thing far more present in Reddit than here...
contrarians - "oh no what I say should be put in a holy altar, how do you dare to disagree with MEEEEEE?". Sorry but contrarians are leagues above the sort of circlejerking that you see in Reddit, where you'd get 1000 weaboos screeching because you wrote "animes".
"ackshyually" - refer to what I mentioned already about context. Those "ackshyually" are caused by decontextualisation, that happens far more often in Reddit.
I know that what I'm going to say is anecdotal, but it's still worth sharing: I see the difference specially because I used to moderate a small Reddit sub, and I mod a Lemmy comm nowadays. People here are more reasonable and contributive; I barely need to intervene here, and even then 99% of the time it's like "don't do that" "okay". In Reddit though? Well.
I was on Lemmy.word for slightly over a month and posted many times across numerous communities and instances, so I definitively gave it my best shot.
Depending on which instances yours federates with, you'll get a different experience. lemmy.world and lemm.ee in special tend to gather Reddit-like critters alongside a few good posters, so instances where behaviour is a bit more monitored (such as beehaw) tend to defederate them.
Also Lemmy has backend issues
I'm no coder to claim that the issues are "backend" or "frontend". Instead I'll say the issues that I see:
papercuts, like the bell icon staying even after you checked all messages
a lack of mod tools
rarely lemmy.ml (the instance that I'm in) slows down.
In the past it used to show errors and refuse to load, but I don't recall this happening nowadays. And it never showed a downtime banana.
can't cross-instance linking posts in a convenient way
So... come on, the platform works. It has its issues, it's likely worse from lemmy.world due to the amount of posters, but it works.
Bad actors
Name them. Otherwise it boils down to "chrust me". Unless referring to the CSAM event below.
lemmy.world comm being bombarded with CSAM [...] Imagine if a subreddit had to be shut down because of this.
I seriously believe that the approach taken by the lemmy.world admins to close down !lemmyshitpost was more sensible than the actions that I'd expect any Reddit instance (oh wait, there's only Spez's) to take. If the same happened in 2023 Reddit, here's what would likelyhappen:
subreddit mods ask for help to the admins, "we're being bombarded with CSAM". They hear admin crickets in return.
mods lock subreddit to avoid the bombardment. u/ModCodeOfConduct forces them to reopen.
mods eventually give up and leave. The sub becomes unmoderated and attracts paedophiles until you got a full paedo ring..
the paedo ring grows large enough to get a mod outrage of 9001 subs.
Spez deletes the sub while making a public announcement, like "WE SNOOS STAND AGAINST PAEDOPHILIA!" (cough former Reddit admin Aimée Challenor cough cough)
the original userbase of the subreddit has no equivalent community to go to, because unlike in Lemmy you're expected to have a single sub per subject.
and sees an influx of kinder people
Dude. You're in Reddit. That's the pot calling the kettle black. Reddit makes even Faecesbook's community look wholesome in comparison, it's on par with modern Twitter. Lemmy is considerably nicer than Reddit.
And if you still want something nicer there's always Beehaw. I'm being serious - for people who want/need an environment with more monitored behaviour, it's a go-to place. Provided of course that you don't want to eat the cake and have it too, by behaving in a way that you don't want others to, otherwise they'll show you the door.
::: spoiler Footnote
It's a bit of off-topic, but this post is a great example on why I don't like the word "toxic". It refers to everything and nothing at the same time; it boils down to "I don't like this", but dresses it as if it was an intrinsic feature of the object (in this case, Lemmy or Reddit). Note how the list of things that I'd consider "toxic" are completely unlike the person complaining about Lemmy, and if you gather a third person odds are that you'll get a full list of other things to be considered "toxic".
:::
I think what they meant by contrarians is people who disagree for the sake of disagreeing without any actual argument , usually in order to stir up drama or engage in a circlejerk
If a site couldn't handle CSAM promptly and effectively then it's not ready, period. No one should have to shut down an entire community because of it.
They do realize that Reddit had subreddits like r/jailbait and 4chan used to be filled with CSAM until they cracked down?
They also do not mention specifics on who the 'purity testers' or 'pedants' are. Reddit also has a good record of being a place for pedantic nerds :nerd:
It sounds like the real complaint is that it's different.
Because yeah it's certainly not more toxic. That's laughable. My interactions here have been overwhelmingly better than on reddit.
And the other complaints boil down to "it's small and new, yuck"... Yeah that's a good thing usually. There have been terrible attacks with CSAM but people are handling it and luckily I've never seen a single image like that. On reddit it was not uncommon to see mutilated humans without wanting to even though there was far more time and resources available to prevent that
I think there is some valid complaints to be had against being swarmed by fanatics on Lemmy but there is no way it’s more toxic than Reddit. For the most part I’d say the community is very much the same between the major Lemmy instances and Reddit. Just with more FOSS evangelism and Linux love.
The issue is smaller communities. All my hobbies have small Lemmy communities… with either 2 subscribers or posts that are months old.
And on Reddit smaller communities are VERY nice. It’s the big subs that are filled with edgy teens trying to out meme each others.
and leftism tbh
edit: i know you guys all gonna downvote lol. dgaf
I’d say that Reddit was the exact amount of leftism. Just with more “orange man bad” in addition to the anti work/late stage capitalism bend as Reddit is more USA-centric
lol people are def nicer here. This guy just misses his little friends.
Posts about people being nicer while being condescending about his position 🤦
It's throughout many of the comments on this post.
I fart in your general direction.
(Sniff) oh yeah. our farts smell so good
Hey fuck you bud
Every complaint about the users is a complaint you can make about every other online community 🙄 Just go through the effort of blocking the jerks and the communities/instances they congregate and spawn from.
Yup. On Reddit, people complained about users from /r/thedonald or/r/politics, so I made myself a simple rule: avoid obviously politically slanted communities and extremely popular communities. Things were much better, and I took that same rule of thumb here (avoid lemmygrad, exploding heads, and most of the larger communities on lemmy.ml) and I've been happy.
It turns out, if you actively avoid jerks, you'll probably be happier.
Oh I agree. Maybe not toxic per se, but extremely out of touch. I think what happened is it just became a bigger echo chamber, because from the already echo chamber reddit, all the people who are the type to switch to the fediverse (privacy focused, foss lovers) are on lemmy, with their opinions being spouted back at them, so it feels like everyone agrees, when really they're a minority.
The biggest differing opinion between reddit and lemmy that I see is lemmy's insistence that absolutely everyone should switch to linux. Of course I saw that on reddit a bit too, but it always had some pushback.
And of course there's also the ignorance of the fediverse's problems. Like people just can't comprehend why someone wouldn't switch to Mastodon or Lemmy.
This doesn't apply to all topics though. There is still some good discussion here. Sometimes it can be better than reddit.
What's weird is I don't experience this on hacker news. People seem to be a lot less out of touch, and have a wider variety of opinions. Not entirely sure why, maybe because it's had time to mature?
Yeah I kinda noticed this privacy/FOSS thing here, people commenting about software in question being proprietary or has cloud backup for example I have to double check what community I'm at, and 90% times it's not privacy or FOSS related, I was downvoted multiple times for making a mistake of mentioning proprietary software
Lol. I don't have an account anymore, but I was able to lookup the post on Google and found it. Dude seems to be getting ripped apart a bit. It's pretty funny.
One thing I've noticed about the alternatives subreddit, is there is a lot of people persuading people against alternatives. It's almost like there was some organising to persuade people there was no alternative.
I mean, when you factor in you'd probably get removed, or shadow-banned, or have your posts removed for mentioning Lemmy, it feels like there is a multifaceted approach to discouraging folk from leaving the reddit teet.
While there is an element of truth, it's scattered in with exaggeration and only focussing on negatives. The objective was to say Lemmy bad, staying good.
No way is Lemmy more toxic than reddit. I find those "well ackshually" folks are much less here.
I use to follow /r/degoogle on reddit... but it felt like pretty much every discussion was people shitting on every alternative, and implying that all measures are totally pointless unless you stop interacting with any form of computer for the rest of your life. It's just so weird having people say there there's no point switching from Chrome to Firefox because google is the default search engine on Firefox. I got to the point where I really did believe there was some deliberate destabilization going on, to weaken the community. (And it worked. I unsubscribed; and I'm sure it struggled to keep anyone who actually had anything useful to say.)
Anyway... I wouldn't be surprised if /r/RedditAlternatives was similar to that.
Oof, I can imagine that sucks. Come join us on !degoogle@lemmy.ml :) Everyone seems quite enthusiastic about finding alternatives. I'm all about the Firefox, GrapheneOS, Proton Mail, Signal, Element etc. :)
There's a lot of FOSS nerds here who get disgusted at you if you suggest someone use a web browser that isn't Firefox. But if you hung around on the Linux/FOSS subreddits, you'd get the exact same thing...
Agreed, feels like the vast majority of people here are FOSS enthusiasts, which isn't a bad thing necessarily if you align with them, but definitely a bias and could put off people who genuinely don't care about FOSS or tech in general.
There is quite a bit of bias on reddit that makes it quite uncomfortable for some of those people. Quite often Linux, Firefox and great open source software is bashed. It can be quite disconcerting to be in a different environment, but it isn't solely because of the views and biases of those on Lemmy. It's also significantly down to the views and biases of those one reddit also.
Yep, bias exists everywhere. There's no avoiding it. Reddit does have the benefit that biases tend to change from sub to sub though. Lemmy instances that I've seen (not defederated ones) tend to hold the same FOSS bias, but the intensity of it varies from instance to instance.
A lot of open source advocates do tend to be inclined to open source software on an open source link aggregator.
Signed, Open Source entusiast. :)
Yeah that ain't the issue, it's moreso the attitude than anything when someone chooses something that fits their needs better than the open-source alternative.
I say this as someone who uses Firefox but still uses MusicBee.
There’s some real holier-than-thou types online that just have to be heard. And when Lemmy doesn’t want to listen to their main character ramblings they crack the shits and run back to Reddit with the other main characters
Maybe I'm being unfair, but somehow when I read complaints like this about "purity" and "insufferable" and all that, I always assume it's "they downvoted and insulted me when I made a bigoted joke about like transpeople or something".
I know it sounds like I'm taking the piss, but I don't think I've encountered a kinder, more accepting community than Hexbear, due to admins here actually enforcing civility rules. And I'm sure there's an equally chill instance for people who aren't interested in tearing the arms off their boss and drinking blood directly from the limbless wounds.
Hexbear is literally the only place on the entirety of the internet where I can be vulnerable in my posts without worry it's going to be used in harassment against me by some reactionary freak.
r/chapotraphouse was one of the most accepting and inclusive subreddits of all time on reddit when it came to not punching down, and Hexbear is orders of magnitude better than even that.
Y'all could be the kindest people but I'd never know because I simply cannot stand the amount of inline media spam in every single @hexbear thread. It's obnoxious to read and detracts from any amount of intelligent conversation that could be occurring.
The unfortunate thing is that these show up as small emotes on hexbear.net, so the users generally don't realize they're huge disruptive images to others.
If one can get past the 20 most invasive, tactless, eternally-online members of Hexbear and Lemmygrad, they're generally great places. Unfortunately, those people are the main ones getting attention and alienating people on other instances.
It's disheartening whenever I see a legitimate chance to teach someone something and a Hex account just makes an absolute malicious shitpost that isn't even worth calling a dunk. That, and a couple of highly-active users in particular who will consistently take the worst possible interpretation of a post and insist anyone who disagrees is a bad actor. Sankara would roll in his grave if he could see those post histories.
ngl, i love those folks. i agree we could chill out in some situations.
That is just because they see you as one of them.
Encounter them as a non-hexbear, and they will either bring up the most abrasive takes on communism, worship dictators like gods, or just shitpost because they know they can't win.
Have a look how they treat other communities, and you'll see what I mean.
I find Lemmy uses to be a little pretentious oft times, extremely narrow minded in it's left leaning views. Very Reddit like in that last regard, perhaps more so.
At the same time, I do find a lot of insightful, clear headed individuals and some genuinely good people, but that also exists on Reddit.
The people running this site are better by far and the mods a little more level headed, but I don't expect that to last because power always corrupts.
I've already seen some people modding a stupid number of places, which is always a bad sign.
We'll see where this place ends up, but it is not as liberated and people here want to believe, and not as immune to corruption as they think.
I’ve already seen some people modding a stupid number of places, which is always a bad sign.
The ones I have seen are also kinda pathetic. Opening 15+ magazines/instances/communities, all of which are almost the same subject, most of them are post-less.
I have noticed this too. It's better just to not interact. At the end of the day, I just wanted a better link aggregator than what reddit became and it works nicely for that.
I mean... My own experience here completely agrees with their overall appraisal of the situation.
The only reason I'm still here instead of back there is 3rd party app support...but rather than 100% of my Reddit time becoming 100% Lemmy time, it's more like 100% of my Reddit time becoming 20% still Reddit, from a computer, 20% Lemmy on mobile, and 15% in disbelief that I'm spending time on Facebook, and the remaining 45% of that time I used to spend on Reddit, I'm just not spending it on social media anymore.
So yeah. Lemmy wants to be a reddit alternative, but for me it's just not. It's similar, but with less content overall, less relevant and less interesting content, less interesting comments, and on average a worse community. Other than the shitty spez business practices (which are a big deal, don't get me wrong), Lemmy's just "Reddit, but worse in every way" to me.
Unless Lemmy gets better, it'll never be more than an occasional visit for me...and if Reddit were for some reason to right the ship, shit can spez, and reintroduce 3rd party app support, I'd probably go back in a heartbeat.
I’d probably go back in a heartbeat.
Remember: once a dick, always a dick. Reddit will not be unshittified, even if it looks that way for very brief moments.
I get what you're saying, and even partially agree.
But at the same time, if I'm looking for a social media/content aggregation platform, and I have to choose between "idealistic vision, small and problematic community, low quantity and low quality content" vs "corporate/capitalist asshole vision, large and mediocre community, variable quality and quantity content" the latter is going to win every time, based on the fact that there is actually at least some content there that's worth my time.
So far with Lemmy, the only thing I get here is memes...and news that I am already getting from 4 other sources first. None of my niche Reddit communities have any real presence here, so my visits are brief and unsatisfying.
I hear you, but what make me stick with Lemmy and try my best to make it work is the whole concept of decentralized social media. We can't just handle the power back to big techs, see what facebook did in the whole trump election scandal. or what Twitter is becoming. The fediverse now is the only alternative we have, it is the last stand against a corporate controlled internet.
And I am tired to pretend social media does not dictates the real world trends, it does and it is here to stay. There is no more separation from irl and internet.
There's concept and there's execution.
Gotta have both.
I'm not wasting time on, or making any commitment to, a flawed execution, no matter how much I might appreciate the concept.
And for that matter, while I know this isn't a receptive audience to the idea, decentralization isn't the be-all-end-all concern for a platform like this. Idealistically it's nice, sure. But for me (and I'd wager most), it's not even in my top 5 concerns when deciding how (or if) I spend my time on social media.
For me, it has to be relevant, informative, fresh, and well-delivered. If that means trading some of my personal data to their collectors, I'm fine with that. Lord knows everyone else is gathering it too. In the case of Lemmy, the benefits don't matter if it's not delivering on my main needs of it.
There are lot of people working for free to make it work by trying to improve it. It is easy to complain from the confort of my chair at home.
And so society becomes more cursed each day.
I largely agree, yet I'm more like 70% lemmy, 5% Reddit, 25% working on my own Reddit alternative. Why? I refuse to give Reddit more of my data when they've demonstrated that they're more interested in monetization than making the best community (huge shift from when I first joined Reddit). I also think lemmy is doing interesting things to try to foster a great community, and I want to see what works.
But at the end of the day, I think lemmy is architected wrong. It relies on people spending a lot on hosting, which I really don't think it's sustainable, and it is also confusing for users, which is going to reduce adoption. My project attempts to solve both:
decentralized, so very little hosting costs, just a few relays
single namespace - less confusing for users, so /c/community means the same thing regardless of the relay you choose
There are some potential downsides, so I'm interested to see how bad those are.
But at the end of the day, I think lemmy is architected wrong. It relies on people spending a lot on hosting, which I really don’t think it’s sustainable, and it is also confusing for users, which is going to reduce adoption.
Have you considered that while those may be genuine technical issues, addressing those alone won't in turn help much in building good communities? Imo one of the common problems across all social media is that a lot of smart, capable folks build their backend systems but neglect to bring on community relations teams (or in the context of entire platforms, community governance teams, maybe?) that coordinate with the people that use those systems.
Probably the big reason for this is that thus far large social media platforms have been built with a corporate mindset, and so the people aren't viewed as people, but an audience for adverts, subscriptions, products, etc. Lemmy has a different yet similar issue insofar as technically capable folks building backend systems, but they don't (nor others deploying their tech) have the resources to bring on any additional community-facing help to then coordinate and collaborate with people in governing their spaces.
Thanks for the feedback! And yeah, it's absolutely something I've been thinking about. I'm not sure I'll even publish it once I have it working because I'm worried about a bunch of nonsense like CSAM or bigotry, much less the more mundane issues of not spam.
And that's the rub, building a good community is hard, especially on a digital platform, and requires a very different skillet from building good software. I'm not sure I'm cut out for that part, but I can learn from the issues lemmy runs into and try to solve them with technical solutions, namely quality moderation tools.
That's especially challenging in a decentralized system, and it seems to have caused a lot of people to leave, so I'm trying to have a good solution out of the gate.
Since it's decentralized, I can't force anyone to recognize any given moderation without breaking the whole point of decentralization (i.e. nobody has control, even me), so my plan is to rely on a web of trust type system. For example:
you flag users you trust
users report content for violating certain rules
if enough people in your web of trust flag content, you won't see it
I'll probably include a default list, but users would be free to choose their own moderators if they think mine suck. But I have no idea how well that'll work, but once I get a prototype working, I'll post it somewhere (probably here on lemmy) to solicit feedback.
I think this idea is different enough to get people interested, and hopefully robust enough to keep people on the platform. To get content, I'll probably bridge it with lemmy or something so it'll look like another instance (again, not sure if that's feasible or even wanted). It's early days, and the more frustrated I get with lemmy, the more I'll work on it.
Elitism ? definitly. Especially linux. But toxic ? I only saw cordials talks in here, with a few trolls here and there.
As for csam I never saw any scrolling a bit every days. I saw people talking about another instance encouraging it and troll spamming, it but never once saw it myself.
What I saw on reddit without searching was almost daily gore. And definitly sone real csam (this was a long time ago, seems to be fixed now)
Literally everyone from the 6-sided Ursine instance is awful. I've had 0 good experiences with them, and not for lack of trying. The conversation always starts with me making a mild take, they say something about how I just need to get used to the taste of Stalin's scrotum, I say I think committing war crimes is bad actually, and then they say "it's a shame you're so closed-minded, but if you aren't just see this manifesto [link to pig shit balls]".
Tell me I'm wrong.
If you are from that instance: don't respond, I don't want to talk to you.
bad actors can spam disgusting shit all over the damn place to the point where one relatively large community (I believe it was c/shitposting on Lemmy. world but I can't remember for sure had to be shut down by the mods for a while because it was being bombarded by CSAM.
I guess he hasn't heard of, I think it was r/AHS, that did exactly this routinely to get subreddits they didn't like shut down.
That was a lie made up by right wingers. It's the same pedo-scare rhetoric that transphobes and qanon are using.
I guess he hasn’t heard of, I think it was r/AHS, that did exactly this routinely to get subreddits they didn’t like shut down.
You are a buffoon if you believe this. I was a regular on r/AHS, and this was an obvious lie.
Fair enough, I can't actually find any evidence.
I thought that's how the mod protests were going to end.
Nice, more redditors can only make a forum worse.
maybe it needs a little curation, but once you've blocked the instances, communities and users that are personally annoying to you, it's a fun and engaging place with the usual share of human noise. Maybe some people are happy to have reddit choosing what deserves to reach your eyes, I like to do it myself :)
Absolutely. Reddit had default subs and you would add to it as you explored. Lemmy is like the opposite... it's quieter here so you start with seeing everything and then subtract the bad out. Ive blocked instances (mostly other languages), communities, even some users that seem to exist to just post about Linux/communism/that guy who seems to mostly post NSFW material that looks way too young. And after subtracting out what you don't want in your feed it's a pretty good experience.
I've never watched star trek in my life but idk I kinda like some of these memes. They can stay.
I honestly just wish the internet would go back to individual forums. Lemmy is great for a reddit alternative, but I think old school forums were just better overall
I know forums still exist, obviously, but they're kind of shitty right now.
I can't agree with you, forums were so clunky
Forums worked really elegantly when you had an active userbase of maybe a couple of dozen people a day.
Megaforums... not so much.
Yeah there's way too many people online for that type of structure to work anymore
Reddit SEO captured them. They got shitty because they stopped growing, and when a community stops growing, it decays. And yes. They're absolutely better
NodeBB and other forum software have added activityPub integration on their
dev roadmaps, so you might see it become a thing again. Personally I don't want to create a new forum account for every thing I'm interested in.
I believe that most of the things people do, or try to do, on reddit (and therefore reddit alternatives) just aren't appropriate for how the site is structured. Reddit is a 'link aggregator', that's what it was designed for. People post links to content.
So it's no surprise that forums are a better option, structurally, for a ton of communities.
Like some of the top-ranking comments here are saying, that place has a very large proportion of people who were coming from the banned subreddits like The Donald, various straight-up hate communities, and typical alt-right groups. So naturally, alternatives that were founded by anarchists and socialists (raddle, lemmy.ml) were almost always disregarded there, possibly with the exception of the Wolfballs admin (I can't remember too well if they got much attention with the 'they're not all like that' line)
It's always funny to me to see newer users complain about a lot of political (incl. FOSS) users in an inherently political project, which was picked by many precisely because its political values prevent the for-profit shittery that reddit.com has been doing for 15 years, and that alt-right social media alternatives frequently do whenever they get enough users. Yes, we're going to voice our concerns when people show up at the door and want this to be just like reddit was, or bring over the uncritical mainstream ignorance we came over here to avoid.
We don't have unblockable "He gets us" spam.
That in itself is worth any friction I have to overcome to use the 'verse.
Never really understood the thought process "If I move to a different place, it'll definitely be magically free of arseholes and people I disagree with." It's just not reflective of reality - wherever you go, there'll be arseholes. Just build your Subscribed feed, dip into All occasionally to se what else is out there, find an instance that takes moderation seriously and aren't actual fascists and block the strays that occasionally make it through.
And OOP is right to say Lemmy has backend issues. The dev team of 2 people is too small and they really need to make safety a massive priority ASAP. Being able to block instances as a user is a big step forward (planned in the next major release I believe) but both mod and admin tools need to be much better and they need to do a lot more to tackle CSAM hits. I hope they're taking note of the various projects @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com has begun to tackle these issues.
In terms of the size of the Lemmyverse, I don't really give a shit about that. What I care about is quality rather than quantity and it stands to reason that as quality continues to improve (as I believe it is) then quantity will follow in its wake.
OOP seems to forget that Lemmy only got as big as it is right now about 4 months ago - of course there's a lack of niche communities and of course there's a lack of tools. Poor old Ernst developing KBin got hit with tens of thousands of users for software that wasn't even out of Alpha.
The best things we can do as users is create good content, encourage discussion etc even when it feels like we're talking into the void. Because sooner or later, if the content is good, people will engage. We're not at that tipping point yet but it'll come if we put the effort in.
All alternative platforms should be assumed to be at least 50% rancid garbage, because that's where all the people banned from the mainstream platforms inevitably go.
The fact that lemmy isn't 90% flat earthers and crypto spam is actually astounding and i don't know how on earth this has been achieved. Especially considering how suboptimal the moderation tools are it's really impressive how good the content here is.
The devs' politics led to them valuing building a welcoming community over the principle of free speech. There was a strictly enforced moderation policy from the start, which may seem crazy now but it's a lot easier to do when your community is small. Toxic people definitely came in and got banned. On their way out you'd often see them complaining about how ridiculous it is to filter out slurs. The community that stuck around was really great. I'm not someone who posts a lot on any platform, but I was viewing lemmy every day for a couple years because the discussions were good, and there was very little hostility.
Today the community is more like reddit than it is like old lemmy, lemmy actually feels a lot less friendly today than it did like six months ago.
I do think the devs were wholly unprepared for reddit to shoot itself in the foot as badly as it did. Their project went from a passion project to serious business almost overnight. With time I'm sure they're capable of working through the issues we're facing today, but I don't think they were ready for the big migration when it happened.
Well, I think the people here prior to Rexit were already producing good content and then the people who moved over from Reddit were primarily people annoyed by u/spez and who valued content quality and genuinely wanted a decent platform. There'll be times when things get shitty but by and large I do think Lemmy had a good start. We just really need the devs to give some power to instance admins and Mods via decent tools, because the one thing that will kill progress is people not being able to curate and protect their Communities.
/u/spez aliases are getting grumpy.
He is not wrong. I have had to block and get rid of other instances on Lemmy, because they are filled with toxic motherfuckers, and elitist Linux users
elitist Linux users
You're just as worse. You're a hexbear user, and I don't like how you guys promote CCP propaganda
I think that, perhaps, the user is trying to use Lemmy as Reddit, rather than using some of the fantastic quality of life improvements that evaporated with the API nonsense.
For example, blocking users and communities (and soon instances). Some users and communities, even if I enjoy them or the instances that they are on, sometimes are just too toxic for me. And that isn't to say that the comms and users necessarily are (sometimes they are) but, that sometimes engaging with some comms and users either causes undue stress or temptation to get involved in an Internet fight. That's not behavior that is good for us, even if it sometimes feels good in the moment.
I'm hoping (and have suggested) that a "timeout" feature gets added to allow one to readily self-regulate and disengage when they find that interactions are approaching the sorts that are algorithmically encouraged on commercial social media platforms. The outrage machine is just terrible and I've found myself much happier and in a better headspace since leaving such platforms. Added bonus is that transphobia actually gets taken seriously on most instances and, while it doesn't technically impact my as a cis guy, I'm much happier knowing that people are able to feel safer to be themselves (or come to terms with themselves).
As for the complaint about people being more likely pedantic or correct people on technical details, I love that - finding out that I'm wrong about something is fantastic because that means that I learned something. When there's topics, like tech, where there are often correct and incorrect answers and they change or get added to regularly, one really needs to leave the ego at the door. We're all humans (and bots and human facsimiles), which means we'll be wrong from time to time. It's a fact of life, effectively in environments where there are a lot of knowledge-workers and the medium of communication is directly related to the topics.
Personally, I'd like to see more comms regarding to digital circuit design and open-source silicon.
I also think the website is exceptionally good, and has a unique distinction of being equally good on desktop and mobile. Feel that the website is so good on mobile that I don't need to use a mobile app, and I sure as heck can't say that about Reddit.
Oh god yes.
I refuse to install any app from the websites I use.
Reddit has been trying all kinds of tricks into getting me to install their app, just like most other websites.
I literally had to switch to desktop view every time, because it just wouldn't allow me to use their mobile view, like wtf?
Lemmy is a breath of fresh air in that regard.
... an optional feature where it only lets you browse for X minutes a day would be awesome
User blocking doesn't work at all.
How so?
The person you blocked can still see, and reply to, everything you say. It only denies you the opportunity to respond, allowing them to discredit you and turn others against you without your knowledge. It also doesn't stop them downvoting you at all, leaving them free to retaliate via vote bombing.
They should be the ones unable to see any comments you make. They should be unable to reply or respond to you. They should be unable to vote on any of your comments or even posts at all.
But it's the opposite, and therefore completely broken.
Unfortunately, if they were to do this I'd imagine they'd be able to know you blocked them - as your instance would need to tell the other instance (and if they were a single user instance they could grab that record from the database) to hide your comments/posts. Which could cause even more problems as there are definitely people who'd go scorched earth over it. Even if they didn't go on a rampage about it, they'd still be able to just then logout and see what you're saying because of that.
From what I recall in the ActivityPub spec, transmitting blocks is already there, but I imagine no one implements it for that reason.
The outlined issues don't seem to be lemmy exclusive, but then again, I've spent quite a short time here.
The toxicity is caused by the society, not by the platform. From my experience, one can always find a more toxic subreddit.
Reddit is just as much moderated by volunteers, that's the reason I started using reddit. Also, having corporate admins doesn't make the platform any more spam resistant.
If anything I would expect these problems to be more prevalent in smaller (lemmy) platforms and stabilize with growth to reddits level.
Now I'm not trying to defend lemmy, but being even more community driven I want it to succeed and become what reddit used to be.
I want it to succeed and become what reddit used to be.
I want it to exceed what reddit ever was. It's tempting to look back at those days and want to remake it, but really, we can and should go further in making good communities. And with federation, in theory, it's so much easier to have a small town booted up without it constantly feeling an inch from death, the death-struggle of almost all comfy communities that haven't become popular.
☝️This post DEFINITELY NOT made by reddit corpo. Nope, no sir.
I left reddit when RIF was shut down because of that "no API for you" bulltrash. I found lemme.world and it was like the clouds parted and a warm sunbeam shine down upon my cold, wet, and shivering body. It's like reddit was in 2010 when I first became a daily user... but better in some ways. Smaller community, which will be interesting to watch grow as the years pass, everyone already here still trying to figure out how it can be made better and generally filling up with long time reddit users completely fed up with that corperate, ad riddled cesspool the site turned out to be. Is lemme.world perfect? No way and far from it... but that's okay. There's a really good bunch of dedicated computer smart folks (not me as one could imagine) continually working to mold and shape it into something that fills that dark hole left in the world of social media caused by the requirement for corperate suits needs to shove ads and propaganda down our throats between every blink we make.
Anyways, it sounds like the response he got were likely caused by some flavor of antagonist, rage baiting posts intentionally made to stir up said responses. I'm sure this is a win for lemme.world.
Literally my first interaction in reddit after I left 2 months ago was with a troll spamming emojis like he was so smarter than me that was laughable. No thanks sir.
a troll spamming emojis like he was so smarter than me
I mean ... you could join an instance that's federated with hexbear.
When I first started using Lemmy, most of the front page was hate content. Lately it seems like less than 10% though.
I think that was just growing pains. It's unreasonable to expect a community as small as Lemmy was beforehand to immediately moderate itself like a large community when they grow as quickly as Lemmy did. It takes time to build the systems and fill positions. The amount of hate content has been dropping consistently. I barely see any hate posts and far fewer hate comments. Excluding when I make the mistake of treading into Hexbear but that's just cause I'm stupid sometimes.
I definitely see a lot of toxic comments on here but I think that's mainly from reddit outcasts trying their hardest to be sassy. Sassy unhelpful comments on Reddit won the most karma so it can be helpful to remind them that that doesn't actually work here
I have noticed that the rate of my own sassy short comments has reduced quite a bit here, when compared to the past. I feel that the reduced volume of content, more detailed comments by others, and more of a sense of investment by commenters has encouraged me to up my game. To decide that if I am to comment, it is worth giving the comment more consideration and depth.
Will this continue? I hope so.
It absolutely is an echo chamber, and it gets really toxic. This place is extremely xenophobic and it's very exhausting.
Mf acts like CSAM and rampart porn spamming bots are not a thing on Reddit. That's some neat cherry picking right there. Here's the thing, at least rightwing nutcases are far less prevalent here due to defederations.
Lemmy.world is the problem
I actually don't experience these any of the issues. If you don't like tankie stuff then just block lemmygrad and hexbear.
Tbh, I'm very left so I like lemmygrad anti-capitalist anti-US memes.
They're fine as long as you keep a safe distance, plus it's fun to watch them antagonize any nazis that show up.
🤨
Fuck it. I'll take my media raw. I'm not gonna block something just because it offends me and if shit posters start taking over the place well thats just society baby! I prefer it that way to giving some central entity the power to 'clean' up everything how they see fit. Not gonna lock myself into an echo chamber if I can help it.
To all the admins, thanks and take your time fixing things and if instances go offline for a while, thanks for giving me a social media break!
honestly I found this was dependant on the instance you are on. I switched instances off my previous one (well technically I bounce back and forth) and I find it super dependant on the instance I'm on with what the toxicity levels are.
I see this a lot and I really don't understand it.
Here I am on lemmy.world, replying to you on sh.itjust.works, on a post from lemmy.ml.
Clearly neither of us are browsing just our local instance, and indeed I imagine most people are not. So what does it matter what instance anyone is on, beyond instance-specific defederations?
There is a sense of comraderie on most instances. Not sure if that's the case on .world since y'all are so large and general purpose.
And also the level of moderation sometimes differs greatly based on where communities are hosted.
Also, defederations matter a lot, considering beehaw and hexbear, two of the 10 largest servers, are defederated with a large number of other servers. A new user on sh.itjust.works or lemmy.world is going to have a very different experience than one on lemmy.ml, because they won't have any interaction with hexbears or beehawers.
The instance matters less once you've been here a while and figured out how to find everything, but for new users it can often be a significant barrier to entry if they join the wrong instance and have a bad experience.
I think it depends a lot on what the instance you're on considers is I see vastly different topics of posts between the two instances that I'm on
I bet that dude said something racist and got dogpiled. I only see toxic comments on lemmy when I say something racist.
That's a fair point. While racism thrives in small communities where any rare truth gets downvoted, Lemmy's federation has made it almost impossible for racist communities to reach critical mass here.
As someone who browses /new, I've seen numerous times someone trashing Lemmy, and then 20 posts down I find they posted something incredibly stupid.
Lemmy news is a cesspit from a post POV but other than that shrug
I think there are more straight shooters here, could be dude just had bad takes.
It is too easy to accidentally downvote.
Straight shooters is a wiggle word to say asshole who doesn't care about others feelings.
Thats funny how first paragraph of their post is describing my experience with Reddit. I think, in majority, people here are nicer.
Also Im curious how many backend issues had Reddit in it's first couple of years? I doubt situation back then was better. And its surprising to see anyone on Reddit complaining about backend problems here, while they literally made impossible to create any 3rd party apps or software based on Reddit API.
They're not wrong. Lemmy across all its instances has a real hall monitor vibe. It's because most people here are both trans and in IT.
Well...bye.
I think they might have a point about the moderation issue. It's the same story on mastodon and the fediverse where there is too much to moderate and prolific ban evaders can run rampant.
For what it's worth I believe that rough edges like this are a small negative compared to the postives of being able to use social media without being under the yoke of a big tech company.
Someone told lil' whiney here something he didn't like. Lemmy has been great in my eyes. Since getting here in the exodus of reddit 3:16 "And whoa, fuck uspez, this place sucks" it has been pretty great. Kinda like 12 years ago reddit.
But this is social media. There will be trolls. There will be people smarter than you. And likely dude got buthurt and went back to the communities where his thoughts are welcome at large, even if they are wrong or misleading or whatever. Safe space so-to-speak.
If he thinks this is toxic, holy shit is IRL ever gonna eat him alive. Even the redditards who simp it up for maga and r/conservative won't save him then.
If someone corrects what you wrote into an English sentence, and you have a problem with people looking out for you, then you're a dick.
Watch this.
I'm a republican.
Hi a republican, I'm dad
Ree
Me too. COME OUT YE BLACK AND TANS, COME OUT AND FIGHT ME LIKE A MAN.
::: spoiler spoiler
If you really want to make the more rabid and trigger-happy Hexbear and Lemmygrad users mad, you have to say you're a Democrat
:::
Lemmy obviously has some problems. If the OP doesn't want to deal with them and be here, it's their decision. Directly or indirectly, I don't see why would you want to argue with them.
Sounds fairly accurate to me.
Well, only way to solve this is by having people here who aren't idiots (whatever that means to you) to participate and make things better. But this is too hard for most people, I guess.
The “Not enough mod tools” complaint is valid and I hope that improves as the platform moves forward.
I DO NOT get the disdain for the Lemmy userbase. I’ve been here for the past 4-5 months and can say I’ve had so many more meaningful and fulfilling conversations here on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit in the 10 years I was there.
I think it’s the same situation as between a small town and a big city. Reddit is huge and with a large number of people; you’re going to statistically get a larger number of assholes. Not to mention there are tens of thousands of people commenting on anything that hits r/all, so there’s no chance someone else is going to read your 1 comment that is drowning in a sea of other comments.
Lemmy feels more like a small town. Things move a little slower here, but there’s less competition to have your voice heard, and I end up seeing some of the same users time and time again across the Fediverse. I think that smaller feel means more people have a chance to see your content without it getting drowned out by the masses, which means more opportunity to make connections.
Some people suck, but Lemmy has been fucking awesome for me so far and I love this place because of that.
Idk. It seems like that was a bot trying to dissuade people from leaving Reddit. One of the reasons we left Reddit was bc of the bots.
I had that kind of “astroturf-y” feel from the Reddit comment as well, but their opinion about mod tools is not entirely wrong.
The fear-mongering about CSAM being all over the place hasn’t been my experience, though. I’ve never come across CSAM here on Lemmy (sorry to those who have), but I don’t tend to keep NSFW posts on because I cruise Lemmy at work.
I think CSAM isn't prevalent here because the groups posting it know that they will get nuked from orbit by every other instance for doing so. I think there is still plenty of CSAM content posted on lemmy, but not on the main federated net/web, instead on a private net/web (you can whitelist federate instances, which would likely be what any group of instances handling illicit material would opt for)
CSAM isn't tagged as NSFW, because it's trolls (criminals) posting it. I think the admins have been pretty on the ball with removing it though
Can we please stop calling anyone who doesn't agree with us a bot?
How is that a bot to you?
New users who aren’t defederated from Lemmygrad and hexbear by default are what contribute to that perception
I can definitely say that I have enjoyed interacting with folks on Lemmy more than on reddit. Lemmy has felt like small subreddits even in the larger communities.
Every place on the internet is gonna have people that suck but the vast majority of my interactions here have been nice.
For one thing, it feels there is so much stronger of a push here to read the article instead of just the headline. Especially appreciated when someone adds the article to the post or leaves it in a comment. TLDR bot isn't for me but it helps.
There's also so much less of a push to be that meme comment that hits the top. There are still jokes but it's not this barrage of people trying to be the class clown at the expense of meaningful conversation.
But especially the bots. Holy crap the bots were making it such a headache. The same comment slightly adjusted then posted over and over as replies to top comments for karma farming. The same stolen repost on 20 slightly similar subreddits and it doesn't really belong on half of them. Not that Lemmy would be immune to this if it were as big as Reddit but sheesh I wish Reddit cared about the quality of content. They're fine with whatever keeps people coming back and I guess that kind of content appeals to the most people.
Same here. I have had better experience here than reddit. Much fewer one line / meme responses and more actual discussion on a topic.
Personally I have to disagree when anyone says how much nicer, better, greater the community here is. From my experience its pretty much the same as on Reddit by now. You got nice people and you got people who just like to argue for no good reason. But I think thats just how it is online these days and I don't see it as a bad thing. Just disagree that community-wise this is so much better than Reddit. But I guess thats an unpopular opinion.
I’m glad you shared your experience, honestly.
I’m happy with what I’ve seen here, but I’ll also say that I didn’t hang out in too many smaller subreddits. Even when I did, I saw some vitrol come out on the regular. Maybe the vibe on smaller subreddits is better than Lemmy?
Either way, I’m glad you’re here.
I definitely get the small town feel. Like I regularly run into the same users, even from different instances. No one here tries to be a jerk, at least from what I've seen. And when you create content, people actually look and care.
A lot of it is also the instance you are on. Having my account on Lemmy.world I do not have to deal with hexbear for example. They don't have downvotes on their instance and have a totally different culture from the other instances.
Also, know that a lot of people that ended up on Lemmy are actually the banned rejects from reddit. And maybe seeing they don't get their "free speech" here either is what made them not believe in the platform.
I have very much been enjoying my time here, most people have been wonderful.
Agreed wholeheartedly. The Lemmy community has been wonderful. People here actually have good conversations, even if they take a few days to do so, unlike the folks on Reddit. Reddit comments were more meme-y and less substantive.
Yeah this is basically like reddit prior to the DIGG migration. People are much nicer here.
Redditalternatives has two types of folks who visit it, the smaller one thinks reddit is shit because of the choices the employees make. The larger one thinks reddit is shit because spooky woke moralist SJW shills paid by George Soros are censoring free speech via coordinated downvote, report, and ban campaigns.. Sometimes a person occupies both groups.
The former group likes Lemmy et. al. The latter gets on here, sees a pro union post top of all, shits themselves dehydrated, and leaves to write screeds like that one.
So you're saying we should upvote even more pro union content.
I'm doing my part!
Is this collective action to force change?
We have to take a first step if we're ever going to reach our fully automated luxury gay space communist goals.
One can dream... in the meantime the agenda's on industrial sabotage and unionizing
You have a real way with words. Definitely stealing this one
As a 10+ year reddit user who has switched 98% to Lemmy, only checking reddit on my computer every couple days: Lemmy is completely fine, and I have seamlessly transitioned from Reddit.
Its userbase is more technical than Reddit's, and there's not as much content. But it is a perfectly good Reddit alternative. I find it isn't as addictive as reddit, which is awesome. I just wish there were more educational communities akin to AskHistorians, AskScience, etc.
I’m a 15-year user of Reddit. Lemmy right now is very similar to very early Reddit. Reddit’s users were more technical back then, too. I’m betting the early adopters of places like this are usually the technical types.
Another nice thing about Lemmy is that a lot of the low-effort, casual users on Reddit haven’t gotten here yet. Interaction here is definitely a lot more pleasant.
Also 15 year account and 100% agreed.
It's very akin to reddit ~10 years ago. Grammar nazis, "um actually" and pedantic debates are everywhere. You just have to not engage and consistently remember the other guy is probably a sweaty nerd who cares way more than you do.
The worst part is the pedants aren't even right most of the time. I've seen so many people complaining about perfectly acceptable sentence structure.
I tell myself they're just younger folks that have been failed by their schools, but then I get sad that they're younger folks that have been failed by their schools.
Actually, it's not always young kids, we all suck at grammar and that's okay. If clear communication took place, who cares?
The problem is that they're not recognizing clear communication and yet assume anything that confuses them is a mistake made by another.
Let's be honest - we're all sweaty nerds here
I actually have a sweating disorder where I sweat all day. I'm also a software engineer.
I finally feel like I belong.
Ditto. No issues with Lemmy here. I mean, there were a couple of annoying communities (to me anyway) but it was easy to block them.
Generally I’ve not noticed any toxic behaviour otherwise. At all.
In fact I was somewhat taken aback at the quality of responses to my last post. It’s going to take me days to research all the options and advice I was given. And from what I could see, most if not all the comments were informative and interesting.
The signal to noise ratio here is excellent, even if the numbers of comments etc are lower.
The only toxic I got was when I accidental posted in a conservative thread without realizing what it was. Basically like /r/conservative. Fortunately I was able to block the instance and move on.
mmmm askhistorians was one of my favourite late night prowls.
Its* userbase.
That is an incomplete sentence.
“sentence fragment”
“‘sentence fragment’ is also a sentence fragment.”
“must conserve battery power”
closes eyes
It's not a sentence. Checkmate!
(I upvoted you.)
Big oof. Corrected, to my great and utter shame. I am debased before you, o grammar sage!
Lotta people coming here from Reddit expecting 1:1 replacement, and then get pissy that the 2 man dev team that's just trying to keep up with this sudden burst in activity isn't at parity with the multi-million dollar company that's been developing their site for almost 2 decades.
Honestly, I'm just tired of the constant comparison. Lemmy can be it's own thing. It's a work in progress and it has a lot of promise, but for anyone looking for their reddit experience, there's really only one place to get that.
I don't want Lemmy to be as big as reddit. When it does it's guaranteed to be enshittified.
It’s an open source project. It has no investors driving it toward user hostile profit seeking which is the primary force behind enshittification. A large user base doesn’t cause it, merely triggers it where the cause is already present.
I'm aware, that doesn't mean it's impossible though.
Enshitified is the wrong word imo. Reddit went downhill long before the API changes. Most popular subreddits were filled with karma farming bots spamming the same shit over and over.
By the end I only used reddit for news and niche hobbies.
"Enshittification" is the wrong word for everything. It is both often used incorrectly for what it means, and doesn't even represent what it means well. People just like it because it has the word shit in it. It's a bad term and I can't wait for it to fall into obscurity.
Instance admins are already compromised sometimes. They can be bribed or get greedy.
Also, fuck that guys tone. Condescending prick calling other people pedantic.
Honestly glad I left. For now at least when I see that new message number I'm not terrified of what I'll find inside
Yup, I haven't even bothered deleting my account. I'll get to it eventually, but I just don't go to Reddit anymore. I've been hereb since the API announcement (didn't wait for it to take effect), and I've been reasonably happy here.
I will say that lemmy seems a bit more leftist than Reddit, at least in the communities I visit. On Reddit, you'll get Bernie bros and whatnot, whereas on lemmy there's a lot of literal socialists/communists. But at least there are fewer far right folks baiting people into one sided debates. I find the socialists and communists easier to detect, so I think lemmy so far wins.
Lemmy isn't perfect, but it at least doesn't have ads and I can use why client I want, or build my own. So I'll stay until I find or build something better (I'm working on an experimental, distributed link aggregator).
I'm a bit of a Bernie bro but some of the communities on here aren't just left but like extreme left which is.. different for sure. They're at least more tolerable than the "We support free speech but not leftist speech" Republicans and the communities that are too much I can just block and never interact with. While I'm sure I'd still enjoy Reddit if I logged on or went back to the subs I used to be on, I refuse out of principle. I even feel gross when I need to visit subs to get niche tech answers. I won't ever trust Reddit again and we've got some solid meme communities here. It does enough for what it is, I only hope we grow as Reddit continues to burn.
Yup, agreed on most counts.
I consider myself a left leaning libertarian, and I generally feel more welcomed here than on Reddit. I still get lots of down votes for mentioning libertarianism (apparently that's associated with facism somehow? Not my fault right wing nutjobs tried to steal the term), but I at least get decent discussion about actual policies, especially when I'm left of both major parties. That was a bit more rare on Reddit.
But even if lemmy was actually way worse than Reddit, I'm not going back, that bridge has been burned. If I ever needed to leave lemmy, I would pour more time into my decentralized link aggregator project.
if you're deleting your Reddit account, you should make your past content all garbage by using Powerdeletesuite
Same, I haven’t logged in since Apollo shut down. I occasionally check my small country’s sub through browser, as it’s not active enough on lemmy, but that’s it. I’m super happy with lemmy.
"I don't like Reddit.
Its interface is ugly as sin. There are fewer users there and they're all pretentious, extremely liberal, and anti American."
-Some Digg user circa 2008/2009 (probably)
Based
One day I will wake up, realize 'based' went the way of 'tubular' and probably still not have an objective definition.
"Tubular" I can at least trace where it came from. It's surfer lingo. Sometimes when you catch a wave, the wave crests all the way over you and encloses into a tube. Surfing through that is supposedly the most euphoric thing about the sport. "Tubular" is thus "anything that makes you feel the way a surfer surfing through a tube-shaped wave feels". Thrill, wonder, excitement, etc.
I have no idea where tf "based" came from. Wiktionary suggests that it ultimately comes from the chemical definition of "base" (i.e. the opposite of an acid). "Freebasing" is a way of converting certain drugs, particularly cocaine, into smokable form by converting them from acid to base. Rapper Lil B. is alleged to have coined "based" to describe his lifestyle as someone who is unafraid to be himself as an individual (which, I guess, included smoking crack). This supposedly filtered into 4chan to become an alt-right slogan for "admirable person who bravely maintains alt-right opinions in spite of adversity" ("based and redpilled"), and later was claimed by groups outside the alt-right to simply mean, "someone with admirable opinions".
It definitely started gaining traction from based god lil b lol
I think the funniest part about it is how obviously over the top and ridiculous lil b would be, then yeah the alt right tried to take it over but now it's basically back to the lil b style meaning.
I'm not into the culture so I didn't want to lean too heavily on this one source. It's good to have some corroboration!
he talks about it in this interview from 2010, a little more than halfway through the article. afaik, his use is where the slang originates.
https://www.complex.com/music/a/complex/lil-b-talks-getting-sucker-punched-gay-rumors-drake-envy - so sorry about the ugly link, still learning how to do this
As far as imageboards go, I believe lil b was the origin, not mere traction. KYM can hopefully confirm.
My closest guess is "based in reality".
I was familiar with its use referring to baseheads, and later took it to mean based in facts. https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/based/
Pretentious and extremely liberal still fit perfectly for reddit today. They definitely aren't anti-american though. They have an unquestioning bloodlust for every US state department adversary
Meaning Russia and China, I assume?
replace American with Russian/Chinese and you have modern day Reddit accurately described to a T
The only times I've seen toxicity like this is ironically whenever there is a big wave of reddit user influx, things usually settle down for a while as they adapt to the cultures here (or get banned), it's not as much of an Eternal September as much as it is a Irregularly Scheduled September.
Most of the active comms here are smaller but better quality than their subreddit equivalent. You even get good discussions here on memes sometimes. (Politics and News here still could be better, though.)
For someone who's been very unhappy with the state of social media for quite a while, Lemmy is a breath of fresh air, even though there are definitely growing pains.
I'd rather deal with this supposedly "toxic" lemmy userbase than sift through a thousand comment post where 900 are bot reposts on reddit
This feels like it was written by someone who has never been on Lemmy because that has not been my experience at all.
Reddit is fucking full of bots astroturfing right wing political nonsense and we’re not getting that on Lemmy because those instances are often defederated.
Or, you know, he’s one of those guys who signed up for world when he should have gone to exploding heads.
This. I have much more quality discussions here than I ever did on Reddit. Not sure wtf they are on about.
I’d say it’s roughly my experience with Lemmy as well tbh.
There are some good discussions to be had here, but I don’t think they’re necessarily wrong about the issues, just a bit overblown.
I think Reddit’s far worse in general though. I think it’s gotten particularly worse over the past few years, it’s almost Facebook levels of people looking at stuff just to make themselves angry.
Half of the /all feed is about obnoxious people and fights these days.
The r/Canada subreddit was taken over by far right wing mods and astroturfed to all hell with Conservative nonsense and Convoy support. I found myself speaking up more and more there because it was full of homophobic, racist antivaxxers and that is not an exaggeration.
Didn't help that most of us gave up and stuck to /r/onguardforthee
~~I don't see those fights you speak of, maybe I managed to avoid them ? Genuinely curious. ~~
Edit: I am a moron and cannot read. Thought the poster above was talking about Lemmy...
Half was a ridiculous over exaggeration, but I see so much /r/crazyfuckingvideos and /r/fightporn, /r/imthemaincharacter is another awful subreddit.
Recently people were getting whipped up about that YouTube prankster who got shot, it was posted a ridiculous number of times.
I am sorry I misread your post and thought you talked about lemmy... Haven't been to Reddit in ages...
Nevermind my question then.
It can also depend on the time of day if browsing All or which communities you're in. Lemmy does have a lot of folks who were banned from various subreddits, but they're a minority.
Lol, the user doesn't seem to realize that if everywhere you go and comment, if absolutely everyone is an asshole, then maybe it's you that's the problem...
There's also a chance everyone else is actually an asshole, but here that almost definitely isn't it.
True.
Yes I was thinking in those lines. If they deliverd garbage and then was annoyed that they got garbage back.
Guy is hundred percent right. Lemmy is a echo chamber for a certain demographic as vast majority of users are in it.
We either have tech, or politics. Literally every topic ends up in either. We also don't have the differing opinions aspect as just about every debater talks like they're just the different shade of the same color.
Even spicy news that would make any other site a warzone of opinions just echo chambered here. Literally everyone agrees on one conclusion and random two comments that disagree with that having at least -15 points.
Yeah reddit is already a tiny bit of an echo chamber (tech savvy, frequently online folks). Lemmy is worse (every other post is "big tech bad, Linux good, privacy ftw). Not that these are necessarily bad things, they're just not representative of the general population.
I would love to get the opinions of people who fall for Nigerian Prince scams, or people who actually click the ads that say "There are hot singles in your area" just to diversify my niche online social group.
Reddit has echo chambers in the different subreddits, and they can be about as vicious or more than Lemmy instances.
Good. If I wanted the general population, I'd scroll Facebook
The general population: ::: spoiler spoiler
:::
To name a few (note, I am only refering to the loud obnoxious minority, not the majority who are mostly cool)
Sure you can. Look again at your link. You linked straight to one heavily down voted comment thread under that post. Click the view all comments link and you can see that virtually all the other comments there are positive, mainly, other funny wifi names. If you find one negative post, already heavily down voted, to be too much negativity for you then you are not going to be happy anywhere on the internet.
Yes, you are right, it has become more positive recently. When I first saw this, the comment in question had a positive point. Perhaps due to different timezone (some would be asleep while others awake)?
Also: look at the number of people who upvotes that shit.
This is what 35 years of right-wing talk radio turning any cultural event into a political crusade has gotten us. The right wing echo chamber has brain-poisoned so many Americans, that they no longer have any non-political schemata for interpersonal interaction on any topic.
Want to talk about how to keep the Internet fast and secure? That's political now.
Want to talk about the science behind the causes of climate change? That's political now.
Want to talk about making anyone's life better in any material way, other than a blood-sucking c-suite executive? That's political now.
Want to talk about medicine? Oh you betcha that's political now.
Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, and Fox News have caused this. And I have no problem calling them out for it. Think saying-so is "political?" Screw off. I don't care if your politics get in the way of everything that's interesting to discuss. Deal with it, or move to Saudi Arabia where conservatives would be happiest.
The idea that something that affects society can be nonpolitical is just your bias towards the status quo.
Everything was always political, and the status quo has always depended on hordes of lumpen trained to identify with their own oppressors over their own interests.
Before there were networks of right-wing radio and websites distributing right-wing talking points, they just used TV, newspapers, mailing lists, posters, etc. The effect was still 100 million Americans cheering when the national guard shot students protesting against the state sending their friends to die while participating in atrocities in Vietnam.
Even gardening is political; the notion that you should only plant grass and ornamental plants, mow your lawn once a week, and any deviation was a flaw was popularized and enforced by William Levitt to keep people from having too much time to read and become communists.
Similar sentiments spring up after the civil war regarding edible gardening and use of fruiting trees in urban planning, for fear that black people will live off foraging instead of working.
People that act like the media landscape was better or people more informed overall when everyone got their news from the same big 3-4 networks and 2-3 newspapers BLOW MY FUCKING MIND. Like, please read Manufacturing Consent once.
This take that things only got "political" when conservative talk radio got popular...I honestly can't.
Right, and to some people of a certain temperament, being aware of, and concerned about a vast range of entirely different issues, all of which can be engaged with on a number of levels that build on your knowledge and understanding, all of that is just an "echo chamber".
The echo chamber argument doesn't account for the fact that people can have shared fundamental values and nevertheless have constructive valuable informative conversations that engage in nuanced analysis. Being concerned about climate change, for instance, you can have all kinds of productive conversations about new research showing how hot September was, or how to make cities more walkable, or any number of things, and those are valuable conversations where describing them as echo chambers is silly. They're actually good conversations where we gain something from having them. If your primary test of a community is whether it does or doesn't have echo chambers, it doesn't have meaningful things to say about cases like this.
There are so many "Well Acshually" people here. It's insane.
Well Actually not enough. Debate things till the end and know what is right.
We need some form of wiki to manage those debates so that we only have them once.
You forgot about Star Trek memes. Although often those are about tech and politics.
Star Trek memes are the only things keeping me on platform lmao
Seems like this person's main problem is that they went to lemmy.world, which does basically seem like a collection of all the worst redditors.
I'd say a lot of users, perhaps even most, on lemmy.world are just fine, but I've seen some wildly bad behavior from their mods (e.g., one of their politics mod making a mod-flaired comment about how "The United States is not a racist nation," like what)
Lmao what? The heart of the global empire is somehow not racist now, despite all the evidence to the contrary? After all the police killings of unarmed black men, how can anyone believe that?
Probably the same type of person who'd complain about reddit being too "left leaning." We're not talking about people with a reasonable or healthy array of takes.
ngl incredibly glad we're not federated with those guys
I mean, is it? Because I've found it to be an overall better experience so far. Am I just not going to the right instances/communities? I mean, I get that there are some fucked up places in the Fediverse, but I haven't been actively looking for them, and I haven't accidentally stumbled across anything so far.
Yeah I think we're on the good lemmies 😁
Redditors complaining about CSAM? Last I checked Reddit had a subreddit called r/18_19 (a porn subreddit for adult teenagers aged under 20) with over 1.5 million subscribers. I sorry, but there is no way that all the posters there are over 18, given Reddit's lax verification practices on NSFW instances. That's some "trust me bro" nonsense. Reddit had r/jailbait and violentacerz not even a decade ago. Spez was there back then too.
I have never seen any CSAM on Lemmy. If it's an issue, it should be dealt with the utmost urgency and concern though.
Some people really hate lemmy. There was another post in that subreddit with a screenshot of some csam instance with the title what is wrong with Lemmy. This is enough for people who is looking for a reason to not leave Reddit. Another talking point of these people are the political leaning of Lemmy devs. E.g. See this thread https://mstdn.social/@PVTejas/111022248039156302
I really don't get why people care so much about the political opinions of the devs, you're just using the software they're making and not hanging out with them or something
i mean, when the revolution comes *checks calender* sometime in Q3 next year, i expect post screenshots across the lemmyverse to appear in multiple kangaroo trials and summary executions. But of course the same is true of Reddit, so who cares.
Knowing reddit, I'm willing to guess they weren't even talking about actual CSAM either, but instead whining that a certain instance allows lewd drawings of certain fictional characters that are "totally equivalent to real kids being abused!!1!" according to them
downside of lemmyverse: you will get death threats for being a lolicon
upside of lemmyverse: you can send death threats to lolicons
eh, reddit leans left but there's a good chunk of far right extremists that have infiltrated a lot of subs especially politics ones and turned them to shit.
lemmy leans left but instead of the extreme right we have lots of extreme left and tankies,namely from 2 particular instances.
both kinds of extremists never make any sense, are complete snowflakes, and live in some sort of weird alternate reality where in some cases I can't even tell of they are extreme left or right, they both trend towards extreme levels of authoritarian dick sucking
lol
Reddit leans "acceptable" left, which is basically what the yanks allow.
Reddit's highest concentration of users from 2015 was a US military base
It creates an environment where you can call out billionaires/gun nuts/anti vaxxers/homophobes/Saudis/etc and get upvotes, but it won't let you create an actual opposition to the problem.
Like, surely you have heard about atrocities committed by Saudi Arabia or Israel or other US allies? They get maybe half a day on r/all, compared to any demonstrably less deadly event in Iran/China/Russia that hangs in news subreddits for weeks? Even if it isn't a left wing bias, it's definitely a right wing bias.
The left-right spectrum isn't a helpful model (Piped link) on an international forum. As you've seen in all the replies, people have very different ideas on what is left and what isn't... there is actually no true definition. Many people will, for example, argue that liberalism is the status quo and therefore centrist since the advent of socialism/anti-capitalism and fascism. This is especially true outside of the Five Eyes countries (US, UK, AUS, etc.) where the political atmosphere is clearly different for historical and cultural reasons. On top of that, reddit is so huge that different communities have noticeably different leanings, so naturally someone will object when any generalization is made.
Congratulations, you just pissed off all the anarchists lol
The political compass is a better representation purely because it acknowledged that political ideals aren't a linear spectrum, but it still misses the mark because a plane isn't sufficient either.
Politics is such a complex topic and any simple representation of it will lead to what would appear to be contradictions in a person's beliefs.
Absolutely. And certainly with this kind of geometric modelling, with a spectrum or plane where these broad and complex concepts are ordered more-than or less-than others.
I disagree with even this. It's not better, it's equally inappropriate.
The political compass is adding an extra idealist axis to an undefined axis (the linked video explains this in more proper detail). It's just digging further into a hole in an attempt to make it work, when the whole paradigm is wrong. And this is bad, because the compass model has rationalized that undefined, subjective linear spectrum. It helps delude people.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
left-right spectrum isn't a helpful model
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I miss the random non tech centric communities from Reddit. The userbase here, across the fediverse as a whole gravitates towards more tech focused aspects and while that's fine, you miss out on the random topics / subreddits you'd find on Reddit.
(The answer isn't also 'just start that community here', specially I miss randomly getting topics from subjects I wouldn't even search for, but just get surfaced because of the shear amount of content and users Reddit has)
Maybe I'm just weird but I think the tech focus is better.
Like that's where all this started. Kevin Rose wanted a better version of Slashdot, a tech news aggregator, so he created Digg.
And Digg was about tech news for several years before going to a general format, at which point it became trash.
And then Digg's redesign killed the site and everyone flocked to a Digg clone called reddit, even though reddit was a clone of post-shittification Digg, not pre-shittification Digg.
Being tech-focussed really does help. I'd sooner deal with Well Actually neckbeards than the average Facebook user, even if I'm not just interested in tech news.
Check the top hour filter of all instances. That's where other content surfaces.
TL;DR: no. Definitively no.
NTL;R: Okay... let me chew on this.
For me, at least, non-contributive ("toxic") [see footnote*] behaviour would be: assumptions (including witch hunting), decontextualisation, "didn't read but still replying lol lmao", insults, "I dun unrurrstand", whining + entitlement, and "chrust me" = "I take you for gullible". And those things happen far, far less in Lemmy than in Reddit.
For the poster complaining about Lemmy, "toxic" would be, instead:
I know that what I'm going to say is anecdotal, but it's still worth sharing: I see the difference specially because I used to moderate a small Reddit sub, and I mod a Lemmy comm nowadays. People here are more reasonable and contributive; I barely need to intervene here, and even then 99% of the time it's like "don't do that" "okay". In Reddit though? Well.
Depending on which instances yours federates with, you'll get a different experience. lemmy.world and lemm.ee in special tend to gather Reddit-like critters alongside a few good posters, so instances where behaviour is a bit more monitored (such as beehaw) tend to defederate them.
I'm no coder to claim that the issues are "backend" or "frontend". Instead I'll say the issues that I see:
And it never showed a downtime banana.So... come on, the platform works. It has its issues, it's likely worse from lemmy.world due to the amount of posters, but it works.
Name them. Otherwise it boils down to "chrust me". Unless referring to the CSAM event below.
I seriously believe that the approach taken by the lemmy.world admins to close down !lemmyshitpost was more sensible than the actions that I'd expect any Reddit instance (oh wait, there's only Spez's) to take. If the same happened in 2023 Reddit, here's what would likelyhappen:
Dude. You're in Reddit. That's the pot calling the kettle black. Reddit makes even Faecesbook's community look wholesome in comparison, it's on par with modern Twitter. Lemmy is considerably nicer than Reddit.
And if you still want something nicer there's always Beehaw. I'm being serious - for people who want/need an environment with more monitored behaviour, it's a go-to place. Provided of course that you don't want to eat the cake and have it too, by behaving in a way that you don't want others to, otherwise they'll show you the door.
::: spoiler Footnote
It's a bit of off-topic, but this post is a great example on why I don't like the word "toxic". It refers to everything and nothing at the same time; it boils down to "I don't like this", but dresses it as if it was an intrinsic feature of the object (in this case, Lemmy or Reddit). Note how the list of things that I'd consider "toxic" are completely unlike the person complaining about Lemmy, and if you gather a third person odds are that you'll get a full list of other things to be considered "toxic".
:::
I think what they meant by contrarians is people who disagree for the sake of disagreeing without any actual argument , usually in order to stir up drama or engage in a circlejerk
They do realize that Reddit had subreddits like r/jailbait and 4chan used to be filled with CSAM until they cracked down?
They also do not mention specifics on who the 'purity testers' or 'pedants' are. Reddit also has a good record of being a place for pedantic nerds :nerd:
It sounds like the real complaint is that it's different.
Because yeah it's certainly not more toxic. That's laughable. My interactions here have been overwhelmingly better than on reddit.
And the other complaints boil down to "it's small and new, yuck"... Yeah that's a good thing usually. There have been terrible attacks with CSAM but people are handling it and luckily I've never seen a single image like that. On reddit it was not uncommon to see mutilated humans without wanting to even though there was far more time and resources available to prevent that
well there's your problem
I think there is some valid complaints to be had against being swarmed by fanatics on Lemmy but there is no way it’s more toxic than Reddit. For the most part I’d say the community is very much the same between the major Lemmy instances and Reddit. Just with more FOSS evangelism and Linux love.
The issue is smaller communities. All my hobbies have small Lemmy communities… with either 2 subscribers or posts that are months old.
And on Reddit smaller communities are VERY nice. It’s the big subs that are filled with edgy teens trying to out meme each others.
and leftism tbh edit: i know you guys all gonna downvote lol. dgaf
I’d say that Reddit was the exact amount of leftism. Just with more “orange man bad” in addition to the anti work/late stage capitalism bend as Reddit is more USA-centric
How’s Lemmy.world mismanaged?
They are demonstrating the reddit post first hand.
Step 1) be toxic and mock people for the choices they make.
Step 2) act superior
Step 3) passive aggressively victim blame
lol people are def nicer here. This guy just misses his little friends.
Posts about people being nicer while being condescending about his position 🤦
It's throughout many of the comments on this post.
I fart in your general direction.
(Sniff) oh yeah. our farts smell so good
Hey fuck you bud
Every complaint about the users is a complaint you can make about every other online community 🙄 Just go through the effort of blocking the jerks and the communities/instances they congregate and spawn from.
Yup. On Reddit, people complained about users from /r/thedonald or/r/politics, so I made myself a simple rule: avoid obviously politically slanted communities and extremely popular communities. Things were much better, and I took that same rule of thumb here (avoid lemmygrad, exploding heads, and most of the larger communities on lemmy.ml) and I've been happy.
It turns out, if you actively avoid jerks, you'll probably be happier.
Oh I agree. Maybe not toxic per se, but extremely out of touch. I think what happened is it just became a bigger echo chamber, because from the already echo chamber reddit, all the people who are the type to switch to the fediverse (privacy focused, foss lovers) are on lemmy, with their opinions being spouted back at them, so it feels like everyone agrees, when really they're a minority.
The biggest differing opinion between reddit and lemmy that I see is lemmy's insistence that absolutely everyone should switch to linux. Of course I saw that on reddit a bit too, but it always had some pushback.
And of course there's also the ignorance of the fediverse's problems. Like people just can't comprehend why someone wouldn't switch to Mastodon or Lemmy.
This doesn't apply to all topics though. There is still some good discussion here. Sometimes it can be better than reddit.
What's weird is I don't experience this on hacker news. People seem to be a lot less out of touch, and have a wider variety of opinions. Not entirely sure why, maybe because it's had time to mature?
Yeah I kinda noticed this privacy/FOSS thing here, people commenting about software in question being proprietary or has cloud backup for example I have to double check what community I'm at, and 90% times it's not privacy or FOSS related, I was downvoted multiple times for making a mistake of mentioning proprietary software
Lol. I don't have an account anymore, but I was able to lookup the post on Google and found it. Dude seems to be getting ripped apart a bit. It's pretty funny.
One thing I've noticed about the alternatives subreddit, is there is a lot of people persuading people against alternatives. It's almost like there was some organising to persuade people there was no alternative.
I mean, when you factor in you'd probably get removed, or shadow-banned, or have your posts removed for mentioning Lemmy, it feels like there is a multifaceted approach to discouraging folk from leaving the reddit teet.
While there is an element of truth, it's scattered in with exaggeration and only focussing on negatives. The objective was to say Lemmy bad, staying good.
No way is Lemmy more toxic than reddit. I find those "well ackshually" folks are much less here.
I use to follow /r/degoogle on reddit... but it felt like pretty much every discussion was people shitting on every alternative, and implying that all measures are totally pointless unless you stop interacting with any form of computer for the rest of your life. It's just so weird having people say there there's no point switching from Chrome to Firefox because google is the default search engine on Firefox. I got to the point where I really did believe there was some deliberate destabilization going on, to weaken the community. (And it worked. I unsubscribed; and I'm sure it struggled to keep anyone who actually had anything useful to say.)
Anyway... I wouldn't be surprised if /r/RedditAlternatives was similar to that.
Oof, I can imagine that sucks. Come join us on !degoogle@lemmy.ml :) Everyone seems quite enthusiastic about finding alternatives. I'm all about the Firefox, GrapheneOS, Proton Mail, Signal, Element etc. :)
We got some Hexbear toxicity, and some real Linux apologists.
But the fun thing about the fediverse is that you can just block those instances and be done with it.
There's a lot of FOSS nerds here who get disgusted at you if you suggest someone use a web browser that isn't Firefox. But if you hung around on the Linux/FOSS subreddits, you'd get the exact same thing...
Agreed, feels like the vast majority of people here are FOSS enthusiasts, which isn't a bad thing necessarily if you align with them, but definitely a bias and could put off people who genuinely don't care about FOSS or tech in general.
There is quite a bit of bias on reddit that makes it quite uncomfortable for some of those people. Quite often Linux, Firefox and great open source software is bashed. It can be quite disconcerting to be in a different environment, but it isn't solely because of the views and biases of those on Lemmy. It's also significantly down to the views and biases of those one reddit also.
Yep, bias exists everywhere. There's no avoiding it. Reddit does have the benefit that biases tend to change from sub to sub though. Lemmy instances that I've seen (not defederated ones) tend to hold the same FOSS bias, but the intensity of it varies from instance to instance.
A lot of open source advocates do tend to be inclined to open source software on an open source link aggregator.
Signed, Open Source entusiast. :)
Yeah that ain't the issue, it's moreso the attitude than anything when someone chooses something that fits their needs better than the open-source alternative.
I say this as someone who uses Firefox but still uses MusicBee.
There’s some real holier-than-thou types online that just have to be heard. And when Lemmy doesn’t want to listen to their main character ramblings they crack the shits and run back to Reddit with the other main characters
Maybe I'm being unfair, but somehow when I read complaints like this about "purity" and "insufferable" and all that, I always assume it's "they downvoted and insulted me when I made a bigoted joke about like transpeople or something".
I know it sounds like I'm taking the piss, but I don't think I've encountered a kinder, more accepting community than Hexbear, due to admins here actually enforcing civility rules. And I'm sure there's an equally chill instance for people who aren't interested in tearing the arms off their boss and drinking blood directly from the limbless wounds.
Hexbear is literally the only place on the entirety of the internet where I can be vulnerable in my posts without worry it's going to be used in harassment against me by some reactionary freak.
r/chapotraphouse was one of the most accepting and inclusive subreddits of all time on reddit when it came to not punching down, and Hexbear is orders of magnitude better than even that.
Y'all could be the kindest people but I'd never know because I simply cannot stand the amount of inline media spam in every single @hexbear thread. It's obnoxious to read and detracts from any amount of intelligent conversation that could be occurring.
The unfortunate thing is that these show up as small emotes on hexbear.net, so the users generally don't realize they're huge disruptive images to others.
If one can get past the 20 most invasive, tactless, eternally-online members of Hexbear and Lemmygrad, they're generally great places. Unfortunately, those people are the main ones getting attention and alienating people on other instances.
It's disheartening whenever I see a legitimate chance to teach someone something and a Hex account just makes an absolute malicious shitpost that isn't even worth calling a dunk. That, and a couple of highly-active users in particular who will consistently take the worst possible interpretation of a post and insist anyone who disagrees is a bad actor. Sankara would roll in his grave if he could see those post histories.
ngl, i love those folks. i agree we could chill out in some situations.
That is just because they see you as one of them.
Encounter them as a non-hexbear, and they will either bring up the most abrasive takes on communism, worship dictators like gods, or just shitpost because they know they can't win.
Have a look how they treat other communities, and you'll see what I mean.
I find Lemmy uses to be a little pretentious oft times, extremely narrow minded in it's left leaning views. Very Reddit like in that last regard, perhaps more so.
At the same time, I do find a lot of insightful, clear headed individuals and some genuinely good people, but that also exists on Reddit.
The people running this site are better by far and the mods a little more level headed, but I don't expect that to last because power always corrupts.
I've already seen some people modding a stupid number of places, which is always a bad sign.
We'll see where this place ends up, but it is not as liberated and people here want to believe, and not as immune to corruption as they think.
The ones I have seen are also kinda pathetic. Opening 15+ magazines/instances/communities, all of which are almost the same subject, most of them are post-less.
I have noticed this too. It's better just to not interact. At the end of the day, I just wanted a better link aggregator than what reddit became and it works nicely for that.
I mean... My own experience here completely agrees with their overall appraisal of the situation.
The only reason I'm still here instead of back there is 3rd party app support...but rather than 100% of my Reddit time becoming 100% Lemmy time, it's more like 100% of my Reddit time becoming 20% still Reddit, from a computer, 20% Lemmy on mobile, and 15% in disbelief that I'm spending time on Facebook, and the remaining 45% of that time I used to spend on Reddit, I'm just not spending it on social media anymore.
So yeah. Lemmy wants to be a reddit alternative, but for me it's just not. It's similar, but with less content overall, less relevant and less interesting content, less interesting comments, and on average a worse community. Other than the shitty spez business practices (which are a big deal, don't get me wrong), Lemmy's just "Reddit, but worse in every way" to me.
Unless Lemmy gets better, it'll never be more than an occasional visit for me...and if Reddit were for some reason to right the ship, shit can spez, and reintroduce 3rd party app support, I'd probably go back in a heartbeat.
Remember: once a dick, always a dick. Reddit will not be unshittified, even if it looks that way for very brief moments.
I get what you're saying, and even partially agree.
But at the same time, if I'm looking for a social media/content aggregation platform, and I have to choose between "idealistic vision, small and problematic community, low quantity and low quality content" vs "corporate/capitalist asshole vision, large and mediocre community, variable quality and quantity content" the latter is going to win every time, based on the fact that there is actually at least some content there that's worth my time.
So far with Lemmy, the only thing I get here is memes...and news that I am already getting from 4 other sources first. None of my niche Reddit communities have any real presence here, so my visits are brief and unsatisfying.
I hear you, but what make me stick with Lemmy and try my best to make it work is the whole concept of decentralized social media. We can't just handle the power back to big techs, see what facebook did in the whole trump election scandal. or what Twitter is becoming. The fediverse now is the only alternative we have, it is the last stand against a corporate controlled internet.
And I am tired to pretend social media does not dictates the real world trends, it does and it is here to stay. There is no more separation from irl and internet.
There's concept and there's execution.
Gotta have both.
I'm not wasting time on, or making any commitment to, a flawed execution, no matter how much I might appreciate the concept.
And for that matter, while I know this isn't a receptive audience to the idea, decentralization isn't the be-all-end-all concern for a platform like this. Idealistically it's nice, sure. But for me (and I'd wager most), it's not even in my top 5 concerns when deciding how (or if) I spend my time on social media.
For me, it has to be relevant, informative, fresh, and well-delivered. If that means trading some of my personal data to their collectors, I'm fine with that. Lord knows everyone else is gathering it too. In the case of Lemmy, the benefits don't matter if it's not delivering on my main needs of it.
There are lot of people working for free to make it work by trying to improve it. It is easy to complain from the confort of my chair at home. And so society becomes more cursed each day.
I largely agree, yet I'm more like 70% lemmy, 5% Reddit, 25% working on my own Reddit alternative. Why? I refuse to give Reddit more of my data when they've demonstrated that they're more interested in monetization than making the best community (huge shift from when I first joined Reddit). I also think lemmy is doing interesting things to try to foster a great community, and I want to see what works.
But at the end of the day, I think lemmy is architected wrong. It relies on people spending a lot on hosting, which I really don't think it's sustainable, and it is also confusing for users, which is going to reduce adoption. My project attempts to solve both:
There are some potential downsides, so I'm interested to see how bad those are.
Have you considered that while those may be genuine technical issues, addressing those alone won't in turn help much in building good communities? Imo one of the common problems across all social media is that a lot of smart, capable folks build their backend systems but neglect to bring on community relations teams (or in the context of entire platforms, community governance teams, maybe?) that coordinate with the people that use those systems.
Probably the big reason for this is that thus far large social media platforms have been built with a corporate mindset, and so the people aren't viewed as people, but an audience for adverts, subscriptions, products, etc. Lemmy has a different yet similar issue insofar as technically capable folks building backend systems, but they don't (nor others deploying their tech) have the resources to bring on any additional community-facing help to then coordinate and collaborate with people in governing their spaces.
Thanks for the feedback! And yeah, it's absolutely something I've been thinking about. I'm not sure I'll even publish it once I have it working because I'm worried about a bunch of nonsense like CSAM or bigotry, much less the more mundane issues of not spam.
And that's the rub, building a good community is hard, especially on a digital platform, and requires a very different skillet from building good software. I'm not sure I'm cut out for that part, but I can learn from the issues lemmy runs into and try to solve them with technical solutions, namely quality moderation tools.
That's especially challenging in a decentralized system, and it seems to have caused a lot of people to leave, so I'm trying to have a good solution out of the gate.
Since it's decentralized, I can't force anyone to recognize any given moderation without breaking the whole point of decentralization (i.e. nobody has control, even me), so my plan is to rely on a web of trust type system. For example:
I'll probably include a default list, but users would be free to choose their own moderators if they think mine suck. But I have no idea how well that'll work, but once I get a prototype working, I'll post it somewhere (probably here on lemmy) to solicit feedback.
I think this idea is different enough to get people interested, and hopefully robust enough to keep people on the platform. To get content, I'll probably bridge it with lemmy or something so it'll look like another instance (again, not sure if that's feasible or even wanted). It's early days, and the more frustrated I get with lemmy, the more I'll work on it.
Elitism ? definitly. Especially linux. But toxic ? I only saw cordials talks in here, with a few trolls here and there.
As for csam I never saw any scrolling a bit every days. I saw people talking about another instance encouraging it and troll spamming, it but never once saw it myself.
What I saw on reddit without searching was almost daily gore. And definitly sone real csam (this was a long time ago, seems to be fixed now)
Literally everyone from the 6-sided Ursine instance is awful. I've had 0 good experiences with them, and not for lack of trying. The conversation always starts with me making a mild take, they say something about how I just need to get used to the taste of Stalin's scrotum, I say I think committing war crimes is bad actually, and then they say "it's a shame you're so closed-minded, but if you aren't just see this manifesto [link to pig shit balls]".
Tell me I'm wrong.
If you are from that instance: don't respond, I don't want to talk to you.
I guess he hasn't heard of, I think it was r/AHS, that did exactly this routinely to get subreddits they didn't like shut down.
That was a lie made up by right wingers. It's the same pedo-scare rhetoric that transphobes and qanon are using.
You are a buffoon if you believe this. I was a regular on r/AHS, and this was an obvious lie.
Fair enough, I can't actually find any evidence.
I thought that's how the mod protests were going to end.
Nice, more redditors can only make a forum worse.
maybe it needs a little curation, but once you've blocked the instances, communities and users that are personally annoying to you, it's a fun and engaging place with the usual share of human noise. Maybe some people are happy to have reddit choosing what deserves to reach your eyes, I like to do it myself :)
Absolutely. Reddit had default subs and you would add to it as you explored. Lemmy is like the opposite... it's quieter here so you start with seeing everything and then subtract the bad out. Ive blocked instances (mostly other languages), communities, even some users that seem to exist to just post about Linux/communism/that guy who seems to mostly post NSFW material that looks way too young. And after subtracting out what you don't want in your feed it's a pretty good experience.
I've never watched star trek in my life but idk I kinda like some of these memes. They can stay.
I honestly just wish the internet would go back to individual forums. Lemmy is great for a reddit alternative, but I think old school forums were just better overall
I know forums still exist, obviously, but they're kind of shitty right now.
I can't agree with you, forums were so clunky
Forums worked really elegantly when you had an active userbase of maybe a couple of dozen people a day.
Megaforums... not so much.
Yeah there's way too many people online for that type of structure to work anymore
Reddit SEO captured them. They got shitty because they stopped growing, and when a community stops growing, it decays. And yes. They're absolutely better
NodeBB and other forum software have added activityPub integration on their dev roadmaps, so you might see it become a thing again. Personally I don't want to create a new forum account for every thing I'm interested in.
I believe that most of the things people do, or try to do, on reddit (and therefore reddit alternatives) just aren't appropriate for how the site is structured. Reddit is a 'link aggregator', that's what it was designed for. People post links to content.
So it's no surprise that forums are a better option, structurally, for a ton of communities.
Less trolls here that just want to argue with everyone over everything
Like some of the top-ranking comments here are saying, that place has a very large proportion of people who were coming from the banned subreddits like The Donald, various straight-up hate communities, and typical alt-right groups. So naturally, alternatives that were founded by anarchists and socialists (raddle, lemmy.ml) were almost always disregarded there, possibly with the exception of the Wolfballs admin (I can't remember too well if they got much attention with the 'they're not all like that' line)
It's always funny to me to see newer users complain about a lot of political (incl. FOSS) users in an inherently political project, which was picked by many precisely because its political values prevent the for-profit shittery that reddit.com has been doing for 15 years, and that alt-right social media alternatives frequently do whenever they get enough users. Yes, we're going to voice our concerns when people show up at the door and want this to be just like reddit was, or bring over the uncritical mainstream ignorance we came over here to avoid.
We don't have unblockable "He gets us" spam.
That in itself is worth any friction I have to overcome to use the 'verse.
Never really understood the thought process "If I move to a different place, it'll definitely be magically free of arseholes and people I disagree with." It's just not reflective of reality - wherever you go, there'll be arseholes. Just build your Subscribed feed, dip into All occasionally to se what else is out there, find an instance that takes moderation seriously and aren't actual fascists and block the strays that occasionally make it through.
And OOP is right to say Lemmy has backend issues. The dev team of 2 people is too small and they really need to make safety a massive priority ASAP. Being able to block instances as a user is a big step forward (planned in the next major release I believe) but both mod and admin tools need to be much better and they need to do a lot more to tackle CSAM hits. I hope they're taking note of the various projects @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com has begun to tackle these issues.
In terms of the size of the Lemmyverse, I don't really give a shit about that. What I care about is quality rather than quantity and it stands to reason that as quality continues to improve (as I believe it is) then quantity will follow in its wake.
OOP seems to forget that Lemmy only got as big as it is right now about 4 months ago - of course there's a lack of niche communities and of course there's a lack of tools. Poor old Ernst developing KBin got hit with tens of thousands of users for software that wasn't even out of Alpha.
The best things we can do as users is create good content, encourage discussion etc even when it feels like we're talking into the void. Because sooner or later, if the content is good, people will engage. We're not at that tipping point yet but it'll come if we put the effort in.
All alternative platforms should be assumed to be at least 50% rancid garbage, because that's where all the people banned from the mainstream platforms inevitably go.
The fact that lemmy isn't 90% flat earthers and crypto spam is actually astounding and i don't know how on earth this has been achieved. Especially considering how suboptimal the moderation tools are it's really impressive how good the content here is.
The devs' politics led to them valuing building a welcoming community over the principle of free speech. There was a strictly enforced moderation policy from the start, which may seem crazy now but it's a lot easier to do when your community is small. Toxic people definitely came in and got banned. On their way out you'd often see them complaining about how ridiculous it is to filter out slurs. The community that stuck around was really great. I'm not someone who posts a lot on any platform, but I was viewing lemmy every day for a couple years because the discussions were good, and there was very little hostility.
Today the community is more like reddit than it is like old lemmy, lemmy actually feels a lot less friendly today than it did like six months ago.
I do think the devs were wholly unprepared for reddit to shoot itself in the foot as badly as it did. Their project went from a passion project to serious business almost overnight. With time I'm sure they're capable of working through the issues we're facing today, but I don't think they were ready for the big migration when it happened.
Well, I think the people here prior to Rexit were already producing good content and then the people who moved over from Reddit were primarily people annoyed by u/spez and who valued content quality and genuinely wanted a decent platform. There'll be times when things get shitty but by and large I do think Lemmy had a good start. We just really need the devs to give some power to instance admins and Mods via decent tools, because the one thing that will kill progress is people not being able to curate and protect their Communities.
/u/spez aliases are getting grumpy.
He is not wrong. I have had to block and get rid of other instances on Lemmy, because they are filled with toxic motherfuckers, and elitist Linux users
You're just as worse. You're a hexbear user, and I don't like how you guys promote CCP propaganda
But at least you can block here.
I mean… if you’re getting disdain from your home instance… you picked the wrong home instance. Switch instances.
Aren’t Redditors getting $ for content now?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23887226/reddit-gold-system-contributor-program
Yup
I think that, perhaps, the user is trying to use Lemmy as Reddit, rather than using some of the fantastic quality of life improvements that evaporated with the API nonsense.
For example, blocking users and communities (and soon instances). Some users and communities, even if I enjoy them or the instances that they are on, sometimes are just too toxic for me. And that isn't to say that the comms and users necessarily are (sometimes they are) but, that sometimes engaging with some comms and users either causes undue stress or temptation to get involved in an Internet fight. That's not behavior that is good for us, even if it sometimes feels good in the moment.
I'm hoping (and have suggested) that a "timeout" feature gets added to allow one to readily self-regulate and disengage when they find that interactions are approaching the sorts that are algorithmically encouraged on commercial social media platforms. The outrage machine is just terrible and I've found myself much happier and in a better headspace since leaving such platforms. Added bonus is that transphobia actually gets taken seriously on most instances and, while it doesn't technically impact my as a cis guy, I'm much happier knowing that people are able to feel safer to be themselves (or come to terms with themselves).
As for the complaint about people being more likely pedantic or correct people on technical details, I love that - finding out that I'm wrong about something is fantastic because that means that I learned something. When there's topics, like tech, where there are often correct and incorrect answers and they change or get added to regularly, one really needs to leave the ego at the door. We're all humans (and bots and human facsimiles), which means we'll be wrong from time to time. It's a fact of life, effectively in environments where there are a lot of knowledge-workers and the medium of communication is directly related to the topics.
Personally, I'd like to see more comms regarding to digital circuit design and open-source silicon.
I also think the website is exceptionally good, and has a unique distinction of being equally good on desktop and mobile. Feel that the website is so good on mobile that I don't need to use a mobile app, and I sure as heck can't say that about Reddit.
Oh god yes.
I refuse to install any app from the websites I use.
Reddit has been trying all kinds of tricks into getting me to install their app, just like most other websites.
I literally had to switch to desktop view every time, because it just wouldn't allow me to use their mobile view, like wtf?
Lemmy is a breath of fresh air in that regard.
... an optional feature where it only lets you browse for X minutes a day would be awesome
User blocking doesn't work at all.
How so?
The person you blocked can still see, and reply to, everything you say. It only denies you the opportunity to respond, allowing them to discredit you and turn others against you without your knowledge. It also doesn't stop them downvoting you at all, leaving them free to retaliate via vote bombing.
They should be the ones unable to see any comments you make. They should be unable to reply or respond to you. They should be unable to vote on any of your comments or even posts at all.
But it's the opposite, and therefore completely broken.
Unfortunately, if they were to do this I'd imagine they'd be able to know you blocked them - as your instance would need to tell the other instance (and if they were a single user instance they could grab that record from the database) to hide your comments/posts. Which could cause even more problems as there are definitely people who'd go scorched earth over it. Even if they didn't go on a rampage about it, they'd still be able to just then logout and see what you're saying because of that.
From what I recall in the ActivityPub spec, transmitting blocks is already there, but I imagine no one implements it for that reason.
The outlined issues don't seem to be lemmy exclusive, but then again, I've spent quite a short time here.
The toxicity is caused by the society, not by the platform. From my experience, one can always find a more toxic subreddit.
Reddit is just as much moderated by volunteers, that's the reason I started using reddit. Also, having corporate admins doesn't make the platform any more spam resistant.
If anything I would expect these problems to be more prevalent in smaller (lemmy) platforms and stabilize with growth to reddits level.
Now I'm not trying to defend lemmy, but being even more community driven I want it to succeed and become what reddit used to be.
I want it to exceed what reddit ever was. It's tempting to look back at those days and want to remake it, but really, we can and should go further in making good communities. And with federation, in theory, it's so much easier to have a small town booted up without it constantly feeling an inch from death, the death-struggle of almost all comfy communities that haven't become popular.
☝️This post DEFINITELY NOT made by reddit corpo. Nope, no sir.
I left reddit when RIF was shut down because of that "no API for you" bulltrash. I found lemme.world and it was like the clouds parted and a warm sunbeam shine down upon my cold, wet, and shivering body. It's like reddit was in 2010 when I first became a daily user... but better in some ways. Smaller community, which will be interesting to watch grow as the years pass, everyone already here still trying to figure out how it can be made better and generally filling up with long time reddit users completely fed up with that corperate, ad riddled cesspool the site turned out to be. Is lemme.world perfect? No way and far from it... but that's okay. There's a really good bunch of dedicated computer smart folks (not me as one could imagine) continually working to mold and shape it into something that fills that dark hole left in the world of social media caused by the requirement for corperate suits needs to shove ads and propaganda down our throats between every blink we make.
Anyways, it sounds like the response he got were likely caused by some flavor of antagonist, rage baiting posts intentionally made to stir up said responses. I'm sure this is a win for lemme.world.
Literally my first interaction in reddit after I left 2 months ago was with a troll spamming emojis like he was so smarter than me that was laughable. No thanks sir.
I mean ... you could join an instance that's federated with hexbear.
When I first started using Lemmy, most of the front page was hate content. Lately it seems like less than 10% though.
I think that was just growing pains. It's unreasonable to expect a community as small as Lemmy was beforehand to immediately moderate itself like a large community when they grow as quickly as Lemmy did. It takes time to build the systems and fill positions. The amount of hate content has been dropping consistently. I barely see any hate posts and far fewer hate comments. Excluding when I make the mistake of treading into Hexbear but that's just cause I'm stupid sometimes.
I definitely see a lot of toxic comments on here but I think that's mainly from reddit outcasts trying their hardest to be sassy. Sassy unhelpful comments on Reddit won the most karma so it can be helpful to remind them that that doesn't actually work here
I have noticed that the rate of my own sassy short comments has reduced quite a bit here, when compared to the past. I feel that the reduced volume of content, more detailed comments by others, and more of a sense of investment by commenters has encouraged me to up my game. To decide that if I am to comment, it is worth giving the comment more consideration and depth.
Will this continue? I hope so.
It absolutely is an echo chamber, and it gets really toxic. This place is extremely xenophobic and it's very exhausting.
Mf acts like CSAM and rampart porn spamming bots are not a thing on Reddit. That's some neat cherry picking right there. Here's the thing, at least rightwing nutcases are far less prevalent here due to defederations.
Lemmy.world is the problem
I actually don't experience these any of the issues. If you don't like tankie stuff then just block lemmygrad and hexbear.
Tbh, I'm very left so I like lemmygrad anti-capitalist anti-US memes.
They're fine as long as you keep a safe distance, plus it's fun to watch them antagonize any nazis that show up.
🤨
Fuck it. I'll take my media raw. I'm not gonna block something just because it offends me and if shit posters start taking over the place well thats just society baby! I prefer it that way to giving some central entity the power to 'clean' up everything how they see fit. Not gonna lock myself into an echo chamber if I can help it.
To all the admins, thanks and take your time fixing things and if instances go offline for a while, thanks for giving me a social media break!
honestly I found this was dependant on the instance you are on. I switched instances off my previous one (well technically I bounce back and forth) and I find it super dependant on the instance I'm on with what the toxicity levels are.
I see this a lot and I really don't understand it. Here I am on lemmy.world, replying to you on sh.itjust.works, on a post from lemmy.ml. Clearly neither of us are browsing just our local instance, and indeed I imagine most people are not. So what does it matter what instance anyone is on, beyond instance-specific defederations?
There is a sense of comraderie on most instances. Not sure if that's the case on .world since y'all are so large and general purpose.
And also the level of moderation sometimes differs greatly based on where communities are hosted.
Also, defederations matter a lot, considering beehaw and hexbear, two of the 10 largest servers, are defederated with a large number of other servers. A new user on sh.itjust.works or lemmy.world is going to have a very different experience than one on lemmy.ml, because they won't have any interaction with hexbears or beehawers.
The instance matters less once you've been here a while and figured out how to find everything, but for new users it can often be a significant barrier to entry if they join the wrong instance and have a bad experience.
I think it depends a lot on what the instance you're on considers is I see vastly different topics of posts between the two instances that I'm on
I bet that dude said something racist and got dogpiled. I only see toxic comments on lemmy when I say something racist.
That's a fair point. While racism thrives in small communities where any rare truth gets downvoted, Lemmy's federation has made it almost impossible for racist communities to reach critical mass here.
As someone who browses /new, I've seen numerous times someone trashing Lemmy, and then 20 posts down I find they posted something incredibly stupid.
Lemmy news is a cesspit from a post POV but other than that shrug
I think there are more straight shooters here, could be dude just had bad takes.
It is too easy to accidentally downvote.
Straight shooters is a wiggle word to say asshole who doesn't care about others feelings.
Thats funny how first paragraph of their post is describing my experience with Reddit. I think, in majority, people here are nicer. Also Im curious how many backend issues had Reddit in it's first couple of years? I doubt situation back then was better. And its surprising to see anyone on Reddit complaining about backend problems here, while they literally made impossible to create any 3rd party apps or software based on Reddit API.
They're not wrong. Lemmy across all its instances has a real hall monitor vibe. It's because most people here are both trans and in IT.
Well...bye.
I think they might have a point about the moderation issue. It's the same story on mastodon and the fediverse where there is too much to moderate and prolific ban evaders can run rampant.
For what it's worth I believe that rough edges like this are a small negative compared to the postives of being able to use social media without being under the yoke of a big tech company.
He's not wrong. 🤷
Someone told lil' whiney here something he didn't like. Lemmy has been great in my eyes. Since getting here in the exodus of reddit 3:16 "And whoa, fuck uspez, this place sucks" it has been pretty great. Kinda like 12 years ago reddit.
But this is social media. There will be trolls. There will be people smarter than you. And likely dude got buthurt and went back to the communities where his thoughts are welcome at large, even if they are wrong or misleading or whatever. Safe space so-to-speak.
If he thinks this is toxic, holy shit is IRL ever gonna eat him alive. Even the redditards who simp it up for maga and r/conservative won't save him then.
If someone corrects what you wrote into an English sentence, and you have a problem with people looking out for you, then you're a dick.
Watch this. I'm a republican.
Hi a republican, I'm dad
Ree
Me too. COME OUT YE BLACK AND TANS, COME OUT AND FIGHT ME LIKE A MAN.
::: spoiler spoiler
If you really want to make the more rabid and trigger-happy Hexbear and Lemmygrad users mad, you have to say you're a Democrat :::
Lemmy obviously has some problems. If the OP doesn't want to deal with them and be here, it's their decision. Directly or indirectly, I don't see why would you want to argue with them.
Sounds fairly accurate to me.
Well, only way to solve this is by having people here who aren't idiots (whatever that means to you) to participate and make things better. But this is too hard for most people, I guess.