It's really hit or miss. The communities generally have most of the same downsides as those on the corporate competition, but with added issues due to the small size of Lemmy/fediverse and inherent features of a decentralized platform.
I mostly stick to bigger communities and instances on Lemmy, which was not a thing I did much on the r-word site, and I admit that makes it trickier to make a one-to-one comparison.
My hobbies and interests aren't actually all that obscure, but the communities for them on Lemmy are functionally dead, fractured across multiple instances, or just plain non-existent as far as I can tell. Really little or no engagement. So, that sucks.
Another issue that seems especially apparent here is that it seems much easier for smaller groups with "loud" voices / strong opinions to overwhelm any kind of discussion or debate and give the appearance that their opinion is majority opinion, even if it is not. I'm not saying that doesn't happen elsewhere, just that it seems especially pronounced here. People would complain about group think on the r-word site, but it's often amplified here.
One thing I like about some of the bigger communities here is that it seems like it's more visible when unprovoked rudeness and incivility are called out. Not that it never happened on the corporate r-word site, but I do run across that a bit more here.
I'm very new to this I thought the point of it was that all the decentralized bits are still linked. Do you mean there are duplicates of communities that are just named slightly different or what?
They're not linked. Every instance/server can have it's own version of "memes". So you can have memes@lemmy.world and memes@lemm.ee the one at memes@lemmy.ml is the most active one though. Imho federation doesn't work for this. There's always gonna be one community at the top. If that community goes rogue though, that's when you can easily drop it and go to another.
Less trolls, skills, and spammers. And bots.
But it seems to have a higher percentage of zealots. People go crazy and extreme over some weird stuff. You can't have a casual opinion about Linux here for instance.
The fuck did you say about Linux?
So much this. People seem to generally be fine here (I never found the reddit communities I interacted with to be toxic) but heaven forbid you purposefully use Windows or pay for software.
Or Apple. /c/technology is an Apple hatefest.
You’re spot on - I’m not feeling like I really care about either place these days. Maybe I’ve outgrown social media, especially if the content is high-school level Absolutism.
It's fine. I like that it's normal for people to post multi-paragraph comments in response to a post. Gives me plenty of material to read when I'm bored, and this place. Is still small enough that you recognize people in different threads. It's cozy, but some communities could use improvements.
Also, the other things I've noticed is that many of the people complaining about Lemmy being toxic are some of the most argumentative ones themselves,if you don't believe me, you can go to their user page and more often than not find examples of them being rude or unpleasant on the first page.
Misery loves company, after all.
Loved you in Oppenheimer
Eh. Credit is credit, I'll take it.
omg can i have your autograph?
I may have made a rude comment that is visible on my first user page but that is generally not my style.
I also did not complain about lemmy being toxic, or more toxic than reddit, i said that compared to reddit, i am seeing a lot more angry people and toxic discussion because i look further than just my niche interests since they have hardly any traffic. That is still my honest take on the topic.
I use Linux btw
But are you using Firefox??!?
Whta about hydrogen powered public transit?
Yes! Of course I also make sure it is installed with Flatpaks instead of Snaps.
You should actually be using de-googled Libre Wolf with uBlock Origin and your own DNS server. You've let me down. /s
It has zero niche reach. Unfortunately, that's really important for the people who try to switch from Reddit. You can't compete with Reddit when your favorite hobby sub there has 20,000 members or even many more and meaningful daily activity.
The people here are mostly more techy and nerdy which leads to niceness but also holier than thou attitudes everywhere.
The content here turns over slower, which is another big sticking point, but the bones of the site are good.
It's suffering from being new and different. If it can hang on long enough for Reddit to go full Facebook, maybe it can hit a stride and prosper but I honestly don't know.
It has zero niche reach
People can't expect a Reddit-clone. I thought when I saw the proliferation of UK communities that they are going to end up dead. They did. My old Reddit account is 15yo so I saw Reddit grow organically and it went like this:
1-2yr old Reddit Top level subs: e.g. AskReddit
3-5yr old Reddit: Secondary level starts: r/unitedkingdom r/ukpolitics
6+ years third level: UKFood, AskUK, CasualUK.
Each time Reddit grew subs were created organically after main subs got fed up with a certain type of post. AskUK formed in response to users getting fed up with questions in UnitedKingdom and people wanted UK specific questions of AskReddit. UnitedKingdom spawned as more UK users visited. CasualUK spawned when some people wanted less politics.
It was organic and subs spawned when required. So subs rarely died because they only came into existence when there was demand.
When there's fewer people you can afford to shove everything into higher level subs and if you want it to be specific put it in the title like this:
Brits - what's your fave tea?
[Yanks] Whats your fave eagle?
Putting posts into communities with 3 people that never gets viewed is pointless. I basically stalk just a few subs and make sure anything I'd ask in a more specific Reddit sub gets posted in the most generic but relevant I can find. E.g. I asked about HaikuOS on the Linux community - it's not even a Linux distro but it's open source and it's the closest-big community that would know anything about it.
People need to treat Lemmy like early Reddit. Don't think you can clone reddit's vibe and operation in a year.
I think oldschool Redditors need to WAKE UP and remember wtf it used to be like before the Digg exodus exploded Reddit into mainstream.
N.B. everyone's comments are worth a shitton more here because there's fewer comments. You aren't shouting into a storm, your voice gets heard here. Embrace that people. Stop with the low-effort humour to get karma and put some thought into what you want to say. If nothing else it'll improve your mental health.
This is such a great point that your voice gets heard. When I read that, it finally clicked with me. When I click through, it's rare that I don't read every comment. On Reddit, I rarely did because there were so many comments. Here, I'm usually reading them all. Your voice is being heard. Nice.
You aren't wrong, the problem is much of lemmy is against anything that could lead to growth to hit levels where nice communities could exist.
It's suffering from being new and different. If it can hang on long enough for Reddit to go full Facebook, maybe it can hit a stride and prosper but I honestly don't know.
I'm starting to lose faith, but we'll see in the long run once Meta enables federation. It may be bad for the fediverse, or it could force unprecedented growth. My main fear is that activitypub ends up the way of e-mail, regulated by the big players. I'm too dumb to figure out if it can happen, though.
I'm asking because I've personally found it far more hostile than Reddit (the only other platform I've put much time into). What I've mostly seen is that people downvote quickly and tend towards eliteism relative to Reddit. That said, I recognize that this could be just by instance or community, so I'm curious how others have found it.
Yeah idk, I’ve tended to see the exact opposite. I rarely downvote and I think most people I interact with on here do the same.
What kind of communities do you frequent? For me it’s a pretty curated c/home with most chill communities and then I’ll browse c/all and even on there most people seem chill.
So long winded but to answer your question I think most people are nice, the elitist comments might not get drowned out as much since there’s less people.
Edit: wanted to add that the people here on lemmy seem to be older and techy and that demographic tends to be more clear and blunt. However, that might be something that comes off hostile but really isn’t.
The problem is not just that it’s hostile, but it’s also full of people that know jack shit.
On Reddit you go to r/whatever and there’s a good chance the guy answering your question is the actual godfather of whatever. Those guys didn’t make the move to Lemmy because they are hardcore into whatever, but casually into Reddit. What we got are the people that were hard core into Reddit, and casual into whatever.
So we have a bunch of blind leading the blind dilettantes getting all pissed off about shit they know fuck all about.
That’s actually a really great point that was hitting on something I felt but didn’t understand about my interactions and I think it really sums it up. It feels like every community is a general community here - explaining how technology works on reddit to someone on a general purpose sub was expected, but here you get people posting clickbaity anti-capitalist anti-tech shit in tech communities that are factually wrong and getting absurd upvotes and agreement from people who agree with the politics and that’s all.
Knowledge is low, sire.
On Reddit you go to r/whatever and there’s a good chance the guy answering your question is the actual godfather of whatever.
There was also a good chance they were another Unidan.
Who was pretty knowledgeable about biology and contributed a lot before he developed a serious case of Reddit brain.
I'd say there are fewer hostile people, but the ones that are hostile are really hostile.
I do notice users here snapping back at jerks a lot more.
There's far less of a chance of being banned for it here. Unless you're snapping back at a mod or admin directly. Calling an idiot an idiot when they say idiotic things or a jerk a jerk when they are being a jerk on Reddit counts as harassment.
My experience is the opposite. I'm mostly on startrek.website & lemmy.world, while keeping local in the former and going for all in the latter.
ive found it incredibly diverse. there are many instances, and some are known for nice folks. beehaw is friendly.. midwest.social has been nice to me.
lemmy.world is a taunting wasps nest of nonsense.. the bigger the community the more... rough.. you may find it.
I've been on the Internet specifically for the social aspects of it since 1990 and I honestly don't see much difference at all between any specific site, forum, Usenet bulletin board, chat room, or service. Just the in-jokes are different and some terminology changes. People are people no matter where they are. The internet as a whole fosters a particular subset of people that even amongst their own different tribes, are fundamentally the same. A lot of outcasts and marginalized people that have no others of their particular group in reality to vibe with. I'm one of them, and I love the web because there are so many others like me here, everywhere I happen to go on it.
It's not often I wish for awards to give on Lemmy, but I wish I could for this comment , it is exactly why I love the internet, all summed up perfectly.
At times like this I like to give out a Lemmy Lemon 🍋
Did you know that lemons aren't natural and happened when humans crossbred citrons and sour/bitter oranges?
Life never actually gave us lemons. We gave ourselves lemons!
I think this nails it.
I miss some of the communities I used on reddit that are still either quiet or very quiet over here, but I also recognise that unless I ramp up my participation in them, I haven't really got grounds to feel negative about that. Besides, using social media less is a plus to me.
I love there's no ads, tracking and 'suggestions' - in short, no algorithm. The apps are (mostly) open source and the community are appreciative of that.
I used to get news from reddit and can get it here too, there's no difference in quality or quantity. Politically, I appreciate the de-emphasis on hateful content and it helps I'm on an instance where the Admin is on top of their game in that respect. It is noticeably more left-wing on here but since I am too I guess that's not an issue for me. It's certainly way better than Reddit in that respect where I'd stumble across fairly extreme right-wing opinions in (supposedly) non political subs every day.
People seem, by and large, much calmer and more reasonable here and less inclined to attack en masse. I've noticed a distinct improvement in my overall mental health but I think that might have more to do with not being on reddit than being on here.
Lemmy is what we make it. For those of us who came over in the Summer, Lemmy/KBin is less than 6 months old. Let's not paint it into being one thing or another just yet.
I just wish there was a single leftist community on the internet which was academically engaged with contemporary political science instead of simping for shitty autocrats because they want to relitigate the cold war.
Quora has a higher rate of intelligent posts than most open forums. And the community tends to be less tolerant of troll posts and those not backed by evidence. Much less right-wing extremism.
Try saying vote 3rd party.
Lemmy feels like a subset of Reddit.
Certain communities are continuations of those that are/were on Reddit. The "post link to a paywalled article, everyone bitches about the headline" section of the world is a carbon copy. A lot of the technical space...I haven't encountered as many "May God create a deeper, hotter hell for you and your family if you buy Intel over AMD" types here, though this may have been because I haven't really found a substantial PC hardware community.
Commercial Republicanism doesn't seem to be anywhere near as present. The folks with a mossy oak jacket instead of a personality...there's a few of them here but the extremists actually seem to be Stalinites.
The various permutations of No Stupid Questions or Ask Lemmy aren't as dick-in-hand horny as Reddit's were (I'm guessing there's fewer teenagers here), though there's a lot more talk about the platform itself. slow turn to look at OP
Official discussion boards are completely absent. Nobody's ending Youtube videos with "Go check out our Lemmy community." I'll use the example of Coffee Stain Studios' game Satisfactory: Snut still occasionally mentions their subreddit, and while there is a community here, it's A. unofficial and B. almost entirely dead.
The brain trust feels gone. Stuff like r/tipofmytongue or r/whatisthisthing or r/askhistorians just hasn't happened here yet, possibly because of the lower population. I'm less confident that I can get an actual answer to "What's this weird piece of bent metal I found in the back of my grandmother's silverware drawer for?" or "What's that movie where a guy pulls a nuclear bomb with an ATV and gets radiation sickness?" I don't foresee AMA's or anything like that, though it seems that was dying off on Reddit as well.
Moderators overall seem to be doing an amazing job, because the place seems well moderated, I don't really notice the mods doing their jobs as much (possibly because Lemmy doesn't do the deleted by moderator thing that Reddit did for some reason), and I've yet to see or hear about a mod being a human case of pink eye like you'd see so often on Reddit. Use Reddit for awhile and you build up a list of moderator names and the subs they ruin, the same list on Lemmy is still blank so far.
It's still the internet, which means The Worthless are present and accounted for. You know, the "people" who didn't get enough attention as children who exist only to make casual conversation via text impossible via interpreting every sentence as 100% true and literal. Say something like "Raiders of the Lost Ark was better than Last Crusade" and The Worthless are guaranteed to show up and try to lecture you about opinion versus objective fact.
This entire comment rings true to me. Get out of my head.
It seems nice and scratches the itch to be approximately social, but suffering through seeing the same 5 articles posted nearly back to back by bots is deeply annoying. And the lack of content when sorting by 6hrs means I inevitably have to spam block the weird porn/fetish stuff that decides to crop up in-between lol.
I've found more far-left shitposting here than anywhere else on the internet, which might be some people's cup of tea but I find incredibly obnoxious. I'm not even right-leaning. Glad I can block whole instances with the app I use at least
It's actually fun to engage in many communities here in all types of conversation and media formats
Plenty of federated instances to choose from
Cons:
Specific communities are small or nonexistent
Not enough user generated content per day that you can waste time on (Maybe this is a good thing lol)
Instance switching is still a bit of a pain because I am lazy
Web UI is okay, nothing too special. Including some alternative frontends
Instance federation is like proto p2p. It's not easily scalable, so it can't automatically react to sudden demand or attention.
Better conversations, and less echo chambers in general. I know exactly who'll disagree with that notion too, but that has been my experience.
The right-wingers that did come over are obviously butthurt to hell since they can't abuse the report function and get backed by obviously biased mods like they do on Reddit. It's easier to simply ignore them here, as well, even though they're around as always.
Hell, half the comments in this very thread seem to be bitching about "Marxism" like it's something that anyone gives half a shit about in today's world. They need their bubble, and they seem to be angry they didn't get this one, too.
Also people are generally more tech-savvy here than there, for obvious reasons. That's a plus.
I have been happy to get outside my bubble a little bit. But at the same time, many of the Marxists here seem to be in their own bubble.
I suppose you just don't see the censorship and raging echo chamber crowd when it's your own tribe running it. Enjoy the blinders pal.
It's pretty widely accepted that whatever happens over in the US has ramifications all over the world. My tribe, so to speak, are Swedish speaking Finns, and we're a very small minority in a country that functions better than most.
It sort of gives one a perspective. The Finns are liberal in some things sure, but very conservative in many ways. We'll never legalize weed for example, but we also won't touch abortion rights because that's just common sense.
That said, in the US my voting pattern would be extreme left sure, because that's just normal over here. Sadly people are afraid and vote right because immigration, but that'll stop once everyone realises it doesn't work, since we still depend on immigration to get jobs filled. Everyone knows it, they just don't want to say it out loud.
And when the climate really hits us, the clowns will probably be gone anyway. It's the last gasp we're seeing right now. Enjoy it while you can.
I think this whole left/right thing is the issue. Stop bundling shit together and work in individual issues yo. Abortion rights is common sense. So is right to bear arms. Somehow we gotta have an XOR gate on this? Lunacy.
Finland is up there on weapons per person in Europe, but it is both expensive and complicated to get that first license. It does get easier the more you are into it, but following all the laws to the letter is, again, expensive as hell.
Meanwhile practically every fighting aged male has had some time on the range and weapon safety drilled into them during their conscription, although some more so than others. It might be an old system, but it works for us. Can't really see it working in the US, tho, for obvious reasons.
Is it practical? Not really. Do we have a lot of mass shootings? Nope.
Training requirements is practical and good, but restricting based on money is bad. Not only the rich need to defend themselves.
I agree in principle, and the fee in itself isn't expensive. It's the fact that you need to buy a safe with a high enough security rating (which they actually do come to check on randomly) and then also another secure place to store ammo in. Legally they have to be separated when not in use.
After that you need an active membership in either a hunting party or a gun sports club, and participate/shoot a certain amount each year to keep the license for your gun. You also have to file and get approved for each individual gun you buy/own.
With all that said though, once you've gotten your first license and proved you can handle whatever firearm you got for either purpose it gets easier to get a second one, and then a third, as long as you have a valid enough reason to buy and own whatever gun you're after.
Most people just start with a .22 and go up from there if it is for sports, or buy a shotgun or rifle for hunting.
As for self defense - it's practically impossible to get a handgun for self protection purposes in any legal way, unless there are very special circumstances. Owning a gun for self protection is just not a thing people take seriously here, outside certain ..groups.
As a sidenote tho, if you know where to look it's not particularly hard to get a handgun if you want one, you just don't want to get caught with one, and it's also not completely trivial to get decent ammo. A black market Glock goes for around 500€ afaik.
Like I said, I agree with you in principle, but like I also mentioned, Finland is very conservative with certain things. This is one of them. I haven't been shooting for a long time due to medical reasons, so some of this might be out of date. Maybe someone more involved please correct me if I got something wrong.
Self defense and particularly defense against unchecked government is the whole primary point for me. I don't care to go about shooting animals. Gun sports is cool I guess.
Yes, I understood that point. It's just not widely shared outside of the US. I personally wouldn't mind having something for self defense, but I'm in a minority and it comes from living a rough life when younger. Luckily the risk of running into an armed intruder here is just about zero anyway. It's just another world, really.
..and I think you're smart enough to know there's no outshooting any government, no matter the country.
Just about zero? Try several times in my own personal life. I'll die in a shootout long before I ever let them take me again. Death > torture
If it wasn't apparent already, we don't live on the same continent. We live in completely different worlds.
The biggest threat here is getting mugged by some youngster with a knife that'll get caught within 15 minutes.
If I lived over there I'd be carrying too. Here? Here we leave our babies to sleep outside safely.
Must be nice.
I tend to find that it needs about 10x the users, but I honestly don't know if it could handle that at the moment. Generally I would assume one would use a social network for the social aspects, but right now the top (everything) post of the past 24 hours has something like a thousand votes and about a hundred comments, which is actually a pretty decent amount. But there's maybe 1 other post with 100+ comments right now in the top of the past 24 hours that I can see. Go to a second page or scroll for a bit and you'll see most posts have less than ten comments.
Is number of comments the most important metric? Probably not, but it is pretty important one since it's kind of the main reason I would come here instead of just scrolling through Google News or whatever, and I'm guessing I'm not alone.
The only people who actually managed the migration in my opinion were the StarTrek.website people, and it took a clever coordinated effort in a community of people who probably skew more technical than most. For most communities that were interested in things like specific games, shows, hobbies, or whatever and not interested in a new computer toy to play with, they've essentially died out and are either ghost towns or full of bot posts.
In large part I think it's because Lemmy's discoverability is pretty trash, and while I get that it's kind of on purpose it's still an issue. The migration led to this explosion of communities but because finding them is harder than making them, it spread these relatively small communities out. The hope was that they would find each other and coalesce, but instead it seems like they took the path of least resistance and just slid back to their old haunts.
One of Lemmy's key strengths is that it can act both as an aggregator that has a stream of news stories and comments but if tuned slightly differently it can act much more like an old school forum, but there's really no way to bridge the two ways of interaction right now. I think one path forward is finding that middle ground, and slowly becoming a respiratory of useful discussions like old school forums, Facebook groups, and yeah even reddit. But to do that there needs to be a lot more searchable and discoverable and not just letting Google do it. Finding a way to both surface jokes and memes and whatever for quick consumption, but also having some way to keep those highly technical 130 page long forum posts where they reverse engineer an aquarium bubble pump or something available and simmering on the back burner, ready to be found in a few years and awakened when someone makes a breakthrough.
On a more personal note, I feel like I'm vibing less and less with Lemmy. The memes have slowed way down, the articles are interesting sometimes but the lack of any comments makes me less interested in interacting with them, and I feel like I hit the wall of reddit repost bots spamming thousands of sonic fan arts way quicker than I used to. It honestly feels a lot more like it's dying from lack of meaningful user interaction pretty much everywhere outside the star trek memes. Half the time it feels like I'm just using Hacker News by proxy. Just like that line "butter spread over too much bread" it feels like the users are spread out over too many servers. I dunno, I've had a few so I'm rambling. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk I guess.
I blocked all of those repost bots a few months ago, and it really improved the experience for me. No longer are there seemingly interesting posts but with 0 engagement, with the real OP not even on Lemmy. It feels a lot more organic.
Better than Reddit. The community is a lot more welcoming, much more friendly and lacks the open hostility of Reddit. Frankly I hope Lemmy doesn't become mainstream, as much as I want Spez's empire to fall.
I find it mostly better than any other option available, but the polarization of the people here is sometimes hilariously out of control.
I like it better. Sometimes you do see users being irrational, entitled/whiny or disingenuous, but it's still way less than you'd see in Twitter or Reddit. And I've seen users chewing others for engaging in those three things, frankly that's fucking great.
However I do think that there's lots of room to improve. I'll mention some sore points:
On disagreement, some users immediately assuming that the others are stupid (lacking reasoning) or ignorant (lacking a piece of info), instead of asking themselves "am I missing something?".
While witch hunters are not as bad here as in Reddit, they're still bad. If you want to denounce people, basic reading comprehension is obligatory.
Excessive focus on the words being used to convey something instead of what is being conveyed.
"WAAAHHH TL;DR!@!@!1" is becoming more and more frequent. If it's too long to read, it's also too long to whine about its length.
I'm a Democratic Socialist so pretty much everyone hates me when I offer my opinions.
With that said, I love Lemmy.
No algorithm and no ads means I get far more positive than negative interactions on average.
Really? I would have sworn demsoc/socdem to be the most popular position here. At least during peak CET hours ;)
Negative, Ghost Rider.
Both Republicans and Democrats enthusiastically work together to keep us off the ballot and silenced in the media, and that includes federated media.
Dems get particularly upset when you point out the realities of Biden's America for the working class.
That’s funny. My experience with lemmy is it’s overwhelmingly leftist. And anything that doesn’t reinforce their worldview is heavily downvoted. Every liberal who isn’t hanging out on lemmygrad is called a liberal as a slur or a reactionary.
The only things I’ve seen that are exclusively non-leftist is the conservative Lemmy that thinks Fox News and Newsmax is a credible source of information
And whatever hexbear is.
The thing is that Democratic Socialism is not seen favorably by a lot of leftists, as they're seen as being more loyal to the establishment than to revolution. Too leftist for the American Overton window, but not leftist enough for Lemmygrad types, basically
I don’t know that it’s too leftist for me - just a lot of the personalities are too much for me - i can’t listen to anymore Bernie-would’ve-won and Hillary’s-a-war-criminal 8 years later.
I also think Hillary would’ve been a great president for real, so no one likes me either.
I also think Hillary would’ve been a great president for real, so no one likes me either.
A lot of people think Biden is a great president, which shows you just how low the bar is these days. FDR had a literal plot on his life and still had the balls to rule as a socialist, and he was so popular he ended up the longest-serving president in US history.
because any criticism of Biden right now helps Trump to become president. Save your criticisms when there is an actual open primary (ie: 2027), it's already too late for a challenge to Biden this year, as a majority of states ballot access filing deadline dates have already passed.
See what I mean?
¯_ (ツ)_/¯ . I consider myself dem soc, I just see the necessity of pragmatism right now; when the alternative is a presidential candidate who reads Mein Kampf as an instruction manual.
In America, you only have two choices. If you vote for something other that democrats or liberals, your vote is literally wasted. Both choices are considered "right" or "centrum right" in most European countries, there is no "left" choice. The system is utterly ridiculous and there's no escaping it. The most usefull thing you can do with your vote is to choose the least evil party (or join the system and change it from the inside).
In America, you only have two choices. If you vote for something other that democrats or liberals, your vote is literally wasted.
That logic is why we are where we are. A 40-year loss of personal and economic liberty, because you and yours refuse to see the two parties for what they are.
Do not vote third party under our current electoral system.
You need to either work within the current system like the Progressives do, or work to change the system to one that doesn't fuck people over if they vote third party.
At the start it was better, but for about a month now I think there have been more negative interactions than positive ones.
The biggest problem imo is that since Lemmy's userbase is mostly made up of people who left Reddit, they bring their mentality with them. And the two plaforms have hugely different userbases size wise, so if someone says something really stupid on Reddit you can ignore/ block and you can do that with 1000s of people. On Lemmy if you block 1000s of people, you basically just blocked most people who post/ comment.
/rant over
Yeah basically my biggest problem is with how small the userbase is. ( then again I have a few other problems besides that)
For larger communities it’s great. For small communities it sucks. People need to let the mainstream ones grow before branching to these smaller communities.
Outside of that the community is incredibly lefty, I am pretty liberal too but it’s pretty wild how much it leans. There’s also a huge fascination to have everything be FOSS , Linux, and using Firefox . Ex the audacity of the Sync developer charging for an app was hilarious.
Super cool at first, but slowly becoming more and more like Reddit.
Only a matter of time before it becomes a less moderated version of Reddit.
I keep running into the same fucking idiot, it’s like suckmywang has all the same interests as me. This site would be a lot better without them tbh
Jokes aside, there are some genuine morons on this site that it would benefit from losing...
I am all for having more people, but being an obscure "site" is a good filter imo.
The Voyager App has some bugs, but for what it is, I'm amazed by the polish.
On Reddit, all I did was look at memes from the top subreddits, spending my day filtering through the vastly unfunny majority. It's also through memes that I kept up to date with the news.
On Lemmy, I decided to not fall into that sort of doom scrolling again. I blocked all meme communities. I browse through "All" to find any obscure community that peaks my interest, block the ones that don't and add the ones that do to "Home" or "Favourites".
This means my feed is much more curated than the slop I was ingesting on Reddit. I still doom scroll sometimes 😅, but it's better now than it was before, I think.
peaks my interest
Pique - verb - arouse (interest or curiosity).
"with his scientific curiosity piqued, he was looking forward to being able to analyse his find"
On Lemmy you can't even doomscroll. There's not enough (meme) content to sustain that
There's a lot less people over here, but that will get better over time.
The community is a lot more left-leaning. It's not that I don't like this. I do agree with most of these opinions.
I just don't want people getting banned for stating their opinion.
Mentioning you're gonna pirate cause you don't like the news of the service you use prices going up r/cordcutters doesn't like this.
But services need to see that kinda feedback to know they're losing people. I've never had Netflix and never will. Their catalog just sucks. I have Peacock for WWE so Premiere League and movies is just a bonus.
I cashed in on the BF $20/yr deal so ad-free is $6mo. I have Shudder for horror of course.
So I have my fair share of services but I vote with my wallet and use a VPN when needed. But there's a lot of power abusing mods on Reddit. Reddit needs to be shut down and re-do all the mods across the site. If buying a digital movie isn't owning then piracy isn't stealing.
deleted by creator
Clever
It's about the same as everywhere else. The most fun I have on any social media platform these days is blocking assholes.
There are still echo chambers just like Reddit.
Echo chamber is just another way of saying people tend to group up with like minded people. I certainly don't want to interact with people on the internet that I avoid in real life.
Polite counterpoint: ‘echo chambers’ are more than that, I feel. It’s not that they are a group of like-minded people, so much as they police groupthink and don’t allow even moderately dissenting opinions.
See: r/conservative, and them permabanning anyone who so much as hints at a different mindset.
It really depends. If I run a queer friendly space, then part of being queer friendly is not putting people in the position to have to defend their existence every time they log in. Which means that anything I can see that even smells off gets removed immediately. If you come and whine about it instead of giving me a clear signal you understood, you’re getting banned.
Is it an echo chamber?
I don’t know. Probably.
Would I run it any other way?
Fuck no.
I think in your case you're definitely banning queerphobia/bigotry, which I hope most people agree is radically different from banning dissenting opinions.
Maybe the definition of an echo chamber should revolve more about what would be different if you weren't in it? For example, I'd say I'm in a community that is an echo chamber if, when getting out of this community, I might change some of my views that previously seemed obvious. I hope that people in a queer community don't start questioning their sexuality/worth once they're outside of a queer friendly community - although after writing it out maybe some do :(
But then it's not the same mechanics: if I come out of an echo chamber I might read up on some new evidence/arguments/opinions that challenge my thinking, while coming out of a queer friendly space is, as you're saying, getting exposed to hateful comments and being weakened by these. It doesn't seem right to say it's an echo chamber, just like it doesn't seem right to say there are "conspiracy-friendly" communities!
I think in your case you're definitely banning queerphobia/bigotry, which I hope most people agree is radically different from banning dissenting opinions.
It’s a bit more than that. In order to enable people to just hang out and relax and be themselves, you have to make sure they are never put in a position to justify their existence.
You have to go in pretty blunt and nip stuff in the bud. That means banning not just bigotry, but a whole swath of topics and rhetoric that inevitably lead to “those kinds of discussions”.
This in turn leads to reactions like the other reply. “I was just asking questions”, “I was just explaining a point of view I don’t agree with”, “but you have to see it from their side”. Yes. Silly questions that have been asked many times before. We know that point of view, we don’t need you to explain it. No, we don’t have to see it from their side. Not here. Not now.
Don’t bring that negativity in here. Just leave us and let us enjoy our silly memes in peace.
That was my experience on blahaj. I'd never been banned from a community, let alone one I've been an ally to before. Such a pure echo chamber that even discussing why the outside world holds the views they have, even without expressing agreement, gets you labeled a transphobe.
Honestly, it soured me on lemmy as a whole since that was the content I had been enjoying the most.
It’s even in leftist zines.
It funny you bring up r/conservatism. It use to be a fairly big sub and far more moderate until Trump got into power. But if you had anything bad to say about Trump, banned.
Now it is just an echo chamber with few members. Go there and given day and only a few posts with up vote above 100. Really mostly a bunch of pathetic people since the moderate conservatives left.
Lemmy can be a bit this way but on the opposite spectrum.
Username checks out
I've found that I rarely get called out for poor spelling or grammar on lemmy compared to other sites. So long as it is pretty obvious what the correct word or grammar is no one cares to mention. The exception is if the mistake is particularly humorous.
It is the exact same as reddit, only there's less content and comments.
The people, mods, bots, and content are all just the same. There's even still people shilling covert adds on here. It's just cheaper and easier for them to get to the front page of lemmy, since you only need like 20 bot/fake accounts.
I haven't recognized any posts as covert ads here I think. Can you give an example?
The last one I remember was an "article" dealing with some web analytics stuff that all the bigger websites use. It was written to look like someone not associated with any of the different ones talked about, but there was one that was written about more favorably that happened to be cheaper than what was commonly used. The comment section had a couple accounts agreeing but it was all pretty obvious. I'll see if I can find it.
Hm not sure what to make of this. The author of the article states pretty clearly what company they are affiliated with. The comments seem to push a product called Splunk which doesn't appear in the article at all.
I was wrong on the authors part.
People started recommending splunk in the comments to troll against the OP that submitted the link to lemmy. Also, when it popped up on lemmy at had like 15 votes and no negative votes, which is really high and odd to happen in the instance. Especially if you look at how many down votes it has on it now.
Generally good and I like it. My only complaint is that it feels a bit snobby with the discussions and fickle with the downvote button. Like, ok, I get you disagree, but you don't need to publish your book series in the comments section to express what could've been a short sentence. And why are y'all downvoting this cute puppy? And, oh god, the occasional sad asshole who'd rather have a dumpster fire than a cozy campfire.
Generally discussion has been more mature and respectful. Still, I think people are more likely to downvote things they disagree with but I think happens more in controversial topics like Threads defederation, Gaza, and politics in general.
If you want to compare to Reddit, they tend to hide comments with negative scores anyway, and though I can't see the upvote/downvote ratio for comments, having 5 upvotes and 4 downvotes feels worse than 500 upvotes and 400 downvotes. The points don't matter anyway so don't even bother worrying about them.
Just be nice and think of the other person.
ETA: You also have to curate your feed a bit to block stuff you don't want to see, certain accounts and stuff like the immature trolls on hexbear.
The cynicism is more annoying to me, but reddit had more of it, I didn't care much there though.
Good, unless you try and give an opinion on politics.
Agreed. Lemmy has exactly one political opinion, and woe betide any poor soul of another persuasion.
Otherwise the community is pretty great. Lots of good conversation with intelligent commenters.
Politics is nearly impossible to discuss with anyone, anywhere... The problem lies in the fact that nobody has the same foundation for discussing such topics. Probably the biggest issue is what people consider a reliable source of information. If you cannot agree that site xyz is stating things that actually happened, then how can you discuss anything political?
Honestly, I think the pain in discussing politics has more to do with today's culture than anything with Lemmy specifically. It just so happens that Lemmy got popular around the time that "fake news" and misinformation became so extremely prevalent.
I think you’re making a solid point, but I think the basic problem is a fundamental lack of the willingness to listen and digest someone else’s point of view. Sources of information are important to a debate, but they’re ultimately irrelevant if either side isn’t willing to even consider the possibility that there’s more to learn than what they already know.
I did use sources as a big point, but it's because it's the easiest to see. Even if we are having a conversation that's opinion based, a lot of the conversation can be misinterpreted just because of different world views.
I think just about everyone wants what's best for everyone, but different people see the solution to that differently. What is the "best" for someone? In what areas of their life? Burning fossil fuels offers a lot of jobs, but doing so destroys the planet. Except some argue that it isn't destroying the planet, and that we're being lied to. But let's assume it climate change is real, if one side is saying we need to do away with fossil fuels because it's destroying our planet, the other side may hear that they want to take away their source of income (how they put a roof over their head, feed their family, enjoy life). And within that conversation, there can be innumerable amount of different understandings based on the people you grew up around, that I can't even really list examples because it's too nuanced.
If you want to talk about abortion, the debate is really about when the fetus is a human. It is generally agreed that killing a 1 year old baby, for any reason (financial struggles, the child was the conception of rape, unplanned) that killing a 1 year old child is not okay, regardless of your pro or anti abortion stance. So then you'd be arguing when does the life cross that threshold to definitely not okay? Is it at birth? In which case was the day before it born okay to kill it? Most aren't okay with late term abortion, but everyone has the line they think it's okay (with some the line is before the egg is fertilized). Not many people are upset if someone takes a plan B (some people are, but they're the minority), so stopping the process that early is fine. So then the line would be somewhere between the two, and that's an extraordinarily complex subject for people without medical degrees to try and discuss (and complex for even those with medical degrees). But of course there's the aspect of it being the choice of the mother, since it's the mothers body. In which case you could instead talk about the (obviously) flawed scenario: while you're sleeping, someone is hooked up to you as a dialysis machine. You wake up to find this was done to you. They need to be connected to you for 9 months to live, and if you disconnect them at any point you will kill them. Is it okay for you to pull the plug? Honestly, I think there's a lot of valid arguments for either side for that scenario, and both people could be totally right. Both parties have to accept the fact that the other person's viewpoint has validity to have a peaceful political discussion, but it's difficult when your own viewpoint makes you feel that they are killing people, or stripping others of basic human rights. Then you get emotional, you become irrational, and you get angry at the other person. It's just all to likely to happen, we are emotional creatures after all, not machines. And once you start getting irrational, you become more set on your current viewpoint, less likely to hear what they are actually saying, and more likely to misinterpret what they are trying to convey.
This is just two examples of highly controversial topics, but they're controversial because there's nuance to it. To be on the same page about all the different parts of the topic is nearly impossible. Not to mention we already have opinions on a lot of it. I'm guessing several people reading this feel inclined to share their opinion on some of the things I said. I don't think there is anything any online platform can do to have an entirely open discussion. To leave it entirely open for anyone means there will be tension, insults, anger, and whatever else. If you get a few people that can restrain their emotions to have a logical discussion and actually hear what others are saying, you could do it, but then it's not an open discussion.
Same with the ACAB crowd. Seems sweeping generalizations are completely fine as long as the hive-mind agrees.
And not that I’m defending cops at all. But I’m just very anti-“all” when it comes to defining issues.
I think Lemmy is great, don't get me wrong!
However, I have never quite seen such a depressing social media site in my life.
Maybe it's just me, but I've found the majority of the humor here is tinged with poisoned irony, misery, and helpless sadness.
I understand the whole "if we don't laugh over it, we'll cry about it"–thing, but, man.. I came for funny memes and found an ocean of sadness. Feels bad, man.
Not really a place to come to feel uplifted. Would love to see more wholly positive memes & interactions!
Its okay but the issue I have is when I search for a community, 20+ communities show up of the same name in different instances.
Generally better, but give it a minute.
I find that there's more actual discussion here. On Mastodon most replies are people just agreeing with the OP. That also means people butt heads more. I have found people to be nice here.
I never used Reddit, so I can't say how different it is compared to Reddit.
Way more thoughtful and open to discussing matters.
It depends, largely on your opinion on and experience with Linux.
It has the same benefits and issues as most platforms: People.
Some people need to know that they don’t actually need to post a comment. It’s okay to type something out and delete it.
Though at least it has somewhat more technically inclined groups. Lots of people way smarter than I am that I like to learn code/tech tips and tricks from.
Oh gross, I didn’t come to social media for people.
The lemmy devs should have stuck to their convictions and committed to a social media protocol for lemmings.
Same shit, different platform.
more active in terms of not feeling drowned out, but also just as much if not more fickle about things that are posted, so i basically stopped doing that and do the occasional comment if im feeling fanciful
I didn't use reddit that much before switching to lemmy (only browsing a couple of niche subreddits that I liked), but in general I do like people here a bit more. At least in my experience, I saw more people here willing to have discussions when compared to reddit, which is something I do enjoy from time to time.
That being said, I must agree with a lot of commenters in this thread - there is a lot of propaganda on this platform and that's a part of lemmy that I have the biggest gripes with.
It's a raging echo chamber in here. There's Democrats foaming at the mouth with how much they hate Republicans. It'd be one thing if they argued their stances and took on responses, but instead they only ridicule and strawman while admins delete and ban dissent. I'm not even a Republican. I just expect my alternative community to not make their moves from the fascist playbook. The whole point of decentralization is so we don't have central figures abusing their positions!
Someone tell me this is just a lemmy.world thing and that there's better instances.
As I've grown older, contrary to the norm, I've grown more liberal, so Lemmy seems more welcoming. But I do worry about the echo chamber here. I think about it a lot.
I found it both weird (sometimes in a bad way) and fascinating.
From all life taught me, more online freedom normally gives rise to far-right extremism, and this place is surprisingly...left?
But yes, it might be skewed. As a left (and not Democrat kind of left, more like communist kind of left) I can't not enjoy it, but I understand some people can be left out and that's not nice to them.
The general ethos really is left-wing here.
It's all up to who runs the server and decentralizing should be used to combat that nonsense.
Sure
Lemmy as a project is free from ideology, but the spirit of main instances is like this. That's what I'm saying.
Here's how I see this. There's people out there making posts and comments I want to see but can't because someone owns the streets and decided those people must be silence. What's even the point of switching away from the corporate abuse nonsense? It's the same here except just not as good. The only way this makes sense is if people manage their own filters and admins can't.
I am reading a lot more toxic discussion and really angry people here on lemmy than i did on reddit, which makes me sometimes think i might be at the wrong place. I blocked some of the communities that pull american politics in my feed but still. On reddit, i was good reading just my niche interest subs, but there is very little traffic here for niche stuff, so i end up reading the crazy talk too.
Same. And I like some disagreement as that brings discussion. Lemmy can be pretty toxic if you don't echo back the expected.
Just as bad a reddit but with a chip on it's shoulder. everyone THINKS they are better for being here, but it's full of all the samethink problems reddit had.
Contributions that aren't explicitly Marxist are heavily down voted. Overall the atmosphere is less neutral and less helpful.
On lemmy.ml and other outright tankie instances I'm sure this happens, but I've never seen it outside of that. Maybe it's time to switch to a better instance?
Extremely left, fairly toxic unless you're in a niche community. Couldn't count how many times self-described leftists from Lemmy instances told me to unalive myself.
Lemmy is the only community I know where claims of "toxic extreme leftist" cannot easily be dismissed.
theres someone commented on reddits post when reddits stsrting to be shit,
and honestly i feel more happy to use lemmy,
pardon my engliah
Lots of actual calls for violence on here and people screaming nazi at anyone who casually disagrees with them.
Reporting the calls for actual IRL violence does nothing, mods don't seem to respond or take action.
Too leftist for me, but after blocking a good chunk of communities (and all Germans) it’s not bad
how is
Germans?
Yeah, Germans do really love their language and very active and before I blocked a lot of communities half of my feed was in German. Not sure about the situation now. I had to do something similar on Reddit when German posts creeped in the homepage too.
It's really hit or miss. The communities generally have most of the same downsides as those on the corporate competition, but with added issues due to the small size of Lemmy/fediverse and inherent features of a decentralized platform.
I mostly stick to bigger communities and instances on Lemmy, which was not a thing I did much on the r-word site, and I admit that makes it trickier to make a one-to-one comparison.
My hobbies and interests aren't actually all that obscure, but the communities for them on Lemmy are functionally dead, fractured across multiple instances, or just plain non-existent as far as I can tell. Really little or no engagement. So, that sucks.
Another issue that seems especially apparent here is that it seems much easier for smaller groups with "loud" voices / strong opinions to overwhelm any kind of discussion or debate and give the appearance that their opinion is majority opinion, even if it is not. I'm not saying that doesn't happen elsewhere, just that it seems especially pronounced here. People would complain about group think on the r-word site, but it's often amplified here.
One thing I like about some of the bigger communities here is that it seems like it's more visible when unprovoked rudeness and incivility are called out. Not that it never happened on the corporate r-word site, but I do run across that a bit more here.
I'm very new to this I thought the point of it was that all the decentralized bits are still linked. Do you mean there are duplicates of communities that are just named slightly different or what?
They're not linked. Every instance/server can have it's own version of "memes". So you can have memes@lemmy.world and memes@lemm.ee the one at memes@lemmy.ml is the most active one though. Imho federation doesn't work for this. There's always gonna be one community at the top. If that community goes rogue though, that's when you can easily drop it and go to another.
Less trolls, skills, and spammers. And bots.
But it seems to have a higher percentage of zealots. People go crazy and extreme over some weird stuff. You can't have a casual opinion about Linux here for instance.
The fuck did you say about Linux?
So much this. People seem to generally be fine here (I never found the reddit communities I interacted with to be toxic) but heaven forbid you purposefully use Windows or pay for software.
Or Apple. /c/technology is an Apple hatefest.
You’re spot on - I’m not feeling like I really care about either place these days. Maybe I’ve outgrown social media, especially if the content is high-school level Absolutism.
It's fine. I like that it's normal for people to post multi-paragraph comments in response to a post. Gives me plenty of material to read when I'm bored, and this place. Is still small enough that you recognize people in different threads. It's cozy, but some communities could use improvements.
Also, the other things I've noticed is that many of the people complaining about Lemmy being toxic are some of the most argumentative ones themselves,if you don't believe me, you can go to their user page and more often than not find examples of them being rude or unpleasant on the first page.
Misery loves company, after all.
Loved you in Oppenheimer
Eh. Credit is credit, I'll take it.
omg can i have your autograph?
I may have made a rude comment that is visible on my first user page but that is generally not my style.
I also did not complain about lemmy being toxic, or more toxic than reddit, i said that compared to reddit, i am seeing a lot more angry people and toxic discussion because i look further than just my niche interests since they have hardly any traffic. That is still my honest take on the topic.
I use Linux btw
But are you using Firefox??!?
Whta about hydrogen powered public transit?
Yes! Of course I also make sure it is installed with Flatpaks instead of Snaps.
You should actually be using de-googled Libre Wolf with uBlock Origin and your own DNS server. You've let me down. /s
It has zero niche reach. Unfortunately, that's really important for the people who try to switch from Reddit. You can't compete with Reddit when your favorite hobby sub there has 20,000 members or even many more and meaningful daily activity.
The people here are mostly more techy and nerdy which leads to niceness but also holier than thou attitudes everywhere.
The content here turns over slower, which is another big sticking point, but the bones of the site are good.
It's suffering from being new and different. If it can hang on long enough for Reddit to go full Facebook, maybe it can hit a stride and prosper but I honestly don't know.
People can't expect a Reddit-clone. I thought when I saw the proliferation of UK communities that they are going to end up dead. They did. My old Reddit account is 15yo so I saw Reddit grow organically and it went like this:
1-2yr old Reddit Top level subs: e.g. AskReddit 3-5yr old Reddit: Secondary level starts: r/unitedkingdom r/ukpolitics 6+ years third level: UKFood, AskUK, CasualUK.
Each time Reddit grew subs were created organically after main subs got fed up with a certain type of post. AskUK formed in response to users getting fed up with questions in UnitedKingdom and people wanted UK specific questions of AskReddit. UnitedKingdom spawned as more UK users visited. CasualUK spawned when some people wanted less politics.
It was organic and subs spawned when required. So subs rarely died because they only came into existence when there was demand.
"I feel thin like butter scraped across too much bread"
When there's fewer people you can afford to shove everything into higher level subs and if you want it to be specific put it in the title like this:
Putting posts into communities with 3 people that never gets viewed is pointless. I basically stalk just a few subs and make sure anything I'd ask in a more specific Reddit sub gets posted in the most generic but relevant I can find. E.g. I asked about HaikuOS on the Linux community - it's not even a Linux distro but it's open source and it's the closest-big community that would know anything about it.
People need to treat Lemmy like early Reddit. Don't think you can clone reddit's vibe and operation in a year.
I think oldschool Redditors need to WAKE UP and remember wtf it used to be like before the Digg exodus exploded Reddit into mainstream.
N.B. everyone's comments are worth a shitton more here because there's fewer comments. You aren't shouting into a storm, your voice gets heard here. Embrace that people. Stop with the low-effort humour to get karma and put some thought into what you want to say. If nothing else it'll improve your mental health.
This is such a great point that your voice gets heard. When I read that, it finally clicked with me. When I click through, it's rare that I don't read every comment. On Reddit, I rarely did because there were so many comments. Here, I'm usually reading them all. Your voice is being heard. Nice.
You aren't wrong, the problem is much of lemmy is against anything that could lead to growth to hit levels where nice communities could exist.
I'm starting to lose faith, but we'll see in the long run once Meta enables federation. It may be bad for the fediverse, or it could force unprecedented growth. My main fear is that activitypub ends up the way of e-mail, regulated by the big players. I'm too dumb to figure out if it can happen, though.
I'm asking because I've personally found it far more hostile than Reddit (the only other platform I've put much time into). What I've mostly seen is that people downvote quickly and tend towards eliteism relative to Reddit. That said, I recognize that this could be just by instance or community, so I'm curious how others have found it.
Yeah idk, I’ve tended to see the exact opposite. I rarely downvote and I think most people I interact with on here do the same.
What kind of communities do you frequent? For me it’s a pretty curated c/home with most chill communities and then I’ll browse c/all and even on there most people seem chill.
So long winded but to answer your question I think most people are nice, the elitist comments might not get drowned out as much since there’s less people.
Edit: wanted to add that the people here on lemmy seem to be older and techy and that demographic tends to be more clear and blunt. However, that might be something that comes off hostile but really isn’t.
The problem is not just that it’s hostile, but it’s also full of people that know jack shit.
On Reddit you go to r/whatever and there’s a good chance the guy answering your question is the actual godfather of whatever. Those guys didn’t make the move to Lemmy because they are hardcore into whatever, but casually into Reddit. What we got are the people that were hard core into Reddit, and casual into whatever.
So we have a bunch of blind leading the blind dilettantes getting all pissed off about shit they know fuck all about.
That’s actually a really great point that was hitting on something I felt but didn’t understand about my interactions and I think it really sums it up. It feels like every community is a general community here - explaining how technology works on reddit to someone on a general purpose sub was expected, but here you get people posting clickbaity anti-capitalist anti-tech shit in tech communities that are factually wrong and getting absurd upvotes and agreement from people who agree with the politics and that’s all.
Knowledge is low, sire.
There was also a good chance they were another Unidan.
Who was pretty knowledgeable about biology and contributed a lot before he developed a serious case of Reddit brain.
I'd say there are fewer hostile people, but the ones that are hostile are really hostile.
I do notice users here snapping back at jerks a lot more.
There's far less of a chance of being banned for it here. Unless you're snapping back at a mod or admin directly. Calling an idiot an idiot when they say idiotic things or a jerk a jerk when they are being a jerk on Reddit counts as harassment.
My experience is the opposite. I'm mostly on startrek.website & lemmy.world, while keeping local in the former and going for all in the latter.
ive found it incredibly diverse. there are many instances, and some are known for nice folks. beehaw is friendly.. midwest.social has been nice to me. lemmy.world is a taunting wasps nest of nonsense.. the bigger the community the more... rough.. you may find it.
https://fedidb.org/
There’s definite buzz words here. Use them and get destroyed depending on what light you’re using them in.
I've been on the Internet specifically for the social aspects of it since 1990 and I honestly don't see much difference at all between any specific site, forum, Usenet bulletin board, chat room, or service. Just the in-jokes are different and some terminology changes. People are people no matter where they are. The internet as a whole fosters a particular subset of people that even amongst their own different tribes, are fundamentally the same. A lot of outcasts and marginalized people that have no others of their particular group in reality to vibe with. I'm one of them, and I love the web because there are so many others like me here, everywhere I happen to go on it.
It's not often I wish for awards to give on Lemmy, but I wish I could for this comment , it is exactly why I love the internet, all summed up perfectly.
At times like this I like to give out a Lemmy Lemon 🍋
Did you know that lemons aren't natural and happened when humans crossbred citrons and sour/bitter oranges?
Life never actually gave us lemons. We gave ourselves lemons!
I think this nails it.
I miss some of the communities I used on reddit that are still either quiet or very quiet over here, but I also recognise that unless I ramp up my participation in them, I haven't really got grounds to feel negative about that. Besides, using social media less is a plus to me.
I love there's no ads, tracking and 'suggestions' - in short, no algorithm. The apps are (mostly) open source and the community are appreciative of that.
I used to get news from reddit and can get it here too, there's no difference in quality or quantity. Politically, I appreciate the de-emphasis on hateful content and it helps I'm on an instance where the Admin is on top of their game in that respect. It is noticeably more left-wing on here but since I am too I guess that's not an issue for me. It's certainly way better than Reddit in that respect where I'd stumble across fairly extreme right-wing opinions in (supposedly) non political subs every day.
People seem, by and large, much calmer and more reasonable here and less inclined to attack en masse. I've noticed a distinct improvement in my overall mental health but I think that might have more to do with not being on reddit than being on here.
Lemmy is what we make it. For those of us who came over in the Summer, Lemmy/KBin is less than 6 months old. Let's not paint it into being one thing or another just yet.
I just wish there was a single leftist community on the internet which was academically engaged with contemporary political science instead of simping for shitty autocrats because they want to relitigate the cold war.
Quora has a higher rate of intelligent posts than most open forums. And the community tends to be less tolerant of troll posts and those not backed by evidence. Much less right-wing extremism.
Try saying vote 3rd party.
Lemmy feels like a subset of Reddit.
Certain communities are continuations of those that are/were on Reddit. The "post link to a paywalled article, everyone bitches about the headline" section of the world is a carbon copy. A lot of the technical space...I haven't encountered as many "May God create a deeper, hotter hell for you and your family if you buy Intel over AMD" types here, though this may have been because I haven't really found a substantial PC hardware community.
Commercial Republicanism doesn't seem to be anywhere near as present. The folks with a mossy oak jacket instead of a personality...there's a few of them here but the extremists actually seem to be Stalinites.
The various permutations of No Stupid Questions or Ask Lemmy aren't as dick-in-hand horny as Reddit's were (I'm guessing there's fewer teenagers here), though there's a lot more talk about the platform itself. slow turn to look at OP
Official discussion boards are completely absent. Nobody's ending Youtube videos with "Go check out our Lemmy community." I'll use the example of Coffee Stain Studios' game Satisfactory: Snut still occasionally mentions their subreddit, and while there is a community here, it's A. unofficial and B. almost entirely dead.
The brain trust feels gone. Stuff like r/tipofmytongue or r/whatisthisthing or r/askhistorians just hasn't happened here yet, possibly because of the lower population. I'm less confident that I can get an actual answer to "What's this weird piece of bent metal I found in the back of my grandmother's silverware drawer for?" or "What's that movie where a guy pulls a nuclear bomb with an ATV and gets radiation sickness?" I don't foresee AMA's or anything like that, though it seems that was dying off on Reddit as well.
Moderators overall seem to be doing an amazing job, because the place seems well moderated, I don't really notice the mods doing their jobs as much (possibly because Lemmy doesn't do the deleted by moderator thing that Reddit did for some reason), and I've yet to see or hear about a mod being a human case of pink eye like you'd see so often on Reddit. Use Reddit for awhile and you build up a list of moderator names and the subs they ruin, the same list on Lemmy is still blank so far.
It's still the internet, which means The Worthless are present and accounted for. You know, the "people" who didn't get enough attention as children who exist only to make casual conversation via text impossible via interpreting every sentence as 100% true and literal. Say something like "Raiders of the Lost Ark was better than Last Crusade" and The Worthless are guaranteed to show up and try to lecture you about opinion versus objective fact.
This entire comment rings true to me. Get out of my head.
It seems nice and scratches the itch to be approximately social, but suffering through seeing the same 5 articles posted nearly back to back by bots is deeply annoying. And the lack of content when sorting by 6hrs means I inevitably have to spam block the weird porn/fetish stuff that decides to crop up in-between lol.
I've found more far-left shitposting here than anywhere else on the internet, which might be some people's cup of tea but I find incredibly obnoxious. I'm not even right-leaning. Glad I can block whole instances with the app I use at least
Which app would that be?
Thunder!
Pros:
FOSS Everywhere
So far, no brigading by salty nationalists
So far, excellent moderation on most communities
Better UI experience
It's actually fun to engage in many communities here in all types of conversation and media formats
Plenty of federated instances to choose from
Cons:
Specific communities are small or nonexistent
Not enough user generated content per day that you can waste time on (Maybe this is a good thing lol)
Instance switching is still a bit of a pain because I am lazy
Web UI is okay, nothing too special. Including some alternative frontends
Instance federation is like proto p2p. It's not easily scalable, so it can't automatically react to sudden demand or attention.
Better conversations, and less echo chambers in general. I know exactly who'll disagree with that notion too, but that has been my experience.
The right-wingers that did come over are obviously butthurt to hell since they can't abuse the report function and get backed by obviously biased mods like they do on Reddit. It's easier to simply ignore them here, as well, even though they're around as always.
Hell, half the comments in this very thread seem to be bitching about "Marxism" like it's something that anyone gives half a shit about in today's world. They need their bubble, and they seem to be angry they didn't get this one, too.
Also people are generally more tech-savvy here than there, for obvious reasons. That's a plus.
I have been happy to get outside my bubble a little bit. But at the same time, many of the Marxists here seem to be in their own bubble.
I suppose you just don't see the censorship and raging echo chamber crowd when it's your own tribe running it. Enjoy the blinders pal.
It's pretty widely accepted that whatever happens over in the US has ramifications all over the world. My tribe, so to speak, are Swedish speaking Finns, and we're a very small minority in a country that functions better than most.
It sort of gives one a perspective. The Finns are liberal in some things sure, but very conservative in many ways. We'll never legalize weed for example, but we also won't touch abortion rights because that's just common sense.
That said, in the US my voting pattern would be extreme left sure, because that's just normal over here. Sadly people are afraid and vote right because immigration, but that'll stop once everyone realises it doesn't work, since we still depend on immigration to get jobs filled. Everyone knows it, they just don't want to say it out loud.
And when the climate really hits us, the clowns will probably be gone anyway. It's the last gasp we're seeing right now. Enjoy it while you can.
I think this whole left/right thing is the issue. Stop bundling shit together and work in individual issues yo. Abortion rights is common sense. So is right to bear arms. Somehow we gotta have an XOR gate on this? Lunacy.
Finland is up there on weapons per person in Europe, but it is both expensive and complicated to get that first license. It does get easier the more you are into it, but following all the laws to the letter is, again, expensive as hell.
Meanwhile practically every fighting aged male has had some time on the range and weapon safety drilled into them during their conscription, although some more so than others. It might be an old system, but it works for us. Can't really see it working in the US, tho, for obvious reasons.
Is it practical? Not really. Do we have a lot of mass shootings? Nope.
Training requirements is practical and good, but restricting based on money is bad. Not only the rich need to defend themselves.
I agree in principle, and the fee in itself isn't expensive. It's the fact that you need to buy a safe with a high enough security rating (which they actually do come to check on randomly) and then also another secure place to store ammo in. Legally they have to be separated when not in use.
After that you need an active membership in either a hunting party or a gun sports club, and participate/shoot a certain amount each year to keep the license for your gun. You also have to file and get approved for each individual gun you buy/own.
With all that said though, once you've gotten your first license and proved you can handle whatever firearm you got for either purpose it gets easier to get a second one, and then a third, as long as you have a valid enough reason to buy and own whatever gun you're after.
Most people just start with a .22 and go up from there if it is for sports, or buy a shotgun or rifle for hunting.
As for self defense - it's practically impossible to get a handgun for self protection purposes in any legal way, unless there are very special circumstances. Owning a gun for self protection is just not a thing people take seriously here, outside certain ..groups.
As a sidenote tho, if you know where to look it's not particularly hard to get a handgun if you want one, you just don't want to get caught with one, and it's also not completely trivial to get decent ammo. A black market Glock goes for around 500€ afaik.
Like I said, I agree with you in principle, but like I also mentioned, Finland is very conservative with certain things. This is one of them. I haven't been shooting for a long time due to medical reasons, so some of this might be out of date. Maybe someone more involved please correct me if I got something wrong.
Self defense and particularly defense against unchecked government is the whole primary point for me. I don't care to go about shooting animals. Gun sports is cool I guess.
Yes, I understood that point. It's just not widely shared outside of the US. I personally wouldn't mind having something for self defense, but I'm in a minority and it comes from living a rough life when younger. Luckily the risk of running into an armed intruder here is just about zero anyway. It's just another world, really.
..and I think you're smart enough to know there's no outshooting any government, no matter the country.
Just about zero? Try several times in my own personal life. I'll die in a shootout long before I ever let them take me again. Death > torture
If it wasn't apparent already, we don't live on the same continent. We live in completely different worlds.
The biggest threat here is getting mugged by some youngster with a knife that'll get caught within 15 minutes.
If I lived over there I'd be carrying too. Here? Here we leave our babies to sleep outside safely.
Must be nice.
I tend to find that it needs about 10x the users, but I honestly don't know if it could handle that at the moment. Generally I would assume one would use a social network for the social aspects, but right now the top (everything) post of the past 24 hours has something like a thousand votes and about a hundred comments, which is actually a pretty decent amount. But there's maybe 1 other post with 100+ comments right now in the top of the past 24 hours that I can see. Go to a second page or scroll for a bit and you'll see most posts have less than ten comments.
Is number of comments the most important metric? Probably not, but it is pretty important one since it's kind of the main reason I would come here instead of just scrolling through Google News or whatever, and I'm guessing I'm not alone.
The only people who actually managed the migration in my opinion were the StarTrek.website people, and it took a clever coordinated effort in a community of people who probably skew more technical than most. For most communities that were interested in things like specific games, shows, hobbies, or whatever and not interested in a new computer toy to play with, they've essentially died out and are either ghost towns or full of bot posts.
In large part I think it's because Lemmy's discoverability is pretty trash, and while I get that it's kind of on purpose it's still an issue. The migration led to this explosion of communities but because finding them is harder than making them, it spread these relatively small communities out. The hope was that they would find each other and coalesce, but instead it seems like they took the path of least resistance and just slid back to their old haunts.
One of Lemmy's key strengths is that it can act both as an aggregator that has a stream of news stories and comments but if tuned slightly differently it can act much more like an old school forum, but there's really no way to bridge the two ways of interaction right now. I think one path forward is finding that middle ground, and slowly becoming a respiratory of useful discussions like old school forums, Facebook groups, and yeah even reddit. But to do that there needs to be a lot more searchable and discoverable and not just letting Google do it. Finding a way to both surface jokes and memes and whatever for quick consumption, but also having some way to keep those highly technical 130 page long forum posts where they reverse engineer an aquarium bubble pump or something available and simmering on the back burner, ready to be found in a few years and awakened when someone makes a breakthrough.
On a more personal note, I feel like I'm vibing less and less with Lemmy. The memes have slowed way down, the articles are interesting sometimes but the lack of any comments makes me less interested in interacting with them, and I feel like I hit the wall of reddit repost bots spamming thousands of sonic fan arts way quicker than I used to. It honestly feels a lot more like it's dying from lack of meaningful user interaction pretty much everywhere outside the star trek memes. Half the time it feels like I'm just using Hacker News by proxy. Just like that line "butter spread over too much bread" it feels like the users are spread out over too many servers. I dunno, I've had a few so I'm rambling. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk I guess.
I blocked all of those repost bots a few months ago, and it really improved the experience for me. No longer are there seemingly interesting posts but with 0 engagement, with the real OP not even on Lemmy. It feels a lot more organic.
Better than Reddit. The community is a lot more welcoming, much more friendly and lacks the open hostility of Reddit. Frankly I hope Lemmy doesn't become mainstream, as much as I want Spez's empire to fall.
I find it mostly better than any other option available, but the polarization of the people here is sometimes hilariously out of control.
I like it better. Sometimes you do see users being irrational, entitled/whiny or disingenuous, but it's still way less than you'd see in Twitter or Reddit. And I've seen users chewing others for engaging in those three things, frankly that's fucking great.
However I do think that there's lots of room to improve. I'll mention some sore points:
I'm a Democratic Socialist so pretty much everyone hates me when I offer my opinions.
With that said, I love Lemmy.
No algorithm and no ads means I get far more positive than negative interactions on average.
Really? I would have sworn demsoc/socdem to be the most popular position here. At least during peak CET hours ;)
Negative, Ghost Rider.
Both Republicans and Democrats enthusiastically work together to keep us off the ballot and silenced in the media, and that includes federated media.
Dems get particularly upset when you point out the realities of Biden's America for the working class.
That’s funny. My experience with lemmy is it’s overwhelmingly leftist. And anything that doesn’t reinforce their worldview is heavily downvoted. Every liberal who isn’t hanging out on lemmygrad is called a liberal as a slur or a reactionary.
The only things I’ve seen that are exclusively non-leftist is the conservative Lemmy that thinks Fox News and Newsmax is a credible source of information
And whatever hexbear is.
The thing is that Democratic Socialism is not seen favorably by a lot of leftists, as they're seen as being more loyal to the establishment than to revolution. Too leftist for the American Overton window, but not leftist enough for Lemmygrad types, basically
I don’t know that it’s too leftist for me - just a lot of the personalities are too much for me - i can’t listen to anymore Bernie-would’ve-won and Hillary’s-a-war-criminal 8 years later.
I also think Hillary would’ve been a great president for real, so no one likes me either.
A lot of people think Biden is a great president, which shows you just how low the bar is these days. FDR had a literal plot on his life and still had the balls to rule as a socialist, and he was so popular he ended up the longest-serving president in US history.
Anyway left is globally right.
because any criticism of Biden right now helps Trump to become president. Save your criticisms when there is an actual open primary (ie: 2027), it's already too late for a challenge to Biden this year, as a majority of states ballot access filing deadline dates have already passed.
See what I mean?
¯_ (ツ)_/¯ . I consider myself dem soc, I just see the necessity of pragmatism right now; when the alternative is a presidential candidate who reads Mein Kampf as an instruction manual.
In America, you only have two choices. If you vote for something other that democrats or liberals, your vote is literally wasted. Both choices are considered "right" or "centrum right" in most European countries, there is no "left" choice. The system is utterly ridiculous and there's no escaping it. The most usefull thing you can do with your vote is to choose the least evil party (or join the system and change it from the inside).
That logic is why we are where we are. A 40-year loss of personal and economic liberty, because you and yours refuse to see the two parties for what they are.
I'll vote Green. You should too.
Part of the effort to keep third parties off the ballot is that you make shit infinitely worse.
It's called the spoiler effect, and it fucks us over all the god-damn time.
Do not vote third party under our current electoral system.
You need to either work within the current system like the Progressives do, or work to change the system to one that doesn't fuck people over if they vote third party.
If you want to get involved with actually doing that second thing, here's a great place to start.
I think so, too.
Nothing good comes from nazareth
At the start it was better, but for about a month now I think there have been more negative interactions than positive ones.
The biggest problem imo is that since Lemmy's userbase is mostly made up of people who left Reddit, they bring their mentality with them. And the two plaforms have hugely different userbases size wise, so if someone says something really stupid on Reddit you can ignore/ block and you can do that with 1000s of people. On Lemmy if you block 1000s of people, you basically just blocked most people who post/ comment.
/rant over
Yeah basically my biggest problem is with how small the userbase is. ( then again I have a few other problems besides that)
For larger communities it’s great. For small communities it sucks. People need to let the mainstream ones grow before branching to these smaller communities.
Outside of that the community is incredibly lefty, I am pretty liberal too but it’s pretty wild how much it leans. There’s also a huge fascination to have everything be FOSS , Linux, and using Firefox . Ex the audacity of the Sync developer charging for an app was hilarious.
Super cool at first, but slowly becoming more and more like Reddit.
Only a matter of time before it becomes a less moderated version of Reddit.
I keep running into the same fucking idiot, it’s like suckmywang has all the same interests as me. This site would be a lot better without them tbh
Jokes aside, there are some genuine morons on this site that it would benefit from losing...
I am all for having more people, but being an obscure "site" is a good filter imo.
The Voyager App has some bugs, but for what it is, I'm amazed by the polish.
On Reddit, all I did was look at memes from the top subreddits, spending my day filtering through the vastly unfunny majority. It's also through memes that I kept up to date with the news.
On Lemmy, I decided to not fall into that sort of doom scrolling again. I blocked all meme communities. I browse through "All" to find any obscure community that peaks my interest, block the ones that don't and add the ones that do to "Home" or "Favourites".
This means my feed is much more curated than the slop I was ingesting on Reddit. I still doom scroll sometimes 😅, but it's better now than it was before, I think.
Pique - verb - arouse (interest or curiosity). "with his scientific curiosity piqued, he was looking forward to being able to analyse his find"
On Lemmy you can't even doomscroll. There's not enough (meme) content to sustain that
I just don't want people getting banned for stating their opinion.
Mentioning you're gonna pirate cause you don't like the news of the service you use prices going up r/cordcutters doesn't like this.
But services need to see that kinda feedback to know they're losing people. I've never had Netflix and never will. Their catalog just sucks. I have Peacock for WWE so Premiere League and movies is just a bonus.
I cashed in on the BF $20/yr deal so ad-free is $6mo. I have Shudder for horror of course.
So I have my fair share of services but I vote with my wallet and use a VPN when needed. But there's a lot of power abusing mods on Reddit. Reddit needs to be shut down and re-do all the mods across the site. If buying a digital movie isn't owning then piracy isn't stealing.
deleted by creator
Clever
It's about the same as everywhere else. The most fun I have on any social media platform these days is blocking assholes.
There are still echo chambers just like Reddit.
Echo chamber is just another way of saying people tend to group up with like minded people. I certainly don't want to interact with people on the internet that I avoid in real life.
Polite counterpoint: ‘echo chambers’ are more than that, I feel. It’s not that they are a group of like-minded people, so much as they police groupthink and don’t allow even moderately dissenting opinions.
See: r/conservative, and them permabanning anyone who so much as hints at a different mindset.
It really depends. If I run a queer friendly space, then part of being queer friendly is not putting people in the position to have to defend their existence every time they log in. Which means that anything I can see that even smells off gets removed immediately. If you come and whine about it instead of giving me a clear signal you understood, you’re getting banned.
Is it an echo chamber?
I don’t know. Probably.
Would I run it any other way?
Fuck no.
I think in your case you're definitely banning queerphobia/bigotry, which I hope most people agree is radically different from banning dissenting opinions.
Maybe the definition of an echo chamber should revolve more about what would be different if you weren't in it? For example, I'd say I'm in a community that is an echo chamber if, when getting out of this community, I might change some of my views that previously seemed obvious. I hope that people in a queer community don't start questioning their sexuality/worth once they're outside of a queer friendly community - although after writing it out maybe some do :(
But then it's not the same mechanics: if I come out of an echo chamber I might read up on some new evidence/arguments/opinions that challenge my thinking, while coming out of a queer friendly space is, as you're saying, getting exposed to hateful comments and being weakened by these. It doesn't seem right to say it's an echo chamber, just like it doesn't seem right to say there are "conspiracy-friendly" communities!
It’s a bit more than that. In order to enable people to just hang out and relax and be themselves, you have to make sure they are never put in a position to justify their existence.
You have to go in pretty blunt and nip stuff in the bud. That means banning not just bigotry, but a whole swath of topics and rhetoric that inevitably lead to “those kinds of discussions”.
This in turn leads to reactions like the other reply. “I was just asking questions”, “I was just explaining a point of view I don’t agree with”, “but you have to see it from their side”. Yes. Silly questions that have been asked many times before. We know that point of view, we don’t need you to explain it. No, we don’t have to see it from their side. Not here. Not now.
Don’t bring that negativity in here. Just leave us and let us enjoy our silly memes in peace.
That was my experience on blahaj. I'd never been banned from a community, let alone one I've been an ally to before. Such a pure echo chamber that even discussing why the outside world holds the views they have, even without expressing agreement, gets you labeled a transphobe.
Honestly, it soured me on lemmy as a whole since that was the content I had been enjoying the most.
It’s even in leftist zines.
It funny you bring up r/conservatism. It use to be a fairly big sub and far more moderate until Trump got into power. But if you had anything bad to say about Trump, banned.
Now it is just an echo chamber with few members. Go there and given day and only a few posts with up vote above 100. Really mostly a bunch of pathetic people since the moderate conservatives left.
Lemmy can be a bit this way but on the opposite spectrum.
Username checks out
I've found that I rarely get called out for poor spelling or grammar on lemmy compared to other sites. So long as it is pretty obvious what the correct word or grammar is no one cares to mention. The exception is if the mistake is particularly humorous.
[._.]
It is the exact same as reddit, only there's less content and comments.
The people, mods, bots, and content are all just the same. There's even still people shilling covert adds on here. It's just cheaper and easier for them to get to the front page of lemmy, since you only need like 20 bot/fake accounts.
I haven't recognized any posts as covert ads here I think. Can you give an example?
The last one I remember was an "article" dealing with some web analytics stuff that all the bigger websites use. It was written to look like someone not associated with any of the different ones talked about, but there was one that was written about more favorably that happened to be cheaper than what was commonly used. The comment section had a couple accounts agreeing but it was all pretty obvious. I'll see if I can find it.
*found it. https://lemmy.world/post/9297498
Hm not sure what to make of this. The author of the article states pretty clearly what company they are affiliated with. The comments seem to push a product called Splunk which doesn't appear in the article at all.
I was wrong on the authors part.
People started recommending splunk in the comments to troll against the OP that submitted the link to lemmy. Also, when it popped up on lemmy at had like 15 votes and no negative votes, which is really high and odd to happen in the instance. Especially if you look at how many down votes it has on it now.
Generally good and I like it. My only complaint is that it feels a bit snobby with the discussions and fickle with the downvote button. Like, ok, I get you disagree, but you don't need to publish your book series in the comments section to express what could've been a short sentence. And why are y'all downvoting this cute puppy? And, oh god, the occasional sad asshole who'd rather have a dumpster fire than a cozy campfire.
Generally discussion has been more mature and respectful. Still, I think people are more likely to downvote things they disagree with but I think happens more in controversial topics like Threads defederation, Gaza, and politics in general.
If you want to compare to Reddit, they tend to hide comments with negative scores anyway, and though I can't see the upvote/downvote ratio for comments, having 5 upvotes and 4 downvotes feels worse than 500 upvotes and 400 downvotes. The points don't matter anyway so don't even bother worrying about them.
Just be nice and think of the other person.
ETA: You also have to curate your feed a bit to block stuff you don't want to see, certain accounts and stuff like the immature trolls on hexbear.
The cynicism is more annoying to me, but reddit had more of it, I didn't care much there though.
Good, unless you try and give an opinion on politics.
Agreed. Lemmy has exactly one political opinion, and woe betide any poor soul of another persuasion.
Otherwise the community is pretty great. Lots of good conversation with intelligent commenters.
Politics is nearly impossible to discuss with anyone, anywhere... The problem lies in the fact that nobody has the same foundation for discussing such topics. Probably the biggest issue is what people consider a reliable source of information. If you cannot agree that site xyz is stating things that actually happened, then how can you discuss anything political?
Honestly, I think the pain in discussing politics has more to do with today's culture than anything with Lemmy specifically. It just so happens that Lemmy got popular around the time that "fake news" and misinformation became so extremely prevalent.
I think you’re making a solid point, but I think the basic problem is a fundamental lack of the willingness to listen and digest someone else’s point of view. Sources of information are important to a debate, but they’re ultimately irrelevant if either side isn’t willing to even consider the possibility that there’s more to learn than what they already know.
I did use sources as a big point, but it's because it's the easiest to see. Even if we are having a conversation that's opinion based, a lot of the conversation can be misinterpreted just because of different world views.
I think just about everyone wants what's best for everyone, but different people see the solution to that differently. What is the "best" for someone? In what areas of their life? Burning fossil fuels offers a lot of jobs, but doing so destroys the planet. Except some argue that it isn't destroying the planet, and that we're being lied to. But let's assume it climate change is real, if one side is saying we need to do away with fossil fuels because it's destroying our planet, the other side may hear that they want to take away their source of income (how they put a roof over their head, feed their family, enjoy life). And within that conversation, there can be innumerable amount of different understandings based on the people you grew up around, that I can't even really list examples because it's too nuanced.
If you want to talk about abortion, the debate is really about when the fetus is a human. It is generally agreed that killing a 1 year old baby, for any reason (financial struggles, the child was the conception of rape, unplanned) that killing a 1 year old child is not okay, regardless of your pro or anti abortion stance. So then you'd be arguing when does the life cross that threshold to definitely not okay? Is it at birth? In which case was the day before it born okay to kill it? Most aren't okay with late term abortion, but everyone has the line they think it's okay (with some the line is before the egg is fertilized). Not many people are upset if someone takes a plan B (some people are, but they're the minority), so stopping the process that early is fine. So then the line would be somewhere between the two, and that's an extraordinarily complex subject for people without medical degrees to try and discuss (and complex for even those with medical degrees). But of course there's the aspect of it being the choice of the mother, since it's the mothers body. In which case you could instead talk about the (obviously) flawed scenario: while you're sleeping, someone is hooked up to you as a dialysis machine. You wake up to find this was done to you. They need to be connected to you for 9 months to live, and if you disconnect them at any point you will kill them. Is it okay for you to pull the plug? Honestly, I think there's a lot of valid arguments for either side for that scenario, and both people could be totally right. Both parties have to accept the fact that the other person's viewpoint has validity to have a peaceful political discussion, but it's difficult when your own viewpoint makes you feel that they are killing people, or stripping others of basic human rights. Then you get emotional, you become irrational, and you get angry at the other person. It's just all to likely to happen, we are emotional creatures after all, not machines. And once you start getting irrational, you become more set on your current viewpoint, less likely to hear what they are actually saying, and more likely to misinterpret what they are trying to convey.
This is just two examples of highly controversial topics, but they're controversial because there's nuance to it. To be on the same page about all the different parts of the topic is nearly impossible. Not to mention we already have opinions on a lot of it. I'm guessing several people reading this feel inclined to share their opinion on some of the things I said. I don't think there is anything any online platform can do to have an entirely open discussion. To leave it entirely open for anyone means there will be tension, insults, anger, and whatever else. If you get a few people that can restrain their emotions to have a logical discussion and actually hear what others are saying, you could do it, but then it's not an open discussion.
Same with the ACAB crowd. Seems sweeping generalizations are completely fine as long as the hive-mind agrees.
And not that I’m defending cops at all. But I’m just very anti-“all” when it comes to defining issues.
I think Lemmy is great, don't get me wrong!
However, I have never quite seen such a depressing social media site in my life.
Maybe it's just me, but I've found the majority of the humor here is tinged with poisoned irony, misery, and helpless sadness.
I understand the whole "if we don't laugh over it, we'll cry about it"–thing, but, man.. I came for funny memes and found an ocean of sadness. Feels bad, man.
Not really a place to come to feel uplifted. Would love to see more wholly positive memes & interactions!
Its okay but the issue I have is when I search for a community, 20+ communities show up of the same name in different instances.
Generally better, but give it a minute.
I find that there's more actual discussion here. On Mastodon most replies are people just agreeing with the OP. That also means people butt heads more. I have found people to be nice here.
I never used Reddit, so I can't say how different it is compared to Reddit.
Way more thoughtful and open to discussing matters.
It depends, largely on your opinion on and experience with Linux.
It has the same benefits and issues as most platforms: People.
Some people need to know that they don’t actually need to post a comment. It’s okay to type something out and delete it.
Though at least it has somewhat more technically inclined groups. Lots of people way smarter than I am that I like to learn code/tech tips and tricks from.
Oh gross, I didn’t come to social media for people.
The lemmy devs should have stuck to their convictions and committed to a social media protocol for lemmings.
Same shit, different platform.
more active in terms of not feeling drowned out, but also just as much if not more fickle about things that are posted, so i basically stopped doing that and do the occasional comment if im feeling fanciful
I didn't use reddit that much before switching to lemmy (only browsing a couple of niche subreddits that I liked), but in general I do like people here a bit more. At least in my experience, I saw more people here willing to have discussions when compared to reddit, which is something I do enjoy from time to time.
That being said, I must agree with a lot of commenters in this thread - there is a lot of propaganda on this platform and that's a part of lemmy that I have the biggest gripes with.
It's a raging echo chamber in here. There's Democrats foaming at the mouth with how much they hate Republicans. It'd be one thing if they argued their stances and took on responses, but instead they only ridicule and strawman while admins delete and ban dissent. I'm not even a Republican. I just expect my alternative community to not make their moves from the fascist playbook. The whole point of decentralization is so we don't have central figures abusing their positions!
Someone tell me this is just a lemmy.world thing and that there's better instances.
As I've grown older, contrary to the norm, I've grown more liberal, so Lemmy seems more welcoming. But I do worry about the echo chamber here. I think about it a lot.
It's not really that contrary, most people don't actually become more conservative as they age. It's not quite a myth but very much over stated. Political orientations over the course of the life span are very stable. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1113&context=poliscifacpub
I found it both weird (sometimes in a bad way) and fascinating.
From all life taught me, more online freedom normally gives rise to far-right extremism, and this place is surprisingly...left?
But yes, it might be skewed. As a left (and not Democrat kind of left, more like communist kind of left) I can't not enjoy it, but I understand some people can be left out and that's not nice to them.
The general ethos really is left-wing here.
It's all up to who runs the server and decentralizing should be used to combat that nonsense.
Sure
Lemmy as a project is free from ideology, but the spirit of main instances is like this. That's what I'm saying.
Here's how I see this. There's people out there making posts and comments I want to see but can't because someone owns the streets and decided those people must be silence. What's even the point of switching away from the corporate abuse nonsense? It's the same here except just not as good. The only way this makes sense is if people manage their own filters and admins can't.
I am reading a lot more toxic discussion and really angry people here on lemmy than i did on reddit, which makes me sometimes think i might be at the wrong place. I blocked some of the communities that pull american politics in my feed but still. On reddit, i was good reading just my niche interest subs, but there is very little traffic here for niche stuff, so i end up reading the crazy talk too.
Same. And I like some disagreement as that brings discussion. Lemmy can be pretty toxic if you don't echo back the expected.
Just as bad a reddit but with a chip on it's shoulder. everyone THINKS they are better for being here, but it's full of all the samethink problems reddit had.
Contributions that aren't explicitly Marxist are heavily down voted. Overall the atmosphere is less neutral and less helpful.
On lemmy.ml and other outright tankie instances I'm sure this happens, but I've never seen it outside of that. Maybe it's time to switch to a better instance?
Extremely left, fairly toxic unless you're in a niche community. Couldn't count how many times self-described leftists from Lemmy instances told me to unalive myself.
Lemmy is the only community I know where claims of "toxic extreme leftist" cannot easily be dismissed.
theres someone commented on reddits post when reddits stsrting to be shit,
and honestly i feel more happy to use lemmy,
pardon my engliah
Lots of actual calls for violence on here and people screaming nazi at anyone who casually disagrees with them.
Reporting the calls for actual IRL violence does nothing, mods don't seem to respond or take action.
Too leftist for me, but after blocking a good chunk of communities (and all Germans) it’s not bad
how is
Germans?
Yeah, Germans do really love their language and very active and before I blocked a lot of communities half of my feed was in German. Not sure about the situation now. I had to do something similar on Reddit when German posts creeped in the homepage too.
SPRICH