The “Not enough mod tools” complaint is valid and I hope that improves as the platform moves forward.
I DO NOT get the disdain for the Lemmy userbase. I’ve been here for the past 4-5 months and can say I’ve had so many more meaningful and fulfilling conversations here on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit in the 10 years I was there.
I think it’s the same situation as between a small town and a big city. Reddit is huge and with a large number of people; you’re going to statistically get a larger number of assholes. Not to mention there are tens of thousands of people commenting on anything that hits r/all, so there’s no chance someone else is going to read your 1 comment that is drowning in a sea of other comments.
Lemmy feels more like a small town. Things move a little slower here, but there’s less competition to have your voice heard, and I end up seeing some of the same users time and time again across the Fediverse. I think that smaller feel means more people have a chance to see your content without it getting drowned out by the masses, which means more opportunity to make connections.
Some people suck, but Lemmy has been fucking awesome for me so far and I love this place because of that.
Idk. It seems like that was a bot trying to dissuade people from leaving Reddit. One of the reasons we left Reddit was bc of the bots.
I had that kind of “astroturf-y” feel from the Reddit comment as well, but their opinion about mod tools is not entirely wrong.
The fear-mongering about CSAM being all over the place hasn’t been my experience, though. I’ve never come across CSAM here on Lemmy (sorry to those who have), but I don’t tend to keep NSFW posts on because I cruise Lemmy at work.
Can we please stop calling anyone who doesn't agree with us a bot?
How is that a bot to you?
New users who aren’t defederated from Lemmygrad and hexbear by default are what contribute to that perception
I can definitely say that I have enjoyed interacting with folks on Lemmy more than on reddit. Lemmy has felt like small subreddits even in the larger communities.
Every place on the internet is gonna have people that suck but the vast majority of my interactions here have been nice.
I’ve had so many more meaningful and fulfilling conversations here on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit in the 10 years I was there.
For one thing, it feels there is so much stronger of a push here to read the article instead of just the headline. Especially appreciated when someone adds the article to the post or leaves it in a comment. TLDR bot isn't for me but it helps.
There's also so much less of a push to be that meme comment that hits the top. There are still jokes but it's not this barrage of people trying to be the class clown at the expense of meaningful conversation.
But especially the bots. Holy crap the bots were making it such a headache. The same comment slightly adjusted then posted over and over as replies to top comments for karma farming. The same stolen repost on 20 slightly similar subreddits and it doesn't really belong on half of them. Not that Lemmy would be immune to this if it were as big as Reddit but sheesh I wish Reddit cared about the quality of content. They're fine with whatever keeps people coming back and I guess that kind of content appeals to the most people.
I DO NOT get the disdain for the Lemmy userbase. I’ve been here for the past 4-5 months and can say I’ve had so many more meaningful and fulfilling conversations here on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit in the 10 years I was there.
Personally I have to disagree when anyone says how much nicer, better, greater the community here is. From my experience its pretty much the same as on Reddit by now. You got nice people and you got people who just like to argue for no good reason. But I think thats just how it is online these days and I don't see it as a bad thing. Just disagree that community-wise this is so much better than Reddit. But I guess thats an unpopular opinion.
I’m glad you shared your experience, honestly.
I’m happy with what I’ve seen here, but I’ll also say that I didn’t hang out in too many smaller subreddits. Even when I did, I saw some vitrol come out on the regular. Maybe the vibe on smaller subreddits is better than Lemmy?
Either way, I’m glad you’re here.
I definitely get the small town feel. Like I regularly run into the same users, even from different instances. No one here tries to be a jerk, at least from what I've seen. And when you create content, people actually look and care.
A lot of it is also the instance you are on. Having my account on Lemmy.world I do not have to deal with hexbear for example. They don't have downvotes on their instance and have a totally different culture from the other instances.
Also, know that a lot of people that ended up on Lemmy are actually the banned rejects from reddit. And maybe seeing they don't get their "free speech" here either is what made them not believe in the platform.
I have very much been enjoying my time here, most people have been wonderful.
Agreed wholeheartedly. The Lemmy community has been wonderful. People here actually have good conversations, even if they take a few days to do so, unlike the folks on Reddit. Reddit comments were more meme-y and less substantive.
Yeah this is basically like reddit prior to the DIGG migration. People are much nicer here.
Redditalternatives has two types of folks who visit it, the smaller one thinks reddit is shit because of the choices the employees make. The larger one thinks reddit is shit because spooky woke moralist SJW shills paid by George Soros are censoring free speech via coordinated downvote, report, and ban campaigns.. Sometimes a person occupies both groups.
The former group likes Lemmy et. al. The latter gets on here, sees a pro union post top of all, shits themselves dehydrated, and leaves to write screeds like that one.
shits themselves dehydrated
You have a real way with words. Definitely stealing this one
shits themselves dehydrated
I'm dying
I don't really see any hint of the poster being from the latter group though
As a 10+ year reddit user who has switched 98% to Lemmy, only checking reddit on my computer every couple days: Lemmy is completely fine, and I have seamlessly transitioned from Reddit.
Its userbase is more technical than Reddit's, and there's not as much content. But it is a perfectly good Reddit alternative. I find it isn't as addictive as reddit, which is awesome. I just wish there were more educational communities akin to AskHistorians, AskScience, etc.
I’m a 15-year user of Reddit. Lemmy right now is very similar to very early Reddit. Reddit’s users were more technical back then, too. I’m betting the early adopters of places like this are usually the technical types.
Another nice thing about Lemmy is that a lot of the low-effort, casual users on Reddit haven’t gotten here yet. Interaction here is definitely a lot more pleasant.
Also 15 year account and 100% agreed.
It's very akin to reddit ~10 years ago. Grammar nazis, "um actually" and pedantic debates are everywhere. You just have to not engage and consistently remember the other guy is probably a sweaty nerd who cares way more than you do.
The worst part is the pedants aren't even right most of the time. I've seen so many people complaining about perfectly acceptable sentence structure.
I tell myself they're just younger folks that have been failed by their schools, but then I get sad that they're younger folks that have been failed by their schools.
Ditto. No issues with Lemmy here. I mean, there were a couple of annoying communities (to me anyway) but it was easy to block them.
Generally I’ve not noticed any toxic behaviour otherwise. At all.
In fact I was somewhat taken aback at the quality of responses to my last post. It’s going to take me days to research all the options and advice I was given. And from what I could see, most if not all the comments were informative and interesting.
The signal to noise ratio here is excellent, even if the numbers of comments etc are lower.
The only toxic I got was when I accidental posted in a conservative thread without realizing what it was. Basically like /r/conservative. Fortunately I was able to block the instance and move on.
mmmm askhistorians was one of my favourite late night prowls.
Say we're going to leave Reddit if the API changes go through
Actually leave Reddit
Refuse to elaborate
Get called toxic by the people who chose to stay
Honestly glad I left. For now at least when I see that new message number I'm not terrified of what I'll find inside
Yup, I haven't even bothered deleting my account. I'll get to it eventually, but I just don't go to Reddit anymore. I've been hereb since the API announcement (didn't wait for it to take effect), and I've been reasonably happy here.
I will say that lemmy seems a bit more leftist than Reddit, at least in the communities I visit. On Reddit, you'll get Bernie bros and whatnot, whereas on lemmy there's a lot of literal socialists/communists. But at least there are fewer far right folks baiting people into one sided debates. I find the socialists and communists easier to detect, so I think lemmy so far wins.
Lemmy isn't perfect, but it at least doesn't have ads and I can use why client I want, or build my own. So I'll stay until I find or build something better (I'm working on an experimental, distributed link aggregator).
I'm a bit of a Bernie bro but some of the communities on here aren't just left but like extreme left which is.. different for sure. They're at least more tolerable than the "We support free speech but not leftist speech" Republicans and the communities that are too much I can just block and never interact with. While I'm sure I'd still enjoy Reddit if I logged on or went back to the subs I used to be on, I refuse out of principle. I even feel gross when I need to visit subs to get niche tech answers. I won't ever trust Reddit again and we've got some solid meme communities here. It does enough for what it is, I only hope we grow as Reddit continues to burn.
Same, I haven’t logged in since Apollo shut down. I occasionally check my small country’s sub through browser, as it’s not active enough on lemmy, but that’s it. I’m super happy with lemmy.
Lotta people coming here from Reddit expecting 1:1 replacement, and then get pissy that the 2 man dev team that's just trying to keep up with this sudden burst in activity isn't at parity with the multi-million dollar company that's been developing their site for almost 2 decades.
Honestly, I'm just tired of the constant comparison. Lemmy can be it's own thing. It's a work in progress and it has a lot of promise, but for anyone looking for their reddit experience, there's really only one place to get that.
I don't want Lemmy to be as big as reddit. When it does it's guaranteed to be enshittified.
Also, fuck that guys tone. Condescending prick calling other people pedantic.
"I don't like Reddit.
Its interface is ugly as sin. There are fewer users there and they're all pretentious, extremely liberal, and anti American."
-Some Digg user circa 2008/2009 (probably)
This feels like it was written by someone who has never been on Lemmy because that has not been my experience at all.
Reddit is fucking full of bots astroturfing right wing political nonsense and we’re not getting that on Lemmy because those instances are often defederated.
Or, you know, he’s one of those guys who signed up for world when he should have gone to exploding heads.
This. I have much more quality discussions here than I ever did on Reddit. Not sure wtf they are on about.
I’d say it’s roughly my experience with Lemmy as well tbh.
There are some good discussions to be had here, but I don’t think they’re necessarily wrong about the issues, just a bit overblown.
I think Reddit’s far worse in general though. I think it’s gotten particularly worse over the past few years, it’s almost Facebook levels of people looking at stuff just to make themselves angry.
Half of the /all feed is about obnoxious people and fights these days.
It can also depend on the time of day if browsing All or which communities you're in. Lemmy does have a lot of folks who were banned from various subreddits, but they're a minority.
The only times I've seen toxicity like this is ironically whenever there is a big wave of reddit user influx, things usually settle down for a while as they adapt to the cultures here (or get banned), it's not as much of an Eternal September as much as it is a Irregularly Scheduled September.
Most of the active comms here are smaller but better quality than their subreddit equivalent. You even get good discussions here on memes sometimes. (Politics and News here still could be better, though.)
For someone who's been very unhappy with the state of social media for quite a while, Lemmy is a breath of fresh air, even though there are definitely growing pains.
I'd rather deal with this supposedly "toxic" lemmy userbase than sift through a thousand comment post where 900 are bot reposts on reddit
Guy is hundred percent right. Lemmy is a echo chamber for a certain demographic as vast majority of users are in it.
We either have tech, or politics. Literally every topic ends up in either. We also don't have the differing opinions aspect as just about every debater talks like they're just the different shade of the same color.
Even spicy news that would make any other site a warzone of opinions just echo chambered here. Literally everyone agrees on one conclusion and random two comments that disagree with that having at least -15 points.
Yeah reddit is already a tiny bit of an echo chamber (tech savvy, frequently online folks). Lemmy is worse (every other post is "big tech bad, Linux good, privacy ftw). Not that these are necessarily bad things, they're just not representative of the general population.
Reddit has echo chambers in the different subreddits, and they can be about as vicious or more than Lemmy instances.
they're just not representative of the general population.
Good. If I wanted the general population, I'd scroll Facebook
To name a few (note, I am only refering to the loud obnoxious minority, not the majority who are mostly cool)
- Linux: too over the top fanboying a times, and the distro war can be absurd here; this coming from me, a full-time Linux user
- Atheism: yes, I know religion is stupid; but you know what else is stupid, trying to force feed your opinion; I mean, we can't even joke about church wifi name here
- Vegan: no, bashing meat eaters won't make them stop eating them, they'll just hate you more
- American Politic: no, not everything is about your shit, that orange business man/ex-president in an orange suit doesn't affect the rest of the world
Atheism: yes, I know religion is stupid; but you know what else is stupid, trying to force feed your opinion; I mean, we can’t even joke about church wifi name here
Sure you can. Look again at your link. You linked straight to one heavily down voted comment thread under that post. Click the view all comments link and you can see that virtually all the other comments there are positive, mainly, other funny wifi names. If you find one negative post, already heavily down voted, to be too much negativity for you then you are not going to be happy anywhere on the internet.
There are so many "Well Acshually" people here. It's insane.
Well Actually not enough. Debate things till the end and know what is right.
We need some form of wiki to manage those debates so that we only have them once.
We either have tech, or politics.
You forgot about Star Trek memes. Although often those are about tech and politics.
Star Trek memes are the only things keeping me on platform lmao
This is what 35 years of right-wing talk radio turning any cultural event into a political crusade has gotten us. The right wing echo chamber has brain-poisoned so many Americans, that they no longer have any non-political schemata for interpersonal interaction on any topic.
Want to talk about how to keep the Internet fast and secure? That's political now.
Want to talk about the science behind the causes of climate change? That's political now.
Want to talk about making anyone's life better in any material way, other than a blood-sucking c-suite executive? That's political now.
Want to talk about medicine? Oh you betcha that's political now.
Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, and Fox News have caused this. And I have no problem calling them out for it. Think saying-so is "political?" Screw off. I don't care if your politics get in the way of everything that's interesting to discuss. Deal with it, or move to Saudi Arabia where conservatives would be happiest.
Right, and to some people of a certain temperament, being aware of, and concerned about a vast range of entirely different issues, all of which can be engaged with on a number of levels that build on your knowledge and understanding, all of that is just an "echo chamber".
The echo chamber argument doesn't account for the fact that people can have shared fundamental values and nevertheless have constructive valuable informative conversations that engage in nuanced analysis. Being concerned about climate change, for instance, you can have all kinds of productive conversations about new research showing how hot September was, or how to make cities more walkable, or any number of things, and those are valuable conversations where describing them as echo chambers is silly. They're actually good conversations where we gain something from having them. If your primary test of a community is whether it does or doesn't have echo chambers, it doesn't have meaningful things to say about cases like this.
I agree. But candidly I feel like there are bots that contribute to the voting.
Lol, the user doesn't seem to realize that if everywhere you go and comment, if absolutely everyone is an asshole, then maybe it's you that's the problem...
Yes I was thinking in those lines. If they deliverd garbage and then was annoyed that they got garbage back.
There's also a chance everyone else is actually an asshole, but here that almost definitely isn't it.
True.
I mean, is it? Because I've found it to be an overall better experience so far. Am I just not going to the right instances/communities? I mean, I get that there are some fucked up places in the Fediverse, but I haven't been actively looking for them, and I haven't accidentally stumbled across anything so far.
Yeah I think we're on the good lemmies 😁
I miss the random non tech centric communities from Reddit. The userbase here, across the fediverse as a whole gravitates towards more tech focused aspects and while that's fine, you miss out on the random topics / subreddits you'd find on Reddit.
(The answer isn't also 'just start that community here', specially I miss randomly getting topics from subjects I wouldn't even search for, but just get surfaced because of the shear amount of content and users Reddit has)
Maybe I'm just weird but I think the tech focus is better.
Like that's where all this started. Kevin Rose wanted a better version of Slashdot, a tech news aggregator, so he created Digg.
And Digg was about tech news for several years before going to a general format, at which point it became trash.
And then Digg's redesign killed the site and everyone flocked to a Digg clone called reddit, even though reddit was a clone of post-shittification Digg, not pre-shittification Digg.
Being tech-focussed really does help. I'd sooner deal with Well Actually neckbeards than the average Facebook user, even if I'm not just interested in tech news.
Check the top hour filter of all instances. That's where other content surfaces.
It sounds like the real complaint is that it's different.
Because yeah it's certainly not more toxic. That's laughable. My interactions here have been overwhelmingly better than on reddit.
And the other complaints boil down to "it's small and new, yuck"... Yeah that's a good thing usually. There have been terrible attacks with CSAM but people are handling it and luckily I've never seen a single image like that. On reddit it was not uncommon to see mutilated humans without wanting to even though there was far more time and resources available to prevent that
I wouldn’t say it’s more toxic, but it certainly is a different atmosphere.
Coming from my curated subs on reddit to mostly browsing All-top on Lemmy, it certainly feels like Lemmys audience is surprisingly more authoritarian-conservative than reddit, despite the very active Linux, FOSS, and privacy communities.
I think there is some valid complaints to be had against being swarmed by fanatics on Lemmy but there is no way it’s more toxic than Reddit. For the most part I’d say the community is very much the same between the major Lemmy instances and Reddit. Just with more FOSS evangelism and Linux love.
The issue is smaller communities. All my hobbies have small Lemmy communities… with either 2 subscribers or posts that are months old.
And on Reddit smaller communities are VERY nice. It’s the big subs that are filled with edgy teens trying to out meme each others.
and leftism tbh edit: i know you guys all gonna downvote lol. dgaf
I’d say that Reddit was the exact amount of leftism. Just with more “orange man bad” in addition to the anti work/late stage capitalism bend as Reddit is more USA-centric
In my experience Reddit users at least tried to hide their blatant racism/sexism/homophobia.
On the other hand, I've never seen so many people calling others racists, sexists or homophobes ever before than on Lemmy. It's almost as if there is a group of people who see those things everywhere, even when it's not actually there.
I have seen zero comments where this is actually occurring but I've seen lots of comments where people are accusing someone of being those things.
I think it's the same reason some women starts to hate all men - they can't separate the good ones from the bad ones anymore and they just start hating an entire gender.
TL;DR: no. Definitively no.
NTL;R: Okay... let me chew on this.
Lemmy as a whole is definitively more toxic than Reddit
For me, at least, non-contributive ("toxic") [see footnote*] behaviour would be: assumptions (including witch hunting), decontextualisation, "didn't read but still replying lol lmao", insults, "I dun unrurrstand", whining + entitlement, and "chrust me" = "I take you for gullible". And those things happen far, far less in Lemmy than in Reddit.
For the poster complaining about Lemmy, "toxic" would be, instead:
- pedants - pedants are fine as long as context-aware. And even then, I don't recall a single pedant screeching at my L3 broken English here, unlike in Reddit.
- purity testers - this can be interpreted 1000 ways.
- concern trolls - yet another thing far more present in Reddit than here...
- contrarians - "oh no what I say should be put in a holy altar, how do you dare to disagree with MEEEEEE?". Sorry but contrarians are leagues above the sort of circlejerking that you see in Reddit, where you'd get 1000 weaboos screeching because you wrote "animes".
- "ackshyually" - refer to what I mentioned already about context. Those "ackshyually" are caused by decontextualisation, that happens far more often in Reddit.
I know that what I'm going to say is anecdotal, but it's still worth sharing: I see the difference specially because I used to moderate a small Reddit sub, and I mod a Lemmy comm nowadays. People here are more reasonable and contributive; I barely need to intervene here, and even then 99% of the time it's like "don't do that" "okay". In Reddit though? Well.
I was on Lemmy.word for slightly over a month and posted many times across numerous communities and instances, so I definitively gave it my best shot.
Depending on which instances yours federates with, you'll get a different experience. lemmy.world and lemm.ee in special tend to gather Reddit-like critters alongside a few good posters, so instances where behaviour is a bit more monitored (such as beehaw) tend to defederate them.
Also Lemmy has backend issues
I'm no coder to claim that the issues are "backend" or "frontend". Instead I'll say the issues that I see:
- papercuts, like the bell icon staying even after you checked all messages
- a lack of mod tools
- rarely lemmy.ml (the instance that I'm in) slows down.
- In the past it used to show errors and refuse to load, but I don't recall this happening nowadays.
And it never showed a downtime banana. - can't cross-instance linking posts in a convenient way
So... come on, the platform works. It has its issues, it's likely worse from lemmy.world due to the amount of posters, but it works.
Bad actors
Name them. Otherwise it boils down to "chrust me". Unless referring to the CSAM event below.
lemmy.world comm being bombarded with CSAM [...] Imagine if a subreddit had to be shut down because of this.
I seriously believe that the approach taken by the lemmy.world admins to close down !lemmyshitpost was more sensible than the actions that I'd expect any Reddit instance (oh wait, there's only Spez's) to take. If the same happened in 2023 Reddit, here's what would likelyhappen:
- subreddit mods ask for help to the admins, "we're being bombarded with CSAM". They hear admin crickets in return.
- mods lock subreddit to avoid the bombardment. u/ModCodeOfConduct forces them to reopen.
- mods eventually give up and leave. The sub becomes unmoderated and attracts paedophiles until you got a full paedo ring..
- the paedo ring grows large enough to get a mod outrage of 9001 subs.
- Spez deletes the sub while making a public announcement, like "WE SNOOS STAND AGAINST PAEDOPHILIA!" (cough former Reddit admin Aimée Challenor cough cough)
- the original userbase of the subreddit has no equivalent community to go to, because unlike in Lemmy you're expected to have a single sub per subject.
and sees an influx of kinder people
Dude. You're in Reddit. That's the pot calling the kettle black. Reddit makes even Faecesbook's community look wholesome in comparison, it's on par with modern Twitter. Lemmy is considerably nicer than Reddit.
And if you still want something nicer there's always Beehaw. I'm being serious - for people who want/need an environment with more monitored behaviour, it's a go-to place. Provided of course that you don't want to eat the cake and have it too, by behaving in a way that you don't want others to, otherwise they'll show you the door.
Footnote
It's a bit of off-topic, but this post is a great example on why I don't like the word "toxic". It refers to everything and nothing at the same time; it boils down to "I don't like this", but dresses it as if it was an intrinsic feature of the object (in this case, Lemmy or Reddit). Note how the list of things that I'd consider "toxic" are completely unlike the person complaining about Lemmy, and if you gather a third person odds are that you'll get a full list of other things to be considered "toxic".
I think what they meant by contrarians is people who disagree for the sake of disagreeing without any actual argument , usually in order to stir up drama or engage in a circlejerk
Lol. I don't have an account anymore, but I was able to lookup the post on Google and found it. Dude seems to be getting ripped apart a bit. It's pretty funny.
Oh I agree. Maybe not toxic per se, but extremely out of touch. I think what happened is it just became a bigger echo chamber, because from the already echo chamber reddit, all the people who are the type to switch to the fediverse (privacy focused, foss lovers) are on lemmy, with their opinions being spouted back at them, so it feels like everyone agrees, when really they're a minority.
The biggest differing opinion between reddit and lemmy that I see is lemmy's insistence that absolutely everyone should switch to linux. Of course I saw that on reddit a bit too, but it always had some pushback.
And of course there's also the ignorance of the fediverse's problems. Like people just can't comprehend why someone wouldn't switch to Mastodon or Lemmy.
This doesn't apply to all topics though. There is still some good discussion here. Sometimes it can be better than reddit.
What's weird is I don't experience this on hacker news. People seem to be a lot less out of touch, and have a wider variety of opinions. Not entirely sure why, maybe because it's had time to mature?
Yeah I kinda noticed this privacy/FOSS thing here, people commenting about software in question being proprietary or has cloud backup for example I have to double check what community I'm at, and 90% times it's not privacy or FOSS related, I was downvoted multiple times for making a mistake of mentioning proprietary software
I was getting absolutely mocked the other day in the linux gaming community suggesting people install Windows on their machine, rather than whining about counter strike 2 not running on their LinuxOS.
There’s some real holier-than-thou types online that just have to be heard. And when Lemmy doesn’t want to listen to their main character ramblings they crack the shits and run back to Reddit with the other main characters
Maybe I'm being unfair, but somehow when I read complaints like this about "purity" and "insufferable" and all that, I always assume it's "they downvoted and insulted me when I made a bigoted joke about like transpeople or something".
Elitism ? definitly. Especially linux. But toxic ? I only saw cordials talks in here, with a few trolls here and there.
As for csam I never saw any scrolling a bit every days. I saw people talking about another instance encouraging it and troll spamming, it but never once saw it myself.
What I saw on reddit without searching was almost daily gore. And definitly sone real csam (this was a long time ago, seems to be fixed now)
lol people are def nicer here. This guy just misses his little friends.
Posts about people being nicer while being condescending about his position 🤦
It's throughout many of the comments on this post.
I fart in your general direction.
(Sniff) oh yeah. our farts smell so good
Hey fuck you bud
I have noticed this too. It's better just to not interact. At the end of the day, I just wanted a better link aggregator than what reddit became and it works nicely for that.
Less trolls here that just want to argue with everyone over everything
Yes it is
No it isn't
I mean... My own experience here completely agrees with their overall appraisal of the situation.
The only reason I'm still here instead of back there is 3rd party app support...but rather than 100% of my Reddit time becoming 100% Lemmy time, it's more like 100% of my Reddit time becoming 20% still Reddit, from a computer, 20% Lemmy on mobile, and 15% in disbelief that I'm spending time on Facebook, and the remaining 45% of that time I used to spend on Reddit, I'm just not spending it on social media anymore.
So yeah. Lemmy wants to be a reddit alternative, but for me it's just not. It's similar, but with less content overall, less relevant and less interesting content, less interesting comments, and on average a worse community. Other than the shitty spez business practices (which are a big deal, don't get me wrong), Lemmy's just "Reddit, but worse in every way" to me.
Unless Lemmy gets better, it'll never be more than an occasional visit for me...and if Reddit were for some reason to right the ship, shit can spez, and reintroduce 3rd party app support, I'd probably go back in a heartbeat.
I’d probably go back in a heartbeat.
Remember: once a dick, always a dick. Reddit will not be unshittified, even if it looks that way for very brief moments.
I get what you're saying, and even partially agree.
But at the same time, if I'm looking for a social media/content aggregation platform, and I have to choose between "idealistic vision, small and problematic community, low quantity and low quality content" vs "corporate/capitalist asshole vision, large and mediocre community, variable quality and quantity content" the latter is going to win every time, based on the fact that there is actually at least some content there that's worth my time.
So far with Lemmy, the only thing I get here is memes...and news that I am already getting from 4 other sources first. None of my niche Reddit communities have any real presence here, so my visits are brief and unsatisfying.
I hear you, but what make me stick with Lemmy and try my best to make it work is the whole concept of decentralized social media. We can't just handle the power back to big techs, see what facebook did in the whole trump election scandal. or what Twitter is becoming. The fediverse now is the only alternative we have, it is the last stand against a corporate controlled internet.
And I am tired to pretend social media does not dictates the real world trends, it does and it is here to stay. There is no more separation from irl and internet.
There's concept and there's execution.
Gotta have both.
I'm not wasting time on, or making any commitment to, a flawed execution, no matter how much I might appreciate the concept.
And for that matter, while I know this isn't a receptive audience to the idea, decentralization isn't the be-all-end-all concern for a platform like this. Idealistically it's nice, sure. But for me (and I'd wager most), it's not even in my top 5 concerns when deciding how (or if) I spend my time on social media.
For me, it has to be relevant, informative, fresh, and well-delivered. If that means trading some of my personal data to their collectors, I'm fine with that. Lord knows everyone else is gathering it too. In the case of Lemmy, the benefits don't matter if it's not delivering on my main needs of it.
I largely agree, yet I'm more like 70% lemmy, 5% Reddit, 25% working on my own Reddit alternative. Why? I refuse to give Reddit more of my data when they've demonstrated that they're more interested in monetization than making the best community (huge shift from when I first joined Reddit). I also think lemmy is doing interesting things to try to foster a great community, and I want to see what works.
But at the end of the day, I think lemmy is architected wrong. It relies on people spending a lot on hosting, which I really don't think it's sustainable, and it is also confusing for users, which is going to reduce adoption. My project attempts to solve both:
- decentralized, so very little hosting costs, just a few relays
- single namespace - less confusing for users, so /c/community means the same thing regardless of the relay you choose
There are some potential downsides, so I'm interested to see how bad those are.
But at the end of the day, I think lemmy is architected wrong. It relies on people spending a lot on hosting, which I really don’t think it’s sustainable, and it is also confusing for users, which is going to reduce adoption.
Have you considered that while those may be genuine technical issues, addressing those alone won't in turn help much in building good communities? Imo one of the common problems across all social media is that a lot of smart, capable folks build their backend systems but neglect to bring on community relations teams (or in the context of entire platforms, community governance teams, maybe?) that coordinate with the people that use those systems.
Probably the big reason for this is that thus far large social media platforms have been built with a corporate mindset, and so the people aren't viewed as people, but an audience for adverts, subscriptions, products, etc. Lemmy has a different yet similar issue insofar as technically capable folks building backend systems, but they don't (nor others deploying their tech) have the resources to bring on any additional community-facing help to then coordinate and collaborate with people in governing their spaces.
maybe it needs a little curation, but once you've blocked the instances, communities and users that are personally annoying to you, it's a fun and engaging place with the usual share of human noise. Maybe some people are happy to have reddit choosing what deserves to reach your eyes, I like to do it myself :)
Absolutely. Reddit had default subs and you would add to it as you explored. Lemmy is like the opposite... it's quieter here so you start with seeing everything and then subtract the bad out. Ive blocked instances (mostly other languages), communities, even some users that seem to exist to just post about Linux/communism/that guy who seems to mostly post NSFW material that looks way too young. And after subtracting out what you don't want in your feed it's a pretty good experience.
I've never watched star trek in my life but idk I kinda like some of these memes. They can stay.
Since when can we block entire instances?
They might be talking from a mobile perspective (or alternative UI) since a lot of them have that ability. Though, the next Lemmy update will have that feature natively thankfully!
Get connect. I blocked the ones that don't speak English cause... I don't speak not-English
Boost for Lemmy allows you to block whole instances using keywords. Works well.
I find Lemmy uses to be a little pretentious oft times, extremely narrow minded in it's left leaning views. Very Reddit like in that last regard, perhaps more so.
At the same time, I do find a lot of insightful, clear headed individuals and some genuinely good people, but that also exists on Reddit.
The people running this site are better by far and the mods a little more level headed, but I don't expect that to last because power always corrupts.
I've already seen some people modding a stupid number of places, which is always a bad sign.
We'll see where this place ends up, but it is not as liberated and people here want to believe, and not as immune to corruption as they think.
I’ve already seen some people modding a stupid number of places, which is always a bad sign.
The ones I have seen are also kinda pathetic. Opening 15+ magazines/instances/communities, all of which are almost the same subject, most of them are post-less.
One thing I've noticed about the alternatives subreddit, is there is a lot of people persuading people against alternatives. It's almost like there was some organising to persuade people there was no alternative.
I mean, when you factor in you'd probably get removed, or shadow-banned, or have your posts removed for mentioning Lemmy, it feels like there is a multifaceted approach to discouraging folk from leaving the reddit teet.
While there is an element of truth, it's scattered in with exaggeration and only focussing on negatives. The objective was to say Lemmy bad, staying good.
No way is Lemmy more toxic than reddit. I find those "well ackshually" folks are much less here.
I use to follow /r/degoogle on reddit... but it felt like pretty much every discussion was people shitting on every alternative, and implying that all measures are totally pointless unless you stop interacting with any form of computer for the rest of your life. It's just so weird having people say there there's no point switching from Chrome to Firefox because google is the default search engine on Firefox. I got to the point where I really did believe there was some deliberate destabilization going on, to weaken the community. (And it worked. I unsubscribed; and I'm sure it struggled to keep anyone who actually had anything useful to say.)
Anyway... I wouldn't be surprised if /r/RedditAlternatives was similar to that.
Oof, I can imagine that sucks. Come join us on [email protected] :) Everyone seems quite enthusiastic about finding alternatives. I'm all about the Firefox, GrapheneOS, Proton Mail, Signal, Element etc. :)
There's a lot of FOSS nerds here who get disgusted at you if you suggest someone use a web browser that isn't Firefox. But if you hung around on the Linux/FOSS subreddits, you'd get the exact same thing...
We got some Hexbear toxicity, and some real Linux apologists.
But the fun thing about the fediverse is that you can just block those instances and be done with it.
What is a linux apologist?
Every complaint about the users is a complaint you can make about every other online community 🙄 Just go through the effort of blocking the jerks and the communities/instances they congregate and spawn from.
Yup. On Reddit, people complained about users from /r/thedonald or/r/politics, so I made myself a simple rule: avoid obviously politically slanted communities and extremely popular communities. Things were much better, and I took that same rule of thumb here (avoid lemmygrad, exploding heads, and most of the larger communities on lemmy.ml) and I've been happy.
It turns out, if you actively avoid jerks, you'll probably be happier.
I honestly just wish the internet would go back to individual forums. Lemmy is great for a reddit alternative, but I think old school forums were just better overall
I know forums still exist, obviously, but they're kind of shitty right now.
I believe that most of the things people do, or try to do, on reddit (and therefore reddit alternatives) just aren't appropriate for how the site is structured. Reddit is a 'link aggregator', that's what it was designed for. People post links to content.
So it's no surprise that forums are a better option, structurally, for a ton of communities.
☝️This post DEFINITELY NOT made by reddit corpo. Nope, no sir.
I left reddit when RIF was shut down because of that "no API for you" bulltrash. I found lemme.world and it was like the clouds parted and a warm sunbeam shine down upon my cold, wet, and shivering body. It's like reddit was in 2010 when I first became a daily user... but better in some ways. Smaller community, which will be interesting to watch grow as the years pass, everyone already here still trying to figure out how it can be made better and generally filling up with long time reddit users completely fed up with that corperate, ad riddled cesspool the site turned out to be. Is lemme.world perfect? No way and far from it... but that's okay. There's a really good bunch of dedicated computer smart folks (not me as one could imagine) continually working to mold and shape it into something that fills that dark hole left in the world of social media caused by the requirement for corperate suits needs to shove ads and propaganda down our throats between every blink we make.
Anyways, it sounds like the response he got were likely caused by some flavor of antagonist, rage baiting posts intentionally made to stir up said responses. I'm sure this is a win for lemme.world.
Never really understood the thought process "If I move to a different place, it'll definitely be magically free of arseholes and people I disagree with." It's just not reflective of reality - wherever you go, there'll be arseholes. Just build your Subscribed feed, dip into All occasionally to se what else is out there, find an instance that takes moderation seriously and aren't actual fascists and block the strays that occasionally make it through.
And OOP is right to say Lemmy has backend issues. The dev team of 2 people is too small and they really need to make safety a massive priority ASAP. Being able to block instances as a user is a big step forward (planned in the next major release I believe) but both mod and admin tools need to be much better and they need to do a lot more to tackle CSAM hits. I hope they're taking note of the various projects @[email protected] has begun to tackle these issues.
In terms of the size of the Lemmyverse, I don't really give a shit about that. What I care about is quality rather than quantity and it stands to reason that as quality continues to improve (as I believe it is) then quantity will follow in its wake.
OOP seems to forget that Lemmy only got as big as it is right now about 4 months ago - of course there's a lack of niche communities and of course there's a lack of tools. Poor old Ernst developing KBin got hit with tens of thousands of users for software that wasn't even out of Alpha.
The best things we can do as users is create good content, encourage discussion etc even when it feels like we're talking into the void. Because sooner or later, if the content is good, people will engage. We're not at that tipping point yet but it'll come if we put the effort in.
All alternative platforms should be assumed to be at least 50% rancid garbage, because that's where all the people banned from the mainstream platforms inevitably go.
The fact that lemmy isn't 90% flat earthers and crypto spam is actually astounding and i don't know how on earth this has been achieved. Especially considering how suboptimal the moderation tools are it's really impressive how good the content here is.
The devs' politics led to them valuing building a welcoming community over the principle of free speech. There was a strictly enforced moderation policy from the start, which may seem crazy now but it's a lot easier to do when your community is small. Toxic people definitely came in and got banned. On their way out you'd often see them complaining about how ridiculous it is to filter out slurs. The community that stuck around was really great. I'm not someone who posts a lot on any platform, but I was viewing lemmy every day for a couple years because the discussions were good, and there was very little hostility.
Today the community is more like reddit than it is like old lemmy, lemmy actually feels a lot less friendly today than it did like six months ago.
I do think the devs were wholly unprepared for reddit to shoot itself in the foot as badly as it did. Their project went from a passion project to serious business almost overnight. With time I'm sure they're capable of working through the issues we're facing today, but I don't think they were ready for the big migration when it happened.
Well, I think the people here prior to Rexit were already producing good content and then the people who moved over from Reddit were primarily people annoyed by u/spez and who valued content quality and genuinely wanted a decent platform. There'll be times when things get shitty but by and large I do think Lemmy had a good start. We just really need the devs to give some power to instance admins and Mods via decent tools, because the one thing that will kill progress is people not being able to curate and protect their Communities.
I mean… if you’re getting disdain from your home instance… you picked the wrong home instance. Switch instances.
Aren’t Redditors getting $ for content now?
He is not wrong. I have had to block and get rid of other instances on Lemmy, because they are filled with toxic motherfuckers, and elitist Linux users
But at least you can block here.
I'm so intrigued by how often people complain about foss and Linux on lemmy. Everything about Lemmy appeals to people who are really into both and as someone else pointed out those leanings and the other main complaint, leftist politics, are all insanely tied together and all should be very much expected on Lemmy.
When I first started using Lemmy, most of the front page was hate content. Lately it seems like less than 10% though.
I think that was just growing pains. It's unreasonable to expect a community as small as Lemmy was beforehand to immediately moderate itself like a large community when they grow as quickly as Lemmy did. It takes time to build the systems and fill positions. The amount of hate content has been dropping consistently. I barely see any hate posts and far fewer hate comments. Excluding when I make the mistake of treading into Hexbear but that's just cause I'm stupid sometimes.
Like some of the top-ranking comments here are saying, that place has a very large proportion of people who were coming from the banned subreddits like The Donald, various straight-up hate communities, and typical alt-right groups. So naturally, alternatives that were founded by anarchists and socialists (raddle, lemmy.ml) were almost always disregarded there, possibly with the exception of the Wolfballs admin (I can't remember too well if they got much attention with the 'they're not all like that' line)
It's always funny to me to see newer users complain about a lot of political (incl. FOSS) users in an inherently political project, which was picked by many precisely because its political values prevent the for-profit shittery that reddit.com has been doing for 15 years, and that alt-right social media alternatives frequently do whenever they get enough users. Yes, we're going to voice our concerns when people show up at the door and want this to be just like reddit was, or bring over the uncritical mainstream ignorance we came over here to avoid.
Literally my first interaction in reddit after I left 2 months ago was with a troll spamming emojis like he was so smarter than me that was laughable. No thanks sir.
a troll spamming emojis like he was so smarter than me
I mean ... you could join an instance that's federated with hexbear.
The outlined issues don't seem to be lemmy exclusive, but then again, I've spent quite a short time here.
The toxicity is caused by the society, not by the platform. From my experience, one can always find a more toxic subreddit.
Reddit is just as much moderated by volunteers, that's the reason I started using reddit. Also, having corporate admins doesn't make the platform any more spam resistant.
If anything I would expect these problems to be more prevalent in smaller (lemmy) platforms and stabilize with growth to reddits level.
Now I'm not trying to defend lemmy, but being even more community driven I want it to succeed and become what reddit used to be.
I want it to succeed and become what reddit used to be.
I want it to exceed what reddit ever was. It's tempting to look back at those days and want to remake it, but really, we can and should go further in making good communities. And with federation, in theory, it's so much easier to have a small town booted up without it constantly feeling an inch from death, the death-struggle of almost all comfy communities that haven't become popular.
Mf acts like CSAM and rampart porn spamming bots are not a thing on Reddit. That's some neat cherry picking right there. Here's the thing, at least rightwing nutcases are far less prevalent here due to defederations.
We don't have unblockable "He gets us" spam.
That in itself is worth any friction I have to overcome to use the 'verse.I think that, perhaps, the user is trying to use Lemmy as Reddit, rather than using some of the fantastic quality of life improvements that evaporated with the API nonsense.
For example, blocking users and communities (and soon instances). Some users and communities, even if I enjoy them or the instances that they are on, sometimes are just too toxic for me. And that isn't to say that the comms and users necessarily are (sometimes they are) but, that sometimes engaging with some comms and users either causes undue stress or temptation to get involved in an Internet fight. That's not behavior that is good for us, even if it sometimes feels good in the moment.
I'm hoping (and have suggested) that a "timeout" feature gets added to allow one to readily self-regulate and disengage when they find that interactions are approaching the sorts that are algorithmically encouraged on commercial social media platforms. The outrage machine is just terrible and I've found myself much happier and in a better headspace since leaving such platforms. Added bonus is that transphobia actually gets taken seriously on most instances and, while it doesn't technically impact my as a cis guy, I'm much happier knowing that people are able to feel safer to be themselves (or come to terms with themselves).
As for the complaint about people being more likely pedantic or correct people on technical details, I love that - finding out that I'm wrong about something is fantastic because that means that I learned something. When there's topics, like tech, where there are often correct and incorrect answers and they change or get added to regularly, one really needs to leave the ego at the door. We're all humans (and bots and human facsimiles), which means we'll be wrong from time to time. It's a fact of life, effectively in environments where there are a lot of knowledge-workers and the medium of communication is directly related to the topics.
Personally, I'd like to see more comms regarding to digital circuit design and open-source silicon.
I also think the website is exceptionally good, and has a unique distinction of being equally good on desktop and mobile. Feel that the website is so good on mobile that I don't need to use a mobile app, and I sure as heck can't say that about Reddit.
Oh god yes.
I refuse to install any app from the websites I use.
Reddit has been trying all kinds of tricks into getting me to install their app, just like most other websites.
I literally had to switch to desktop view every time, because it just wouldn't allow me to use their mobile view, like wtf?
Lemmy is a breath of fresh air in that regard.
... an optional feature where it only lets you browse for X minutes a day would be awesome
/u/spez aliases are getting grumpy.
It absolutely is an echo chamber, and it gets really toxic. This place is extremely xenophobic and it's very exhausting.
bad actors can spam disgusting shit all over the damn place to the point where one relatively large community (I believe it was c/shitposting on Lemmy. world but I can't remember for sure had to be shut down by the mods for a while because it was being bombarded by CSAM.
I guess he hasn't heard of, I think it was r/AHS, that did exactly this routinely to get subreddits they didn't like shut down.
I guess he hasn’t heard of, I think it was r/AHS, that did exactly this routinely to get subreddits they didn’t like shut down.
You are a buffoon if you believe this. I was a regular on r/AHS, and this was an obvious lie.
Fair enough, I can't actually find any evidence.
I thought that's how the mod protests were going to end.
I actually don't experience these any of the issues. If you don't like tankie stuff then just block lemmygrad and hexbear.
Tbh, I'm very left so I like lemmygrad anti-capitalist anti-US memes.
They're fine as long as you keep a safe distance, plus it's fun to watch them antagonize any nazis that show up.
How do you block comments from people who are in a specific instance? I am sick of hexbears defending russias and chinas genocides
🤨
Fuck it. I'll take my media raw. I'm not gonna block something just because it offends me and if shit posters start taking over the place well thats just society baby! I prefer it that way to giving some central entity the power to 'clean' up everything how they see fit. Not gonna lock myself into an echo chamber if I can help it.
To all the admins, thanks and take your time fixing things and if instances go offline for a while, thanks for giving me a social media break!
I bet that dude said something racist and got dogpiled. I only see toxic comments on lemmy when I say something racist.
That's a fair point. While racism thrives in small communities where any rare truth gets downvoted, Lemmy's federation has made it almost impossible for racist communities to reach critical mass here.
As someone who browses /new, I've seen numerous times someone trashing Lemmy, and then 20 posts down I find they posted something incredibly stupid.
honestly I found this was dependant on the instance you are on. I switched instances off my previous one (well technically I bounce back and forth) and I find it super dependant on the instance I'm on with what the toxicity levels are.
I see this a lot and I really don't understand it. Here I am on lemmy.world, replying to you on sh.itjust.works, on a post from lemmy.ml. Clearly neither of us are browsing just our local instance, and indeed I imagine most people are not. So what does it matter what instance anyone is on, beyond instance-specific defederations?
There is a sense of comraderie on most instances. Not sure if that's the case on .world since y'all are so large and general purpose.
And also the level of moderation sometimes differs greatly based on where communities are hosted.
Also, defederations matter a lot, considering beehaw and hexbear, two of the 10 largest servers, are defederated with a large number of other servers. A new user on sh.itjust.works or lemmy.world is going to have a very different experience than one on lemmy.ml, because they won't have any interaction with hexbears or beehawers.
The instance matters less once you've been here a while and figured out how to find everything, but for new users it can often be a significant barrier to entry if they join the wrong instance and have a bad experience.
I think it depends a lot on what the instance you're on considers is I see vastly different topics of posts between the two instances that I'm on
Thats funny how first paragraph of their post is describing my experience with Reddit. I think, in majority, people here are nicer. Also Im curious how many backend issues had Reddit in it's first couple of years? I doubt situation back then was better. And its surprising to see anyone on Reddit complaining about backend problems here, while they literally made impossible to create any 3rd party apps or software based on Reddit API.
I think they might have a point about the moderation issue. It's the same story on mastodon and the fediverse where there is too much to moderate and prolific ban evaders can run rampant.
For what it's worth I believe that rough edges like this are a small negative compared to the postives of being able to use social media without being under the yoke of a big tech company.
Better this than Reddit where you get banned for any and everything. I got banned from various subs for all kinds of stupid shit. I ended up getting permabanned from Reddit for saying child molesters should be executed because I was "advocating violence". On the same day I was banned for that there was a post on one of the biggest default subs saying someone should be killed for a printer software update with dozens of people saying similar shit in the comments and nothing happened to any of them.
Someone told lil' whiney here something he didn't like. Lemmy has been great in my eyes. Since getting here in the exodus of reddit 3:16 "And whoa, fuck uspez, this place sucks" it has been pretty great. Kinda like 12 years ago reddit.
But this is social media. There will be trolls. There will be people smarter than you. And likely dude got buthurt and went back to the communities where his thoughts are welcome at large, even if they are wrong or misleading or whatever. Safe space so-to-speak.
If he thinks this is toxic, holy shit is IRL ever gonna eat him alive. Even the redditards who simp it up for maga and r/conservative won't save him then.
Well...bye.
If someone corrects what you wrote into an English sentence, and you have a problem with people looking out for you, then you're a dick.
Well, only way to solve this is by having people here who aren't idiots (whatever that means to you) to participate and make things better. But this is too hard for most people, I guess.
Can’t say I necessarily disagree with most of what they said. The same things have also been said right here on lemmy. I don’t see their point though as they’re just describing anonymous unfiltered social media as a whole really.
Sounds fairly accurate to me.
Watch this. I'm a republican.
Hi a republican, I'm dad
Me too. COME OUT YE BLACK AND TANS, COME OUT AND FIGHT ME LIKE A MAN.
spoiler
If you really want to make the more rabid and trigger-happy Hexbear and Lemmygrad users mad, you have to say you're a Democrat
Ree
Many such cases
I can imagine this same person screaming their head off of if their favorite subreddit had to be closed for the exact same problems on Lemmy and c/shitposting on lemmy.world went through with CSAM. Hell, they'd probably scream to fix the issue.
To the people who say they don't run into jerks here or they don't understand when people say it's worse than reddit... what rose colored glasses are you wearing? Huge swaths of lemmy are little better than 4chan.
"Oh, you just have to curate your communities."
Stop. Take your superior than thou attitude and just stop. You are part of the problem.
Why is curating your communities a bad recommendation? I understand that there could be more admin tooling and such, but why is looking out for your interests a "Holier than thou" attitude?
- it's a form of victim blaming. Example:
"I went to India and I was sexually assaulted on a bus." "THATS YOUR FAULT FOR NOT GOING TO THE 'GOOD' PARTS."
No. Fuck you. India has a rampant sexual assault problem.
Lemmy has rampant problems. To ignore them and say it's the visitors fault is such a fucking asshole position to take. If the first time you came to lemmy was when csam was being spammed and you were subjected to it... it 100% isn't your fault. If you make a comment on something that interests you from All and you don't see which community it is in and you get spammed with slurs and attacks for having a different opinion... it's not your fault.
- it's toxic as fuck and super passive aggressive.
"You don't know how to curate your experience. You aren't very good at it. You must have issues."
That's what people are saying. They hide behind the bullshit example you gave "what's wrong with selecting your interests." No. Fuck you.
Can you point me to the 4chan like part of lemmy? I just go to the main page and click on 'all' so maybe I'm missing something but what I see are just some linux memes, post about video games and 'asklemmy' posts. Never noticed 4chan like content.
Lolol they are 100% correct. This place will be completely overrun by tankies and commies a year from now. I am constantly attacked for having an extremely moderate opinion. The only reason I'm still here is I like the idea of this place. In practice it's 4chan with communist teenagers.
I find the raving tankies to be a small contingent of Lemmy, in my experience.
Could your moderate opinions be actually not very moderate, “ShittyRedditWasBetter”? Your username advances a very strong opinion.
Only because you are on lemmyworld and the worst parts of it have been defederated because it's a fucking cesspit out there.
My views are quite middle of the pack. Capitalism mostly works, but we need string corrections where it doesn't, mainly housing, healthcare, education. LGBTQ+ should be treated fairly and respected as humans. There should be a national registration and stronger gun laws but DNC policy is stupid and ineffective.
I've been called Nazi multiple times on multiple threads.
