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  • 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

  • Seems like this person's main problem is that they went to lemmy.world, which does basically seem like a collection of all the worst redditors.

    • I'd say a lot of users, perhaps even most, on lemmy.world are just fine, but I've seen some wildly bad behavior from their mods (e.g., one of their politics mod making a mod-flaired comment about how "The United States is not a racist nation," like what)

      • (e.g., one of their politics mod making a mod-flaired comment about how "The United States is not a racist nation,"

        Lmao what? The heart of the global empire is somehow not racist now, despite all the evidence to the contrary? After all the police killings of unarmed black men, how can anyone believe that?

      • one of their politics mod making a mod-flaired comment about how "The United States is not a racist nation,"

        ngl incredibly glad we're not federated with those guys

  • 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.

  • If a site couldn't handle CSAM promptly and effectively then it's not ready, period. No one should have to shut down an entire community because of it.

    They do realize that Reddit had subreddits like r/jailbait and 4chan used to be filled with CSAM until they cracked down?

    They also do not mention specifics on who the 'purity testers' or 'pedants' are. Reddit also has a good record of being a place for pedantic nerds :nerd:

  • Maybe I'm being unfair, but somehow when I read complaints like this about "purity" and "insufferable" and all that, I always assume it's "they downvoted and insulted me when I made a bigoted joke about like transpeople or something".

  • I 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.

  • 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.

  • Never really understood the thought process "If I move to a different place, it'll definitely be magically free of arseholes and people I disagree with." It's just not reflective of reality - wherever you go, there'll be arseholes. Just build your Subscribed feed, dip into All occasionally to se what else is out there, find an instance that takes moderation seriously and aren't actual fascists and block the strays that occasionally make it through.

    And OOP is right to say Lemmy has backend issues. The dev team of 2 people is too small and they really need to make safety a massive priority ASAP. Being able to block instances as a user is a big step forward (planned in the next major release I believe) but both mod and admin tools need to be much better and they need to do a lot more to tackle CSAM hits. I hope they're taking note of the various projects @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com has begun to tackle these issues.

    In terms of the size of the Lemmyverse, I don't really give a shit about that. What I care about is quality rather than quantity and it stands to reason that as quality continues to improve (as I believe it is) then quantity will follow in its wake.

    OOP seems to forget that Lemmy only got as big as it is right now about 4 months ago - of course there's a lack of niche communities and of course there's a lack of tools. Poor old Ernst developing KBin got hit with tens of thousands of users for software that wasn't even out of Alpha.

    The best things we can do as users is create good content, encourage discussion etc even when it feels like we're talking into the void. Because sooner or later, if the content is good, people will engage. We're not at that tipping point yet but it'll come if we put the effort in.

    • All alternative platforms should be assumed to be at least 50% rancid garbage, because that's where all the people banned from the mainstream platforms inevitably go.

      The fact that lemmy isn't 90% flat earthers and crypto spam is actually astounding and i don't know how on earth this has been achieved. Especially considering how suboptimal the moderation tools are it's really impressive how good the content here is.

      • 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.

      • 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.

  • ☝️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.

  • 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.

386 comments