How have you personally found the Lemmy community compared to its competition and other social media?
How have you personally found the Lemmy community compared to its competition and other social media?
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?
Yes exactly. Because anyone can spin up their own instance and communities on that instance, there are many duplicates of traditionally popular communities from other social sites. It used to be worse here, but it's still pretty bad around sports, politics, and many niche groups.
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.
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.
My experience is exactly the same. I find people way more toxic here, and way more extreme discussions. I still reddit more on my PC, RES makes reddit worthwhile, and I'm unsubbed to most of the very popular subreddits, so my feed is mostly tailored to my hobbies and interests, which don't seem to be either very active here, or don't exist yet.
Since I don't reddit on my phone anymore cause I can't use RIF, I use kbin. But it's rather lackluster to me.
Yeah I think it's because there's so much less engagement here than on Reddit. The same toxic people would have been buried or down voted to hell over there, but here with far far fewer comments those toxic trolls will remain visible and take up a disproportionate amount of any comments section.
There's also a selection bias thing going on, people who would get shadow banned or downvoted on Reddit find that they get engagement with their content here so stick around, the people who they put off will leave, which causes the toxicity ratio to go up and eventually the place will end up full of toxic commenters and posters. With a federated system this is an incredibly difficult problem to solve.
There's some interesting musings on how this can affect the development of online spaces here which has stuck with me since I read it. https://eev.ee/blog/2016/07/22/on-a-technicality/
On lemmy, I've literally been told that I should be tortured and nuked because I was born in the US, and then got banned for defending myself.
Yeah I find it incredibly toxic here. I'm way more prone to leaving a comment on reddit than here. Honestly the inbox notification on lemmy gives me a little anxiety.
I find Reddit way more toxic, especially post the purge from the lack of apps. It's like their moderation ranked or something. It's probably different in smaller pages, but I've found the front page over there is way worse than Lemmy nowadays in terms of quality of conversation.
Given the purge was due to moderator access to API's, I'm not surprised.
Same. And I like some disagreement as that brings discussion. Lemmy can be pretty toxic if you don't echo back the expected.
I've noticed an ebb and flow to that. It seems like anger goes down when activity goes up, which is the opposite of what I would usually expect from the internet but that's how it's been on here. I have an account where I filter/block things and one where I don't so I can see what's really going on, and when there's too much hate and rage content on the front page I take a break from lemmy for a while.
I think most of the people who say lemmy isn't toxic at all are probably people who found a bubble where people don't push back on their personal brand of toxicity very much.
It depends a lot on what you consider "toxic".
If it's just about intrusive off-topic political discussion, then I fully agree with you: it's far more common in Lemmy than in Reddit, and sometimes it reaches a point that even people who'd otherwise enjoy discussing politics roll their eyes and say "not this shit again".
However, if "toxic" includes other forms of undesirable behaviour, then Lemmy is probably less toxic than Reddit. For example: while sometimes you do see here disingenuous and deliberate stupidity, "waah TL;DR!!", the "I don't understand" conveying disagreement, or passive aggressiveness, in Reddit they pop up all the time.
So, what do you consider toxic? Depending on that, the other users' experiences might be really similar or really different from yours.
intrusive off-topic political discussion
Yeah that is pretty much what i meant.
The halcyon days lasted about month. After that each post sounded more and more like that 14 year old atheist reading the bible meme.
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.
In my experience a significant portion of Lemmy lives in a fantasy world and really doesnt like this being pointed out.
Take videogames for example, if you were yo ask me what Lemmy thinks about videogames... "AAA devs should only release games they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into making once they are absolutely finished and bug free with no expensive future DLCs or microtransactions, absolutely no ongoing subscription costs for the absolute minimum price they think they can sell it for and not go out of business but it should also be DRM free and nobody should buy it anyway because its digital and you shouldnt feel bad downloading it for free because it doesnt cost money to make another digital copy its just corporate greed."
God help you if you dont agree. I too would like to live in a post scarcity communist utopia, but we dont.
AAA devs should only release games they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into making once they are absolutely finished and bug free with no expensive future DLCs or microtransactions, absolutely no ongoing subscription costs for the absolute minimum price they think they can sell it for and not go out of business but it should also be DRM free and nobody should buy it anyway because its digital and you shouldnt feel bad downloading it for free because it doesnt cost money to make another digital copy its just corporate greed.”
Honestly I think it's a lot more complicated and nuanced regarding this here than reddit. When I was a wee lad, I yo-ho-ho some sweet software and games via bbs's but mostly went legit as I aged. I don't think there's more piracy justification here than reddit, but also, I think we're in a 'golden-shower-age' of enshitiffication where services paid for won't be rendered and that, justifiably, moves the sentiment.
That said, as a game dev, I don't think people are asking for your proposed argument overwhelmingly - they just want AAA devs to treat their paying userbase better. Some of those considerations are unrealistic, but often they're justified.
I'm finding Lemmy's audience to be very similar to 2008 reddit, it's not perfect, but it's better than current day reddit and I thank the lemmy creators for having a viable alternative.
FUCK SPEZ.
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.
The fuck did you say about Linux?
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'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 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 try to participate more actively on Lemmy than I did on reddit, where I was really just a lurker. I decided to do so in order to support the platform at least a little. I have the impression that a lot of lemmy users feel similar and really do want to care for this project. And that's really cool, I think.
In my opinion, however, the biggest issue with Lemmy has unfortunately changed little in the past 6 months: I think there is still pretty little original content. What's more, the little OC there is easily gets lost in the flood of reposts or screenshots from other platforms. At least that's the impression I get from most of the larger communities (besides from /pics). I think that's a shame since this makes it hard to find and appreciate the content someone took quite some time to make.
As far as interactions with others are concerned, it sometimes bothers me that a whole bunch of Lemmy users seem to have really fixed opinions on certain topics. Those guys don't seem to take arguments into account at all but rather seem to be on some sort of propaganda mission instead. So it seems to me that there are multiple topics that simply can't be discussed in a meaningful way on Lemmy. I think that's a shame as well.
But all in all, I quite like Lemmy for what it is.
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)
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.
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.
There’s definite buzz words here. Use them and get destroyed depending on what light you’re using them in.
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 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.
There is no leftist community on the internet that will ever be good because there will necessarily be people with clandestine motives weather they're doing so for work or fun. Every actual organization ive been in on the left operates under the assumption that some of our members are plants. The secret US orgs have been disrupting leftist anything for as long as they've existed and so long as they exist a real online community for serious leftist thought will always be under attack. Actually organizing in the actual community is the only remedy, and even then the bad actors are still there, they just can't be faceless and as inflammatory.
See, my view is that this would be very easy to spot if leftist communities were more academically engaged and rejected a lot of the more mindless revolutionary rhetoric to begin with. That kind of rote populism where everything western is irredeemably evil and must be burned to the ground is the part which is ripe for exploitation, while the bits about economic egalitarianism and labor unity are broadly popular. My entire gripe is that if leftist communities focused on the latter, wed deny the provocateurs oxygen to begin with.
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.
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.
"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:
- 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 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.
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.
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 removed 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.
Basically reddit with more Linux posting and few other differences.
Reddit but good
Lol true
this
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?
Pros:
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FOSS Everywhere
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So far, no brigading by salty nationalists
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So far, excellent moderation on most communities
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Better UI experience
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It's actually fun to engage in many communities here in all types of conversation and media formats
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Plenty of federated instances to choose from
Cons:
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Specific communities are small or nonexistent
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Not enough user generated content per day that you can waste time on (Maybe this is a good thing lol)
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Instance switching is still a bit of a pain because I am lazy
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Web UI is okay, nothing too special. Including some alternative frontends
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Instance federation is like proto p2p. It's not easily scalable, so it can't automatically react to sudden demand or attention.
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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 removed 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.
For me, it’s great. It’s like Reddit honestly, no matter how many would get offended by the comparison, but that’s how it feels to me. I wasn’t a power user there, and I haven’t been here.
I like reading and finding stuff, and that’s been fun and plentiful here too. The comments are much less numerous, but about the same in terms of their content. At least compared to how it was when I left Reddit, and it’s been a while now, maybe it’s changed.
If I want serious and informative and extremely helpful comments, I’ll hop to hackernews at yc. If so want to know what’s up around the world and see cute cats and a few interesting things besides, I’ll just open lemmy and do a short scroll. If I feel like I need a pick-me-up, I’ll read the comments in anything other than news articles regarding war or politics. I get the same feeling I did back in Reddit. There are legitimately funny comments and jokes and such here, and it’s great for what it is.
I haven’t tried tilde, though I did give it a peek back in the day. I feel perfectly at home and content here, combined with hackernews. It’s enough, and since I mostly just do short scrolls here and there and don’t really doom scroll, it’s just very nice.
I love being here, honestly, and have had no complaints after I got over missing Apollo (the client) and then, for a short period, Memmy.
Once the UX got close to what I like, with Voyager, it’s been nice and cozy.
Haven’t missed Reddit at all. I get the exact same experience here personally.
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 ;)
Nothing good comes from nazareth
There's a different odour.
Its the Same people and the same odour m8
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.
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 find it mostly better than any other option available, but the polarization of the people here is sometimes hilariously out of control.
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.
Username checks out
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.
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
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
- 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.
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.
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 about the same as everywhere else. The most fun I have on any social media platform these days is blocking assholes.
Much ruder and angrier, and prone to accusations of fascism for any deviation from groupthink. Basically like Reddit but worse, and with less content. Never mind.
I was discussing this with my husband. I think part of it is that some of the Lemmy crowd came over because they were banned on reddit for being hyper-disagreeable, rude, violent lil bastards.
I came over because I got sick of he-get-sus ads
I think part of it is that some of the Lemmy crowd came over because they were banned on reddit for being hyper-disagreeable, rude, violent lil bastards
this wouldn't be the first time it happens either
Yeah, I guess aside from fediverse enthusiasts (or whatever), a fair chunk of the early Lemmy adopters may have been banned from Reddit (or at least their favourite subs).
Since the API changes, I wonder if there have been more "normies" moving out this way.
I feel like I've actually seen less of that so far on Lemmy (at least on lemmy.world), Reddit had gotten really bad about it the past few years to where it was a requirement to add "/s" any time you wanted to make a joke because some dipshit would purposely misconstrue your comment in the worst way possible unless you explicitly identified it as a joke. Maybe it's still just as bad on other instances or maybe I just haven't made a bad enough comment on here for people to attack me for supporting the side I'm actually trying to make fun of.
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
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.
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.
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.
The cynicism is more annoying to me, but reddit had more of it, I didn't care much there though.
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.
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!
A lot more sexist
I haven't seen this. Are there specific communities you are thinking of?
Honestly it's mostly the very casual, low effort stuff on meme communities that I was thinking of last night when I commented. The incel shit, I can deal with. But it's the casual objectification, as well as the diminishing of anything outside of a woman's appearance that I find exhausting.
Less out-and-out manosphere garbage than on Reddit, but man oh man have I seen some real incel adjacent shit pop up from time to time on asklemmy and nostupidquestions.
And they stay up too, because we’re too small to moderate effectively around the clock.
I've been here for 3 months and i haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary. Well other than a serious amount of tankies. Might i say it's almost like your making shit up. Can you provide a sauce?
Edit: still no source you like shit stiring don't you uWu
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?
Way more thoughtful and open to discussing matters.
As long as you don't have the wrong opinions, of course.
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.
When I first landed (the day boost died for reddit) it was all flowers and birds but since the start of the gazan genocide Interactions have grown progressively more toxic in almost every forum. Everybody has strong political opinions, which isnt a problem per se, but they are more than prone to bash them into everybody else.
I personally agree with most of the stuff here, but still, I would prefer a space for the exchange of ideas and dissertation over one for pure confrontation and circlejerk.
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.
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.
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.
I think the community here is pretty terrible, I doubt I'll stick around long term. There's a reason why comment sections are dead and its because this place is full of assholes
Which communities/servers? I’ve found the comments on non political threads to be mostly reasonable.
There’s no doubt that lemmy is currently less active than reddit though
Honestly even on political topics here you are much more likely to face a civil debate. There are exceptions, but chances are chances.
I think there's plenty of assholes here but I personally encounter them less frequently here than I did on reddit
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.
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.
Loads of extremely radicalized political posts and comments and people advocating violence and brutality towards groups they don’t agree with. It’s gross. I’m using Lemmy less and less with all these psychos. And the content is piss poor usually too. I try to contribute but it feels pointless
This is essentially reddit but way worse made up of individuals suspended from reddit so people whom simp for Karl marx and want to watch him fuck there wife while having a wank in the closet and people who have a wank over some fox news presenter saying the word woke
Too leftist for me, but after blocking a good chunk of communities (and all Germans) it’s not bad