1y ago

Lemmy is being gentrified

Gonna just say it. As a longtime Lemmy user I'm really not a fan of a lot of the people coming over from Reddit. It's probably just a small but vocal minority and confirmation bias on my part, but I get the impression that they are trying to turn Lemmy into Reddit, toxicity, entitlement, stupid challenges and all.

When we've had two major debacles before Reddit even opened back up, one about "how dare these unpaid admins try to lessen their workload with sign up questions", and the other about "how dare instances block other instances that are being used as proxies for forwarding spam and bot content into their own instances." The people from reddit seem to still think they're on Reddit and any perceived inferiority that Lemmy has compared to Reddit is seen as just as bad as Reddit's corporate decisions. A few people even trying to go to an instance with the intent of "converting" the existing users who may be socialist or communist, by commenting abuse on their posts of course, just like how they presumably do it on Reddit.

People also seem to be refusing to learn what federation is and how that works, despite it being literally the most important aspects of Lemmy. This is evident in people telling instances who block spam or troll ridden instances to "mind their own business" as if that content doesn't get forwarded over to and show up on the main pages of other instances, you know, what the fediverse was designed to do.

FYI, Reddit has opened back up. Spez has made it clear that he will never tolerate subreddits shutting down and inconveniencing you again. If you're so unwilling to even adopt a different mindset and perspective when coming to Lemmy, I think it's best if you went back. Plenty of us came here because we didn't want to be on Reddit.

Last thing and a pet peeve of mine: stop calling yourself a refugee. You left a meme website for another meme website because you didn't like one aspect of the management, the entire decision and migration probably took less than an hour of you sitting in your comfortable house in front of a computer. To compare that to being a refugee speaks volumes about your entitlement and privilege. And it's especially ironic considering what real refugees go through to save themselves and their families, that you won't even answer a few registration questions.

56 comments

I recall these kinds of threads on Reddit when Digg was imploding, the OG Reddit hipsters were annoyed at the influx of users and the change it brought to discourse on the platform.
But the fact is, if we want Lemmy to grow, it's going to change.
- There is no value in growth for the sake of growth. Lemmy isn't a commercial platform that needs to keep getting VC money to stay afloat. Only thing that actually matters is sustainability.
  Sustainability comes from having enough people to do development, people willing to host servers, and users to create content. All these things are already present and Lemmy can go on indefinitely without any major growth.
  In fact, rapid growth can be a net negative because it brings a lot of toxic behaviors from Reddit. When there's a slow trickle of users coming in then they adjust to existing norms. When there's a horde of new users they become the norm and overwhelm the existing community.
  
  Lemmy has seen a rapid uptick in client development since the Reddit drama kicked off. I think it's an absolute net win, and the nature of federated instances and communities means you can always create/find the old school Lemmy environment you miss.
  A move away from corporate overlords is an absolute net win.

I think a really important thing to consider here is how much of Reddit's culture was a result of bots and dark patterns. I think people will actually adjust fairly quickly and once sign ups start to settle a sort of diffuse equilibrium of cultures and attitudes will form that will generally look very different from Reddit. All that said, I think the foundational culture that we establish now will prove to be incredibly important. I think this is a great argument for why existing communities may choose to stay in the medium-weight class. Thereby avoiding the growth boost that comes from being the largest community.
EDIT: Also important to note, I feel like this is gonna be a slow, slow process. We really have no idea when sign-ups will settle and could be looking at months or days of Reddit hemorrhaging users. I think we'll have a better idea after things kick off on the 30th.
- I think you're onto something with Reddit culture being driven by bots. I went on Reddit for the first time in a few weeks yesterday and the front page just felt so... Fake. Especially compared to a place like Lemmy that feels more like the old-school Internet - Real people having real conversations, instead of just trying to meet a status quo and a particular tone of voice. It's refreshing here. I don't want it to become Reddit 2.0.
  (Disclaimer: I came here recently from Reddit.)
  
  Me too and I don't want Lemmy to be Reddit. This place as some bugs and it will take me time to get used to the way this site works vs Reddit.
  But I love it here and don't want any harm to come to it. And I loved the difficulty of signing up. To me that was the best part to be approved.
  
  That's exactly how Digg felt after the major exodus from there to Reddit. All that was left was advertisers and advertiser's bots gaming the Digg system to fill up their front page.
  The rot is deep and once the real people leave it becomes much more visible.
- I agree with this 100%. That affects both the types of interactions, and the types of users.
  When Reddit really took off 12 or so years ago, it was primarily a forum for discussion. I loved it because there would be in-depth, respectful, quality discussions on almost every page. I spent hours debating science and politics and technology and relationships and other things of substance with other intelligent respectful open-minded people.
  For a few years now, Reddit has been trying to become a quick content scroll app- bombarding the user with page after page of memes and videos and low effort crap that only holds attention for 12 seconds but results in another page load and thus another ad impression. In 'new reddit' and the apps, there's very little focus on discussion or comments. Just quick content to flip through.
  And that affects the discussions on Reddit (quality discussions are now the exception rather than the norm) and also the people who join and stay at the site. There's a lot more animosity, assumption of bad faith, etc.
  But I also think that because Lemmy's design DOESN'T push people into quick content, but IS focused on discussions, that trend can reverse. People who want quick content will quickly grow bored here and leave. And we can keep the discussions respectful and open-minded.
  I also think that the 'welcome to lemmy' posts should talk more about community and culture; what sort of interactions users should and shouldn't expect here. That should include an explicit warning that if you're going to start arguments and assume everyone else is an idiot, this probably isn't for you, but if you want to have good respectful discussions this is your new home.
- EDIT: Also important to note, I feel like this is gonna be a slow, slow process. We really have no idea when sign-ups will settle and could be looking at months or days of Reddit hemorrhaging users.
  THIS THIS THIS. A lot of folks call the migration to Mastodon from Twitter a 'failure' because Mastodon didn't immediately jump to 100 million monthly active users lol. There was a spike, but a lot of folks went back to Twitter. But we now see more spikes every week or so when some stupid shit happens on Twitter, and with every spike, more and more people stick around. We get about 2000 new users an hour on Mastodon across all servers. Now at 12 million MAUs, up from wayyyyyy less than that earlier last year. Growing slowly is the key, a migration won't be instant.

This site is full of neolibs posting propaganda on the World News sub. It's annoying.
- This may be true, but unlike reddit you won't be banned for calling them pieces of shit.

As one of the folks who came from Reddit when everyone else did, sorry. :(
It makes sense that any mass exedous from some other community will greatly change the destination community, and much of value will be lost in the process.
So, is there anything I can do to help preserve and embody what I've helped destroy? I'll definitely keep in mind what you've said here about "toxicity, entitlement, and stupid challenges," and I'll learn more about federation and keep an open mind. Any other advice how we former Redditors can help keep what made Lemmy great before hordes of Redditors flooded it?
Any advice how we can help even enrich the Lemmy community and make it better than we first found it?
I don't want to go back to Reddit. And I don't want to be a pariah or paracite here. And I accept that those who were on Lemmy have wisdom to share that newcomers can benefit from.
- So, is there anything I can do to help preserve and embody what I’ve helped destroy? I’ll definitely keep in mind what you’ve said here about “toxicity, entitlement, and stupid challenges,” and I’ll learn more about federation and keep an open mind. Any other advice how we former Redditors can help keep what made Lemmy great before hordes of Redditors flooded it?
  Ive been here longer then this guy, and submitted feature requests and bugs that got fixed/implemented.
  It's fine, don't let anyone make you feel guilty, it's OK to ask questions, voice your opinions and suggest criticism.
  You can donate to lemmy, i heard there is more work to be done on moderation tools and maybe that can help.
  Also on reddit there is a subreddit called linux4noobs , maybe there should be a lemmy4noobs, if you are willing to moderate that could help.
- I realized now just how much I sounded like some kind of Lemmy early adopter supremacist in this thread, for that I apologize. I didn't mean to be a dick.
  I guess just take a good look at Reddit and Lemmy, and try and identify toxic elements to be avoided. Things like attacking mods and admins for perceived underperformance, plenty of people have talked about Reddit's switch from discussion to fast content and how that culture can clash with Lemmy which is still discussion oriented, trying to push for stupid challenges, stuff like that. Things that shouldn't be done on any social media platform. I'm not saying to make Lemmy its absolutely unique thing or an exclusive thing or preserve its 'culture' or anything, just very not excited that toxic elements from Reddit which Lemmy had more or less avoided until now are being brought to Lemmy. Not to say that Lemmy is free of its own toxicity, hell I'm probably part of the problem and also need to work on that, but being our own toxic elements is no excuse to keep them either. Don't pick them up.
  
  I don't think you're being a dick for what it's worth and I'm one of those people who's more new to Lemmy since the Reddit drama. I just really like the leftist FOSS vibe here and despite my new-ness this feels more home than Reddit ever did.
  I think it's worth remembering that negative experiences stand out more but that doesn't mean Lemmy hasn't gained more good experiences.
  
  I realized now just how much I sounded like some kind of Lemmy early adopter supremacist in this thread, for that I apologize. I didn’t mean to be a dick.
  God I love this about the Fediverse lol. On Twitter or Reddit you don't get actual human interactions like this.
- It's cool that you want to be open minded and respectful but you really don't need to lick this guy's boots or anyone else proclaiming some kind of exceptionalism for participating on some web forums before you or I did. I can appreciate it probably feels unwelcome seeing a community you were comfortable in change with an influx of new people but there's some glaring ironies to what this guy is saying and it pretty much just boils down to gatekeeping.
  It's particularly amusing how he has managed to engineer vicarious offence at people calling themselves refugees because of the lack of real hardship compared to real refugees yet cannot see the "go back to where you came from" written between and sometimes even on the lines of every sneering paragraph. There's an overall lack of awareness that's sadly ironic for the author of this polemic against newcomers and their supposed lack of awareness.
  No, I think you'll be just fine being yourself and not walking on eggshells for people like this, frankly they needs a cold shower and a dose of reality.

Seriously? Can't people just use social platform the way they want to? Like, just chose what you want to follow and ignore the rest. Or create you own server where you can cherry pick users. But if you "original people" insist on circlejerking one another, I really dont mind packing my shits and leaving Lemmy. I dit it for facebook, reddit and multiple others already.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Yeah we already went through this exact thing with Masto and Twitter. The complaining about defed is particularly annoying to me, like... defederation is a feature of the fediverse, not a bug, lol... Hopefully the "this doesn't work exactly like MyFavoriteSite" folks will clear out eventually like the last wave.

Last thing and a pet peeve of mine: stop calling yourself a refugee.
No fun allowed, got it.
You're taking yourself way too seriously. Let people have their fun name, its not hurting anybody.
Of course the average user doesn't know what federation is, thats a complex topic. Be realistic, live and let live.
- You're taking yourself way too seriously. Let people have their fun name, its not hurting anybody.
  Using a term associated with tragedy and human right abuses for 'fun' is a very interesting take.
  Of course the average user doesn't know what federation is, thats a complex topic. Be realistic, live and let live.
  Maybe do your research before you sign up. I didn't know what federation was before finding about Lemmy either, yet I already knew the basics when I made an account.
  
  Using a term associated with tragedy and human right abuses for ‘fun’ is a very interesting take.
  Words can be used in multiple contexts. When somebody does well and I say "hey you're killing it" I'm not condoning murder. I don't cry for all car and plane crash victims when my computer game crashes. Life is better when you don't look for the most offensive way to interpret everything.
  Maybe do your research before you sign up. I didn’t know what federation was before finding about Lemmy either, yet I already knew the basics when I made an account.
  I did. But a ton of people are about to come to reddit from here, and despite how much we want them to, and how reasonable we think it is, most of them won't and don't care to do even 3 minutes of reading to understand how the basics work. This is just how large populations function.

People have to come from somewhere. Since Lemmy is "Reddit like" and Reddit is the biggest of its type, well that's what's where people are going to come from. I mean if you don't new get users you're not going to have a community.
I first took a look at Lemmy some time ago and honestly is was like, "hey man, this party is dead." It wasn't until the recent influx of users that Lemmy got active enough to keep my attention.
There's always going to be clueless people that don't understand how things work. Rather than complain about them I'd rather try to be positive and help them. Though some people just can't be helped and you have to let them slide.
Another issue is the more people you get into a community the wider the range of attitudes. You will get people that don't have nice things to say and there's no avoiding that. It's something that has to tolerated. Of course moderation can help a lot, but it's not going to preclude anybody from ever getting offended.

As a new user, I completely understand your disatisfcation. There are plenty of perfectly well-behaved users coming over but there's also a fair share of others who are tracking in mud, putting their feet on the furniture and overall acting like entitled fools or just aren't the people you would ever invite to your party. I'd be resentful as well.

To compare that to being a refugee speaks volumes about your entitlement and privilege.
Obviously the term is being used in a wholly different context. Comments like these make me think you are just trying to pick a fight instead of listening to the grievances.
Some of us are here because we believe in community-driven projects, and reddit is shutting those down, so yeah, we are being kicked out against our will. So no, this isn't just about favourite meme factory.
Political refugees are a serious issue. Feel free to disagree with me, but I don't think gatekeeping the word "Refugee" as used in a totally different context is particularly productive. It is no more of armchair effort than what you decry.
--
As for the complaints about defederation... This is just noise. If you don't like it or want to stay small, why not just... defederate? Isn't that the point?

Hmm. So as a different perspective, I joined because people were talking about it as a Reddit alternative. Reddit never clicked with me as it just felt like a whirlpool feeding into a meat-grinder. I figured I'd give this other thing a try, and it's has felt more like a ye-olde forum where I can actually say things and get responses back. Though discussions still don't seem to have a lot of longevity. Still, it's kinda nice, and I'll stick around for a bit. :)
I'm not here for the memes or news though... So I don't really have any experience with the issues the OP says, and I'm probably some weird minority?
- I relate to that. I think some of the ills of reddit will inevitably be replicated here because they are just artifacts of scale. Like the good-luck-getting-a-comment-heard-if-you-don't-get-in-early effect.

A lot of the people that have come over aren't people who want decentralisation. They are people who don't give a shit but are unhappy with reddit.
They haven't learned WHY reddit is making this decision. They have no understanding of why IPOs and privately owned companies will always lead to this. They do not understand.
They are just people that want their content slop, but are also mad. They don't actually care how the slop is delivered to them they just know they want it and know they're mad at reddit.
The result is that they want to come somewhere else and behave exactly like it is reddit, when it is not.

I'm one of the newer transplants from Reddit, but for the last several years I've only been a lurker there, because I haven't felt like I really fit in with those communities and that culture well enough to fully engage.
Lemmy feels different, in similar fashion to how Mastodon felt so different from Twitter when I switched over there a year so back. I haven't looked back on Twitter, and I doubt I'll look back on Reddit. The water's way nicer over here, for me.
I do think it'll take a while for most of the disruptive newcomers to fully bounce off the Lemmy/Fediverse culture, but I also do think they will eventually bounce off it, as long as we all stick to our guns in terms of the culture we want to build, the rules with which we want to govern our communities and servers, and the social norms we want to tolerate.
There are just going to be 1973629092 tedious arguments about defederation between here and there. 🙄

i hope sign up questions stay forever. those should be mandatory. like an airport: u have to go through customs and answer questions, else u are a hazard to the airline industry. a blacklist among instances should be universal to filter human waste.

If you don't want to be on a large Lemmy, then I recommend you move to a smaller Lemmy. If you always want to be in a smaller Lemmy, then I recommend you make sure it is one where the admins want to remain small. There are many of these. It will take work to find and join one, however.
But I think it would be more effective than complaining about a service growing big after trying to grow big.

I'm just happy that there's more content now.
More users definitely brings new challenges, but honestly. I'm beyond surprised and happy at how Lemmy is surviving the huge influx this month.
I'd have guessed that servers would have crumbled under 10x the load, super happy that they didn't.
- i guess in this day and age, only bandwidth could be the bottleneck. there is more than plenty of silicon to support this load.

I agree completely. These folks that don’t understand federation and how to create a positive community culture are mostly internet trolls. They don’t care about the negative environment they are creating and how it affects everyone else not like them. Reddit was good for some things, but extremely bad in others. We should not recreate it.

Hamigrated here about 2 weeks ago. Have to agree about the point of people not learning the ins and outs of what makes the fediverse.
Me being a nerd, loved the introduction and for couple nights, just soaked in all the information regarding the fediverse and have actually joined other instances within. Tops off to RadioFree. Been using it daily now.
Felt like others were joining the fediverse because of motivation. Motivation to learn and adopt the technology. For most, they don't care at all about it

I don't agree this is gentrification, but aside from your questionable vocabulary I don't disagree. I came from reddit, understand that it is different, and celebrate the differences.

Yeah, this happened to Mastodon (aka the microblogging part of Fedi) also. I was on Mastodon on-and-off for years before the Twitter exodus, and it was a very different place back then. I can see why people miss the overall community on a platform before it became popular, but then I feel like ActivityPub gives us the tools to shape the communities we want, so we have to engage with it and be more selective than we were before.

People also seem to be refusing to learn what federation is and how that works
Yeah, I've seen plenty of new communities that have already shuttered to "move to X instance where the users are" that would make me laugh if it weren't so annoying that they've just decided to squat a community that could flourish locally if someone else took it over.
- I think there's a minor quirk of Lemmy's UI partially responsible for this, at least as far as I can tell from my one user account on one instance. By default, I am shown communities on my local instance only. I have to click "all" every time to leave my home town and travel the rest of the fediverse. There does seem to be an option to change this in my account settings menu. It's labeled "Type." You first hear about Lemmy, "It's like Reddit, but federated, which means...one account on one instance gets you access to the whole network." you log in, play around a bit, and at some point you ask "I get access to the whole network...how?"
  I've seen people bring up the worry that because each instance has its own namespace, the Fediverse will be even more fractured and dispersed than Reddit. "How am I supposed to have time to browse 100 different r/technology's?" Well, some of them are going to gain popularity and become the de facto standard, and the others will wither and die.
  Might be a ramification of the idea of "general purpose" instances. I've seen a couple instances so far that try to focus on a broad topic and only allow communities within that topic. Which, if your sole interest is in that topic, that's where you should put your account. I figure it'll sort itself out, though.

Really begging folks not to take this kind of approach to having this conversation on Lemmy. We had literally this exact kind of discourse on Mastodon and it has severely impacted the public perception of Mastodon, to the point where there are tons of people that think it's full of 'NIMBYs' who are super strict and expect you to behave a certain way.
People have a very very hard time understanding that software like Lemmy or Mastodon isn't a community or a platform, but a network of individual communities that everyone has a different view into. A lot of my friends were burned joining Mastodon because they interacted with a bunch of boring white people who weren't funny, and it's hard for me to explain to them that you need to join a different instance and follow different people lol. Also people don't understand instances or the fact that instances are run by volunteers.
When I started my Mastodon server (right before the big Twitter 'migration' lol) I loved what I found on Mastodon. The community was amazing. But this exact specific reaction (down to the stuff about refugees) ended up poisoning that community and the folks who potentially wanted to join it.
I'm still new to Lemmy, but I think it's important to approach this with an open mind. Communities grow and change over time, and I think we should be more open to that and lead with empathy. And I understand the frustration with this is VERY real (trust me as an admin I MORE than get it). But I think a lot of what we're getting from Reddit is very positive, not the negatives, due to the fact that we have more moderation control here and because it's mostly the cooler users lol.> Yeah we already went through this exact thing with Masto and Twitter. The complaining about defed is particularly annoying to me, like… defederation is a feature of the fediverse, not a bug, lol… Hopefully the “this doesn’t work exactly like MyFavoriteSite” folks will clear out eventually like the last wave.
Also to be fair I don't think that that means this becomes a neoliberal shithole, but I think the majority of folks joining mean well and like the vibe. They're joining because of the vibe.

My first comment in the federation was met with ‘I know what you mean’. My last comment was met with a ‘stfu snowflake’. It sure didn’t take long for this awesome alternative to go from community to battlefield. Next stop - karma farming. I hated joining the conversation reddit for these reasons. I guess I’ll be lurking again.

In my opinion most of those people aren't going to stay anwyay, they don't have the self control to stop using reddit.

I like lemmy for what it is. I only used reddit fdfees rt²423 crew tþ4t5rwtye²2aew3twor a year, and I don't want a reddit clone at all . I think this works just as intended.
All the people complaining are just kinda hung upt, and don't realize it will all sort itself out as we sort ourselves out in some weird social experiment.

To be clear, is what you're saying here that the service that you're using — which you did not build — is too welcoming to newcomers?
If you want a walled garden, this may not be a very easy place to establish one. I don't think anyone will stop you from trying; but it's not clear to me that the people who are actually building the service are in agreement with your values.
Lots of people are enthusiastic for something different from walled gardens. But it sounds like you really want one, or rather you joined an open service and are now complaining that it's too open for you.
But if you don't like the policies of your current instance and its peers, because they are too welcoming to people who are newcomers, and to people who are different from you ... please don't pretend you're being progressive, okay?

I was on Reddit and I'm feeling slightly insulted. "We" from Reddit may just as well call the old guards snobs, how'd you like that?
Honestly, the OG Lemmy instances had a major problem, that they weren't very clear on what kind of users and community they want. The old timers might have known, but to the new people it wasn't clear.
As a result, tons of people were signing up to lemmy.ml and beehaw, because those were the two on top of the list.
Then these two begun to get more picky about new users and content, and some other instances like lemmy.world spun up as general purpose for everyone, and most people "from Reddit" just signed up to those.
So now the OG instances are back to being special purpose, why are you still complaining?
I guess you can always kick everyone who signed to lemmy.ml in the last 3 weeks, and lemmy.world can defederate from everyone, exactly as intended in the design of Lemmy and the Fediverse. /s
- It's reasonable for the early adopters who built the house to be salty when they get a flood of noobs tracking in mud on the clean carpet. But everyone's a noob at some point in their digital life, so that's why it's important to try to take cues from the culture you are joining and be willing to learn. Don't get insulted - just chill a little and try to engage with the community on its own merits. Give it a few weeks before you decide you know what it should be and what it needs.
  I didn't hear about lemmy until the reddit dustup so i'm a noob too. I picked my instance by going into a bunch of instances, looking at the communities list and applying to the one that had the most content that interested me. It's not rocket science to find where you fit. If you can put together a couple coherent sentences, you shouldn't fear a mild application question. Now i'm getting annoyed by the flood of subreddit dupes, pointless memes, reddit-centric chatter and such, so i imagine it's way worse for the OGs. Reddit is dead. Let it die. Make better comunities, don't resurrect the zombie corpses of subreddits that were just pointless repost karma farms anyway.
  Things will settle down in a few weeks once we get into mid july, i reckon. People with short attention spans will complain and then wander off. People who find a better instance fit will shift, or even start new instances. Bugs will cause problems and get patched, and then there will be new bugs. There will be defederation drama. It's all good. Don't be insulted, settle in. Then in a few months or years when we get a fresh flood of inconsiderate noobs with "rebuilt the thing we left" energy, you get to be the OG yelling about all the mud on the carpet.
- Honestly, the OG Lemmy instances had a major problem, that they weren't very clear on what kind of users and community they want. The old timers might have known, but to the new people it wasn't clear.
  What small forum does that exactly? It's not like we started instances with the intent of absorbing Reddit users. In fact, if things had not grown organically like it had for so long, Lemmy would not be attractive at all for users of other platforms. Reddit grew organically in its early years too, so did every other social media.

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