As a long time Reddit user, there’s something about Lemmy and the fediverse that feels really refreshing and new. I think it has to do with a few things…
People are more respectful of each other and interested in discussion and being social.
Less trolls (users are probably older?)
Due to it not being absolutely huge, I feel like people will actually see my posts and comments instead of being lost in a sea of content. I suppose once Lemmy grows this will change, however the cool thing about the fediverse are the new servers. So you can stick to the server when you want smaller community discussion and go to “all” when you want more populated threads.
The clean UI feels refreshing and clean, almost like the early internet.
What have you noticed? Do you find it refreshing too?
No repost bots, karma farming, or idiots (mostly). The learning curve to joining the fediverse filters out your average facebook/twitter type that Reddit is filled with today. Lemmy right now is how Reddit was a decade ago
Agreed. All of the comments against the protests on Reddit kind of give it away in how little they seem to actually understand how Reddit works and what made it great for so long. They see it as just another feed for them to browse and not a community to foster and participate in. Lemmy feels so great in comparison.
I was on Mastodon and Lemmy roughly a year before the Twitter and Reddit fiascos. I never was active on Twitter, never even had an account, but I’ll admit Reddit was my jam. I didn’t even use any of the 3rd party apps, I actually did use their main app and had no issues with it (except for the occasional annoying ad on my mobile device…). But when the needless greed of Spez started to show at the seams and the communities there started to divide, I took an afternoon to delete everything from nearly 4 years of posts/comments.
Both Mastodon and Lemmy were FAR less active prior to these migrations, and so I honestly checked in once every couple months. But then Mastodon started showing up in my main news feeds due to Musk’s idiocy, and I knew it was time…
Similarly, when Spez started to make the same decisions, I already knew where the party was likely to move.
I only started using Lemmy again yesterday when Memmy came out as I dislike using social media from my desktop (though I do occasionally).
It’s nice to see so much more activity here now. It’ll probably never get to the levels of Reddit, but hey that can be a good thing in its own right.
I felt like Reddit was plagued by the mainstream user during the pandemic. I used to go on Reddit to lurk subs like r/Carding to understand how people(criminals?) steal credit card credentials and dump the balances.
By reading them I change the way I manage my own OPSEC. I could read just about anything there. Now it’s all banned or tightly moderated. Can’t say this can’t say that. Hope lemmy won’t be the same.
Barriers to entry occasionally have positive side effects. The current dynamic in and around the Fediverse reminds me of how dial-up bulletin boards self-selected for computer-literate (and typically intelligent) users. I suppose that implies that we should also expect our own Eternal September, too.
If the adoption rate continues and quality of life improvements such as efficient mobile apps keep getting made, I think it’s inevitable. But I also think it can be a good thing, especially if the distributed instance culture with semi-independent communities persist. If the culture shifts so much to instances just being nodes into the larger “verse” so to speak, the general experience could shift a lot with it.
In any case, with all the different user experiences available already with Mastodon, kbin, lemmy, Calckey, Pixelfed and Peertube offering vastly different experiences into the same ecosystem, it’ll be a lot more diverse I believe as everyone will find their own comfort zone.
i joined reddit in 2015 when the site was already heaving with content and users. good for killing time and consuming, but not for engaging in the community. right now lemmy/kbin is in the sweet spot where there’s enough people to talk to but not so many that i can’t be heard.
The only algorithms here are for sorting posts based on activity and recency, rather than trying to maximize engagement so you see more ads. Also it’s all completely open source.
Certainly there’s some kind of algorithm behind sorting by Hot or Top Day or whatever, but it’s not trying to sell me stuff or sell my preferences to anybody
As much as I’d love to think otherwise, i think a significant amount of the good feeling and comradery that we’re seeing now is due to us being in a bit of a honeymoon phase. You saw the same thing on Mastadon after the Twitter migration, everyone was singing kumbaya and holding hands, but overtime it started to regress a bit (though not nearly as much) towards a more “twitter” feel.
I’m sure over time it’ll stop being quite so feel-good and happy, but the fact that it’s community run and less centralized will help a lot in the long run i think. A lot of the friction and tension on Reddit was due in one way or another to it’s centralization - if you had a popular subreddit that was run by shitty mods, there wasn’t much you could do about it. here, you can just create a new version of the same sub on a different instance, and it’s a lot easier for people to “move” over to the new one.
I think the lower population helps a lot as well, right now the majority of the people on Lemmy are good faith users who care about the platform and want it to succeed. When you have 100’s of millions of users like Reddit does, you’re going to get a lot more bad faith users and people who just want generic content to scroll on
Let’s enjoy it while it lasts. This feels comfortable like the internet until the late 1990s. I didn’t realize I missed that. And when it starts to be exploited for profit, trolled for whatever reason people troll things, and swamped by bots, let’s sneak off somewhere else they don’t know about and do it again.
It’s called the honeymoon effect. The sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can acknowledge that lemmy is vulnerable to all the same failings as reddit, and the sooner we can take steps to safeguard against those failings.
If we instead say “no no, lemmy is different, look at how much better things inherently are over here”, then we’re doomed to go down the same path.
I agree - what would you say those pitfalls are? Of course the decentralizing nature takes care of some problems - but the main thing that made me feel awful browsing reddit was the constant argumentative nature of every discussion. When I first discovered web forums 20 years ago it was the magical aspect of it that had me engaged. It was actually cool to be able to chat with other people online about anything - and that itself put everyone in a good mood; after all, why waste your time being really negative if you’re doing something cool and interesting? Now, it’s very common place. Added with people being more comfortable that they can remain anonymous, huge sites like Reddit are prone to a lot of…crap. That’s what I can think of so far.
I both love and hate the upvote/downvote mechanic. I like seeing quality posts bubble to the top, I also like seeing the general consensus of lurkers, but I don’t like circlejerk posts or that downvoted comments get dogpiled on, which often both result in a toxic, self-righteous flame war. And the solution is obviously not deleting the downvoted comments, because then you’re just censoring unpopular opinions.
I think something worth trying would be not visually distinguishing between posts with no votes and posts with more negative than positive votes. I think an instance could enforce this on their own communities with only positive results.
The only counter argument is that dishonest arguments can’t be “buried” by downvotes (hidden behind a “[show]” button). Another strategy would be to allow burying, but somehow throttle the responses to them; maybe limit the comment depth, or limit the number of responses per user, or allow users to flag flame war threads as “unproductive” which at some point would block further responses.
To be clear, I don’t think the lemmy “spec” should adopt any of these measures, I think these regulations should be decided by instance/community mods, and up to the users to regulate and provide feedback on.
I find it a lot more like old forums, and there is a loooooot less ragebait (post about Matt Walsh and his piss fetish, Tim pool and his homoerotic fascism, etc).
It’s very refreshing and I find myself spending less time on here (searching for interesting content) but more time engaging (instead of lurking)
I like that I can block entire communities. Never gonna see those weird people that obsess over certain public figures, positively or negatively, again 😍
But that’s the thing, on R no matter what you blocked they still pop up in other feeds…so many “news”, meme etc. featuing those shits and here…nada. My thoughts are most of thier shit is bot driven, so here it wont get traction (yet) and if they do its easily avoided!
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !asklemmy@lemmy.ml
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it’s welcome here!
Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
No repost bots, karma farming, or idiots (mostly). The learning curve to joining the fediverse filters out your average facebook/twitter type that Reddit is filled with today. Lemmy right now is how Reddit was a decade ago
Let’s call a spade a spade lol this is honestly it.
It’s really not hard to sign up either; for how small the barrier to entry actually is, it’s made a huge difference in demographics
Agreed. All of the comments against the protests on Reddit kind of give it away in how little they seem to actually understand how Reddit works and what made it great for so long. They see it as just another feed for them to browse and not a community to foster and participate in. Lemmy feels so great in comparison.
silky smooth apps. not overwhelmingly populated and serious.
Yeah man. Lemmy definitely has that early internet feel. I love it. Hope you’re having a good day.
I was on Mastodon and Lemmy roughly a year before the Twitter and Reddit fiascos. I never was active on Twitter, never even had an account, but I’ll admit Reddit was my jam. I didn’t even use any of the 3rd party apps, I actually did use their main app and had no issues with it (except for the occasional annoying ad on my mobile device…). But when the needless greed of Spez started to show at the seams and the communities there started to divide, I took an afternoon to delete everything from nearly 4 years of posts/comments.
Both Mastodon and Lemmy were FAR less active prior to these migrations, and so I honestly checked in once every couple months. But then Mastodon started showing up in my main news feeds due to Musk’s idiocy, and I knew it was time…
Similarly, when Spez started to make the same decisions, I already knew where the party was likely to move.
I only started using Lemmy again yesterday when Memmy came out as I dislike using social media from my desktop (though I do occasionally).
It’s nice to see so much more activity here now. It’ll probably never get to the levels of Reddit, but hey that can be a good thing in its own right.
This is a group of like-minded, technology-affluent users that most likely have a higher average age than Reddit.
I felt like Reddit was plagued by the mainstream user during the pandemic. I used to go on Reddit to lurk subs like r/Carding to understand how people(criminals?) steal credit card credentials and dump the balances.
By reading them I change the way I manage my own OPSEC. I could read just about anything there. Now it’s all banned or tightly moderated. Can’t say this can’t say that. Hope lemmy won’t be the same.
If you don’t like it, you can always set up your own instance here. That’s the beauty of it!
As well as higher average IQ, it feels like.
Barriers to entry occasionally have positive side effects. The current dynamic in and around the Fediverse reminds me of how dial-up bulletin boards self-selected for computer-literate (and typically intelligent) users. I suppose that implies that we should also expect our own Eternal September, too.
If the adoption rate continues and quality of life improvements such as efficient mobile apps keep getting made, I think it’s inevitable. But I also think it can be a good thing, especially if the distributed instance culture with semi-independent communities persist. If the culture shifts so much to instances just being nodes into the larger “verse” so to speak, the general experience could shift a lot with it.
In any case, with all the different user experiences available already with Mastodon, kbin, lemmy, Calckey, Pixelfed and Peertube offering vastly different experiences into the same ecosystem, it’ll be a lot more diverse I believe as everyone will find their own comfort zone.
IQ probably has little to do with it. It’s socialization and learned expectation that are acting as a filter currently.
Yeah, of course. It was a tongue in cheek comment that didn’t land well.
Ah. I got woooshed!
i joined reddit in 2015 when the site was already heaving with content and users. good for killing time and consuming, but not for engaging in the community. right now lemmy/kbin is in the sweet spot where there’s enough people to talk to but not so many that i can’t be heard.
It’s not run to maximize shareholder value
That was my favorite part! Don’t you just love being a tiny cog on the capitalist wheel of despair?
On reddit I deliberately refrained from up/down voting because I hate feeding capitalist algorithms. I’m trying to unlearn that habit now.
At least here there is no algorithm I think?
The only algorithms here are for sorting posts based on activity and recency, rather than trying to maximize engagement so you see more ads. Also it’s all completely open source.
Certainly there’s some kind of algorithm behind sorting by Hot or Top Day or whatever, but it’s not trying to sell me stuff or sell my preferences to anybody
I just wish the orphan crushing machine wasn’t so slow. JUST DO IT!!! Or preferably don’t and stop sucking, but I know that won’t happen.
Even if they were to come out fire spez and go say ‘our bad let’s stop and talk about this’ I’m still not going back.
As much as I’d love to think otherwise, i think a significant amount of the good feeling and comradery that we’re seeing now is due to us being in a bit of a honeymoon phase. You saw the same thing on Mastadon after the Twitter migration, everyone was singing kumbaya and holding hands, but overtime it started to regress a bit (though not nearly as much) towards a more “twitter” feel.
I’m sure over time it’ll stop being quite so feel-good and happy, but the fact that it’s community run and less centralized will help a lot in the long run i think. A lot of the friction and tension on Reddit was due in one way or another to it’s centralization - if you had a popular subreddit that was run by shitty mods, there wasn’t much you could do about it. here, you can just create a new version of the same sub on a different instance, and it’s a lot easier for people to “move” over to the new one.
I think the lower population helps a lot as well, right now the majority of the people on Lemmy are good faith users who care about the platform and want it to succeed. When you have 100’s of millions of users like Reddit does, you’re going to get a lot more bad faith users and people who just want generic content to scroll on
Soon we’ll all be strangers and snobs and kick each other in the ribs to say hi
Likely you aren’t seeing astroturfing on a massive scale by corporate fiddling and complicit mods. It’s not curated to bait you.
I think it all boils down to an older and more geeky user base.
Let’s enjoy it while it lasts. This feels comfortable like the internet until the late 1990s. I didn’t realize I missed that. And when it starts to be exploited for profit, trolled for whatever reason people troll things, and swamped by bots, let’s sneak off somewhere else they don’t know about and do it again.
Agree, agree, agree, agree!
It’s called the honeymoon effect. The sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can acknowledge that lemmy is vulnerable to all the same failings as reddit, and the sooner we can take steps to safeguard against those failings.
If we instead say “no no, lemmy is different, look at how much better things inherently are over here”, then we’re doomed to go down the same path.
I agree - what would you say those pitfalls are? Of course the decentralizing nature takes care of some problems - but the main thing that made me feel awful browsing reddit was the constant argumentative nature of every discussion. When I first discovered web forums 20 years ago it was the magical aspect of it that had me engaged. It was actually cool to be able to chat with other people online about anything - and that itself put everyone in a good mood; after all, why waste your time being really negative if you’re doing something cool and interesting? Now, it’s very common place. Added with people being more comfortable that they can remain anonymous, huge sites like Reddit are prone to a lot of…crap. That’s what I can think of so far.
I both love and hate the upvote/downvote mechanic. I like seeing quality posts bubble to the top, I also like seeing the general consensus of lurkers, but I don’t like circlejerk posts or that downvoted comments get dogpiled on, which often both result in a toxic, self-righteous flame war. And the solution is obviously not deleting the downvoted comments, because then you’re just censoring unpopular opinions.
I think something worth trying would be not visually distinguishing between posts with no votes and posts with more negative than positive votes. I think an instance could enforce this on their own communities with only positive results.
The only counter argument is that dishonest arguments can’t be “buried” by downvotes (hidden behind a “[show]” button). Another strategy would be to allow burying, but somehow throttle the responses to them; maybe limit the comment depth, or limit the number of responses per user, or allow users to flag flame war threads as “unproductive” which at some point would block further responses.
To be clear, I don’t think the lemmy “spec” should adopt any of these measures, I think these regulations should be decided by instance/community mods, and up to the users to regulate and provide feedback on.
There are less reposts bc its newer and bc there is a lot less bots
Totally agree man, it’s a refreshing change lol… I’ve popped back to a couple subs I check and noticed the difference right away over there.
I find it a lot more like old forums, and there is a loooooot less ragebait (post about Matt Walsh and his piss fetish, Tim pool and his homoerotic fascism, etc).
It’s very refreshing and I find myself spending less time on here (searching for interesting content) but more time engaging (instead of lurking)
I like that I can block entire communities. Never gonna see those weird people that obsess over certain public figures, positively or negatively, again 😍
But that’s the thing, on R no matter what you blocked they still pop up in other feeds…so many “news”, meme etc. featuing those shits and here…nada. My thoughts are most of thier shit is bot driven, so here it wont get traction (yet) and if they do its easily avoided!