lemmy.ml and its admins being the developers at the same time.
I don’t think that in itself if the problem. anyone can host an instance. The problem is lemmy.ml being the apparent default instance, advertising itself as an instance for privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, and not mentioning seemingly anywhere in the description/rules that only red flavour authoritarian dogma is allowed in political discussion.
“America bad, therefore former ‘communist’ russia and current ‘communist’ china good.”
Edit: it’s not featured as prominently as it used to be on join-lemmy.org so things may be improving. they should still mention in the description that western viewpoints on many issues are not allowed due to “rule 1”
I realized .ml was fucking insane and delusional when they glorified Stalin and refused to recognize the atrocities he committed.
No matter what your political stance is, as soon as you deny negative facts and exclusively push the “positives” it becomes a problem and may radicalize you (if that isn’t already the case).
What happened to nuanced moderate politics? It seems people unconditionally put the “left” or “right” label on themselves. And ironically these blind followers will have the audacity to call anyone close to the political center, or people who are honest with themselves, cowards.
Yeah, well the guy who runs it is a notorious tankie.
You either tow the pro stalinist line or you are punished
I was on .ml first after leaving reddit, because I didn’t know this was the case, until I called out straight up state propaganda and defended capitalism with social and ethical policies once. You can imagine how they responded to that.
Huh, just checked out the ranking on join-lemmy.org. The default setting is “random”, which might be why it’s not featured up top.
But what’s weird is that lemmy.world isn’t in the ranking at all.
If you sort by active, the top two are lemmynsfw.com, followed by lemmy.ml.
well tbf they are the two most active servers there though. not sure why .world isnt on there though. maybe removed temporarily so that newbies filter out to smaller instances
IIRC it is intentional that world isn’t there to help spread out users to other instances.
Good, because .world is one of the more toxic ban-happy instances in the fediverse.
Lemmy.ml needs to be defederated from all other instances. It’s literally an extremist instance of hate and bigotry.
Tankies on their way to hate private ownership and dictatorship of the bourgeoisie so much that they begin to love state ownership and dictatorship of the bureacracy
Switch to PieFed and this issue goes away.
A few options
- https://piefed.social/ - flagship instance
- https://piefed.zip/ - lemmy.zip team
- https://piefed.ca/ - lemmy.ca team
- https://feddit.online/
The lemmy.ml instance not being treated the same as the rest of the Triad in regards to defederation
Some highlights from the link:
"Don’t worry guys, the Uyghur Genocide was REALLY just birth control! ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/30580167
“See! nobody died IN Tiananmen Square, just AROUND it, so it doesn’t count!!” ~ Davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/30673342
.ml admin, Nutomics continued transphobia https://lemmy.world/post/29222558
CW: Original transphobic Comment from Nutomic
“NK is actually good and anything counter to that is Western propaganda!” ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/31595035
General negative sentiment to other instances who haven’t “seen the way” yet ~davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/27426510
“If you don’t support Russia then you just don’t understand geopolitics” ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/27352415
And a long list of bans/censorship and allowing the proliferation of known propaganda and misinformation outlets clearly demonstrating use of their instance and recognition to force a political narrative
I am currently working on a report on vote manipulation and the early results are showing clear signs of the some most prolific .ml accounts participating in brigading and vote manipulation.
I can’t count the number of times I made a comment way deep in a chain that conflicts with .ml dogma, and after the first downvote, there are suddenly 5 more within minutes
that was so pervasive on reddit, you either get banned, or ended up arguing more and then get banned.
PieFed doesn’t have any of these issues
It does, since it still federates with lemmy.ml…
I think the parent comment is talking about piefed the software, compared to Lemmy the software, not the specific
piefed.socialinstance they’re posting from.That would explain. But that comment is in answer to the top-level comment about the lemmy.ml instance.
The developers of the Lemmy software are the admins of the lemmy.ml instance and are problematic. The complaint is that the software itself can’t be separated from the priorities of the .ml instance.
Piefed doesn’t have the same issue, even if the flagship instance federates with .ml
i block the whole instance, so i dont have to deal with any of those posts, but the single .ml accounts can still be problematic.
Duplicate communities posting the same content over and over again.
Communities are tied to an instance. How many communities will die because lemm.ee is shutting down? There is a slightly mad rush to migrate communities already.
Lemmy should have used usent style naming for communities.
I think there is a feature request to allow communities to subscribe to other communities so that their posts and comments are synced.
Great, so the duplication happens automatically! This is solving the wrong problem, IMHO…
Duplicate communities posting the same content over and over again.
Piefed solves that issue: https://piefed.zip/post/100161
All comments from 5 crossposts in a single view
A few options
- https://piefed.social/ - flagship instance
- https://piefed.zip/ - lemmy.zip team
- https://piefed.ca/ - lemmy.ca team
- https://feddit.online/
How many communities will die because lemm.ee is shutting down?
Active communities have moved elsewhere:
Inactive communities weren’t active in the first place.
How does piefed handle when communities have the same name but different purposes? Like ‘conservative’ being a ‘satire’ community on one instance and a breitbart repost community on another?
Usually they have different icons.
I’m on mobile, so usually if I have a doubt (!europe@feddit.org vs !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com have the some icon) I use my mouse to hover and see what community it is.
Communities are tied to an instance. How many communities will die because lemm.ee is shutting down? There is a slightly mad rush to migrate communities already.
This is what the Piefed community migration system is designed to mitigate. It makes communities completely modular, allowing a community to move their entire posting history to another instance. As soon as it can pull subscribers automatically, it’ll be as if nothing happened.
the architecture of lemmy, both socially and technically, is not working as hoped and it’s likely it will suffer an effective death before it evolves sufficiently to enable distributed communities
the federated model is too lumpy and fragmented at the same time
Lemmy uses ActivityPub, so that can’t really be done in line with the spec.
Onboarding. I think it’ll be better if people promoted individual instances instead of Lemmy as a whole. As a whole, it seems vague.
Or if instances used the word “Lemmy” in their domain names. I can say “go to Lemmy.world or Lemmy.zip or Lemmy.cafe” but if I tell someone to go “sh.itjust.works” they will get confused and wonder why “that site is not Lemmy?”
I advocate the opposite. Because people then see “lemmy.world” and immediately associate it with the rumours about the devs being tankies even though .world and the lemmy devs are unrelated
Maybe. Some people might not even know what a tankie is until they start using Lemmy.
I didn’t. Tankie was a completely new word to me when I started here.
i heard it first on reddit funny enough, but usually referring to same type people as on lemmy
I had no idea what a tankie was until I started using Lemmy. lol
I don’t think we want that. It sets some weird precedent that instances need to be lemmy-dot-something, which is both untrue and restrictive on server hosts as a barrier for entry if that becomes the universal convention.
https://piefed.social has real good onboarding
The lack of content compared to reddit. If you look at !learn_programming@programming.dev for example, there is only one post this week, and 4 posts this month. How is it that, with all the web developers and AI vibe coding shit, no one is actually asking questions?
When I was on reddit, I had to hide posts because there were 10 or 20 interesting questions every day.
It’s a negative feedback loop. There is a good chance programmers asking questions NEED the answer (homework, work-work) so they don’t risk asking in low pop forums, making the forum low pop because there are no questions.
Mods seem inactive.
If people are interested in that topic (or any other), they can join !fedigrow@lemmy.zip. That community regroups people trying to grow communities, and the issues they face.
Yep, I had same reaction. Since there are so many tech nerds on here, as most early adopters are, I thought that community would have a lot more content. But I’ll be adding to it soon enough since I just started to learn programming! :)
It’s just as much a left-wing echo chamber as Truth Social is a right-wing one - and that’s a problem in both cases. Some might say it’s fine because we’re on the right side of history and they’re not, or something along those lines - but the people on Truth Social think the exact same thing. No one’s views ever change that way.
The right wing instances are just defederated from this larger federated group because the people on them were unable to follow the rules of other instances. Repeatedly, they would throw tantrums and create loads of dupe accounts to spam shit when people downvoted their shitty views or their accounts got banned. If they were capable of behaving with civility and following the rules, they’d still be here.
No idea how active that corner of the Lemmyverse is these days, but they have repeatedly chosen to behave in a way that leaves instance administrators with little choice other than defederation.
The right wing instances are just defederated from this larger federated group because the people on them were unable to follow the rules of other instances.
I don’t think it’s just that. I have seen plenty of people say that no conservative content should be allowed on Lemmy. At all.
Go post a conservative article in c/politics and see what happens. Some of the DM’s you’ll get are actually reportable to the FBI. The anti-conservative streak here is extreme. I’ve reported some of the DM’s I get to the police, and I’m not even conservative, but just because I advocate 3-party voting. People on here can be insane.
I’ve seen plenty of pitchforks go after posters. Even when it’s a neutral article that talks about something positive a conservative politician did or said.
That’s what happened. It’s not the solution.
The solution is to behave with civility online and you don’t get banned. No one needs to break instance rules.
If someone is incapable of doing that, why should they get to participate?
The fact that they happen to predominantly come with right wing view points is, frankly, secondary. It’s literally the bare minimum amount of effort in life to simply not be a nuisance.
I think Lemmy just don’t tolerate that view point. I see plenty of hard leftism being tolerated by mods when they shouldn’t. But hey, none of them are my instance. It’s grossly lopsided.
The two main “hard left” instances have been defederated from LW too (hex and grad)
LML is ostensibly a general instance with a strong left wing slant. So I’m assuming those are the users you’re referring to. Every time I’ve personally seen a LML user step over the line for a given community’s rules, they have been banned for it.
Predominantly though, those users are capable of understanding rules and following them.
That’s literally all anyone needs to do.
It’s not really about political views. It’s simply about not being an asshole.
I’m definitely not seeing that on the instances I’m following. Ex. Calls for murdering the rich are not okay regardless of how someone feels.
I don’t think there is such a thing as a left wing echo chamber. We bicker incessantly. The other day I was making a joke at the expense of the car-brain mentality and someone came at me for ableism.
I’m not mad at them, it’s just illustrative of my point. We don’t take shit from each other, and we take each other to task over jokes. The right will, meanwhile, forgive literal pedophilia, rape, and murder of each other. I’m sure as hell not saying we should, but we will never create an echo chamber as good as they do because of that.
There is also a dearth of cannibalistic viewpoints here. And Zoroastrians are woefully underrepresented.
I don’t come here to change my views (though it happens from time to time), and neither do they. I’m not ignorant of their thoughts; I’m inundated with them every day. I don’t need to interact with assholes here. I don’t want to come here and watch people scream back and forth at each other, and I definitely am not interested in participating—there is a reason I’ve left other social media.
Zoroastrians
Zoroastrians for the win. I never thought I’d see that word mentioned on here!
Saw a documentary on them ages ago and they’ve always stuck with me for some reason.
You don’t have to subscribe to political communities if you don’t want to see political discussion. But the dearth of genuine political discussion here is a problem for the people who do want it, that can’t be fixed by individual action.
What is genuine political discussion? How do you moderate it? Who is going to come when it’s moderated? How do you deal with both legitimate and legitimate complaints about biased moderation?
I just don’t think it’s a thing on social media. I think it can happen in private conversations, but as soon as it becomes more about winning an argument or posturing for readers, I think any hope of earnest discourse is lost. The more public a conversation, the worse it is. It’s like trying to argue with a bully in front of their friends. You might be able to reach the humanity in them, but not in that moment.
It used to be, in the early days of mass social media (and it was widespread on forums)
Moderation isn’t easy but it also needn’t be fraught - set standards of civility (strict or loose) and basic rules about hate speech, and let people take themselves out of discussions that are within the rules that they nevertheless don’t like.
It works a lot better in small communities where you talk to the same people - you can ignore people you don’t like and not have the same conversation over and over.
You don’t have to subscribe to political communities if you don’t want to see political discussion.
True but it seems like the majority of Lemmys like attaching anything and everything to something political. I saw some post about a squirrel or something, just chiling in the heat. Supposed to be cute. Immediately devolved into how fat the squirrel looked and how it must be a MAGA squirrel. Then the conversation just devolved into “cheeto man”(stupidist overused Lemmy term ever!) jokes over and over.
Also, Lemmy: why the fuck do you all think saying “cheeto man” is so hilarious? It’s something that 2nd graders would snicker at. Once. And you all say it over and over. WTF?! No wonder you all can’t get girlfriends.
Yeah this is something that has got way worse over time. It used to be that most forums would default to “no politics” and then there were discussion areas set aside for that. And now if you criticise someone for bringing politics into something where it doesn’t belong, you will get angry responses declaring that you’re burying your head in the sand. No, I just don’t want lowest-hanging-fruit political comments on every cat picture.
I think the main problem is that there isn’t much besides politics and memes. Most communities that aren’t politics seem to devolve into meme communities.
!communitypromo@lemmy.ca has a pinned post for communities that are not politics or memes
I’d much, much rather be in an echo chamber where BS is questioned and reality is not ignored than a conservative hellscape where basic facts of reality are ignored, like, “tons of CO2 in the atmosphere is totally fine, actually” or, “trans people are corrupting sports!”.
Yea… fuck those at best extremely stupid people and at worst, vitriolic piles of trash.
would you like to tell me which political side is currently putting people in concentration camps and starting a war
It’s just as much a left-wing echo chamber as Truth Social is a right-wing one - and that’s a problem in both cases.
Very much so. And it seems to be getting even worse lately. I mostly post socialist and third party stuff, but if I dare say I don’t like a democrat or something, I get automatic “YOU’RE ACTUALLY A TRUMPER!! MAGA-NAZI!!!”
Bans and hateful DM’s. All because I don’t like the 2-party system. lol
Agreed on all counts.
The real mystery to me is what value the echo-chamber residents get out of it. Why would someone join a group of people they already agree with, just to be told that their opinions are correct, and to shout down any interloper who contradict them? How is that not a boring waste of time? Is it that most people are insecure in their views and need validation, perhaps? It’s a phenomenon I still don’t understand.
People often accuse me of being a troll because I tend to voice views that are unpopular on this platform. Personally, I just don’t see any point in talking about things we all already agree on. I’d much rather try to change the views of those I disagree with - or have them try to change mine.
This exactly where I am on all counts. Stick with it!
Issues that would be solved by time/gaining more users
- Not nearly enough people to cover all the niche interest communities that Reddit does. At Reddit you find an expert on almost any topic to help you with your problems and you’ll find information on pretty much anything. Lemmy isn’t there yet.
- Not nearly enough history. A lot of content is still good and informative after many years. Lemmy doesn’t have a library of old-but-still-relevant content to search.
Issues independent of user count
- Search sucks. Reddit’s search does too, but reddit is easily searchable via Google. Lemmy isn’t.
- Onboarding is difficult, because you have to choose an instance, which is hugely important, but a newcomer has no idea what makes/is a good community to join
Issues that get worse with more users (aka, the potentially deal-breaking issues)
- Lemmy scales terribly. Every larger instance needs to retain a copy of pretty much all other content out there, and each comment/like/delete/update/… needs to be propagated to every other major instance out there. Adding more instances thus increases complexity and cost instead of decreasing it. Running a major lemmy instance is already prohibitively expensive now, with just about 50k monthly active users. If Lemmy was to scale to Reddit numbers (1.1 billion monthly active users, roughly 22 000x the number of users), everything would just break down.
- Moderation work scales just as terribly. Not only does an admin need to make sure the communities on their instance are moderated, but they also need to moderate all other communities on all other instances.
- Related to the last point, there’s some legal issues as well if an admin doesn’t moderate all other instances. Since content is copied from other instances to your instance, illegal content (e.g. illegal pornography, copyrighted works, …) are also copied to your own server without your active participation. That makes it legally mandatory to moderate all other communities.
- Legal pitfalls in general. If lemmy becomes sizeable enough, all sorts of laws in regards to social media platforms will apply. That’s one thing if the social media platform is run by a huge corporation with a legal department, but it’s an entirely different story for a tiny group of non-profit idealists running the social media platform.
Onboarding is difficult, because you have to choose an instance, which is hugely important, but a newcomer has no idea what makes/is a good community to join
That’s honestly not very helpful.
- It’s not exactly at a place where someone joins lemmy. Most people likely join via downloading an app, and if they are lucky that app links them to join-lemmy.org, and more often than not, it doesn’t link them anywhere and just asks them to either select an instance from a dropdown without further information or it asks them to enter an instance name from memory.
- The advice is very questionable and not really helpful without context.
- Lemmy.world is too big
There are Lemmy-reasons for why that’s a problem, but in any other context, the biggest is the best. And even in regards to lemmy, bigger instances have a higher chance to remain, to be decently moderated and to be decently stable. Before joining Lemmy.world, I was on Feddit.de, and we all know how that ended. And even before they vanished without a warning or an explanation, Feddit.de servers were always outdated, slow and unreliable, and moderation was arbitrary at best and non-existent at worst.
Lemmy.world is stable and works just as expected.
- Lemm.ee is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, something that is not very welcoming to new users (see this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28798607/15305964 )
That’s a somewhat decent reasoning, though not immediately understandable as a new user. And not relevant anymore because Lemm.ee will shutdown within a week or so from now.
- sh.itjust.works names contains “shit”, which can deter users
Thanks, I’m adult enough to know whether I’m offended by the word “shit”.
lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric feddit.org, is German-centric, but technically English speaking too programming.dev is topic-centric blahaj is queer-focused infosec.pub is topic-centric aussie.zone is country-centric midwest.social is region-centric
None of that really matters thanks to federation.
dbzer0 federates hexbear
Like Lemm.ee, apart from the fact that it still exists
beehaw is way outdated
That’s some relevant reasoning.
sopuli.xyz (neutral name
See also:
discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name
Sopuli.xyz isn’t any easier than discuss.tchnics.de, and jet discuss.tchnics.de was excluded for the name only.
While down in the comments it says
Sopuli doesn’t support gifs
Which is a really hard reason to avoid that instance, much more so than “has a difficult name”. That’s got much more practical implications.
But what’s left regardless is: Even that link that is supposed to make instance selection easier isn’t exactly easy to understand for a newcomer.
ut what’s left regardless is: Even that link that is supposed to make instance selection easier isn’t exactly easy to understand for a newcomer.
Newcomers are supposed to just read
" Lemmy has 47k monthly active users
https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency) https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU https://vger.app/settings/install if you want an appFeel free if you have any questions "
The rest was up for debate, feel free to copy paste your comment in that thread so that other people can see it as well
The lack of continuous and backlogged content. For some this is a benefit because it gives them a reason to stop scrolling, but for others who come here to look for answers, find entertainment, or anonymously voice their opinions, this can be something of a downside.
Of course this platform is as anonymous as you make it, but I’ve seen some people say they refrain from commenting more often because they don’t want to be known as a regular, instead wanting to “blend in to the crowd” as one would on more populous sites like Reddit or Twitter.
The same issue Bluesky and other app-killer platforms have/had at the start: momentum. Momentum explains everything else. If you leave out the vapid content on Reddit, it’s still the premier place for asking questions and getting them answered by enthusiastic amateurs or actual experts in the field. The moment Lemmy gets the same quality tech support and DIY responses, it will have its place. Or, like with Bluesky, Reddit needs to become as alienating and disgusting as X became after the Elon takeover.
Reddit is useless for questions. If you’re a subject-matter expert in something, find the subreddit for it and prepare to be horrified.
I had to give my friend this news some years ago, to no avail. Sooo many upvoted “answers” on Reddit are just confidantly incorrect BS. It’s also trivial to find reddit answers from general search results instead of limiting your search to just Reddit.
There was a small window where Reddit could be used to find good answers to things, but that ship sailed long ago.
As soon as the site started to become popular in the mid 2010’s, every “expert” was someone who maybe once took a related class in college, or think sharing their girlfriend’s uncle’s neighbor’s relevant story means they have the definitive answer.
“Hello Reddit, does anyone else catch themselves acting differently between family and friends?”
“As someone who once took a psychology class in college, your symptoms are 100% aligned with dissociative identity disorder, and you should seek help immediately.”
i usually search for what has been asked and answered, asking questions now in many subs, is only inviting trouble from gatekeepers, know it alls , and lastly astroturfing.
As everyone has pointed out, people and content. Its good in some ways since not every post is drowned out with one thousand replies nobody will ever see, but at the same time, you’re not getting much of anything at all sometimes. Not even very niche ones either. Even groups that represent entire states has limited info or replies still. If it can grow to that size and see some more unique and local content more I think even that would be a much better place for it to be.
Yeah this is my issue with it. I can find all the arts, Linux, and political stuff just fine. Sports, music, and places communities are seriously lacking. They exist, but are a shell of what you’d hope they’d be. Engagement is so low, it’s not worth bothering. The sports and music communities being so small and sparse is a real bummer.
This is more to do with most Lemmy users being shut-in nerds not inclined to sports tbh.
This is more to do with most Lemmy users being shut-in nerds not inclined to sports tbh.
Totally this. The amount of shut-in nerds on here, with strange obsessive habits of stalking people who disagree with them, is wild.
I’ve seen people mention wanting to talk more sports on here, and some of the hate and downvotes those posts get is insane.
To be frank, in many cases communities were simply picked up by the wrong people who proceeded to not actively feed it with content. So they simply die.
Yeah the North Carolina community has 383 subscribers and the last post was 9 days ago.
Surprisingly better than I would have expected for a community about a state.
User volume and diversity is probably the main thing right now.
We just need more people posing shit, the fact that one or two users can dominate my feed if they choose to is not ideal. (Though often I appreciate the content anyway)
The diversity aspect is around how we have a lot of people in a small handful of demographics on here. It’s getting better every day, but the thing that made Reddit great before they ruined it was everything you could think of had a community of people posing stuff about it, doesn’t matter how niche.
One leads to the other though, more users naturally will mean increasingly diverse interests in our userbase.
It’s about time Reddit fucked something else up anyway, it’s been a few months
We just need more people posing shit, the fact that one or two users can dominate my feed if they choose to is not ideal.
That’s because so many on Lemmy would rather downvote than post anything.
not enough of my niche interests from reddit moved here. also the sports communities are a little bit like ghost towns
It’s pretty much a symptom of having a small userbase. The most niche thing that can maintain activity isn’t very niche yet. I hope and expect it will improve over time, and in the meanwhile I’d like to see the attitude to Reddit repost bots to soften.
little bit like ghost towns
Welcome to my world! I try to post sports I watch on !sports@beehaw.org as much possible as I can. Same goes for !Football@sopuli.xyz and for !tennis@lemmy.world. Lately is more politics and memes.
It’s too difficult to block huge swaths of things you’re not interested in. Like sports, or memes, or music. You block one community and 99 more about the same subject appear in your feed.
Adding some sort of Usenet-style organization or sublemmy tagging might help.
Piefed has a built-in keyword filter
A few options
- https://piefed.social/ - flagship instance
- https://piefed.zip/ - lemmy.zip team
- https://piefed.ca/ - lemmy.ca team
- https://feddit.online/
Voyager just started supporting it today: https://lemmy.world/post/31839818
We need more users, to do that we need more advertising.
I was waiting to leave reddit for like a year before i found out about lemmy.
There’s no way the twitter clone Bluesky should have absorbed the fleeing reddit users instead of this space that functions just like reddit.
I know that Reddit doesn’t outright ban Lemmy talk, but on my reddit profile, I updated it with my Lemmy username link. I got banned from reddit a couple of hours later. No reason given. And I hadn’t made any recent posts. Ban reason was “violating rules.” lol
I had accounts banned for no reason after recommending lemmy to people, or makikg a username with lemmy in it.
Pretty sure they have a filter setup that automatically bans you.
Removed by mod
I have trouble finding um what are they called here… Communities?.. for the subjects I’m interested in. When I search, all I find is old posts or unrelated posts.
That’s my biggest problem
FYI, your instance is shuttting down soon: https://lemm.ee/post/67603898
To find communities, !communitypromo@lemmy.ca is usually a good place
Oh, brilliant. Thanks.
My first try at the Fediverse, I didn’t know how important it is to instance-hop so when mine was down a lot more often than it was up, I temporarily went back to Reddit.
