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.
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.
Post scarcity communist utopia
You mean Star Trek?
Its a better example than anything else.
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.
I raised the issue that if you want companies like CDPR or Bethesda to keep aiming high and investing 300+ million dollars you have to expect them to try and make their money back as soon as possible or as much as possible over time. 300 million is a HUGE gamble, especially on a video game. So they might rush to launch because the budget is running out, or the game wont be great until it has 2 or 3 expansions or at least a few large patches admittedly I have less sympathy for microtransactions or subscriptions but then thats on the players if they want to support that.
If they are really aiming for groundbreaking, massive, revolutionary… the gaming community needs to tone down the immediate rhetoric or we will just see more and more recycled “it always makes money” Marvel movie type shit.Madden77, Halo 26 and Battlefield 63…
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.
Yeah you kinda nailed it.
Lemmy taught me that I wasn’t just running away from Reddit, but from the kind of content sites like Reddit engender.
The fuck did you say about Linux?
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.
Odd, my experience is the opposite. Everyone here is chill and I rarely get flooded with downvotes. I’ve only had one asshole in my replies.
Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works defederated from some of the more problematic instances. You’ll see it happen more on lemmy.ml.
You still see it quite alot on lemmy.world
That hints me that what people here is calling “toxic” is politics-related, since I’m a lemmy.ml user and I certainly would not say that my experience here is overall “toxic”.
And, funnily enough, most of the issues that I had were with users from either lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works; sometimes lemm.ee.
A lot of it politics related in that someone posts something even slightly critical of communism and a ton of people dogpile on them.
There may be toxic 1v1 conversations, but I generally see dogpiling only from one side.
Got it - mostly politics, then. That explains a lot why you guys are seeing far more toxicity than I do, I don’t generally join political discussions. (And when I do, since I’m myself communist, perhaps I don’t even notice it.)
Yeah. If you don’t participate in the discussions and you aren’t likely to get targeted if you do, you probably won’t see it.
I agree with you, for the most part this has been my experience as well.
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/
Man that blog post nails it I think. Lemmy is probably not going to grow much at all because yeah, all the normal people are chased away
You also have a few things Reddit did or could do that you can’t really do on Lemmy. You also have, with a few exceptions, a rather new moderation team on Lemmy without the years of experience that some Reddit moderators had.
Outside of the mass defederation of any Nazi instances, Lemmy has been a lot weaker on overall moderation.
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. Stray from the echo chamber and you’re going to get a bad reaction probably. 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.
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.
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.
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.
I’d say there are fewer hostile people, but the ones that are hostile are really hostile.
I do notice users here snapping back at jerks a lot more.
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.
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I don’t have an issue with downvotes on the face of it - I came from Reddit, and found their system pretty good. The issue I have is that it seems to be used as a “disagree” button a lot more here, which discourages discussion regardless of the quality. For example, even on this post, anyone who said they’ve had a negative experience has been downvoted.
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I use Linux btw
But are you using Firefox??!?
Whta about hydrogen powered public transit?
Yes! Of course I also make sure it is installed with Flatpaks instead of Snaps.
You should actually be using de-googled Libre Wolf with uBlock Origin and your own DNS server. You’ve let me down. /s
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.
I don’t think it’s that easy. The academics of the left still leave plenty of room for subterfuge, even studied scholars don’t always agree and even bicker at times. More over the academics aren’t what draws people to leftism, direct action and engaging the communities we want to engage is what wins people over, academic first orgs end up looking like insular book clubs with slow and little growth in my experience and from the opinion of others I’ve read in books about organizing.
I think it serves the left better to meet the acute needs of their local communities, which to me serves as the center of organization. Very hard to argue against initiatives like the BPPs Breakfast Program. Which by the way was exactly what put them on the Feds radar, because my guess is the feds have accepted what I describe here as true, or at least best revolutionary practice. I also find organizing around the needs of the community to be very agreeable, I’ve been in orgs where they itemize our goals and use approval voting to rank them, and mutual aid items are more than usually very agreed upon.
I’d love a honest academic space, but even then our movement is a communal one, and if you’re able to help in a ‘boots on the ground’ capacity but you only engage in academics instead, you likely won’t really make to much material impact. Hell I’d love to be wrong about it being near impossible to have an honest leftist space too, and I don’t want to give the feds more credit than they deserve for even the ills of the movement, we learn nothing that way, but it’s really hard to cut through the noise when they specialize in noise. I’d wager some of these noisemakers have even read more anticapitalist books than some of the people who actually are anticapitalists.
I do think you’re onto something though, the average understanding of the academics of leftism (why we do the things we do), is less understood among leftists than ever before. My guess is the increase in the number of leftists and how acceptable the beliefs are seen as being these days helps foster leftism among people who don’t exactly read their heads off about theory.
It’s like to see more stuff about leaning and organizing that knowledge. Keep the sniping and bullshit out of it. Just have a link to something like The Reactionary Mind and a quick blurb about how it makes an argument about conservatism is a new movement because it has to react to enlightenment and give a reason why a group of people deserve a privilege.
It blew my mind to learn that after the French revolution there was some dude arguing to put a king back. Like holy shit. They just killed a king. Some fucked really thinks that’s a good idea? It was fun to drive into that head space and listen to someone’s argument that there are some people that are better and deserve to rule. Gross, but interesting.
It’s led me to learn more about Jefferson and Burr and some of the early American history where some of those guys thought the same way. That they should dress up in wigs and shit and thought they were better. I’m probably mis remembering which names, but I remember the first vice guy was all about that class shit.
Speak to some Scandinavians? Maybe a Finn.
A Finn signing in. What are we discussing?
Do all you guys like dwarves and death metal?
I don’t have anything in particular against dwarves as such, but why would I like them?
I can’t stand most metal, especially the death/black/whatever subgenres. Symphonic maybe once in a decade or so.
Maybe I’m thinking of sweeds on the dwarf thing.
Definitely, who knows what those degenerates are into during the winter months.
Jokes aside, my mother tongue is Swedish but I was born in Finland. I’ve lived in both countries and speak both languages and I prefer Finland by far. Swedes are just… all up in your business all the time. In Finland privacy is preferred, mostly.
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.
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 bitches 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.
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.
Basically reddit with more Linux posting and few other differences.
Lol true
this
Reddit but good
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.
