I tend to find that it needs about 10x the users, but I honestly don’t know if it could handle that at the moment. Generally I would assume one would use a social network for the social aspects, but right now the top (everything) post of the past 24 hours has something like a thousand votes and about a hundred comments, which is actually a pretty decent amount. But there’s maybe 1 other post with 100+ comments right now in the top of the past 24 hours that I can see. Go to a second page or scroll for a bit and you’ll see most posts have less than ten comments.
Is number of comments the most important metric? Probably not, but it is pretty important one since it’s kind of the main reason I would come here instead of just scrolling through Google News or whatever, and I’m guessing I’m not alone.
The only people who actually managed the migration in my opinion were the StarTrek.website people, and it took a clever coordinated effort in a community of people who probably skew more technical than most. For most communities that were interested in things like specific games, shows, hobbies, or whatever and not interested in a new computer toy to play with, they’ve essentially died out and are either ghost towns or full of bot posts.
In large part I think it’s because Lemmy’s discoverability is pretty trash, and while I get that it’s kind of on purpose it’s still an issue. The migration led to this explosion of communities but because finding them is harder than making them, it spread these relatively small communities out. The hope was that they would find each other and coalesce, but instead it seems like they took the path of least resistance and just slid back to their old haunts.
One of Lemmy’s key strengths is that it can act both as an aggregator that has a stream of news stories and comments but if tuned slightly differently it can act much more like an old school forum, but there’s really no way to bridge the two ways of interaction right now. I think one path forward is finding that middle ground, and slowly becoming a respiratory of useful discussions like old school forums, Facebook groups, and yeah even reddit. But to do that there needs to be a lot more searchable and discoverable and not just letting Google do it. Finding a way to both surface jokes and memes and whatever for quick consumption, but also having some way to keep those highly technical 130 page long forum posts where they reverse engineer an aquarium bubble pump or something available and simmering on the back burner, ready to be found in a few years and awakened when someone makes a breakthrough.
On a more personal note, I feel like I’m vibing less and less with Lemmy. The memes have slowed way down, the articles are interesting sometimes but the lack of any comments makes me less interested in interacting with them, and I feel like I hit the wall of reddit repost bots spamming thousands of sonic fan arts way quicker than I used to. It honestly feels a lot more like it’s dying from lack of meaningful user interaction pretty much everywhere outside the star trek memes. Half the time it feels like I’m just using Hacker News by proxy. Just like that line “butter spread over too much bread” it feels like the users are spread out over too many servers. I dunno, I’ve had a few so I’m rambling. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk I guess.
I blocked all of those repost bots a few months ago, and it really improved the experience for me. No longer are there seemingly interesting posts but with 0 engagement, with the real OP not even on Lemmy. It feels a lot more organic.
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.
The problem is not just that it’s hostile, but it’s also full of people that know jack shit.
On Reddit you go to r/whatever and there’s a good chance the guy answering your question is the actual godfather of whatever. Those guys didn’t make the move to Lemmy because they are hardcore into whatever, but casually into Reddit. What we got are the people that were hard core into Reddit, and casual into whatever.
So we have a bunch of blind leading the blind dilettantes getting all pissed off about shit they know fuck all about.
On Reddit you go to r/whatever and there’s a good chance the guy answering your question is the actual godfather of whatever.
There was also a good chance they were another Unidan.
Who was pretty knowledgeable about biology and contributed a lot before he developed a serious case of Reddit brain.
Knowledge is low, sire.
That’s actually a really great point that was hitting on something I felt but didn’t understand about my interactions and I think it really sums it up. It feels like every community is a general community here - explaining how technology works on reddit to someone on a general purpose sub was expected, but here you get people posting clickbaity anti-capitalist anti-tech shit in tech communities that are factually wrong and getting absurd upvotes and agreement from people who agree with the politics and that’s all.
There’s definite buzz words here. Use them and get destroyed depending on what light you’re using them in.
deleted by creator
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.
i dunno i have never used lemmy from a server that does downvotes it grants an immunity to these kinds of concerns. Just be cool and get along and everybody seems okay to me. It’s easy to block the few jerks you run into 🤷♂️. I used reddit for a long time and I find this community just peachy
I’d say there are fewer hostile people, but the ones that are hostile are really hostile.
I’ve found that I rarely get called out for poor spelling or grammar on lemmy compared to other sites. So long as it is pretty obvious what the correct word or grammar is no one cares to mention. The exception is if the mistake is particularly humorous.
[._.]
Super cool at first, but slowly becoming more and more like Reddit.
Only a matter of time before it becomes a less moderated version of Reddit.
It is the exact same as reddit, only there’s less content and comments.
The people, mods, bots, and content are all just the same. There’s even still people shilling covert adds on here. It’s just cheaper and easier for them to get to the front page of lemmy, since you only need like 20 bot/fake accounts.
I haven’t recognized any posts as covert ads here I think. Can you give an example?
I’ve been on the Internet specifically for the social aspects of it since 1990 and I honestly don’t see much difference at all between any specific site, forum, Usenet bulletin board, chat room, or service. Just the in-jokes are different and some terminology changes. People are people no matter where they are. The internet as a whole fosters a particular subset of people that even amongst their own different tribes, are fundamentally the same. A lot of outcasts and marginalized people that have no others of their particular group in reality to vibe with. I’m one of them, and I love the web because there are so many others like me here, everywhere I happen to go on it.
It’s not often I wish for awards to give on Lemmy, but I wish I could for this comment , it is exactly why I love the internet, all summed up perfectly.
Generally discussion has been more mature and respectful. Still, I think people are more likely to downvote things they disagree with but I think happens more in controversial topics like Threads defederation, Gaza, and politics in general.
If you want to compare to Reddit, they tend to hide comments with negative scores anyway, and though I can’t see the upvote/downvote ratio for comments, having 5 upvotes and 4 downvotes feels worse than 500 upvotes and 400 downvotes. The points don’t matter anyway so don’t even bother worrying about them.
Just be nice and think of the other person.
ETA: You also have to curate your feed a bit to block stuff you don’t want to see, certain accounts and stuff like the immature trolls on hexbear.
I like it better. Sometimes you do see users being irrational, entitled/whiny or disingenuous, but it’s still way less than you’d see in Twitter or Reddit. And I’ve seen users chewing others for engaging in those three things, frankly that’s fucking great.
However I do think that there’s lots of room to improve. I’ll mention some sore points:
- On disagreement, some users immediately assuming that the others are stupid (lacking reasoning) or ignorant (lacking a piece of info), instead of asking themselves “am I missing something?”.
- While witch hunters are not as bad here as in Reddit, they’re still bad. If you want to denounce people, basic reading comprehension is obligatory.
- Excessive focus on the words being used to convey something instead of what is being conveyed.
- “WAAAHHH TL;DR!@!@!1” is becoming more and more frequent. If it’s too long to read, it’s also too long to whine about its length.
Extremely left, fairly toxic unless you’re in a niche community. Couldn’t count how many times self-described leftists from Lemmy instances told me to unalive myself.
Lemmy is the only community I know where claims of “toxic extreme leftist” cannot easily be dismissed.
Way more thoughtful and open to discussing matters.
As long as you don’t have the wrong opinions, of course.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I didn’t use reddit that much before switching to lemmy (only browsing a couple of niche subreddits that I liked), but in general I do like people here a bit more. At least in my experience, I saw more people here willing to have discussions when compared to reddit, which is something I do enjoy from time to time.
That being said, I must agree with a lot of commenters in this thread - there is a lot of propaganda on this platform and that’s a part of lemmy that I have the biggest gripes with.
I miss some of the communities I used on reddit that are still either quiet or very quiet over here, but I also recognise that unless I ramp up my participation in them, I haven’t really got grounds to feel negative about that. Besides, using social media less is a plus to me.
I love there’s no ads, tracking and ‘suggestions’ - in short, no algorithm. The apps are (mostly) open source and the community are appreciative of that.
I used to get news from reddit and can get it here too, there’s no difference in quality or quantity. Politically, I appreciate the de-emphasis on hateful content and it helps I’m on an instance where the Admin is on top of their game in that respect. It is noticeably more left-wing on here but since I am too I guess that’s not an issue for me. It’s certainly way better than Reddit in that respect where I’d stumble across fairly extreme right-wing opinions in (supposedly) non political subs every day.
People seem, by and large, much calmer and more reasonable here and less inclined to attack en masse. I’ve noticed a distinct improvement in my overall mental health but I think that might have more to do with not being on reddit than being on here.
Lemmy is what we make it. For those of us who came over in the Summer, Lemmy/KBin is less than 6 months old. Let’s not paint it into being one thing or another just yet.
more active in terms of not feeling drowned out, but also just as much if not more fickle about things that are posted, so i basically stopped doing that and do the occasional comment if im feeling fanciful
