I just wish more of the reddit escapees would understand and embrace that, technologically speaking, Lemmy is not Reddit and that this is a good thing, actually.
There will be splintered communities hosted on different servers. There will be servers that decide to defederate from each other, be it for understandable reasons or stupid ones. And you will, probably, end up having to create more than one account because of drama that had nothing to do with you.
This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. For everything you lose in convenience by not having “the everything site” where you go for literally all things, you gain flexibility and freedom. If my home-instance decides it doesn’t want legal trouble and bans talk of piracy… I can just get an account at one that has no such qualms. My browser/phone will remember my passwords for me.
A community’s culture shifting over time is inevitable, but these newcomers seem to want to change Lemmy on a technological level, and change it in ways that would rob it of the things that make it interesting, yanno?
I also wish it’d be less US-centric around here. But I guess that is inescapable.
Might be a hot take, but Lemmy Culture is good, actually. It isn’t homogenous, instances have unique cultures that might fit your needs and interests better.
I wouldn’t change that, federation and defederation does bring drama, but it also brings really cool micro communities.
I like that it is more inclusive than the DUMBster fire that is reddit.
While it is very left leaning, because the entire world is left leaning, other views so get presented and debated (and downvoted), but they are not filtered out and insta-permabanned. It is way more engaging.
other views so get presented and debated (and downvoted), but they are not filtered out and insta-permabanned. It is way more engaging.
this is my favorite quality of the lemmyverse; you’re not required to follow the groupthink out of fear of being banned and the plethora of viewpoints guarantees that groupthink isn’t as powerful as it is on reddit or twitter.
It’s important that the discourse is visible and thoughtfully debated (as possible).
you’ll be lucky to get thoughtful debate in this country; our discourse is devolved into looking for a chance to dunk on the other person to enrage them enough to quit. the trick to getting anything out of it is to keep your cool.
Outside of a select couple instances where even mentioning an opposing view without disgust and insults results in furious down voting, reporting, and a ban lol.
the absolute best thing on Lemmy is seeing someone complain about an instance that your instance defederates from
Lemmy.ml does have both advantages and disadvantages being federated with almost every major server, for sure.
what are the disadvantages?
Not a fan of the takes the average visitor from more right-wing instances brings, sometimes it’s nice to deliberately pick a smaller instance with like-minded people.
Social media becomes less addicting and less debatebro-ey.
i don’t like seeing it either, but cocooning yourself into an echo chamber doesn’t help thing at all.
I disagree, actually. I never have productive conversations regarding Marxism, for example, with liberals. Opinions being diverse does not necessarily mean they add value to conversations.
Still, I have multiple accounts of the same name, I use when I want to talk to different people.
i never expect the conversations to be productive, especially with liberals; but i don’t find that the discourse forces me to re-evaluate my views and it usually strengthens them.
The fact that it’s mostly like Reddit and people mostly act like redditors.
There’s not really a way around it though.
Happy cake day!
(Intended both warmly and ironically)
And for the parts that don’t function like Reddit, it is worse.
I mean, ignoring the whole federation/syndication/self hostability/freedom/raison d’etre parts, yeah.
You could argue it was the whole point. The rest of fediverse is significantly different, and you can still interact with lemmy from there.
Don’t know why you are down voted. I didn’t leave reddit because I disliked the platform, I left because I disliked the leadership. Lemmy is an attempt at creating a similar platform.
I don’t mean in terms of how the platform operates, I mean the people.
… it’s the same people? It’s literally the same people?
I feel like the last remnants of the New Atheists have retreated onto lemmy. Often when you reference spirituality, religion, or even reflections on group dynamics and psychology that doesn’t portray humans as perfectly rational self-interest decision-making machines, you get raided by these edgy “facts and logic” kids that are extremely annoying.
On reddit, they are contained in their own zoos, while here they seem to pile up even in generalist communities. It feels like 2012 all over again.
My absolute 100% main response to this topic is, by far and away, “TOO MUCH FUCKING EDGINESS”. In all its forms. I say this as a staunch atheist. Get the fuck over yourself, lemmy.
I always find it interesting how they largely just seem to have switched dogmatic stances from some religion to atheism.
The real logical stance is “I do not know if this is true or not because it is unprovable”.
They look down on true believers while being true believers in atheism themselves.
Atheism is just rejecting the claim that Hod or a specific God claim exists, it isn’t claiming that you believe with certainty he does not. I am an agnostic atheist, I reject the claim that the Jewish, Christian, whatever God exists and in fact positively believe they do not exist because of its self-contradictory nature. I admit that there might be a higher power that created our universe and is outside of time, etc, but it’s unknown/unknowable.
Perhaps a bot to auto ban quotes from ben shapiro or jordan peterson?
I want the bot that replies with horrendous shit they did or said whenever they’re mentioned.
You mean repeating the same post?
We like to emulate Reddit for no good reason
HackerNews has one of the best downvoting rules I’ve ever seen - you can’t downvote someone replying to you. I think that simple change massively changes the way karma works.
They also arbitrarily don’t allow you to reply to lots which is annoying. I often have follow-up questions (legit ones, not comebacks or other crap) that I can’t do anything about :(
But I agree, its generally terrible etiquette to downvote something someone has contributed to you if its goodfaith and also, assuming your thing is visible people are gonna see it and your interests are linked so its just silly, bottom-line
Let their compatriotd be their downvotes
Low-karma accounts are rate-limited. I don’t know what the threshold is, but that goes away after you gain some karma.
I def have some(not quite 1000) but had some pretty popular comments
From what I can tell, all the karma thresholds are dynamic and probably only knowable by admins. If nearly 1000 isn’t enough to avoid rate limiting then they sound pretty aggressive.
From my perspective HN’s approach seems to do pretty well at mitigating bad behavior, but might be a little too hard on newcomers and casual users.
Right now, Lemmy seems very tech-focused - which is understandable, as it’s mostly tech geeks that use this platform. I’d like to see a wider variety of interests here, more things outside of technology/Linux/Star Trek/etc.
If we want Lemmy to become more popular, we need to appeal to the mainstream Internet users.
I think an important step to making Lemmy more popular is making sure it actually shows up in search engines. I don’t know enough to say how though
The objective ought to be more engagement, not more users.
If lemmy goes from 200 posts about Linux a day to a thousand posts about Linux a day, I will leave. Fuck that shit
Hey, good to see you here.
If we want Lemmy to become more popular, we need to appeal to the mainstream Internet users.
I was thinking about it the other day, I feel like the vast majority of Internet users are now on Facebook/Instagram/Tiktok/Twitter/Discord depending on their age and demographics.
Text-based forums are probably not appealing to most of them
Text-based forums are probably not appealing to most of them
That’s a good point.
It’s the inverse that is true actually -
As Lemmy becomes more popular it will drift from being so tech focused.
Many popular sites gradually drifted off of tech focus as their user base grew. R*ddit is a prime example of how a very nerdy niche site grew and shifted to be popular (sorta) organically.
I do think that for all the hullabaloo about Ellen Pao and banning a bunch of subreddits - that actually did more to open the place up to users who were otherwise driven away by /r/FatPeopleHate and /r/Jailbait being on the front page all the time.
If Lemmy were to change to attract users it would likely be from increased defederation with instances that are less palatable to mainstream society.
I’d like to see fewer angry communists. Regular communists don’t bother me, but don’t be so aggressive about it.
happier communists? do you mean slrpnk.net?
Well, whenever the actions of capitalists stop affecting me and start being more escapable, that’s the exact minute I’ll stop being so angry. Sound like a deal?
Giving some real “live your life however you want but don’t jam it down my throat” energy and that’s… Nah, fam. That’s not the wave.
We all have problems.
Edit to add: yelling about them on the internet doesn’t do anything to solve them. Talking about it might.
Edit to add: yelling about them on the internet doesn’t do anything to solve them. Talking about it might.
People do talk, sometimes talking doesn’t work, and yelling does.
Okay, do you think people have the right to get angry at problems they have in their life due to an incredibly violent and inefficient system?
Where are you finding non-angry Communists, except in Communist spaces where we don’t have to argue with liberals all the time?
It’s gotta be more user-friendly to regular non-tech peoples, and it has to be explained/pitched to people in a more simplified way. Also there really should be an official mobile app.
If I could state something, although I myself am not using Lemmy (but am I suppose Lemmy adjacent!?) I would love for these little reddit arrows to disappear. Because I think they are of a Pavlovian nature. I dislike any of these buttons you click to express something without really saying anything. Like buttons, etc. I once, many moons ago, had a forum. The most recently responded content floated to the top. That’s how the forum dictated visibility. There were no Facebook-esq like buttons or anything. It was just people talking with other people. I liked that a lot more. I think these things aren’t healthy for people in general. I believe this experience could be free of all that hullabaloo, but I believe I might be in the minority when I say this. But I think it creates a more authentic and humanistic experience because in reality nobody walks around just saying “I LIKE THAT SHIT! YEAH, SUPER GOOD!” And when we compliment people it’s an act of kindness and I don’t think it should come in the form of some push-button action. But yet again, I know this isn’t really how things work nowadays. I just wish it were, because in a way I think it’d make social media so much healthier and a lot more even-keel and a lot less of a “popularity contest.” Which it really shouldn’t be in the first place, because it is all about sharing the human experience with others.
I wish we could have a higher level of discussion, with an expectation that claims should be supported by evidence. Less ad hominem and conspiracy theories about everyone with a different point of view being a bot. And much less “I heard someone from [group I dislike] say [comically evil thing],” being accepted purely off hearsay with no source.
I think lemmy unfortunately inherited some toxic reddit traits in that regard. If you make something up, whole cloth, that tracks with what people want to believe, you get upvoted, if you make a case with strong supporting evidence but it doesn’t fit with what people want to believe, you get downvoted - it’s circle-jerk-y.
Also, people just seem generally incurious about the world and it’s rich, diverse history, and just want to rehash the same talking points over and over again. Too many big communities are focused on news or current events, not enough on broader historical context or philosophical discussion. I don’t really want to rehash the same discussions about the US election over and over again for the thousandth time. When history is discussed, it’s at a meme level, with a handful of historical events being referenced exclusively, oversimplified and weaponized to own your political opponents. The world is filled with color, depth, life, and wonder, but when site culture is so focused on scoring points, the result is everyone’s too guarded and defensive to appreciate that.
I’d much rather read people randomly gushing about some special interest or rabbit hole they went down, or even just rambling thoughts about whatever, compared to the latest story about the latest thing and discussions where everyone knows where they stand based on their camp. It gets boring.
I wish people would stop treating people from instances as a monolith.
Less war hawks, neoliberals, reactionary american exceptionalism from tech workers who have no idea what they’re talking about except that they have money and think that gives them the privilege of opinion.
I would like everyone who came over in the reddit migration to move back to reddit, as they clearly like it more over there than over here. I would like them to stop trying to force Lemmy into being something that it’s not.
I think a large portion of lemmy is too focused on making lemmy popular. Fake engagement and posts that nobody cares about don’t create engagement. Instead, more focus on just enjoying lemmy would ironically lead to better posts and discussion. Likewise, people post the same articles to the same communities seeking engagement. It leads to dupilication which waters down the discussion, ironically, also leading to less engagement. I think federalised communities, as has been discussed would be a good solution. However, it strikes me that they don’t want to miss out on karma, for some reason. So, short term gain, for long term hassle of multiple posts. If some of the most prolific posters posted to the most relevant community and cross posted elsewhere, then maybe communities would coalesce more.
I think part of this comes from wanting a broader base of content, which I agree with. The rest seems to come from wanting the downfall of Reddit, who is in my rearview mirror so I don’t care.
We are currently like old Reddit, a techy, mostly progressive, crowd. That means a lot of uni-topic content.
When there are 10,000 users, and 5 of them are into sewing, the sewing community is dead. When there are 100,000 users, and thus 50 interested in sewing, content starts to form. You can see where this goes from here.
Ultimately a kind of uber cross posting that hides away the technical bits. I’d definitely love that. Or at least if I as a user could specify multiple communities for a post, and from a ux ui perspective it remains a single post.
Then again one could argue that subscribers should simply follow multiple communities and that solves the problem, too and it already works. So just avoid cross posting altogether.
An example of this that really bothers me: I joined several gaming munis because I like to talk about games. But there are people out there who feel that a gaming muni should be about the games industry, and so those munis are just a constant stream of gaming news articles, patch notes, and trailers. Mostly with completely barren comment sections. What I wanted was the social experience of chatting with people about games. I don’t care about (as a random example) the latest Helldivers 2 patch notes.
I think less of an emphasis on having a steady stream of content and more on only posting something that you believe is worthy of discussion would be so much better. If people want to see literally every rockpapershotgun article, they can subscribe to their RSS feed.
I try to comment on things so there is engagement and conversation. Without engagement, this is just a collection of bookmarks.
But it’s kinda up to us to create that. Somehow. Sometimes even just a quip or shitpost comment can sort of open the floodgates.
The way I see it, people shouldn’t post things unless they have some discussion they want to have about that thing. They shouldn’t post just because it’s news. I’d be fine with Lemmy having far less frequent new posts if those posts were all created by people who were legitimately trying to share something rather than just generate content.
Yeah. I find that a lot of comment sections are rather empty and some people who are there are really bad at discussions.
What I wanted was the social experience of chatting with people about games. I don’t care about (as a random example) the latest Helldivers 2 patch notes.
Please yes this. It’s good to see gaming related news but largely I just want to nerd out about the games themselves. Of course I should be told to just post my own damn content, but I have admittedly never been good about creating OC.
What I wanted was the social experience of chatting with people about games.
There’s !letstalkaboutgames@feddit.uk
I don’t know what would get me to comment more than patch notes for an incredibly popular game thousands of people are playing. So either bad example or I have no idea what you want in a gaming sub.
Does a book club meet up to just talk about what their favourite authors tweet about, or what new book is coming out soon in a series they like? No. They talk about what artistic choices they like and don’t like in the books they read, what emotions those books evoke, what other books they remind them of, etc.
I joined with the Reddit exodus and there were so many communities that were a straight copy of a subreddit. No discussion, just posts - yuck.
Coalescing into massive communities is a mixed bag. Putting all your eggs in one basket makes them more vulnerable to rogue moderators, sudden loss of a server, the need to defederate if the host server gets compromised, provides a more attractive target for bots, and other bad actor things.
Yes it would improve ease of use and make Lemmy more newbie friendly, and it can be frustrating to have conversation splintered. Lots of times I’ll comment on an empty story at the top of my new feed only to find a lively discussion a little lower. That’s all frustrating, I agree. It’s also, I think, the nature of federating.
If multiple different news communities are thriving despite posting pretty much the same content, there are reasons for that. People can pick just one to subscribe to, and they don’t all pick the same one. That tells me there is something about each one that makes them attractive to different people.
I think it can really hurt smaller communities, though.
