And to those that have been here for a while, how has your experience changed over the year(s)?
What has worked for you?
What do you see needs improvement in your chosen platform?
I am only on lemmy.world so far
I like the people and moderation much more than Reddit. I’ve had a couple interactions with mods, and it’s so weird, it was like they are actually people or something. Very reasonable comparatively.
No advertisements for Jesus is pleasant, also. Thanks!
That we still can’t use a single account to comment and post outside of our home instance is the most frustrating part of the fediverse and the main contradiction to “you just need one sign up”.
Hello from wherever the fuck I am.
I am posting outside of my instance right now by replying to you
I guess i butchered my complaint. I was thinking of migrating accounts or one account for all instances or something like that. Multiple signups are still a bitcannoying. Although it only matters for defederation corner cases and instances closing up.
You can definitely do that lol
I don’t understand the politics. .ml, hexbear, etc. It’s like going to Christmas dinner with your girlfriend’s family for the first time.
I don’t understand the broader structure, something about Mastodon being part of all this? How everything interconnects, etc.
I’m happy enough here, I read, I make comments, I move on. Just like I did on Reddit. It’s a bit empty, so many of the communities are ghost towns. I get that I’m supposed to help with that, but I’m not much of a poster.
Learning recently that apparently anyone can track my upvote/downvote stats was offputting. I’m going to stop upvoting and downvoting now, I don’t want people making inferences from that, but I’m fine with what I write, because there I always say what I mean.
Votes technically being public and viewable however does mitigate voting manipulation and brigading and overall keeps the fediverse more honest and transparent.
Honestly not great. I was permanently banned from Reddit and the admins wouldn’t tell me what I did. I came to Lemmy thinking it was a better alternative to Reddit, only to find out how toxic Lemmy is. It’s even worse than Reddit in terms of toxicity.
Really? That is surprising. I don’t find lemmy to be toxic.
Look at some of the more political threads and you’ll see what I mean. They have a serious problem with ideological absolutism. You’re either with them 100%, or you’re the enemy. No room for nuance.
Oh, I like that! They’re funny and have provided me with a lot of laughter
My main issue is that only the political subs are active
I’ve had the same experience. Everywhere else is a bit of a ghost town.
I joined a month ago, and I like Lemmy much much more than Reddit. The federation makes it visible that you’re part of a large community, there’s no advertising, and I find the discussion to be of a generally higher quality. I also like that one can see upvotes and downvotes. Not sure whether it needs to be fuzzified or embargoed to fight abuse in future, but either way, it’s nice.
I’m absolutely sold on Lemmy vs Reddit. I dumped Twitter when Musk took over, and by then I was already on Mastodon, but I don’t actually use it much. Didn’t use Twitter much either. Any comments on Mastodon vs Bluesky?
I’m a redfugee came with the big exit about a year ago. I post prolificaly, comment sporadically and have a couple of comms. I love it, it feels more like the olden days of the Internet when everything was smaller and you knew people. I sometimes idly scroll Reddit but not even once a week, it’s fucking dire and atmosphere is shit. Insta I’m on a few times a day for memes and Reels.
Long live the fediverse!
I’ve been here for a few weeks now, and I’ve already grown very fond of it. I love the decentralized approach and how things are managed here. It’s the best alternative to today’s mainstream social media platforms. Hopefully this project has a long life ahead of it
I hope so too. I’ve been trying to engage with communites I’m interested in like coffee, and tea.
I’ve been on Mastodon for almost a month, I enjoy it. I started in the mastodon.social instance then moved to mstdn.plus. I’m still trying to get a hold of Piefed, but it has been good.
I gave Lemmy a dedicated year. A few notes:
Very few people click through.
Lots of rage bait.
Communities split over instances make it pretty hard to know where to post things, what with defederation and such.
I didn’t miss much “news”; lemmy was functional for reporting what people were talking about.
No notification of moderation actions taken against you is a choice.
Those who post small websites that do cool things: thank you! I did discover several other cool places and tools.
I found that about 1/10 of the top lemmy posts (after filtering out jokes and sports) are links to AI slop that nobody bothered to check, comments just take the headline as real if they affirm. Pointing this out in the comments did not reduce engagement or drop the posts.
Cutting it out of my routine, at last for awhile.
One thing I really hoped for from the social Internet was access to people and data that could correct me/fill in gaps. But lemmy doesn’t do this, as people see what is upvoted and upvotes are used for affirmations to the reader.
Communities split over instances make it pretty hard to know where to post things, what with defederation and such.
Piefed can help mitigate this a bit. If there’s a link thats been shared across multiple lemmy instances it will consolidate all the comments into one post
I found that about 1/10 of the top lemmy posts (after filtering out jokes and sports) are links to AI slop that nobody bothered to check, comments just take the headline as real if they affirm. Pointing this out in the comments did not reduce engagement or drop the posts.
Can I see where/how you found this out?
The ratio is a vibe, and I kinda regret posting a precise one. The case I checked carefully is this one: everything this guy posts
which I noted in November, and blocked very shortly thereafter. I vaguely recall finding a handful more examples of ‘too good to be true’ headlines, which were in fact not true, but I did not save links.
What made me sad is that even bereft of the algorithm and bad incentives in system, if the headline is ‘directionally correct’ still seems like the most important thing. Very interested in a social media where correct is ranked over good feels.
(and then there’s the regular examples like this, which are not slop but are heavily disputed/recontextualized by the top comment. Correction highly upvoted, yet the OP itself is still doing well))
I was wondering why do I only see a single post and no comments for that user, but it looks they were banned on my instance.
since I came from reddit in the first wave, I have read others observations multiple times that lemmy.world has bad moderation, in several ways, and not only because they don’t have the capacity for their large server but some other reasons.
you said you had enough for now, but if you come back later, try an account on my instance, slrpnk.net or some others like these that are smaller but not too small. maybe you would like it more. I don’t say lemmy.world was a bad choice, I think still better than reddit in recent years, but you get the idea.
but that this user you linked has been banned for almost 2 years by now on my instance makes it look like that it’s indeed moderated better.instances have a lot of moderation power, to make the experience with them better or worse, by choosing which users or sometimes complete instances to ban, so that’s a reason other instances could feel different
(and then there’s the regular examples like this, which are not slop but are heavily disputed/recontextualized by the top comment. Correction highly upvoted, yet the OP itself is still doing well))
what was the post? I can’t load it now, maybe it was deleted.
honestly the thing I hate the most about lemmy is that deleted posts just give an error that’s more generic than anything microsoft windows could show, and that deleted posts make all the comments inaccessible too.
Been on here since August and I like it. Left Reddit after I got a permaban for expressing how much I’d love to see the death of billionaires so I came here. Haven’t had to worry about a ban for things I say and haven’t been banned from groups cause I commented on other groups (I don’t know what they’re called and I don’t want to call them subs). I’m still getting messages from mods of subreddits saying I’ve been banned cause I commented on an anti-Nintendo sub despite my profile being perma-banned from the site.
Welcome! They’re called communities! /c/
It’s the same as reddit. platforms don’t make a different. people make a difference
It’s all the same people, with the same arrogance and same entitlement and egotism, who take themselves way too seriously and think that justifies their to harass, insult, and report/ban anyone who says stuff they don’t like. to the point they will go into other communities to take your commentary out of context to prove how ‘evil’ you are.
It’s also just got a lot of extremist weirdos who think their extremists beliefs are some deep profound truth that they must use to browbeat other into submission. A lot of them with superiority complexes that can tolerate not admission of limitation of flaw in the glass house from which they throw stones all day.
And the userbase general rewards short, shrill, outlandish, and dramatic commentary/personalities more than it does thoughtful commentary. Thoughtful commentary with nuance and acknowledging the limits of your understanding… will get you harassed and banned.
It’s not an open forum for diverse discussion among a respectful group of people that it wishes it was.
It’s not an open forum for diverse discussion among a respectful group of people that it wishes it was. It’s just tiktok with text.
I felt similarly, until I found the “block” feature. Then I discovered that most of what I consider bullshit is brought by a few bad eggs who I have long since blocked. Now I watch people argue uselessly with them, without having to read the stupid/vitrol that spawned the responses.
I’m glad that works for you. TBF i have been using fediverse for over 2.5 years now, and it was not so bad until about half a year ago, when all the sudden like every other comment I make here gets me insulted and harassed by trolls who accuse me of trolling and being a conspiracy theorist for citing well-known information from reputable sources, while meanwhile counter posted their conspiracy left-wing crap as ‘truth’. The election of Trump and the murder of Kirk seemed to coincide with a big influx of bad faith actors here who were probably banned from reddit for their pro-violence viewpoints. They also tend to be very stupid people IMO, and constantly harass and accuse others of the things they are doing rather and seem to think their hostility towards others is good and correct but anyone’s hostility is wrong and bad.
Not to mention all the weird sentimentalists who just berate and report you if you don’t take highly simplified stances on issues that equate to kindergarten level communication. Even suggestion that a social or political issue is complex and nuanced is grounds for getting you banned in a lot of communities now. That wasn’t the case a year or two ago.
I’ve also repeated been lectured that piefed is some miraculous place that is ‘different’ but I’ve been on it for several months and it seems no different other than a lot of the users on piefed instances huffing their own farts on how superior they are for being on piefed. Which is precisely the type of immature nonsense that crappy people believe, that their arbitrary choices of social media platforms make them morally superior to anyone who isn’t also using those same platforms.
If you notice a pattern - i.e. someone who posts abusive comments all the time - report their profile and I’ll look into banning them from piefed.social to save us all a lot of hassle.
I’ve also repeated been lectured that piefed is some miraculous place that is ‘different’ but I’ve been on it for several months and it seems no different other than a lot of the users on piefed instances huffing their own farts on how superior they are for being on piefed.
Haha.
I get that!
It does take years to feel the difference in a place like this.
Many of us have been engaged with computer freedom for decades. We’re…um…quite happy with this place. But we should be. We put significant work into creating it, and the principles we built it on do work (slowly).
Your feedback on smug superiority is 1000% valid.
We’re stuck in smug party mode here because this is the year of the Linux desktop! We’ve been at this for decades and Microsoft just wildly misplayed their hand. The current specific vibe might calm down, eventually.
It gets better the more familiar you become with it. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone in real life. There are parts that are just way too jarring.
I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone in real life. There are parts that are just way too jarring.
Ugh, this. And I hate that it’s like that.
Like, I used to have my instance open to whoever to sign up. My guiding principle was to have a place that wasn’t overrun with [parts that are just way too jarring]. Holy shit was that an impossible goal to do alone so I shuttered it up and now it’s just a private instance / testbed for Tesseract.
My friends knew I was active on Reddit, and that was fine. But I wouldn’t tell them I spend any amount of time here because what they would see going to almost any random instance will
probablydefinitely not look good on me by association despite that I’m nowhere near that.So if anyone shares this desire, I am open to un-mothballing my instance, rebranding, and taking on new admins and re-opening to users.
i mean, how many of your IRL friends are furries who use Linux on their home PCs?
Ok so wtf is everyone talking about jarring parts
Maybe all the ”what the fuck we just made another-moe" communities?
I swear I used to block three every week, until I figured out it was just a few users who didn’t know how to use content warning tags, and then I just blocked those users.
100% same here. used to be every few weeks, now it’s every other day. and it does help to block certain accounts, but it’s still way more prolific and hard to filter out than it was 6 months ago
No idea. Maybe they’re still federated with Lemmygrad and Hexbear for some odd reason?
My confusion is in no way lessened
They’re particularly toxic tankie servers on Lemmy
lemmy.ml is still rife with crazy tankies who go into other instances and harass the crap out of people.
I recently had an argument that lasted some weeks.
The poster insisted that “tankie” means “peaceful negotiator”. Chef’s kiss
Ok I guess the only thing I have left to google is tankie lol
furries. linux supremacists. extremist left-wingers of various flavors and identity groups. fetishists of every variety and their weird SFW quasi pornography.
not sure how you aren’t seeing any of that. i see it on a daily basis and to not see it i have to block dozens of communities. at one point on lemmy i had something like 60 communities blocked and 100s of users.
I mean I see it but it’s the internet… do people really not expect them to be posting?
nothing wrong with them posting and doing their thing, but in fediverse that stuff hits general feeds and going to be incredibly alienating to a non-fetishist userbase. if the fediverse wants to grow it needs to keep controversial content away from the front page.
personally i know furries and I don’t really care, but I’m a weirdo. Average people are FREAKED OUT by furries, even pro-queer progressives: https://slate.com/advice/2026/02/parent-advice-son-hobby-community-furry.html?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Oh well yeah I mean furry content isn’t the same as furry porn. I immediately blocked the nsfw instances from my feed. Idk why that isn’t done by default
i think some instances do, some don’t.
but some content is not porn, but very much like porn, like a lot of the furry meme stuff
I find it hard to believe you have any friends, pat
Lmfao he definitely does okay, some that are cool enough to know he’s active on reddit and nobody who’s cool enough to know about the lemmy
I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone irl either, mostly because the community is so small that they’d inevitably find one of my posts haha
I’ve only been on the fediverse for a total of like 10 minutes, but it seems so far like a perfectly viable alternative to big tech’s data collection schemes disguised as websites.
Welcome!
Good! I’m a long time lurker, new user.
If you dedicate a day to figuring out how lemmy works then imo it’s quite straightforward. I appreciate the expansion of free speech (i got banned from reddit for telling an AFD member to kill himself) and generally most people here seem ok. it’s still rather niche but oh well. We can fix that by inviting friends! It’s also much more authentic. A lot fewer covert advertisements and more actual people.
I’ve been on the Fediverse since mid-2023, and I’m sticking around!
I bailed on Reddit, FB, and IG, and I’m only on Mastodon and Piefed now. I find that not being on algorithm-driven social media makes me less angry, and I have a much easier time avoiding getting caught up in a mindless scrolling marathon.
I like the ability to filter out by keywords, it makes for a much more pleasant experience
As far as improvements, my main complaint is that I wish there were more people and that the people who are here comment more. Bigger isn’t necessarily better, but there are a lot of communities that just don’t have enough people posting and commenting to make things feel lively yet.
i have been here a similar time and as it’s grow it’s only gotten worse IMO. a year ago I didn’t have to block/ban people calling me names multiple times a day. it happened like a few times a week. my experience is more and more frustrating and the signal to noise ratio is far worse than it was last year or in 2024.
i still see some really great comments and really interesting things, but less and less of it. and i see a lot of the content I enjoy being banned by mods and the people posting it getting harassed by other users because it doesn’t fit it offends them for not being an incredibly crude and simplistic take.
I agree with everything you say here. I would say even some kind of consolidation for communities might be needed as a lot are defunct but I don’t know if that will work or is possible.
I like the ability to filter out by keywords, it makes for a much more pleasant experience
This is one if the most useful features and I think more people should customise Lemmy/Mastodon to their needs.
