Everyone in that thread has Stockholm syndrome. They’re so used to being force fed shit that they couldn’t possibly believe that an online platform could be run any differently than Reddit.
And, everyones total misunderstanding of the fediverse. Yea, no wonder it’s all tech people here, dumbass
I always have to laugh when I see an ostensibly pro-lemmy comment that says:
“Reddit mods are out of control”
Do these people understand that basically the whole idea behind a Federated system is that community owners have significantly more moderation power than they do on commercial platforms? If someone’s main problem with Reddit was unchecked mod power, I have some bad news for them…
The problem with Reddit is the centralized corporate control. The company can, at will, make all the community apps useless, and they did.
Eh, it’s not that the moderators are out of control on Reddit. It’s that they’re under control… by a single corporation.
A moderator here could potentially move their community to another instance if the owner of the instance tries the asshattery that Reddit Corp does.
Users choose the communities that have mods that are cool, the mods choose the instance that’s owned by someone that’s cool. The second half of that sentence isn’t true for reddit which turns it into a top down power dynamic.
Eh there are also power mods on the platform that have a lot of control over loads of large communities there who are an issue in Of themselves in the ways they can control or stifle narratives on the site.
When I was recruiting people during r/place and the protests, I found most of the issue being proper user guides to get people to sign up. Lemmy may be pretty confusing, especially to non-techies.
Replacing “Lemmy” with “Fedderverse” would behoove you, OP. Sincerely, A Kbin user.
Ernest has fixed a whole lot of the issues today, but I wouldn’t recommend kbin at the exact moment, lol. Not that these issues have made me feel like going anywhere else.
What do you recommend then?
Who runs Lemmy?
Who runs the instance you would recommend?
In Ernest I trust. Kbin is a groovy way to consume the federverse. Just like Lemmy et al.
But a little more the instance that Ernest runs…
I mean the sentiment in the comments in that thread is not at all positive. The damage the tankies/hexbear/lemmygrad has done to the reputation of lemmy is not negligible.
imho It’s important to help people stear away from those places when they join lemmy except if that is their intention.
Lemmy went stronger when center-left people joined the platform. .ml and Lemmygrad will remain far-left. There are many server available to suit their needs. I was once on .ml until I joined the server set by people who were active on r/piracy before.
It isn’t about “winning”. Lemmy can coexist with any Fediverse application, and that’s the beauty of it. Everyone on the Fediverse wins.
Not every “Reddit alternative” is on the Fediverse.
Honestly in the current landscape, any alternative to an already popular platform that isn’t federated in some way is doomed from the start.
True even for megacorps for Facebook; hence why Threads is federating.
OMG reading through that comment chain - no not this one, the one on old-reddit.com - makes me remember what Reddit (outside of the tiny niche subs) is like, <shudder>. Leadership flows down-hill, and it is not just spez over there, it is his entire empire of hate, small-mindedness, and bigotry. Who on earth would see what Elon did to Twitter and think, “me 2!” (then overthrow the mods who loved the communities that they themselves built, replacing them with scabs who ban the humans and upvote the bots)?
Edit: for those who cannot bring themselves to go THERE, I brought it here for your amusement - you’re welcome:-P.
A bit of a self aware wolves moment as Scott Adams frequently says ridiculous, smug, inflammatory and poorly researched things on the internet.
This “the alternatives are great” gaslighting stuff has got to stop. We’ve all tried it and we’re all still here, for good reason. Reddit sucks but the fediverse sucks even more.
Oh the irony in this comment… The only person being gaslit is yourself.
And secondly - a lot of people don’t know that you can now block instances individually and that defederation/blocking is not really that big of a deal anymore.
a lot of people don’t know that you can now block instances individually and that defederation/blocking is not really that big of a deal anymore.
I’ll reshare my thoughts on this from a comment I left in a completely different context a few days ago:
My question about that option is: what effect does it have? My understanding is that if we defederate, they can see our content and reply to it, but only other users on their instance will see those replies.
Does an individual blocking them do the same thing? If so, perfect.
But if, as I suspect, it still allows them to see and reply to comments and everyone else in the fediverse can see it, I cannot support it as a solution to dealing with the kind of bad faith interactions which would make me want to block or defederate an instance. It allows them to continue peddling their rubbish without even enabling the person they’re cribbing off of to respond.
Yeah, I’m so weary of this argument but you’re dead right.
If I and all my neighbours close our curtains then we won’t see all the garbage, rats, dead bodies, and other refuse piling up in our street, and then congratulate ourselves at the lovely community we share.
It’s absurd. As though everyone expects that corporate encroachment into the fediverse is going to come with a big sign that says “threads” or some such.
if you think fediverse is worse than reddit you have issue
There’s a certain demographic of people who crave a constant flow of outrage to fuel their social media addiction. I know because I’ve struggled with this myself.
Reddit has a slew of bots and artificially promoted posts to provide this to increase engagement.
I guess we have bots here too, but it’s trivial to block them, and obvious spam/ads tend to be removed on sight.
There’s far less outrage fuel here than on reddit, and also the comparatively slower flow of content encourages actual engagement and participation vs. merely consuming.
I can see why someone who’s balls deep in reddit might be disappointed here.
I may also be completely wrong about some of this, but that’s my observational take.
As someone who went from a daily user of reddit for a decade and now hasn’t used reddit basically since the app’s red wedding, I really don’t think this is it. As much as I hope the fediverse and Lemmy take off, currently I’m extremely pessimistic about that because if anything the problem is the reverse of what you describe. My current front page on Lemmy (all/active):
- an article whining about Elon
- an article about Fox News/trump
- a post complaining about charging for XBL/PSN
- an article about Tesla being banned from driving schools
- an article complaining about DoorDash
and so on. And to get to this great non-rage bait content, I had to go through the trouble of even figuring out how to use the fediverse and which instance to sign up for (and then still hop instances a few times) and spend my first week just blocking like I was getting paid for it because language settings on this site mean nothing, more or less, and there are a few “communities” that pop up here that provide all of the intellectual stimulation of jamming a q-tip too far in your ear.
And if those posts alone don’t paint a clear picture about who the user base is here, heading to the comments will. Most of the comments read like they’re posted by “lefty white linux bro” or “communist trans linux they/them” who have decided that those are their entire identity/personality. While none of those things are bad and I tick a lot of those boxes myself, it creates a real echo chamber that borders on hostile to anyone that isn’t in that category. The other side effect I’ve seen on this is that this place can offer up some real doozies of takes in a way that is likely to make anyone who actually knows anything just up and leave. I saw one the other day that was talking about greatest people in the FOSS space and uncritically lists RMS that was heavily upvoted. At least someone brought up why that’s problematic in the comments, but imagine hopping over to the mainstream sites and talking about best musicians and seeing R Kelly on the list…
Anyway, while I don’t mind an echo chamber now and then, if Lemmy in particular is to grow and be useful for anyone outside of this base, I’d suggest the community adopt something closer akin to “reddiquette” which is probably the main reason why reddit was able to get somewhat past this in the early days, and some of the “niche” communities were able to grow. I put niche in quotes here, because as it stands now Lemmy doesn’t have even very vibrant communities for fairly mainstream things (music and TV, movies, etc.)
So while I personally choose to spend my time here instead of on reddit, that’s mostly an ideological choice and I view as a sacrifice because I’m missing out on tons of other content that I enjoy. Even your post is a form of this – “reddit bad” (sure) “because of bots” (also sure) “and Lemmy has less outrage content and fuels engagement” (uh, no.) Lemmy has as much or more, and it’s only fueling engagement on those that don’t immediately bounce off, but since you posted “their team bad, our team good” you’re getting upvotes and probably will continue to.
That you accuse leftists and marginalized groups of “mAkInG iT ThEiR wHoLe IdEnTiTy” tells me everything I need to know about your privilege and worldview, and explains immediately why you’d prefer reddit, a notorious alt-right platform.
We’re generally not welcome on reddit, so the fact that bigots and transphobes or right-wingers get immediately dunked on here is actually a good feature, and makes this far less toxic overall.
FYI I’ve blocked you, so I won’t see any further hot takes from you and therefore won’t respond. My time and sanity are far too valuable to waste on someone like you.
You perfectly illustrated the point
The “point”
It’s fine for actual bigots to get dunked on. But Lemmy users will dunk on you: literally for liking the “wrong” piece of software. The echo chamber is real.
I’ve not noticed. Can you provide an example? You mean Chrome?
Honestly, I wish more people would switch to Firefox, but I’d never dunk on someone for Chrome. I might try to talk them out of it though lol
Some of the people in that reddit thread are unreasonably angry that some people moved to Lemmy.
I’ll never understand loving a company so much that anyone who doesn’t like it is automatically deemed a bad person. Why is a stranger’s choice of social media so personal to some of these people? Why are they so livid?
I’m not even going to quote the specific comments I’m referring to just in case I get banned. One of them was comparing the entire lemmyverse to the subreddits that were banned over explicitly only having content about hating strangers for existing.
I’m happy I left if that what I’m “missing out” on.
Honestly, there’s a reason hype has died down. The site has all the same problems as other alternatives.
After the initial hype, it’s only as big as a reasonably large individual subreddit. In fact, here are the top weekly posts of lemmy’s federation partners and T_D’s exodus site. The latter edges out the former slightly in upvotes and much more substantially in comments, and it’s just a single community. Even in the fairly small category of “biggest extant reddit alternative”, lemmy doesn’t take first prize.
Same content problem as all the others: roughly half of the posts are politics of a uniform orientation, and the other half are reposted facebook memes.
Reddit’s killer app is the presence of a sizable community for every little niche thing, and that’s not there. Unless your only interests are politics (within roughly .3 standard deviations of the median Huffpo writer) or Facebook memes, it’s not a viable alternative.
Competition: Sure, it’s federated in theory, but the block-happy, drama-centric culture means that, if an alternative were to pop up with the userbase of 2012 Reddit (or even 2018 Reddit), it’d get defederated almost immediately. Open federation solves the “dozens of sites competing for the same thousand-or-so people” problem. Closed federation just pretends to do so.
This is basically all the same issue: not enough users. It’s so dumb. “Lemmy isn’t as good as Reddit because everyone isn’t there yet. But ya, Reddit sucks.” /face-palm Then come over and get users to come over instead of saying there’s not enough people.
Lemmy right now actually feels like it’s the same size as when I started using Reddit, before the Digg migration. It was so much better then.
well it doesnt necessarily need to be politics, the biggest subgroup for lemmy users are usually people into tech (a lot of tech and tech adjacent communities are fairly sized on lemmy) as they are the ones more likely to make the jump. Easiest way to tell is to go to the communities page, sort by all communities and count the number, or even just get an eyeballs search to know that a common thread between many communities is either memes or tech
Hey, it’s not all politics! Star Trek is doing great here! I just saw a post about how the Bell Riots are going to…wait…
there were other options?
Hello from /Kbin
If the fediverse sucks so much, why are Meta and WordPress and Mozilla making efforts to join it, hm?
I understand this comm is about Reddit… But you guys really need to just let it go already. You put so much effort into “owning” Reddit it’s actually kinda sad.
Don’t spend seven months talking about your ex.
This is par for the course though. We shit on Digg for years after everyone had migrated over!
I was looking for a Reddit alternative for years. I would have been cool with anything non-corporate, but figured it would take ages to build.
It’s incredible what Lemmy has turned into so quickly. A Reddit alternative went from being impossible to actually existing within a matter of weeks.
As much as that makes a great story… The groundwork for lemmy goes back years. It’s true that lots of issues were addressed and client apps were ported after Reddit started going down hill, but a ton of work was done beforehand to make that all possible.
client apps were ported after Reddit started going down hill
For me, this can’t be overstated. I don’t work in an office/at a stationary computer and 99.9% of my Reddit time was mobile. I checked out the “mobile apps” for Lemmy, and hated them. I probably wouldn’t be active here at all if it wasn’t for good dedicated apps like Sync.
Voyager for Lemmy is really good and open source. You should try it, might get a better mobile experience.
Will do, thanks!
You can also have a look at https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/
There should be one that you’ll like
I haven’t used Reddit since the blackout. Thankfully Sync for Lemmy was out within a few weeks. Sort by TopDay and there’s enough content on here to scratch my itch.
Boost for Lemmy as well
Kbin, on the other hand, has too many issues.
No offense to Kbin’s developer Ernest, who is working hard, but Kbin is still in alpha stage, and it often has server errors (in fact, kbin.social is down right now, and it has been for the whole day), and the userbase and engagement are far behind Lemmy. There are also federation problems between Kbin and Lemmy sometimes. Kbin is also trying to be a more all-in-one product, with both microblogging and forums, and the users there like to have both, which is fine, but Reddit users are mostly forum users and they seem to prefer Lemmy more.
It was not fully down and this completely ignores the issues that Lemmy had when they updated to the next version a while back. Really unnecessary bashing.
But I realized later that this was a misunderstanding on my part, and that this is not an issue as long as the project is open source, with an open development, and as long as you avoid instances like lemmygrad.
Totally not suspicious, but at the minimum a bit ignorant on how open source software development typically goes. And it isn’t just Lemmygrad, but even their allegedly more moderate main instance Lemmy.ml, which is really just more of the same as far as users and moderation issues go. More problematic is the fact though that you’re still supporting the devs and their problematic views simply by supporting their software and its development by directly using it, and this won’t change until a proper fork from actually decent people is going to become the main used Lemmy software.
And overall, no one won this, because the whole protest was a failure as way too many people just remained on Reddit.
