Gonna just say it. As a longtime Lemmy user I’m really not a fan of a lot of the people coming over from Reddit. It’s probably just a small but vocal minority and confirmation bias on my part, but I get the impression that they are trying to turn Lemmy into Reddit, toxicity, entitlement, stupid challenges and all.
When we’ve had two major debacles before Reddit even opened back up, one about “how dare these unpaid admins try to lessen their workload with sign up questions”, and the other about “how dare instances block other instances that are being used as proxies for forwarding spam and bot content into their own instances.” The people from reddit seem to still think they’re on Reddit and any perceived inferiority that Lemmy has compared to Reddit is seen as just as bad as Reddit’s corporate decisions. A few people even trying to go to an instance with the intent of “converting” the existing users who may be socialist or communist, by commenting abuse on their posts of course, just like how they presumably do it on Reddit.
People also seem to be refusing to learn what federation is and how that works, despite it being literally the most important aspects of Lemmy. This is evident in people telling instances who block spam or troll ridden instances to “mind their own business” as if that content doesn’t get forwarded over to and show up on the main pages of other instances, you know, what the fediverse was designed to do.
FYI, Reddit has opened back up. Spez has made it clear that he will never tolerate subreddits shutting down and inconveniencing you again. If you’re so unwilling to even adopt a different mindset and perspective when coming to Lemmy, I think it’s best if you went back. Plenty of us came here because we didn’t want to be on Reddit.
Last thing and a pet peeve of mine: stop calling yourself a refugee. You left a meme website for another meme website because you didn’t like one aspect of the management, the entire decision and migration probably took less than an hour of you sitting in your comfortable house in front of a computer. To compare that to being a refugee speaks volumes about your entitlement and privilege. And it’s especially ironic considering what real refugees go through to save themselves and their families, that you won’t even answer a few registration questions.
Just create your own instance and discuss whatever you want with your friends or people who share the same interests. I don’t understand why you feel like Lemmy belongs to you. Lemmy is you, Lemmy is me, Lemmy is everyone. Community owners who don’t like Reddit refugees (yep, refugees) can simply stop accepting new members. More people mean more articles, more discussions, more hidden gems, more apps, and more features
Put much better than I could. More users means more toxic people, just because a certain percentage of users will be toxic - but that doesn’t mean that more users is bad.
Social Media sites only work at all if they have a critical mass of users to generate content, otherwise there’s literally no point to them.
I checked out lemmy back in 2022 when I first joined Mastadon, yknow what I found? A ghost town. Next to no content, and none of what little there was was particularly engaging. That’s not the users fault, there just wasn’t enough of them. Now my Lemmy feed is filled with content. Not all of it is great, but a lot of it is.
Honestly the fact that the OP is calling out entitlement and toxicity is ironic, because that’s the impression I’m getting from the post “how dare these redditors trespass into my social media network? And why are they not happy with every aspect of it?? And why aren’t they using the terminology I like?”