As a long time Reddit user, there’s something about Lemmy and the fediverse that feels really refreshing and new. I think it has to do with a few things…
- People are more respectful of each other and interested in discussion and being social.
- Less trolls (users are probably older?)
- Due to it not being absolutely huge, I feel like people will actually see my posts and comments instead of being lost in a sea of content. I suppose once Lemmy grows this will change, however the cool thing about the fediverse are the new servers. So you can stick to the server when you want smaller community discussion and go to “all” when you want more populated threads.
- The clean UI feels refreshing and clean, almost like the early internet.
What have you noticed? Do you find it refreshing too?
It’s called the honeymoon effect. The sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can acknowledge that lemmy is vulnerable to all the same failings as reddit, and the sooner we can take steps to safeguard against those failings.
If we instead say “no no, lemmy is different, look at how much better things inherently are over here”, then we’re doomed to go down the same path.
I agree - what would you say those pitfalls are? Of course the decentralizing nature takes care of some problems - but the main thing that made me feel awful browsing reddit was the constant argumentative nature of every discussion. When I first discovered web forums 20 years ago it was the magical aspect of it that had me engaged. It was actually cool to be able to chat with other people online about anything - and that itself put everyone in a good mood; after all, why waste your time being really negative if you’re doing something cool and interesting? Now, it’s very common place. Added with people being more comfortable that they can remain anonymous, huge sites like Reddit are prone to a lot of…crap. That’s what I can think of so far.
I both love and hate the upvote/downvote mechanic. I like seeing quality posts bubble to the top, I also like seeing the general consensus of lurkers, but I don’t like circlejerk posts or that downvoted comments get dogpiled on, which often both result in a toxic, self-righteous flame war. And the solution is obviously not deleting the downvoted comments, because then you’re just censoring unpopular opinions.
I think something worth trying would be not visually distinguishing between posts with no votes and posts with more negative than positive votes. I think an instance could enforce this on their own communities with only positive results.
The only counter argument is that dishonest arguments can’t be “buried” by downvotes (hidden behind a “[show]” button). Another strategy would be to allow burying, but somehow throttle the responses to them; maybe limit the comment depth, or limit the number of responses per user, or allow users to flag flame war threads as “unproductive” which at some point would block further responses.
To be clear, I don’t think the lemmy “spec” should adopt any of these measures, I think these regulations should be decided by instance/community mods, and up to the users to regulate and provide feedback on.
I feel like people who moved to Lemmy from reddit are really incentivized to help it grow, so I am constantly seeing encouragements for people to interact / upvote / post content, which is great. I think that the community here is very motivated, and so even though there are less people, you get more engagement.
This is a huge part of it. People are in “this is my new home, I’m gonna wash the dishes just this once!”. I imagine things will calm down later.
yeah, that’s pretty much what happened with Mastodon, as far as I can tell. There are still folks there, but it is much quieter now vs when I first joined it.
i dont feel that its quiet, more that people have settled in, the users that stuck with masto use it religiously
just like how people used twitter
I’ve experienced this as well and have enjoyed it. Thanks for sharing.
Yep, I try to upvote everything and comment as much as I can. I’m still confused about how to post to specific instances on Jerboa though. Like I’m typing the name but it’s not showing up in the dropdown
The most discouraging thing that happened was that when I wrote a long and thoughtdul comment and press send, Jerboa gives me the “java type blabla” error, and I lost everything I typed. Then I don’t wanna type it again and I just give up on commenting
Hopefully these issues will be fixed soon! As I understand it it’s not even an issue with Jerboa specifically.
I’ve gotten to the habit of Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C my comments right before hitting Reply, just in case that happens. Luckily, it’s been happening less and less, at least on desktop browser. Hopefully Jerboa gets to that point soon, too.
This
This is how Reddit felt 15 years ago. This too can slide in the wrong direction, so we’ll have to be cautious
There’s no way to prevent it entirely. A larger community will slide that way.
I do think that it can be less encouraged though.
Advantage is if this thing slides in a direction the majority disagrees with it can be forked. On reddit all changes had to be accepted or you could leave. With lemmy and ActivityPub it’s easier to fork the service and have it run in semi parallel to the OG. (Granted forking should only really be done if shit goes sideways)
Edit: besides, due to the open source status the community has more of a say in where things go
This is why I am not putting all my eggs in one basket (e.g., I have a Tildes account).
Great idea. I’ve not heard of tildes. I’ll have to check it out
Ok so let me throw out some old timer wisdom. This is what the social media/forums/the Internet are like when the cream is skimmed off and the 90% of users who only browse, and the 8% who only vote are gone. Enjoy it while you can. The summer always ends.
Absolutely, my first thought was this is what internet was in the 90s and 00s. Slow, good yarns, and lame jokes.
Tbh there’s already too many memes here though. Half my front page is 196 and German me_irl sometimes.
You can block those communities if you want.
I guess I want some memes not all memes
Yea but dont be too hard on the kids. We were sticking frogs in virtual blenders and abusing the /blink/ tag at their age, so let them have their fun.
This is exactly it. I haven’t come across a forum where the “summer syndrome” wasn’t permanently present in a decade. I’ll be lurking around here to see if this is going to finally be it.
I was a bit late one the social media train, isn’t that where the “Eternal September” thing came from?
That’s because way back in the past, every September, a bunch of students who’d never had home internet access would have access via university for the first time. It would take some time for them to pick up the culture, so there’d be a month or so of questionable posts.
Unfortunately some communities don’t seem to exist without the froth. The FIRE community seems difficult to recreate here, or local subs. But do you all remember when r/Bitcoin was mostly programmers?
The FIRE community could use the existing Mr. Money Mustache forums. Only hiccup is, I believe, that it is difficult to get a new account (not sure why that is, maybe that’s an old problem and it’s easier now). I’ve lurked that forum for years; they seem like a friendly, helpful, well regulated, un-frothy bunch.
I love The Good Place! To get a Mr money mustache account, you have to know the answers to a few questions covered by the blog. If anyone needs help, PM me. I’m a long time follower of the FIRE community and can assist.
If bad Janet poops because she chooses to and ends conversations with long farts, I’m a bit afraid of what a very bad Janet does…
The funny thing is on Reddit I was mostly a lurker/content consumer. There was little incentive to actually post because your post or comment was likely to just be drowned out in the absolute torrent of other posts/comments. Here I’m actually able to be heard.
No repost bots, karma farming, or idiots (mostly). The learning curve to joining the fediverse filters out your average facebook/twitter type that Reddit is filled with today. Lemmy right now is how Reddit was a decade ago
The learning curve to joining the fediverse filters out your average facebook/twitter type that Reddit is filled with today.
Let’s call a spade a spade lol this is honestly it.
Agreed. All of the comments against the protests on Reddit kind of give it away in how little they seem to actually understand how Reddit works and what made it great for so long. They see it as just another feed for them to browse and not a community to foster and participate in. Lemmy feels so great in comparison.
It’s really not hard to sign up either; for how small the barrier to entry actually is, it’s made a huge difference in demographics
It is still full of geekery: the sociopaths are not yet here. See:
Great read. I am fanatic then. 🫣
Thanks for the article.
So gatekeeping can have positive intentions.
I noticed two things, along with all the good answers in this thread:
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There is no such thing as Karma, and I hope it will never be implemented into the fediverse. The reason is that on Reddit Karma was handled like a currency, an in order to obtain Karma, the general quality of the content declined, as a result of Karma-farming. Also it was used as a threshold for posting comments in certain communities. Imagine you could join an instance only when you have a certain ammount of a Karma equivalent. That is something I don’t want to see.
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At this moment there are mostly tech savvy users (former heavy Reddit users) here, who are interested in creating content and participation. Also these folks are helping each other. It feels like a little community. I think, the threshold to join the fediverse is still too high for the average mainstream user. Maybe it will be easier to get started when there are mobile apps.
Karma is useful on things like discourse or mattermost as a spam prevention feature, you gradually expose features to people who aren’t being spammy. The same thing is true of a user joining a new community on the same site.
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I think the biggest impact is that the early adopters that have left reddit are the heavy users that respected the flow and community of Reddit. So the good of Reddit has come here, but the general populace and the keyboard warriors haven’t figured it out yet, fortunately.
Ehh I just like people owned things vs corporate overlords dictating what I can do or see. Keyboard warriors are here tho, have seen many an argument around here about whether to defederated this or ban that or nuke some country.
There was a time where the internet was a place for fun. Purely fun! No profit-based platforms, no mass abuse of users, no privacy violating practices, no forced ID verification, and no political correctness censorship enmass.
This age was known as The Golden Age of the Internet. It was something I saw gradually disappear like a frog being slowly boiled in water.
I’d like the hope we can one day come back to this era. The Golden Age was an escape from reality, while this corporate ran bullshit has been nothing but profit focused greed with a constant reminder of reality.
I cannot express in words how amazing the Golden Age was. We never knew we were in it until it was one day gone. Decentralization and freedom from centralized entities may allow the Internet the perhaps return to the Golden Age. An age where the Internet purely exists for everyone to have fun in and be able to express themselves freely without censorship.
Yeah, I loved the golden age. Back when everyone had a Geocities homepage and just linked to each other’s sites. Back when getting a link to your homepage into the Yahoo index meant something.
That’s sort of what I feel like this is - or at least that’s what I’ve felt from browsing Lemmy. No ads and no ragebait/doomscrolling. There’s nothing requiring that I stay engaged - in a way it’s almost respectful of my interests and time.
I remember when it died. Web 2.0
As in when the advertising apps came along, right?
It’s when YouTube and Social Media began to take off.
If I were given the opportunity, I wouldnt swtich back to the state of " the good old internet" .
It was full of popups and viruses. DL speed was 3kbps on good days. Hence without any form of streaming. Depending on operator, you had to pay for the landine communication between your PC and the provider. If a family member picked up the phone from another room while you were using the modem, you got dcded. Of course, one coulnt be joined by phone when he was using internet.
You have to weigh the pros and cons.
Just because we go back culturally, doesn’t mean we have to go back technologically as well.
The type of people to leave reddit over the shenanigans going on are certain demographic. The crowd is different, here, bc we’re more likely to deal with a new website that’s not run by narcissistic sociopaths even if there’s less content.
More left leaning for sure.
I find it a lot more like old forums, and there is a loooooot less ragebait (post about Matt Walsh and his piss fetish, Tim pool and his homoerotic fascism, etc).
It’s very refreshing and I find myself spending less time on here (searching for interesting content) but more time engaging (instead of lurking)
I like that I can block entire communities. Never gonna see those weird people that obsess over certain public figures, positively or negatively, again 😍
But that’s the thing, on R no matter what you blocked they still pop up in other feeds…so many “news”, meme etc. featuing those shits and here…nada. My thoughts are most of thier shit is bot driven, so here it wont get traction (yet) and if they do its easily avoided!
It’s not run to maximize shareholder value
That was my favorite part! Don’t you just love being a tiny cog on the capitalist wheel of despair?
On reddit I deliberately refrained from up/down voting because I hate feeding capitalist algorithms. I’m trying to unlearn that habit now.
At least here there is no algorithm I think?
The only algorithms here are for sorting posts based on activity and recency, rather than trying to maximize engagement so you see more ads. Also it’s all completely open source.
Certainly there’s some kind of algorithm behind sorting by Hot or Top Day or whatever, but it’s not trying to sell me stuff or sell my preferences to anybody
I just wish the orphan crushing machine wasn’t so slow. JUST DO IT!!! Or preferably don’t and stop sucking, but I know that won’t happen.
Even if they were to come out fire spez and go say ‘our bad let’s stop and talk about this’ I’m still not going back.
Likely you aren’t seeing astroturfing on a massive scale by corporate fiddling and complicit mods. It’s not curated to bait you.
Other people have made good points, but one I’ve noticed is that there’s no advertising or profit motive (so far) and there’s also no leadership that encourages dark patterns like increasing negative engagement through encouraging stuff like doomscrolling or starting or continuing arguments.
I’m on Kbin, and I like how by default all the notifications are turned off. So people aren’t automatically told to respond to every little thing they participate in. If they really care, they have to manually go back on check on things they wrote about or were engaged in. Makes it less likely that people will argue endlessly, lowering the quality of posts and replies, and derailing them with long subthreads of off topic discussions or arguments.
It is indeed refreshing. But not sure how long it will last.
By now, we’ve all been around the internet long enough to know that good things never last. That’s really life: Everything’s impermanent. Lemmy will probably suck someday, as will much of the fediverse. But I’m grateful it’s good right now and for the foreseeable future.
It could suck someday, but it doesn’t suffer from the same things that made myspace -> facebook -> reddit suck. No money hungry executives profiting off underpaying employees to implement features no one asked for and selling astroturfing as a service. At least it doesn’t seem that there’s astroturfing as a service here yet.
You’re right. The fediverse is definitely in a better position to ward off the suck.
No money hungry executives
I think that’s going to be the key difference. You can destroy something good, but to really destroy it takes an executive.
We didn’t think those things would suck initially either. Facebook was amazing around 2004 - 2006 before it opened up to the general public.
I don’t think I know a single person who ever thought Facebook was “amazing”… Even back then.
Before it opened up to the general public, we used it to organize parties, share photos without concern, and keep in touch with friends that went to other colleges. There wasn’t anything else like it.
I have hope that as the big corporations enter the Fediverse and start enshittifying it, some of us can sneak off to new instances that just don’t federate with them. Then the masses can enjoy their Meta-branded Fediverse, and the tech bros can make their money from it, while the rest of us carry on quietly in a parallel one.
Let’s hope it keeps that glimmer!
I’m realizing that a few weeks ago I wanted a lot of people to flock to Lemmy and away from Reddit. At this point I just don’t think about Reddit anymore and find myself hoping Lemmy doesn’t get too popular because of everything that comes with that (trolls, meme posters, bots)
Just wait until September… ;)
The flood will eventually come
Haha, I was around then, when AOL got big it was like, well there goes the neighborhood.
We’re not all trapped in the same building anymore. You can just move to a different instance and still have the same software experience but with the community you prefer.
