hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!

  •  Sphere   ( @sphere_au@reddthat.com ) 
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    12911 months ago

    I’ve checked both Reddit and Lemmy since I created my Lemmy account yesterday. Reddit has lost a number of subreddits I used to read and the feed seems decidedly less interesting overall. Although the equivalents to all the subreddits I used don’t necessarily exist here, there is some good information here (particularly IT-related) and I think the overall feel of the community here is better - people seem (so far at least) largely pretty reasonable and there aren’t the armies of contrarians or downvoters just wanting to spread their anger at the world to everyone else. So, overall, win some, lose some, and if I end up just here instead of Reddit, I think any losses there will be offset by gains here. Which if you think about it makes Lemmy look pretty good, given that it is (a) relatively new; (b) volunteer-run and funded; © much, much smaller than Reddit.

    •  Sens   ( @Senseibu@feddit.uk ) 
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      11 months ago

      People say Lemmy is too complicated for most people, well that’s probably a good thing as it naturally filters out the people who only want to incite anger for upvotes. There’s no love on Reddits main subreddits anymore

      Also it’s not that hard to understand anyway.

      • In terms of complexity, becoming conversant enough in how Lemmy works to do basic things feels on par with IRC. The expectations about how easy it is to hop on a service and start using it have shifted significantly because of the centralization of the past couple of decades, but the evidence available from comparing the tone of Reddit to here suggests the speed bump is helpful.

        •  Kushan   ( @Kushan@beehaw.org ) 
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          4411 months ago

          I disagree, it’s easy to say that a barrier to entry is good because it keeps out trolls and those that just want to insight hate, but really those people will find a way when anything gets popular enough to bother with. Meanwhile, that same barrier prevents a lot of underserved people joining in and they’re left to deal with the same toxic people we’re trying to avoid ourselves.

          The centralised services didn’t succeed because they were centralised, they succeeded because they lowered the barrier to entry drastically. It’s a lot easier to do that when you’re centralised, but that’s something we’ll have to overcome if we want this community and others like it to succeed. Otherwise we’ll just slowly die inside our own echo chamber.

            •  Pigeon   ( @Lowbird@beehaw.org ) 
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              1311 months ago

              I think it’s not necessarily just dumber or more impatient people who can be soft-locked out by this, though. People who are too short on time to put a lot into hobbies (e.g. single mom working two jobs, and others with very busy irl lives) or learning a new unfamiliar system may also be left out, or older people with a anxieties or self-defeating beliefs about their ability to learn. And remembering here also that we are used to learning new internet systems, but that’s a skill in itself even though it feels easy to us.

              Leaving people on platforms that have ad-drive, hate-elevating algorithms also has consequences for all of us when it comes to politics and conspiracy spread.

              Technology is a tool, and the tool should be as intuitive to a human newly encountering it as possivle, imo. If people make the same mistakes or have the same confusion with something again and again, it means the system is badly designed for humans, not that the humans are dumb.

              • I don’t get where all this talk of the Fediverse being daunting to learn comes from. I thought it would be like setting DIP switches on a dot matrix printer…but I selected my usual username, provided email for backup, short summary of why I’m here - bam! Connecting to the rest of the Verse, how it’s all interconnected, well, that’s a titch more involved - but to me it’s just registering again at lemmy or kbin, and I can link things up when I have the time.

                The analogy of continents/states/counties/towns sums it up well. There was a really good post at reddit summarizing things.

      •  StingJay   ( @StingJay@lemmy.ml ) 
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        3611 months ago

        You’re right Lemmy is going to take a bit to get used to, but the kicker for me (and maybe a lot of people) is going to be at the end of the month when the 3rd party apps shut down. I’m either going to have to get used to something new either way, whether it be Lemmy or the official Reddit app and my understanding is that the official app is littered with ads and promotions that no one cares about so I probably won’t even bother.

        •  Kayzels   ( @Kayzels@lemmy.world ) 
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          1211 months ago

          Yeah. I’m not willing to use the official Reddit app. I tried for a day, and it was terrible. Using Lemmy with Jerboa feels natural, because the interface is very similar to the app I used for Reddit - Boost. There are communities I will miss, but it’s nice to actually see the fediverse start to grow, and participate in it. It’s hard to change from being a lurker to actually commenting, but the community feels more tight-knit.

      •  araquen   ( @araquen@beehaw.org ) 
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        2611 months ago

        I’m old and easily bamboozled by all this newfangled tech, and at first the whole fediverse thing was overwhelming. But eventually I realized it was not too different than an MMO’s multiple servers, and the idea of cross-realm and connected realms, and it functions not that much differently than a network mesh. You have multiple stand-alone nodes that are capable of cross-communications, so participate in a shared experience, and if one of the nodes goes down, the network will work around it.

        It’s really not complicated once you give yourself time to think. And as long as the interface allows for the aggregation of random tidbits of data as we were accustomed to with Reddit, how the technology feeds that is not something the average user needs to worry about.

        The only real difference between Reddit and Lemmy is that there is a bit more “hard wiring” that needs to be done by the user in order to set up a custom feed on Lemmy, but other than that, the user experience isn’t dreadfully different once the dust settles.

    •  Woofcat   ( @Woofcat@lemmy.ca ) 
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      3411 months ago

      I’m really hoping that lemmy can see a larger uptick in engagement. I know I should be the change I want to see in the world. However the thing I miss the most is pointless arguments in the comments section. :D