OK, let’s try this again. My post got auto-filtered. Maybe the image triggered something? Anyways, apologies if this isn’t the right sub for this. I wanted to get an outsider’s perspective on my experience on Lemmy.
Every. Single. Thread. has the word “capitalism” or “Trump” in it somewhere. I’m sick to death of it. Even though I agree with a lot of the sentiment, the erosion of the middle class, the concentration of wealth, the consolidation of media, the “you will own nothing and be happy” mentality permeating the consumer space. In many ways that’s why I joined Lemmy, but dang it that doesn’t mean I want to talk about absolutely nothing else. Someone once defined a fanatic as “Someone who won’t change their mind and won’t change the subject” and that fits the average Lemming to a T.
And the only communities devoid of politics are also devoid of content. I do a lot of worldbuilding stuff, and I’ve tried to make the worldbuilding community there more active, but sometimes I feel like I’m the only poster. Then I look at r/worldbuilding, and there’s a glut of really interesting posts showcasing people’s imagination and creativity, and nary a mention of Musk or Epstein in sight.
I understand that people’s political opinions are bound to show up obliquely in even unrelated communities, but I can’t overstate how monomaniacal Lemmings are about it. The pic I originally tried to post was a screenshot of a completely non sequitur post in an unrelated community (sorry for the vagueness I think the specifics may have also tripped the auto filter). And Lemmings are always “on”. If you go to mildlyinteresting on lemmy.world right now, you’ll see maybe one or two posts about things like yellow stop signs or three-chambered peanuts, you know, stuff that’s actually mildly interesting, and every other post is stuff like “French president explains the political consequences of AI”. Is that important and worth discussing? Absolutely. What it isn’t is mildly interesting.
When I bring this up on Lemmy, the response is always “Politics is everything and we should never shut up ever!” But even Anne Frank wrote about other stuff in her diary sometimes.
And then there’s the tech side of things. Hope you like Linux, cuz that’s all you’re going to see. And if you dare suggest that Linux may not be the right choice for your blind grandmother, you get eviscerated in the comments.
Granted, Reddit itself used to have a similar problem. It attracted a very specific type of user (neckbeards) and the experience wasn’t great if you weren’t one, but ironically the same popularization of Reddit that lead to its platform decay also solved this homogeneity problem. Similarly, Tankies and their ilk seem to flock to Lemmy, explaining the tone of the discourse.
Others have pointed out that Reddit alternatives tend to attract people who were banned from Reddit (remember Voat?) and I think that explains a lot.
In summary, Lemmy seems great if you’re a Marxist who uses Linux, but pretty much nobody else. Am I crazy? Should I try to stick with it in the hope it gets better?
so how do we get this guy on Linux? lol
Well I am a Marxist who uses linux…
But even Anne Frank wrote about other stuff in her diary sometimes.
Such a banger line lmao. Honestly decent criticisms throughout, I’d love to see more active niche communities that aren’t politics related but unfortunately I only know how to shitpost
It’s just a problem of critical mass. Niche communities are, well… niche. They appeal to only a small subset of the population. For them to be populated enough to be active, the overall user count needs to massively grow. But sometimes it feels like that’s not what people on here want. I mean, even in this very thread there are people saying they don’t want “normies” here.
You have to start out with the whole feed and then just block things until it becomes your home feed.
Skill issue. To be less flippant, you have to do some work up front and there is no algorithm to do it for you. I have an account on a few instances and between them I have plenty of variety and activity in spaces that are not just politically focused. Try other strategies if the one you’re using doesn’t yield the results you want.
The person who typed this out has definitely been putting in the effort in worldbuilding.
yes but we need to make this stuff require 0 skill
Hard disagree. That’s how “brain rot” has become an actual thing and not just a meme phrase. Putting effort into something is good for your brain.
Valid criticism, some valid observations. But also you need to make sure you’re looking at the majority of federated sites, not just one server for activity.
The majority of my posts and interests are not covered by my home instance yet. I still have a great time on this platform.
This person is 100% about the relentless usaian political whinging. It’s so hard to find anything cool and fun on here.
Slrpnk had more but got blown up and unrelenting drama seeking “power users” (lmao) drove off most of the interesting people.
Same thing happened to masto
Slrpnk had more but got blown up and unrelenting drama seeking “power users” (lmao) drove off most of the interesting people.
Could you elaborate what you mean? I’ve been a slrpnk admin for near 3 years, and I haven’t seen any power user drama addicts on the instance. I’m also not sure what you mean by blown up (too popular? We’re still a smallish instance with 380 monthly users).
Personally I think we still have quite a lot of interesting posts and discussions in our communities.
Bad phrasing, me ahh culp ah :p
-loads of downtime and unreliable access caused pop to drop (only unique problem)
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slrpnk suffers from the same problem as the rest of lemmy with posts being drowned out by like 5 people posting 20 things a day to low effort communities.
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The harrassing coms on lemmy (I don’t think there are any on slrpnk to your credit) like shitXssay and stuff drove off users that didn’t want to get recruited into useless conflict.
Ah, I see.
Slrpnk went down only twice for an extended period in the 4 years its been up, each time only for about a week before it was fixed and back online. Both times were due to unforeseen hardware issues (since it’s self-hosted and running on solar power, in-line with our ideals). Without trying to offend, I think you may have an exaggerated view of how unreliable our server has been. Our uptime over 4 years is 98.91%.
We also didn’t see any lengthy drop of our active monthly users. Once they discovered we were back up, our numbers returned to normal, and we’ve continued to see steady growth, with a consistent active monthly userbase, per our fediverse observer stats:
To your second point, I believe it is relatively easy for a user to block those more active communities if they dislike them.
I’m not the person you have to convince lol. Also around half of every day I try I can’t hit slrpnk.
Reacting to criticism of lemmy by getting defensive is part of why lemmy continues to suck.
Just look at the instance’s front page atm. When a user logs in they see a lot of reposted news and posts by like 5 different people.
One discussion about foraging, nothing creative or original. These are hard problems to address but they’re why people bounce.
Also around half of every day I try I can’t hit slrpnk.
I obviously visit Slrpnk very often each day, and I do not have that problem despite being halfway around the globe from where the server is located, and none of our users have reported issues accessing the site. If you cannot access slrpnk, I do not believe the issue is on our end. Do you get any sort of error when you can’t access it?
I am not trying to be defensive, but I am going to push back slightly on your framing of our instance if it contains misleading or incorrect information of our server that could unintentionally harm our reputation.
One discussion about foraging, nothing creative or original.
I also see a post from our zine, self-hosting, vegan, BIFL, Green energy, and Nolawns communities, as well as a fantastic post with imaginative original content in our Solarpunk Art community.
Just timeouts, slrpnk isn’t alone many lemmy instances have issues with loads. While writing the following list I had to wait about 5 seconds for a page load and often refresh or wait a long time for images to load. Users won’t do this.
Let’s go through the list:
- Low effort image screenshot from user track_shovel, 3 comments
- news from major news outlet nytimes, user silence7, 3 comments
- Link to a pdf download about “ai” (presumably llms) sucking, user foxymochakitten, 2 comment
- news from major news outlet, user Haraldvonblauzahn, 64 comments
- news from niche news site, user schizoidman, 0 comments
- news from major news outlet, user silence7, 11 comments
- news from major news outlet, user schizoidman, 0 comments
- Low effort image screenshot from user track_shovel, 2 comments
- A video link about finding cheap hardware for hosting, user prodigal frog, 14 comments
- news specific to a small area of the world, user silence7, 4 comments
- A contextless photograph of a plant and a lament about the lack thereof, user durian, 2 comments
- post about some very specific product, user xcel, 1 comment
- A not topical film on youtube, user cm0002, 0 comments
- A photo of food not bombs, user prodigalfrog, 0 comments
- news from major news outlet, user silence7, 0 comments
- link to a youtube video about a new kind of powerplant, user povoq, 7 comments
- A photo of a river, user jacobcoffinwrites, 2 comments
- A video link about no lawns, user greatwhitebuffalo41, 4 comments
- A post about foraging nettles, user korhaka, 3 comments
Many of these posts are hours or days old, niche, and all the news has probably already been seen by a potential new user.
This doesn’t look like a place someone could jump in or post their own stuff, it looks like a place that people post news and nobody reacts to it.
I don’t know how to do better but a lot of lemmy looks like this. Just reposts from other more popular social media sites and US news (often sad).
I like slrpnk, after the reddit flood it was one of the most chill places on lemmy with a lot of exposure to niche news/hobbies/resources. The problems aren’t unique to slrpnk, but you’ve gotta understand why when seeing something like that and already worried about technical burden a user is just going to bounce off because it looks like a worse reddit.
Just timeouts, slrpnk isn’t alone many lemmy instances have issues with loads. While writing the following list I had to wait about 5 seconds for a page load and often refresh or wait a long time for images to load. Users won’t do this.
I’m not experiencing that, personally. When I visit slrpnk it loads pretty much instantly, and I don’t have to wait for images to load at all, they appear as I scroll. I haven’t experienced any timeouts. You are currently the only person who has reported any sort of issue along those lines, and without more information it will be difficult to diagnose.
Is this occurring from visiting the page on a desktop browser? I have had issues with comments or images not displaying without a refresh when using the Summit app, but regular browsers and every other app I’ve tried has worked as expected.
There was a bug in older versions of Lemmy that would cause a browser to cache potentially gigabytes of data, causing the site to slow to a crawl. Does performance improve if you delete all data/cookies associated with slrpnk from your browser?
Many of these posts are hours or days old, niche,
The default sort is Active, those old posts are still getting comments, otherwise they wouldn’t show up as active. If sorting by New, only the very last post on the front page is over 24h old. However, much of the appeal of reddit was the comments, so I don’t think switching to New being the default would be ideal, since newer posts tend to have less comments.
and all the news has probably already been seen by a potential new user.
Can’t say I agree with that assessment. Many people are not chronically online or already have good news sources for the topics posted about on slrpnk.
If you feel that the type of content posted on slrpnk isn’t appealing, then there’s not much I can say against that, as that is your subjective feeling. However, I think your own bias against the content posted there, such as news, may be leading you to conclude that it won’t appeal to anyone else.
Even during its best days, Reddit was still ultimately a link aggregator with a forum attached below with most of it being news, and some smaller communities having more of a focus on original content, just as slrpnk does.
To maybe be more constructive something you might want to consider is fostering people sharing stuff communally. Lemmy will never beat reddit at being reddit and a lot of reddit is awful anyway.
Something vegantheoryclub used to do was a chat thread each week with a topic to discuss and to just share what’s going on or talk in an unstructured way. You could consider something weekly to support community formation, something that makes someone go “oh! this is why you start using lemmy. This is what you can’t get on reddit!”
We create a pinned community discussion thread each month, and invite our users to participate in the comments with any ideas, happenings in their lives, introductions, etc. We consider it, and call it, the instance’s town square.
The moderator of our writing community also creates a monthly discussion inviting people to discuss the projects they’ve been working on.
I wouldn’t be opposed to more of our moderators creating monthly or weekly threads in their communities, it’s a good suggestion.
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Whenever I recommend Lemmy/Piefed to a friend, I point them to a feed with low/no politics and low/no tech:
- memes/humor: https://piefed.social/f/highmemecontent
- fewer memes: https://piefed.social/f/highsignal
Fair in many respects but also I think he may be unaware of the ideologies that go unchallenged and invisibly by in his “non political” communities. Sorry we’re woke and notice things??
… if you dare suggest that Linux may not be the right choice for your blind grandmother, you get eviscerated in the comments.
Stopped reading here, this is just the view of someone who isn’t used to being in a community that treats windows as the few facto choice.
No, there’s other stuff here, you just have to look for it a bit
Finding them shouldn’t be so hard though. Surely we can make the search function better. If I search for a community I’d at least like to be greeted by the most active versions at the top. I’ve no idea how it ranks them right now.
yea https://lemmyverse.net/communities is better for that
also we should probably have starter packs of communities for users to subscribe to, I know Lemmy v1.0 will allow us to do this, and PieFed already can do this (but I think it’s underutilized for this purpose)
were banned from Reddit
I was banned off reddit plenty of times - never stopped me from going back. What finally drove me off is the post-Oct 7th liberal counter-insurgency campaign that made serious political discussion on reddit next-to impossible.
Find a Lemmy instance that heavily moderates political speech, then. That may be hard to find since Lemmy is full of people who expressed their political opinions on reddit and were banned.
The people coming here after the third party API shutdown, I’m sorry, but you made a political protest. You are doing the politics. If you don’t like what Reddit is doing as a company, you are engaging in politics. You need to stop expressing your personal opinions and views for Reddit if you want to claim political apathy. Otherwise, you are engaging in political speech, and that’s “bad” apparently, so stop it!
Seems right, except I don’t think that it’s mostly people who were banned from Reddit.
There’s too few users here to keep the niche communities alive. That’s why only politics gets discussed, because that’s something affecting everyone regardless of interest.
We also don’t have a lot of original content. Neither did Reddit originally, but they managed to get a massive userbase through the AMA subreddit giving users the possibility to ask celebrities questions. This often got picked up by the tabloid news which spread the word of it’s existence. It turned out that their AMAs was basically a one person job anyway. I don’t think they’ve done anything remotely useful since that to justify their userbase.
Anyway. I kind of like the slower pace here. I went to Reddit the other day after years of hiatus. I don’t know why anyone would want to sign up for that site anymore. Everything there seems to drown in advertising and generic shit. Even if Lemmy should shut down for some reason, I would not go back to the garbage piles on Reddit.
I use a local instance and I think they do a good job of facilitating debate and local insights on local news. I suppose that’s the main purpose of this kind of forum. All the other larger and more international instances are just entertainment to me. I could get by just fine without seeing another Trump meme ever again. Unless it’s really funny.
I’m pretty sure Lemmy does have potential to use these communities better. It’s a lot of clever people. I think if anyone can and wants to make more original content with Lemmy as a base, just for the sake of it, they should just go ahead do it. The admins and mods are too busy running the sites, so we shouldn’t expect them to it.
Understandably, artists probably want a larger market exposure for a start, but other kinds of projects might be suitable. I remember someone have tried making a group for game development on Reddit several times. It always fails, because they’re too big and not committed. I also participated in a sub for random users writing on the same book. That was mildly succesful, and a lot easier to do. Stuff like that might make sense to try.
Erosion of the middle class is a bad thing? What’s the class in the middle of 🤔
You lost me at “Redditor” lol
Fuck Spez
He isn’t wrong, but you also need to block/filter out the tankie instances.
Also there is a lot of trans persons content. I didn’t see thr OP mention that.
