I imagine there’s excitement for the increase of activity but worries about the potential toxic side of Reddit coming along too.

I’d especially be interested in the Lemmy devs’ opinions.

  •  vxnxnt   ( @hamborgr@feddit.de ) 
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    11 months ago

    I’m actually quite pleased at the new influx of users! There’s finally a good amount of activity and real discussion going on here, instead of just posts with links to articles with zero comments and no real OC.

    Aside from that, I have enough faith in the moderators and the structure of the platform itself that there shouldn’t be too much of a toxicity problem. Honestly, my own biggest fear is just that a lot of the new users here lose interest and move on, returning the platform to its earlier days.

    For now, I just hope that the servers don’t go down in flames when the 12th comes around. I can’t wait to see how this platform will look further down the road though!

  • I’m in Lemmy for, like, two years? Mostly lurking. I’ve been looking for alternatives for longer than that though.

    I feel like the monsoon is mostly welcome. Content quality may decrease a bit, but the quantity will make up for it. And quantity is what has been missing IMO.

    In special I’m hoping for specialised instances about some subjects that I enjoy. I like the Lemmy instance but stuff like anime and conlanging “feels” off-topic here.

    • In special I’m hoping for specialised instances about some subjects that I enjoy. I like the Lemmy instance but stuff like anime and conlanging “feels” off-topic here.

      Do you mean for subscribing to the communities of these new instances, or would you completely switch to that instance (create a new account there)?

      I’ve noticed some lags/asyncronity with non-home instance content. I guess it would make sense to be home wherever is the most and best fitting communities. But that would also mean leaving behind the stuff of the current account.

    • Hear hear!
      I expect to be some bumps on the road, but the Lemmyverse was really quiet until recently. Now it’s gaining so much life and shaping into an active and pleasant platform :3

    • Quantity has a quality all its own. I’m glad everyone here is so welcoming and looking forward to seeing how things develop.

      Just to note, I just came from Reddit. I’m hoping for a critical mass of folks so we get those niche and specialty communities.

      • Yup. I got a few of them, although they’re mostly too incomplete to use for conversation. Most of them for a constructed world.

        In special I feel like I should be able to help newbies with phonetics and phonology. Not just “how to read the IPA”, but also stuff like “how to choose phonemes and allophones that fit the goal of your conlang”.

  • Well:

    • I’m annoyed at calling people who dislike an app and choose another website “refugees”
    • I’m happy that we’re going to have more activity
    • I hope more instances will be built and maintained, because I don’t think the large number of new members can be moderated effectively if they keep flocking to the same handful of instances
    • When in doubt, I hope moderators will be too strict rather than not enough, especially in the beginning to make sure the behavioural expectations are very clear
        •  JasSmith   ( @JasSmith@lemmy.ml ) 
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          911 months ago

          I agree. “Powermods” became a thing 10 years ago and it’s been terrible for the site. Advertising companies pay teams of people to ensure subreddits remain advertiser friendly, and friendly to their portfolio of products. Reddit tolerates this because those moderators are free labour, keep the site clean, and post lots of “content.” I’m hopeful that, if Lemmy takes off, federation will allow us to wall off obvious cases of abuse without administrators stepping in, as they have done again, and again, and again on Reddit.

    • just to emphasize your point there about calling people refugees. I always lurked reddit to the point of using libreddit only lately, and never felt the drive to contribute

      with reddit’s shenanigans, I found out about this place in one of the posts asking for alternatives and it’s a whole different atmosphere and I feel more comfortable not lurking anymore

      all this to say that I am here because of reddit’s actions, but I’m not a refugee

  • I’m an ex Reddit user. It seems inevitable that the Reddit admins will lock out third party access - I could be wrong but based on recent years, Reddit doesn’t like to listen to it’s community.

    I hope that the toxicity stays away, but it’s likely there will be toxic users at some point. My main gripe with Reddit was the lack of actual reading. Most mainstream subs were just memes / circlejerks / pics. I’d much prefer to learn something or read something of value over “lol-ing” at a pic.

    I’m keen to see how Lemmy grows.

    • Wanting to learn something hits the nail on the head. I recently came to the realization that I used to learn things on reddit, especially in the comments. Not sure when that stopped but it’s why I had been wishing for an alternative for a while.

      • I still learn things there. I keep my subscriptions pretty clean and tailored to really interesting things, but have a mulrireddit called “fun” where I can browser brainlessly and have a laugh.

    • Yes, toxicity will inevitably appear more (it was already present in small amounts 🙃) but I’m hopeful the lack of a karma system may help to mitigate some of Reddit’s typical “bad behavior”.

  •  comfy   ( @comfy@lemmy.ml ) 
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    11 months ago

    Honestly, while most people here have been alright, toxic newcomers have been a problem and I consider this place ill-prepared to handle them in a bigger wave than this one.

    There has already been an observable culture shift, and some nasty screaming when some newcomers used to being a majority are challenged in their views and shocked to find a nontrivial pushback. And I feel that lemmy.ml will undergo a similar event to /r/antiwork if there isn’t staff action taken , where the place loses all its values and just becomes a sanewashed recuperated place that feels cheated when its founders keep saying what they said from the start. People largely just don’t read rules or sidebars, it seems, and realize lemmy.ml explicitly says it isn’t a general unthemed instance for everyone. It’s broad, but not ‘reddit’ broad, nor (pretending to be) politically neutral. Relevant source

    Edit: I realize this may come off as “why aren’t other people doing more things!”. I realize the staff/devs are overloaded, I’m not blaming them to telling them to drop things. But I regret how few moderating/admin staff were recruited, and we’re seeing how many communities were made 4 years ago and have no active moderation, nor culture to avoid this becoming ‘reddit but here’.

    • I don’t know how to interpret “everyone should feel welcome here” other than it is for everyone. As far as culture shift, it really is impossible to maintain the more “fringe” leftist culture with an increase in users, marxist-leninist simply do not exist in large enough numbers. I don’t really see why lemmy.ml shifting its majority political leaning would be something negative to you, since the only thing that would happen would be more discussion in the comments, and if discussion isn’t something desirable, places like lemmygrad do exist

      • I’m not even talking about the M-Ls, I mean even as broad as anti-capitalism and tech/FOSS. There was a meta discussion a while back I started seeking clarification on what “leftist” in the lemmy.ml blurb means, suggesting something less vague. Because to the devs, it evidently doesn’t mean ‘progressive capitalists’.

        This isn’t just some preference, because these factors are precisely why Lemmy won’t become another reddit disaster. And no, they’re not niche groups. Even on reddit, these communities are substantial!

  •  cecirdr   ( @cecirdr@lemmy.ml ) 
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    11 months ago

    I’m new here from Reddit. I was a former Digg user. Over the past few years, Reddit has gotten swamped with spam and low quality content. I was most at home there on the niche subreddits that were still earnest and not spammy. I hope things stay that way over here.

    I’ve made a small donation to help Lemmy grow. It’s not much, but scaling up to handle the escapees is a big deal. Having the money to grow and build robust processes to keep content thoughtful and helpful is important. While I love the funny posts and memes sometimes on reddit, it’s really infested the popular subreddits to the point of being excessive. Ergo, I tend to hang out in smaller spaces where the dialog is more “straight up”.

  • I’m one of the new ones, but I’ve been aware of and interacted with Lemmy and Mastodon for at least a couple of years.

    For me, I liked what I saw but felt like they lacked enough of the network effect to convince my nontechnical friends to make the jump with me. That made me concerned that they would shrivel up and die. I’d recently been interacting a bit more though, Mastodon especially, since I’d say its gained a good amount of traction given Twitter’s…cancerous CEO. Every couple months I found myself downloading Tusky and Jerboa to mess around, but hadn’t made it a habit.

    Reddit’s API changes were a line in the sand for me though. I decided I didn’t care about my friends following anymore, and I was ready for a smaller community again, with less rage bait and predatory capitalism.

    Does that make me the wrong sort of refugee?

  • I joined the Beehaw instance a bit ago with a small exodus from Tildes, another Reddit alternative. It’s been nice to see the community grow and grow steadily as time progressed, and seeing the Reddit refugees makes me hopeful for the platform’s strength going into the future regardless of what Reddit does with its API (or other features).

    As for the toxic side of Reddit, I’m more concerned for the devs in having to deal with the reports, but as a Reddit mod myself, I don’t think it’ll be too bad. At least on Beehaw we have a supportive community and I’m reminded of a video talking about the userbase of the early UseNet and how they dealt with the first spammer (not necessarily their methods, but the fact that they rose up as a community to enforce a community rule). Hopefully we can see that here (i.e. “the report button exists”).

    Edit: a detail

  • I’m excited to see new communities, more communities, more participation. I’m dreading the inevitable periodic and maybe frequent drops of servers as they struggle to cope with the influx and admins learn how to scale.

    EDIT: oh shit, my eyes just skipped right over the whole of “before” in the title