The “Not enough mod tools” complaint is valid and I hope that improves as the platform moves forward.
I DO NOT get the disdain for the Lemmy userbase. I’ve been here for the past 4-5 months and can say I’ve had so many more meaningful and fulfilling conversations here on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit in the 10 years I was there.
I think it’s the same situation as between a small town and a big city. Reddit is huge and with a large number of people; you’re going to statistically get a larger number of assholes. Not to mention there are tens of thousands of people commenting on anything that hits r/all, so there’s no chance someone else is going to read your 1 comment that is drowning in a sea of other comments.
Lemmy feels more like a small town. Things move a little slower here, but there’s less competition to have your voice heard, and I end up seeing some of the same users time and time again across the Fediverse. I think that smaller feel means more people have a chance to see your content without it getting drowned out by the masses, which means more opportunity to make connections.
Some people suck, but Lemmy has been fucking awesome for me so far and I love this place because of that.
New users who aren’t defederated from Lemmygrad and hexbear by default are what contribute to that perception
Idk. It seems like that was a bot trying to dissuade people from leaving Reddit. One of the reasons we left Reddit was bc of the bots.
I had that kind of “astroturf-y” feel from the Reddit comment as well, but their opinion about mod tools is not entirely wrong.
The fear-mongering about CSAM being all over the place hasn’t been my experience, though. I’ve never come across CSAM here on Lemmy (sorry to those who have), but I don’t tend to keep NSFW posts on because I cruise Lemmy at work.
I think CSAM isn’t prevalent here because the groups posting it know that they will get nuked from orbit by every other instance for doing so. I think there is still plenty of CSAM content posted on lemmy, but not on the main federated net/web, instead on a private net/web (you can whitelist federate instances, which would likely be what any group of instances handling illicit material would opt for)
CSAM isn’t tagged as NSFW, because it’s trolls (criminals) posting it. I think the admins have been pretty on the ball with removing it though
To be honest, the only CSAM I’ve encountered is having it mentioned during the Purge back when it happened. Nothing else. As far as I know Lemmy is quite well moderated.
CSAM? What is that, I’ve never seen any NSFW at all.
“Child Sexual Abuse Material”. It is the new name for “child pornography”.
Ewwwwww
Can we please stop calling anyone who doesn’t agree with us a bot?
How is that a bot to you?
Same here. I have had better experience here than reddit. Much fewer one line / meme responses and more actual discussion on a topic.
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I’m glad you shared your experience, honestly.
I’m happy with what I’ve seen here, but I’ll also say that I didn’t hang out in too many smaller subreddits. Even when I did, I saw some vitrol come out on the regular. Maybe the vibe on smaller subreddits is better than Lemmy?
Either way, I’m glad you’re here.
I’ve had so many more meaningful and fulfilling conversations here on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit in the 10 years I was there.
For one thing, it feels there is so much stronger of a push here to read the article instead of just the headline. Especially appreciated when someone adds the article to the post or leaves it in a comment. TLDR bot isn’t for me but it helps.
There’s also so much less of a push to be that meme comment that hits the top. There are still jokes but it’s not this barrage of people trying to be the class clown at the expense of meaningful conversation.
But especially the bots. Holy crap the bots were making it such a headache. The same comment slightly adjusted then posted over and over as replies to top comments for karma farming. The same stolen repost on 20 slightly similar subreddits and it doesn’t really belong on half of them. Not that Lemmy would be immune to this if it were as big as Reddit but sheesh I wish Reddit cared about the quality of content. They’re fine with whatever keeps people coming back and I guess that kind of content appeals to the most people.
Yeah this is basically like reddit prior to the DIGG migration. People are much nicer here.
As a 10+ year reddit user who has switched 98% to Lemmy, only checking reddit on my computer every couple days: Lemmy is completely fine, and I have seamlessly transitioned from Reddit.
Its userbase is more technical than Reddit’s, and there’s not as much content. But it is a perfectly good Reddit alternative. I find it isn’t as addictive as reddit, which is awesome. I just wish there were more educational communities akin to AskHistorians, AskScience, etc.
I’m a 15-year user of Reddit. Lemmy right now is very similar to very early Reddit. Reddit’s users were more technical back then, too. I’m betting the early adopters of places like this are usually the technical types.
Another nice thing about Lemmy is that a lot of the low-effort, casual users on Reddit haven’t gotten here yet. Interaction here is definitely a lot more pleasant.
Also 15 year account and 100% agreed.
Lotta people coming here from Reddit expecting 1:1 replacement, and then get pissy that the 2 man dev team that’s just trying to keep up with this sudden burst in activity isn’t at parity with the multi-million dollar company that’s been developing their site for almost 2 decades.
Honestly, I’m just tired of the constant comparison. Lemmy can be it’s own thing. It’s a work in progress and it has a lot of promise, but for anyone looking for their reddit experience, there’s really only one place to get that.
"I don’t like Reddit.
Its interface is ugly as sin. There are fewer users there and they’re all pretentious, extremely liberal, and anti American."
-Some Digg user circa 2008/2009 (probably)
and anti American
Based
One day I will wake up, realize ‘based’ went the way of ‘tubular’ and probably still not have an objective definition.
“Tubular” I can at least trace where it came from. It’s surfer lingo. Sometimes when you catch a wave, the wave crests all the way over you and encloses into a tube. Surfing through that is supposedly the most euphoric thing about the sport. “Tubular” is thus “anything that makes you feel the way a surfer surfing through a tube-shaped wave feels”. Thrill, wonder, excitement, etc.
I have no idea where tf “based” came from. Wiktionary suggests that it ultimately comes from the chemical definition of “base” (i.e. the opposite of an acid). “Freebasing” is a way of converting certain drugs, particularly cocaine, into smokable form by converting them from acid to base. Rapper Lil B. is alleged to have coined “based” to describe his lifestyle as someone who is unafraid to be himself as an individual (which, I guess, included smoking crack). This supposedly filtered into 4chan to become an alt-right slogan for “admirable person who bravely maintains alt-right opinions in spite of adversity” (“based and redpilled”), and later was claimed by groups outside the alt-right to simply mean, “someone with admirable opinions”.
My closest guess is “based in reality”.
I was familiar with its use referring to baseheads, and later took it to mean based in facts. https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/based/
Doesn’t Tubular mean “reminiscent of the Mike Oldfield track”?
The only times I’ve seen toxicity like this is ironically whenever there is a big wave of reddit user influx, things usually settle down for a while as they adapt to the cultures here (or get banned), it’s not as much of an Eternal September as much as it is a Irregularly Scheduled September.
Most of the active comms here are smaller but better quality than their subreddit equivalent. You even get good discussions here on memes sometimes. (Politics and News here still could be better, though.)
For someone who’s been very unhappy with the state of social media for quite a while, Lemmy is a breath of fresh air, even though there are definitely growing pains.
I’d rather deal with this supposedly “toxic” lemmy userbase than sift through a thousand comment post where 900 are bot reposts on reddit
Lol, the user doesn’t seem to realize that if everywhere you go and comment, if absolutely everyone is an asshole, then maybe it’s you that’s the problem…
There’s also a chance everyone else is actually an asshole, but here that almost definitely isn’t it.
True.
Yes I was thinking in those lines. If they deliverd garbage and then was annoyed that they got garbage back.
Guy is hundred percent right. Lemmy is a echo chamber for a certain demographic as vast majority of users are in it.
We either have tech, or politics. Literally every topic ends up in either. We also don’t have the differing opinions aspect as just about every debater talks like they’re just the different shade of the same color.
Even spicy news that would make any other site a warzone of opinions just echo chambered here. Literally everyone agrees on one conclusion and random two comments that disagree with that having at least -15 points.
Yeah reddit is already a tiny bit of an echo chamber (tech savvy, frequently online folks). Lemmy is worse (every other post is "big tech bad, Linux good, privacy ftw). Not that these are necessarily bad things, they’re just not representative of the general population.
Reddit has echo chambers in the different subreddits, and they can be about as vicious or more than Lemmy instances.
they’re just not representative of the general population.
Good. If I wanted the general population, I’d scroll Facebook
We either have tech, or politics.
You forgot about Star Trek memes. Although often those are about tech and politics.
Star Trek memes are the only things keeping me on platform lmao
This is what 35 years of right-wing talk radio turning any cultural event into a political crusade has gotten us. The right wing echo chamber has brain-poisoned so many Americans, that they no longer have any non-political schemata for interpersonal interaction on any topic.
Want to talk about how to keep the Internet fast and secure? That’s political now.
Want to talk about the science behind the causes of climate change? That’s political now.
Want to talk about making anyone’s life better in any material way, other than a blood-sucking c-suite executive? That’s political now.
Want to talk about medicine? Oh you betcha that’s political now.
Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, and Fox News have caused this. And I have no problem calling them out for it. Think saying-so is “political?” Screw off. I don’t care if your politics get in the way of everything that’s interesting to discuss. Deal with it, or move to Saudi Arabia where conservatives would be happiest.
Right, and to some people of a certain temperament, being aware of, and concerned about a vast range of entirely different issues, all of which can be engaged with on a number of levels that build on your knowledge and understanding, all of that is just an “echo chamber”.
The echo chamber argument doesn’t account for the fact that people can have shared fundamental values and nevertheless have constructive valuable informative conversations that engage in nuanced analysis. Being concerned about climate change, for instance, you can have all kinds of productive conversations about new research showing how hot September was, or how to make cities more walkable, or any number of things, and those are valuable conversations where describing them as echo chambers is silly. They’re actually good conversations where we gain something from having them. If your primary test of a community is whether it does or doesn’t have echo chambers, it doesn’t have meaningful things to say about cases like this.
I agree. But candidly I feel like there are bots that contribute to the voting.
TL;DR: no. Definitively no.
NTL;R: Okay… let me chew on this.
Lemmy as a whole is definitively more toxic than Reddit
For me, at least, non-contributive (“toxic”) [see footnote*] behaviour would be: assumptions (including witch hunting), decontextualisation, “didn’t read but still replying lol lmao”, insults, “I dun unrurrstand”, whining + entitlement, and “chrust me” = “I take you for gullible”. And those things happen far, far less in Lemmy than in Reddit.
For the poster complaining about Lemmy, “toxic” would be, instead:
- pedants - pedants are fine as long as context-aware. And even then, I don’t recall a single pedant screeching at my L3 broken English here, unlike in Reddit.
- purity testers - this can be interpreted 1000 ways.
- concern trolls - yet another thing far more present in Reddit than here…
- contrarians - “oh no what I say should be put in a holy altar, how do you dare to disagree with MEEEEEE?”. Sorry but contrarians are leagues above the sort of circlejerking that you see in Reddit, where you’d get 1000 weaboos screeching because you wrote “animes”.
- “ackshyually” - refer to what I mentioned already about context. Those “ackshyually” are caused by decontextualisation, that happens far more often in Reddit.
I know that what I’m going to say is anecdotal, but it’s still worth sharing: I see the difference specially because I used to moderate a small Reddit sub, and I mod a Lemmy comm nowadays. People here are more reasonable and contributive; I barely need to intervene here, and even then 99% of the time it’s like “don’t do that” “okay”. In Reddit though? Well.
I was on Lemmy.word for slightly over a month and posted many times across numerous communities and instances, so I definitively gave it my best shot.
Depending on which instances yours federates with, you’ll get a different experience. lemmy.world and lemm.ee in special tend to gather Reddit-like critters alongside a few good posters, so instances where behaviour is a bit more monitored (such as beehaw) tend to defederate them.
Also Lemmy has backend issues
I’m no coder to claim that the issues are “backend” or “frontend”. Instead I’ll say the issues that I see:
- papercuts, like the bell icon staying even after you checked all messages
- a lack of mod tools
- rarely lemmy.ml (the instance that I’m in) slows down.
- In the past it used to show errors and refuse to load, but I don’t recall this happening nowadays.
And it never showed a downtime banana. - can’t cross-instance linking posts in a convenient way
So… come on, the platform works. It has its issues, it’s likely worse from lemmy.world due to the amount of posters, but it works.
Bad actors
Name them. Otherwise it boils down to “chrust me”. Unless referring to the CSAM event below.
lemmy.world comm being bombarded with CSAM […] Imagine if a subreddit had to be shut down because of this.
I seriously believe that the approach taken by the lemmy.world admins to close down !lemmyshitpost was more sensible than the actions that I’d expect any Reddit instance (oh wait, there’s only Spez’s) to take. If the same happened in 2023 Reddit, here’s what would likelyhappen:
- subreddit mods ask for help to the admins, “we’re being bombarded with CSAM”. They hear admin crickets in return.
- mods lock subreddit to avoid the bombardment. u/ModCodeOfConduct forces them to reopen.
- mods eventually give up and leave. The sub becomes unmoderated and attracts paedophiles until you got a full paedo ring…
- the paedo ring grows large enough to get a mod outrage of 9001 subs.
- Spez deletes the sub while making a public announcement, like “WE SNOOS STAND AGAINST PAEDOPHILIA!” (cough former Reddit admin Aimée Challenor cough cough)
- the original userbase of the subreddit has no equivalent community to go to, because unlike in Lemmy you’re expected to have a single sub per subject.
and sees an influx of kinder people
Dude. You’re in Reddit. That’s the pot calling the kettle black. Reddit makes even Faecesbook’s community look wholesome in comparison, it’s on par with modern Twitter. Lemmy is considerably nicer than Reddit.
And if you still want something nicer there’s always Beehaw. I’m being serious - for people who want/need an environment with more monitored behaviour, it’s a go-to place. Provided of course that you don’t want to eat the cake and have it too, by behaving in a way that you don’t want others to, otherwise they’ll show you the door.
Footnote
It’s a bit of off-topic, but this post is a great example on why I don’t like the word “toxic”. It refers to everything and nothing at the same time; it boils down to “I don’t like this”, but dresses it as if it was an intrinsic feature of the object (in this case, Lemmy or Reddit). Note how the list of things that I’d consider “toxic” are completely unlike the person complaining about Lemmy, and if you gather a third person odds are that you’ll get a full list of other things to be considered “toxic”.
I think what they meant by contrarians is people who disagree for the sake of disagreeing without any actual argument , usually in order to stir up drama or engage in a circlejerk
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When in fact upvoting should be the default for everything you see unless you don’t think it belongs at all
This is one of the reasons I like what Beehaw does. Your options are upvote, no vote, and report. Anything worthy of a downvote is worthy of a report.
All browsing is what really sucks for some niche communities. Until we have the ability to exclude our communities from all, these niche communities don’t have a chance to survive.
The devs said that they’re working on a new sorting method that pushes small communities up in the feed. I’m excited to see how it will work.
That’ll be great for most communities. That’s the exact opposite of what I want for a few specific ones though
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Throwing it in my All feed at least so other people in my instance will see it eventually next posts =)
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I am already subscribed!
eh, reddit leans left but there’s a good chunk of far right extremists that have infiltrated a lot of subs especially politics ones and turned them to shit.
lemmy leans left but instead of the extreme right we have lots of extreme left and tankies,namely from 2 particular instances.
both kinds of extremists never make any sense, are complete snowflakes, and live in some sort of weird alternate reality where in some cases I can’t even tell of they are extreme left or right, they both trend towards extreme levels of authoritarian dick sucking
eh, reddit leans left
The left-right spectrum isn’t a helpful model (Piped link) on an international forum. As you’ve seen in all the replies, people have very different ideas on what is left and what isn’t… there is actually no true definition. Many people will, for example, argue that liberalism is the status quo and therefore centrist since the advent of socialism/anti-capitalism and fascism. This is especially true outside of the Five Eyes countries (US, UK, AUS, etc.) where the political atmosphere is clearly different for historical and cultural reasons. On top of that, reddit is so huge that different communities have noticeably different leanings, so naturally someone will object when any generalization is made.
they both trend towards extreme levels of authoritarian dick sucking
Congratulations, you just pissed off all the anarchists lol
The political compass is a better representation purely because it acknowledged that political ideals aren’t a linear spectrum, but it still misses the mark because a plane isn’t sufficient either.
Politics is such a complex topic and any simple representation of it will lead to what would appear to be contradictions in a person’s beliefs.
Politics is such a complex topic and any simple representation of it will lead to what would appear to be contradictions in a person’s beliefs.
Absolutely. And certainly with this kind of geometric modelling, with a spectrum or plane where these broad and complex concepts are ordered more-than or less-than others.
The political compass is a better representation
I disagree with even this. It’s not better, it’s equally inappropriate.
The political compass is adding an extra idealist axis to an undefined axis (the linked video explains this in more proper detail). It’s just digging further into a hole in an attempt to make it work, when the whole paradigm is wrong. And this is bad, because the compass model has rationalized that undefined, subjective linear spectrum. It helps delude people.
My only point on the compass being a better representation is that it acknowledged a problem. That’s not to say it’s a good representation.
I think it’s unhelpful to say that a step toward more fidelity is the same level of bad, though. Even if it’s the tiniest step, it’s a move in the right direction by pointing out that a single line isn’t sufficient.
In reality, it would be more like a series of lines on different topics weighted differently by an individuals priorities so no singular generic representation will ever be truly good enough.
In reality, it would be more like a series of lines on different topics weighted differently by an individuals priorities so no singular generic representation will ever be truly good enough.
In reality, there are no lines. And that’s exactly why I say, it’s not a step forward to add another vague idealist axis on top of a vague undefined idealist axis. Politics is not geometrical, there isn’t a concept of ordered values. The entire method of thinking is wrong, and that video helps explain what a more appropriate alternative model based on human history is like.
Adding an axis is just walking forward down a wrong path; a move in the wrong direction by suggesting the issue is about how much fidelity we have.
It sounds like the real complaint is that it’s different.
Because yeah it’s certainly not more toxic. That’s laughable. My interactions here have been overwhelmingly better than on reddit.
And the other complaints boil down to “it’s small and new, yuck”… Yeah that’s a good thing usually. There have been terrible attacks with CSAM but people are handling it and luckily I’ve never seen a single image like that. On reddit it was not uncommon to see mutilated humans without wanting to even though there was far more time and resources available to prevent that
I wouldn’t say it’s more toxic, but it certainly is a different atmosphere.
Coming from my curated subs on reddit to mostly browsing All-top on Lemmy, it certainly feels like Lemmys audience is surprisingly more authoritarian-conservative than reddit, despite the very active Linux, FOSS, and privacy communities.
- joins Lemmy.world, notoriously mismanaged instance
- stereotypes the rest based on one experience
I honestly just wish the internet would go back to individual forums. Lemmy is great for a reddit alternative, but I think old school forums were just better overall
I know forums still exist, obviously, but they’re kind of shitty right now.
Reddit SEO captured them. They got shitty because they stopped growing, and when a community stops growing, it decays. And yes. They’re absolutely better
I believe that most of the things people do, or try to do, on reddit (and therefore reddit alternatives) just aren’t appropriate for how the site is structured. Reddit is a ‘link aggregator’, that’s what it was designed for. People post links to content.
So it’s no surprise that forums are a better option, structurally, for a ton of communities.
NodeBB and other forum software have added activityPub integration on their dev roadmaps, so you might see it become a thing again. Personally I don’t want to create a new forum account for every thing I’m interested in.
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lol people are def nicer here. This guy just misses his little friends.
Posts about people being nicer while being condescending about his position 🤦
I fart in your general direction.
(Sniff) oh yeah. our farts smell so good
