What are your thoughts on the Lemmy ecosystem?
I’ve been trying it out for the last week. I have my own opinions, but I’d like to hear others and see if we have common ideas on what is good/bad/indifferent about the Lemmy ecosystem.
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Of course not. People discuss like three topics in here.
Beans, poop guy (it was drugs for sure), politics bait, and I didn’t know the 4th
Linux.
Linux, politics, and the occasional meme that doesn’t fit in either of the other two categories.
I don’t see politics as much since I blocked many communities from lemmy.world, including politics, news, people twitter, and of course political memes. IMO “scaled”, or “hot” sorting should be default or something cause the “All” page was almost always American politics from these subs because of the high votes. Though not as much of a problem since the blocking so that’s nice.
I was thinking Linux, neurodivergence, and communism.
Its tiny compared to reddit so it has more of a monoculture. If it grows it might get more diverse
Yeah, but no, but yeah.
On Lemmy, individual communities aren’t big enough to be communities but the community is big enough to be a community.
So any post that makes it to the front of the entire Fediverse has quite a few familiar faces and feels like old reddit would.
The issue I find with wanting Lemmy to be as big as Reddit is, you’re pining for an era of Reddit that doesn’t exist anymore. You can’t go back to 2011-2020 Reddit. It isn’t there to go back to. Bot posts aren’t just indistinguishable on occasion, they’re upvoted all the same, by other bots.
This is the best you’ve got. Pitch a tent and make the most of it, fam.
Unfortunately the bot problem is coming to Lemmy.
Bots posting content is already a thing here, and then taking up front page space is already a thing.
Lemmy is speed running “How to lose your sense of community”.
I don’t agree, the longer I’ve been here the more familiar usernames I see, so to me it’s been improving.
Lemmy is developing. Lemmy will be a second Reddit. It will be…
Do you have examples of such bots?
Reddit repost bots I guess
I disagree somewhat bc of one very crucial factor: here bots exist but they tend to be labelled as such. Look in your settings on the web UI if you find this not to be the case.
You click on a user account, then click block them, repeat just a handful of times and then bam, pretty much you have blocked all the bots there are. Yes it takes effort - it’s not done by default - but at least it’s possible, whereas on Reddit there is simply nothing that can be done, with virtually any amount of effort. Over there they are baked right into the system… right?
And here the bots are, or even can be, helpful. A bot that you know is a bot is a good bot, or at least an honest one.:-)
I… That’s not how this works. Or at least that’s not the context I’m referring to.
I can make an account (or 1000, Lemmy doesn’t exactly have controls to stop me) and run it as a bot, and NOT mark it as a bot. And use it to automatically manipulate the tone of conversations and threads without anyone knowing. And the premise of your argument is now void.
Labeling of bots is done via goodwill.
We’re not worried about goodwill users in this context. We’re talking about astroturfing bots posing as actual users. That said, labeled bots are still a problem if their content out grows organic user content, since that just isolates us, and erodes our community in favor of w/e interesting content bots scaped up today.
Which is a massive problem on almost every social media platform already. And will come to Lemmy soon enough.
Oh… then yes, ofc.
But if we can’t stop it, then so be it. Nothing is perfect, but you try anyway.
Wikipedia has some nice ideas about trusting people incrementally to increasing degrees depending on the outcome of previous manually curated efforts. And PieFed is bringing some of those thoughts into the Fediverse: https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/.
But part of it is not merely bots vs. humans, and rather different styles of what human psychology tends to gravitate toward: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb. e.g. people saying things like “^This”, “I also choose this guy’s wife”, “And my bow”, etc.
Lonely people just wanting to be heard… but unless emoji reactions are provided, how else other than to write a comment? And/or upvote an existing one that says what you wanted. Therefore… “^This” it is then indeed, none of us are immune to such, and any system that relies on people never falling into that trap is going to be vulnerable. The same way that news organization in the West were vulnerable to being bought out by the wealthy - it was always going to happen.
Anyway, wishing for something doesn’t make it happen - that requires effort, like the PieFed approach, imperfect as it may be.
for me, yeah. Honestly much better
Partially. I think it’s a good drop in replacement for:
- Anything technology oriented, from software to hardware to what different open source projects are up to, to what tech corporations are doing, and various discussions around ecosystems (the internet itself, specific services like Discord or Reddit or LinkedIn, app stores, social networking, etc.)
- Funny memes or other humor
It’s got pretty good coverage of certain topics:
- Politics, at least on specific sub topics
- Science and specific scientific disciplines
It has a few pockets that work for very specific things:
- Specific TV show or movie franchises (looking at you, Star Trek)
- ADHD or neurodivergent support/advice
- Noncredible Defense is actually here. Love it.
And it’s just missing a bunch of things I loved on Reddit:
- Sports, especially the unique culture of the NBA subreddit
- Other specific interests in television, film, music, or other cultural interests.
- Local things in specific cities
- Finance and economics stuff
- Lots of specific interests/hobbies are missing, or just aren’t as active.
- Advice/support for career/work life, especially specific careers (in my case, the legal industry and life as a lawyer)
- Advice/support relating to personal relationships, from parenting to dating to very specific support forums for things like divorce or cancer. Even what does exist here is disproportionately neurodivergent, so the topics of focus seem to be pretty different than what would be discussed in other places.
14 year Reddit person and leaving was for the best. After the initial “what am I doing”, it branched to me checking out Mastodon, then pixelfed, and then Fediverse is awesome. My only real beef is the sports situation is not it. Outside of that I haven’t used reddit for a year and don’t miss it honestly.
Same here, was on Reddit since 2010.
I remade an account because some of my communities aren’t big enough here. But the quality of interaction through the fediverse is much much better.
For sports, Reddit has utterly ruined them because in the app they show the results for every F1 Grand Prix as soon as the race finishes in an unremovable “trends” tile. I often can’t watch live, and so I had almost every race this season spoiled.
I’m honestly more afraid to offer an opinion or ask a question on Lemmy because there’s always some high and mighty jackass that thinks they are the final authority on whatever topic and rather than have a discussion, people seem to just resort to name calling.
At least, that has been my experience.
Otherwise I’ve enjoyed it. It can be a cool place once you figure out how to block the malcontents.
The strength of many reddit communities is in the people themselves, and unless you’re really into Linux or star trek, the people aren’t really here.
As a tool for forming communities, Lemmy’s mechanics work just fine.
But the process of federation - combined with the prickly nature of certain administrators - means you can have a lively and robust community in (hypothetically) the far-left transgender tankie community that pioneered the application. But then that gets abruptly cut off and squelched in a more popular forum by some late adopters who hate their politics more than they enjoy their technical savvy.
Lemmy.world has a bunch of memes and political screeching because that’s the kind of user its admins choose to encourage. Other communities have more practical interests. But they don’t draw the same kind of crowd, so you won’t see them on the front page of this site, particularly if you only browse Local.
The idea behind federation is great but in practice it’s splintered communities far too much to serve its purpose at a large scale.
They’re an idea that big forums are actually awful and you’re better off in smaller communities.
Mostly, it’s a pain because it can be hard to find some escoteric bit of knowledge or expertise when you don’t have a Reddit sized forum to troll through.
But that’s where spaces like Discord excel. Nice, tight communities of hobbyists and specialists who are routinely online and regularly churning out useful content.
Looking for information on Discord can be quite tedious
Lemmy.world has a bunch of memes and political screeching because that’s the kind of user its admins choose to encourage.
How are the admins encouraging these users specifically? I have not noticed this, but I have been blocking most politics and meme communities for a while.
Okay but also… they aren’t there (Reddit) either, anymore. Who knows where they went - possibly nowhere, or switched to lurking (either here or there), or X, or Mastodon, or Bluesky, or just nowhere.
I almost dropped off of social media altogether myself, after making the mistake of replying to a comment in Chapotraphouse and another in lemmygrad.ml. Sometimes silence is significantly better than having to put up with toxicity.
Aka some of us choose the bear
And the rest are tired of moderating against those onslaughts.
it’s perfectly fine but there’s not enough users
true but recently I’ve been seeing a slight increase in user activities… 📈
I’ve stopped using reddit completely. I do tend to check twitter a lot though.
On the one hand, I find idle browsing on Lemmy to be a lot more enjoyable than reddit. I see more stuff that I’ve never seen before, and I see less unfunny, uninteresting stuff.
On the other hand: I drew a comic and posted it to what is basically the only Lemmy comic group. I wanted to give Lemmy an honest chance, so that was the only place I shared it. I figured it’d be a nice change of pace since the group is almost entirely reposts from reddit.
My comic started to get some traction, and then the only mod in the only Lemmy comic group removed it for profanity. The profanity in question was the word “balls”.
A few days later I mentioned this story on reddit. Someone asked to see the comic, so I posted it to r/comics, and a few hours later it hit the front page of r/all.
So in my opinion, Lemmy suffers from a lot of the same problems as reddit (like petty tyrant mods), and some of those problems are exacerbated by its small size.
Sorry for that. You should definitely report it on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Yeah the mods can be annoying on here. Lots of times someone has replied to me and by the time I get to it it’s “comment removed by mod” without even an explanation. I wanted to know what that person had to say, even if it was a dumbfuck thing to say. These things only work with interaction, and if you’re stifling interaction on a platform that is starved for it then you’re not making it better, you’re making it worse.
The modlog shows the deleted comments. Example: https://sopuli.xyz/modlog/23366
I’m sorry, “sympathy for enemy combatant” is a banable offence?
Whoa that’s fucking dark. I’m a very strong Ukraine supporter but the dehumanization of Russian soldiers is disturbing.
Depends on what you mean “effective.”
The structure is very similar, and on the surface, it works about the same way. So in that sense, yes.
The lack of centralization improves on reddit - no authoritarian rule-making, no limitation of content by the laws of a single country, etc. - but also adds flaws. The biggest one is the potential for redundant groups on different servers, but also a concern is the potential for someone taking down their server and leaving the users high and dry. (I don’t know exactly what happens to the content in this case, but that could be another issue.)
Practically speaking though, it is not a meaningful replacement for reddit because it is lacking content. I browse “all”, and get fewer total posts that I saw on reddit on my 20 or so subscribed subreddits alone.
Community is the key. Community is what made reddit, and lemmy doesn’t have a developed community. Yet. We can get there, and then discover what other problems with the platform are.
I feel like the decentralization brings some downsides in the quantity of bad actors, extremist views, and the like.
The open platform certainly has an overwhelming advantage over Reddit in other ways, but there seems to be a higher number of trolls, shitheads, wackos, etc and in some cases entire instances dedicated to them.
While these people get banned on Reddit, Lemmy hasn’t yet solved this moderation issue; user accounts are basically disposable and moderation is super distributed, so it’s easy to abuse.
higher number of trolls, shitheads, wackos, etc
That’s because they’re actual humans and not 95% bots like Reddit.
Heres the thing, this is what huamns are. A shithead may be a shithead to one but a golden god to another. A truly open forum will reflect that. Moderation effectively splits different views and both can thrive without interaction with one another (echo chambers). I personally dont mind extremist views because it reminds me they exist and I am of sound mind to ignore them. However, I know not everyone is and I know the dangers of letting extremest views go unchallenged. I doubt technology can help us cover both fronts (open forum of ideas without echo chambers). Education can probably do a lot more. We need to be better humans, accepting of others and critical of ideas instead of people.
Defederation is pretty effective
Lemmy is free and libre, but I sorely miss my world news and Ukraine updates.
Try Telegram and the Moon of Alabama for that.
if you want the most demented conspiracy theories, sure
If you can’t understand Russian and Ukrainian and are thought-constrained by the Overton window you won’t find much value there. I do, though >95% of everything is drek and you have to have the time and enough built-in analytics between your ears.
“Moon of Alabama” is completely divorced from reality. CIA bio weapons labs in Ukraine, complete vehement denial of Russian invasion plans until it happened, then an instant switch to it being a glorious liberation, denial of Russian war crimes and ethnic cleansing, denial of Assad’s war crimes… a textbook firehose of falsehoods.
!ukraine@sopuli.xyz - obviously not as big as the Ukraine subreddit but there’s always new posts.
What do you miss about world news on Reddit?
kinda so-so, so far. shows promise but I’ve also run more immediately into what could be called ‘reddit rot’. For example mod behavior that resembles russian bot farms, etc.
Feel free to report it on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Lemmy communities have the potential to be just as toxic.
That said, the broad majority of interactions I have are very positive.
It really depends on the community choice. I tend to choose Lemmy communities rather than “reddit refuge” communities.
I imagine that plays a big part in my personal experience.
I figure with Lemmy having much fewer users, there’s less potential for toxic communities to form.
Yeah, I have made the experience that most communities on the german-speaking feddit.de were great, but after that had technical issues and went down for 4 months (!), the content isn’t as good anymore and the users are more frustrating.
It satisfies my social media addiction, but will be years before it shows up on many search results.
