I am a reddit refugee. Keep seeing that this is supposed to be somehow better than Reddit. As far as I can tell, it follows a similar format, less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose. But It looks like people still get down vote brigaded on some communities. So I’m curious, how it’s better?
less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose.
Depends on where you landed and your political alignment, but lemmy.world is fairly reasonable at least by what I’m looking for. If you start saying radical things like “Mao’s Great Leap Forward” wasn’t a very good thing on certain instances, you may be banned from there, but with your account residing here, it wont be deleted.
Genocide bad will get you banned from .world , bunch of extremist
In terms of variety of communities it isn’t better, but the hope is over time people will continue to come over here as reddit decays and eventually it’ll catch up.
I left reddit when they killed the 3rd party app I used. I didn’t want to switch and I ended up here. in my opinion Lemmy still has a long way to go to be as good as what I left, but I don’t want to support reddit anymore and I find it to be good enough here to still be enjoyable. I can still look at memes, and there’s still some good discussion to be had.
The biggest thing Lemmy is missing is niche communities and a broader and less techy audience. I think both of those will happen overtime if the platform keeps growing. Crossing my fingers we get there.
It’s pretty pretty hard to have this achieved with how the platform is today. Content is one (communities and posts) but lack of WTF is going on even for tech savvy people is another thing. Try asking a non user to go to the main entrance place for Lemmy (like googling it). Then ask them to find something of interest. Then ask them to create an account so they can comment. Those pretty fundamental things are non-existent.
Pretending that they exist or are easy to use is like saying Arch Linux is easy or even driving is easy. It is not. You need tons of preparation. The above take 1 minute in all common social media. Unless those three things are clear for people 20 to 40 yo, Lemmy will never gain traction.
Lemmy’s barriers to entry are a problem, there’s no getting around that. Personally I don’t think they are that bad and requiring a bit of effort / research is, oddly, in some ways, kind of a good thing…? The people who want to be here have put in at least a little work. But you make a very valid point. It needs to be easier and more intuitive. I would also point out that reddit sucks for new users, too. People are constantly complaining on there about how hard it is to get a new account going because of prerequisite karma, wildly varying sub rules, etc.
For me it’s not that it’s “better” it’s just not the cesspit that Reddit has become. It’s certainly better for avoiding mindless negativity.
Unfortunately, I haven’t observed that. There seem to be many people on Lemmy who go out of their way to be antagonistic to other Lemmy users. Which includes downvote brigading, as the OP said.
Sadly I have to agree. While the nice people on Lemmy are much nicer, there are some really extreme views here that are heavily detached from reality.
I’ve probably had more heavy downvotes or arguments on Lemmy in 9 months than I had on Reddit in over 15 years. The highlight recently was me discussing how expert systems are used in LLM’s, given that I’m a software engineer that works in AI at a big tech company for a living. Nope, I’m wrong, LLM’s aren’t real AI, downvotes… Pair this with me questioning customer data access rules in big tech, which resulted in someone arguing my view on something I literally helped build and telling me to “open source it to prove it”.
I’ve probably had more heavy downvotes or arguments on Lemmy in 9 months than I had on Reddit in over 15 years.
Same. I mean, I still love and prefer Lemmy, but I’ve had DM’s of people saying that they were gonna follow me around on Lemmy “just to keep an eye on” me because I disagreed with what they said. lmao
Mindless negativity has arrived - at least in lemmy.world.
I have some tech-related subscriptions, so I check those out every now and then, but they have few new posts. So when I browse the Popular section, oy… corporations bad, climate change bad, war bad, economy bad. (Not saying it’s not true, I just want a place I can browse and escape all that for five minutes.)
And some users (even mods!) have an “all-or-nothing” attitude too, which is infuriating because they won’t drive me away from the cause, but they may drive away others with less patience.
For example, I say “I support the blue color. Now, I wonder, if metallic blue with a purple hue is really a true blue? And how? Trying to learn. Just curious…” and then someone says “YOU JUST OUTED YOURSELF AS A BLUE HATER!!!”
Typical comment quality is off the chain. Leddit has been going downhill for years in this area.
Can you explain why? Not sure I follow
I recently migrated here. I did so as a precaution, and still browse reddit sometimes .
Reddit IPO’ed, and is now focused on making money. They removed the API to centralize it’s power and remove 3rd party apps. They threatened subreddits who protested, and shut some down. And have made sweeping changes to accommodate to advertisers.
The straw that broke the snoo’s back was the CEO hinting at subreddit paywalls. I figured I would try to learn Lemmy again, and what do you know, it’s more serious, has better comments and posts, segmented even more than reddit with the distros, and fully free/open source.
It also helps that I’m a huge computer nerd, and there’s a lot of that on here, but you can find your niche.
Welcome! Don’t take this wrong, but why didn’t you come sooner? Reddit has had paywalls for as long as I can remember. r/TheLounge is an example of a famous one but any subreddit could enable restricting themselves to premium only.
That’s actually new information to me! The news was pointing to a broader push to subscriptions for subreddits site wide. Definitely not doing that.
I also admit that I am deeply unhappy with reddits enshittification. I’ve been on reddit for over a decade and joined when I was in highschool. Moving was the last thing I wanted, but I’m more aware of the big-corp-monopoly we’re all suffering under. This is part of it.
I ripped the bandage off a few months before they shut down the API. I had to quit RIF cold turkey. I wanted it to be “my choice” if that makes sense. The official Reddit app just didn’t do it for me.
I hope you enjoy your time here! I’ve liked it. My biggest piece of advice is to be the content you want to see. There is a lot less content here than Reddit. That’s good and bad. Good because you get bored a little easier and move on lol, but bad because it can get a little boring. It’s gotten a lot better though!
The other thing, and this is just a pet peeve lol, is that the proper way to link to communities is like
!community@instance. A lot of people try to doc/communitywhich doesn’t work. If you do!communityalone it will link to the local community which could totally not exist or have different rules etc.example: [email protected]
My biggest piece of advice is to be the content you want to see.
Totally agree with this. BUT just know that for some Lemmy’s, they get suspicious pretty quick.
My account is less than a month old. I found a vast hole of the kind of content I want to see, so I started posting a lot. Starting communities, replying to replies on my posts, etc.
And pretty much every day I get called variations of being a troll, spammer, trumper and/or russian asset.
Doesn’t keep me from posting, and I think it’s hilarious. But just a heads up to anyone reading. Tho this thread is old so maybe no one will. But I found this thread just now, so… lol
You’re on lemmy.world, which is pretty much exclusively Reddit refugees, so you probably won’t see much difference in culture there, but that’s what I consider the main advantage.
As in, I left Reddit when I noticed the toxic culture was fucking with my mental health.
Lemmy isn’t particularly great anymore in this regard either, but still magnitudes better.lemmy.world is too popular (I know, I know, I also have a lemmy.world account). But the nice thing about the greater lemmy “galaxy” is you can still subscribe to communities from any instance, no matter what your home instance is.
Life on Lemmy (and reddit/social media in general) becomes a lot better when you turn off vote displays
I agree that votes don’t matter at all. Now please, except my humbly casted vote for you in the upward direction :D But no, I think psychologically speaking, votes actually do kind of matter because of mob mentality. If the first thing you see is something overwhelmingly negative, you’re more likely to think negatively. This was tested and seems to be the case, if people see a bunch of negative comments on something, they are more like to join in on the mob and downvote or be negative
It still falls into some of the same pitfalls that Reddit had (groupthink, reflexive commenting, power-tripping mods), but some of those problems I don’t know that there’s a way to get around them in this format, they’re just a human nature sort of issue. I appreciate that Lemmy doesn’t appear to be owned by a giant mega-corp trying to harvest our “intellectual”, but we’ll see how that pans out in the future. I’ve just gotten used to every online service I’ve used eventually going to shit.
I like that there’s no advertising at the moment, I don’t know that I would mind it so much if there was advertising, as long as it was kept minimal. I know these things don’t just happen for free and if money is needed to help keep the lights on and such.
A very obvious solution to groupthink is to do away with the silly voting system. I don’t know why they kept it. A very simple solution would have been to just assign votes to a topic based on how much attention it’s getting. In simple terms, If opposed has 10,000 people that have viewed it, 1,000 people have left a comment, compared to a post that has 100,000 views and 15 comments, you can tell which one should have more attention score. The upvote and downvote system is too easily used as a dislike or like system. Many of us have the maturity to upvote something because we think it’s a good discussion point even if we don’t agree with what the person is saying. But a lot of people don’t think that way mentally. They see something, they read it, immediately go into toxic hater mode and just downvote it for no reason
Loony power tripping moderators can only ban you from their little bit rather than from the whole site.
Loony power tripping moderators can only ban you from their little bit rather than from the whole site.
Amen!
If you have a shit opinion that noone agrees with and they downvote you to hell, that isn’t “brigading”… As for it being better…the mods alone make it 1000x better.
Just as a user, being able to block subs here is awful nice. When reddit decided I didn’t get to decide what I see anymore, I was out.
Listen, I won’t dig into all the tech and philosophy of decentralization and anti-corporate ownershipa. There are other people here for that. But let me tell you why I am enjoying it: it’s small, it ends, and it feels like early internet.
I load up Lemmy, and see a series of disjointed memes, or a current ongoing meme (like pondering the orb) and absorb that for a short while. I see a couple world news articles, a couple about Trump and a couple about places that aren’t the US. I read an article about Ryzen’s new chips not performing well on Windows and see someone’s retro-gaming setup. Then, after about 10-15 minutes of scrolling, I go “oh hey, I remember this post from yesterday”, and then I close Lemmy because, and this is the important part, I’ve hit the end of new content in my feed.
I still get the news, I still take in a couple memes about the current state of politics, or a celebrity flying her plane altogether too much, but I am never stuck here. There’s no one trying to rage bait me for the sake of user engagement, and any argument I find myself in wraps up and moves on. I don’t feel disconnected, but I am also never completely absorbed, and my life is better for it. Sure, sometimes while I am waiting in a line I load Lemmy only to discover there’s nothing new for me in the hour since I’ve closed it. Sometimes I do the age old, “looking to busy myself”, close Lemmy because there’s nothing to see, immediately open Lemmy because I am looking for something to occupy my Internet poisoned brain. But being bored for a minute here and there is worth it, if it means a lot more free time because I am no longer absorbed in the rat race of infinite scrolling social media.
I think Lemmy is better in a series of ways, but the one that really matters is that it helps me put down my phone, and do things that I enjoy.
It’s a better crowd. Feels more like 2009 Reddit and forums. I can use whichever app I want
Its’ best days are ahead, not behind. And being a decentralized entity - like Bit Torrent or Bitcoin - makes it an important social media experiment that is worth stoking the flames, and whose outcome will be much different than it was with reddit.
No spez. The rest is kinda similar (except on a technical level that mostly matters to nerds)
You ain’t got to be a nerd to appreciate benefits of decantrelization. We need more of in in pretty much every aspect of our lives.
Mega corps and governments are colluding to fuck peasants over.
You own your data, you can self-host your own Lemmy instance and still connect to other Lemmy instances (Like what I do)
Also you can share whatever you want, no one tells you “If you say that again I’ll ban you from the entire network”. And of course, there are no ads or algorithms showing you what their owners want you to see. It’s freedom.
You own your data, you can self-host your own Lemmy instance and still connect to other Lemmy instances (Like what I do)
Can ya point to a series of instructions that show one how to do that? I mean, I’ll search on my own as well, but since you seem well versed, I thought you may have some unique insight on a really good set of instructions.
I like the choose your own adventure element. If you want strong content moderation you can go to Beehaw; if you want something more catch all, Lemmy.world is good; if you’re a Stalinist, you have at least three solid options.
The instances talk to each other, but many fulfill slightly different functions.
At Reddit, it seems the stupidest posts often get thousands of upvotes. Here, they’re lucky if they get 50. So that makes me feel less crazy, I guess.
if you’re a Stalinist, you have at least three solid options.
And what options are those?
- Lemmygrad: classic crowd longing for the Soviet Union
- Lemmy.ml: The catch-all version of Lemmygrad, like Lemmy.world except criticizing Putin or Xi can get you banned
- Hexbear: Like Lemmygrad, but for memes and shitposting
hahaha, wow, I had no idea. Ick.
Thank god we have gotten to a point where it’s possible to hang around here without being immediately aware of the Stalinists haha
