As a long time Reddit user, there’s something about Lemmy and the fediverse that feels really refreshing and new. I think it has to do with a few things…
- People are more respectful of each other and interested in discussion and being social.
- Less trolls (users are probably older?)
- Due to it not being absolutely huge, I feel like people will actually see my posts and comments instead of being lost in a sea of content. I suppose once Lemmy grows this will change, however the cool thing about the fediverse are the new servers. So you can stick to the server when you want smaller community discussion and go to “all” when you want more populated threads.
- The clean UI feels refreshing and clean, almost like the early internet.
What have you noticed? Do you find it refreshing too?
Ok so let me throw out some old timer wisdom. This is what the social media/forums/the Internet are like when the cream is skimmed off and the 90% of users who only browse, and the 8% who only vote are gone. Enjoy it while you can. The summer always ends.
Absolutely, my first thought was this is what internet was in the 90s and 00s. Slow, good yarns, and lame jokes.
Tbh there’s already too many memes here though. Half my front page is 196 and German me_irl sometimes.
You can block those communities if you want.
I guess I want some memes not all memes
It’s called the honeymoon effect. The sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can acknowledge that lemmy is vulnerable to all the same failings as reddit, and the sooner we can take steps to safeguard against those failings.
If we instead say “no no, lemmy is different, look at how much better things inherently are over here”, then we’re doomed to go down the same path.
I agree - what would you say those pitfalls are? Of course the decentralizing nature takes care of some problems - but the main thing that made me feel awful browsing reddit was the constant argumentative nature of every discussion. When I first discovered web forums 20 years ago it was the magical aspect of it that had me engaged. It was actually cool to be able to chat with other people online about anything - and that itself put everyone in a good mood; after all, why waste your time being really negative if you’re doing something cool and interesting? Now, it’s very common place. Added with people being more comfortable that they can remain anonymous, huge sites like Reddit are prone to a lot of…crap. That’s what I can think of so far.
I both love and hate the upvote/downvote mechanic. I like seeing quality posts bubble to the top, I also like seeing the general consensus of lurkers, but I don’t like circlejerk posts or that downvoted comments get dogpiled on, which often both result in a toxic, self-righteous flame war. And the solution is obviously not deleting the downvoted comments, because then you’re just censoring unpopular opinions.
I think something worth trying would be not visually distinguishing between posts with no votes and posts with more negative than positive votes. I think an instance could enforce this on their own communities with only positive results.
The only counter argument is that dishonest arguments can’t be “buried” by downvotes (hidden behind a “[show]” button). Another strategy would be to allow burying, but somehow throttle the responses to them; maybe limit the comment depth, or limit the number of responses per user, or allow users to flag flame war threads as “unproductive” which at some point would block further responses.
To be clear, I don’t think the lemmy “spec” should adopt any of these measures, I think these regulations should be decided by instance/community mods, and up to the users to regulate and provide feedback on.
I feel like people who moved to Lemmy from reddit are really incentivized to help it grow, so I am constantly seeing encouragements for people to interact / upvote / post content, which is great. I think that the community here is very motivated, and so even though there are less people, you get more engagement.
It is still full of geekery: the sociopaths are not yet here. See:
Thanks for the article.
So gatekeeping can have positive intentions.
Yeah man. Lemmy definitely has that early internet feel. I love it. Hope you’re having a good day.
I think the lack of a karma equivalent, and thus karma farming, results in much more thought out and unique posts/comments.
Torn between replying with “this!” as a meme about how generic responses like that are used to farm karma and making a joke about how “of course someone with only 1 reputation point would say there’s no karma equivalent.” Idk how reputation works and if its only internal to instances or a shared across instances. But its possible it does become a karma equivalent in the future.
Reputation seems borked at the moment, it counts downvotes but not upvotes so I’m sitting at -34 right now lol
Boosting is the only way for reputation to go up. I boosted you for science.
I’m not sure I feel comfortable taking advice from a person with -51 reputation…
Ooo everybody come look at Mr. Non-controversial over here with his +40 reputation.
Do you mind explaining what boosting is for us on Lemmy?
Likely you aren’t seeing astroturfing on a massive scale by corporate fiddling and complicit mods. It’s not curated to bait you.
You don’t have your post deleted for forgetting a minor rule and there’s a chance that your post will be seen instead of hidden under countless new posts.
Even worse when you browse /r/all, find an interesting post about some topic, join the discussion, type out a long reply, hit send…
And 3 seconds later you get an automod message that your comment was removed. Because you aren’t a subscriber to that (default!!!) sub, or you aren’t verified, or you used a word they don’t like.
And even worse: You join a discussion, got some good points back and forth, everything is great. You try to reply to the latest comment in that chain to keep the conversation up and suddenly your comments get blocked. Because it was a /r/blackpeopletwitter post (you didn’t even notice as you found it on /r/all) and at some point they only locked it down for verified black users, kicking you out of the discussion.
I mean sure, have your own space on Reddit (even if it’s basically racism), that’s fine. But then subs like these shouldn’t be default subs on /r/all when they constantly lock down threads.
In addition to what everyone has said, Lemmy doesn’t have an established culture compared to Reddit. No in-jokes like the poop knife for example
I was on Mastodon and Lemmy roughly a year before the Twitter and Reddit fiascos. I never was active on Twitter, never even had an account, but I’ll admit Reddit was my jam. I didn’t even use any of the 3rd party apps, I actually did use their main app and had no issues with it (except for the occasional annoying ad on my mobile device…). But when the needless greed of Spez started to show at the seams and the communities there started to divide, I took an afternoon to delete everything from nearly 4 years of posts/comments.
Both Mastodon and Lemmy were FAR less active prior to these migrations, and so I honestly checked in once every couple months. But then Mastodon started showing up in my main news feeds due to Musk’s idiocy, and I knew it was time…
Similarly, when Spez started to make the same decisions, I already knew where the party was likely to move.
I only started using Lemmy again yesterday when Memmy came out as I dislike using social media from my desktop (though I do occasionally).
It’s nice to see so much more activity here now. It’ll probably never get to the levels of Reddit, but hey that can be a good thing in its own right.
i joined reddit in 2015 when the site was already heaving with content and users. good for killing time and consuming, but not for engaging in the community. right now lemmy/kbin is in the sweet spot where there’s enough people to talk to but not so many that i can’t be heard.
I noticed two things, along with all the good answers in this thread:
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There is no such thing as Karma, and I hope it will never be implemented into the fediverse. The reason is that on Reddit Karma was handled like a currency, an in order to obtain Karma, the general quality of the content declined, as a result of Karma-farming. Also it was used as a threshold for posting comments in certain communities. Imagine you could join an instance only when you have a certain ammount of a Karma equivalent. That is something I don’t want to see.
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At this moment there are mostly tech savvy users (former heavy Reddit users) here, who are interested in creating content and participation. Also these folks are helping each other. It feels like a little community. I think, the threshold to join the fediverse is still too high for the average mainstream user. Maybe it will be easier to get started when there are mobile apps.
Karma is useful on things like discourse or mattermost as a spam prevention feature, you gradually expose features to people who aren’t being spammy. The same thing is true of a user joining a new community on the same site.
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silky smooth apps. not overwhelmingly populated and serious.
I think it all boils down to an older and more geeky user base.
I think it has people with above average reading comprehension because amount of people I saw that said opening a Lemmy account is too hard and they couldn’t manage to do it is way too high
