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.
Well ever since reddit died it’s the best thing around.
Lemmy is the Linux of reddits
For conversation about various subjects with broad appeal and a left wing slant, sure.
For tech support or info on niche topics, not at all. Lemmy is not big enough, old enough, or easily indexed by search engines.
The porn is also pretty mid tbh
I’ve started a few subreddits and not had much engagement. I started a really niche community here and had someone posting to it within hours. Yes, fewer users, but the ones that are here seem to be more willing to engage.
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 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 don’t agree, the longer I’ve been here the more familiar usernames I see, so to me it’s been improving.
Do you have examples of such bots?
Reddit repost bots I guess
Lemmy is developing. Lemmy will be a second Reddit. It will be…
A large part of what’s hindering Lemmy is search engine visibility, the “append reddit to your query” trend is really helping Reddit while it can sometimes be somewhat difficult to find content on Lemmy or the fediverde more broadly
The userbase is too small for now. But I hope more people start coming over from Steve Huffman’s hellhole.
Not yet but i hope soon. I started to like lemmy
Welcome here, first time I see your instance, seems nice
Short answer is No. It suffers from many of the same issues of echo chamber, bias, and bullying. Just on a somewhat smaller scale due to fewer users. And never forget - Winter is coming. There will be a time in the future the bots will notice lemmee and come for it also.
But I suspect this is all a human thing. We are a contentious bunch at best and down right hateful at worst. We build communities only to poison and kill them in the end.
I think it has potential to be better in a way Reddit can never be, but the two biggest instances do so little moderation their userbase might as well be “people banned from too many subredits”.
I assumed the killer feature of Lemmy would be “zero reply guys” but instance owners seem willing to tolerate them in the interests of faux-engagement. But the irony is this sort of “engagement” actually scares new users away.
Forgive my ignorance, but what’s a zero-reply guy?
i think corgana meant zero people who reply with meaningless comments just for the sake of replying, like those tiresome one-line joke threads that choke up every big subteddit.
A “reply guy” (wikipedia) is someone who responds to posts/comments in an annoying (usually smug/condescending) way, like what you think of when you think of a “redditor”. Big platforms like Reddit like reply-guys because they generate engagement (often someone telling the reply-guy to f-off) it’s also not a behavior that an algorithm can recognize, so human mods/admins are needed to curb it.
Over time, if Reply-guys are not banned they tend to make the overall ecosystem too exhausting to participate in, and (authentic, desireable) engagement declines.
I used to think it was better than reddit, but I hate to say it, I’ve started to notice facebook meme communities jump onboard. Science memes is amazing and isn’t affected (it seems to be all unique posts I’d never seen), but once those facebook repost meme communities jump onboard, you’re going to end up with all the people that makes facebook rubbish too unfortunately.
I’ve already seen an increase in dumb car meme posts which get reposted 3000x on Facebook (which brings along the same toxic anti-science people). We’re already seeing an increase in people who don’t seem to have much common sense
I want a community which is science and fact oriented, and I’m growing increasingly concerned that as we grow, we’re moving away from that.
But for now, its still awesome in comparison imho (last I looked, many reddit communities were overrun by nutjobs after the mods all left)
You might want to move your account over to mander.xyz and then browse mostly by Local rather than All or Subscribed.
In large measure what you are describing is considered by most people to be harmless - although it is actually not harmless at all.
Anyway, the good news is that this aspect is mainly “contained” within the communities that actually want that. As opposed to e.g. Facebook where it is everywhere (one presumes - I left it even before the pandemic).
There is an ENORMOUS amount of diversity on the Fediverse, more so than anywhere else I’ve seen, and nothing at all like Reddit unless you count the small niche communities, but even there… anytime a post would hit r/all people would comment like “brace yourself, the trolls are coming!”, plus people in those niche subs would browse all and become tainted by it.
I was one of them. I started noticing how defensive my posture was getting, and becoming more snarky, and then even doing that irl at work. Therefore I left Reddit. I almost left Lemmy too, but I refuse to be that way. Us olds (or maybe you aren’t old and instead only mature - or at least talk as if you are haha! 😂) know that we can touch grass and read books - social media is a privilege, not a “right”, and not mandatory for my existence (although it is nice to keep up with things, other than having to use e.g. Google News, so I would have had to investigate finding a good RSS reader).
Reddit started to devolve when the “kids” came in and drowned out all the longer-form, more in-depth discussions involving actual facts, and replaced them instead with “I know you are but what am I?”, “^This”, “I also choose this guy’s wife”, etc. Which don’t get me wrong - humor has its place in the world, it’s just that when here are TENS or even HUNDREDS of such comments, IN A ROW, and they get upvoted whereas someone who writes a longer response gets actively downvoted, plus receives demeaning replies (“hey, tell it to someone who cares <expletive>”), that is when I decided to quit Reddit. Whether I stay here or leave this too, I will not go back to Reddit. Or Facebook.
And most of that I blame the platforms for encouraging people to talk while actively discouraging them from listening. Notice that ads appear between posts, but not between comments, hence they encourage - with their UI elements and such - people posting. One example is how poor their internal search functionality is - oh well, it’s easier just to post my question than to search for an answer. Another example is restricting pinned posts to merely 2 - when they could easily allow like 5 or 10 or something, especially if they allow a folder system. And then even the pinned posts would only show up as being pinned under certain conditions, which users of an app may not see. Omg and don’t even get me started on their official app… 🤮
On Lemmy, it is possible to have good conversations. Make liberal use of the block button to curate what you don’t want though, bc moderation is in short supply, and what is there tends to be heavily biased, so e.g. a person behaving as a dick to someone else is likely to do so to you sometime later, so consider your future self’s mental health as a priority:-).
We’re already seeing an increase in people who don’t seem to have much common sense. I want a community which is science and fact oriented
Common sense is incompatible with science. Science is about testing our fundamental assumptions, assuming nothing.
Well. Common sense is common sense because it can easily be disproven.
As a ‘front page of the internet’ it has been a pretty great replacement for me as it’s where I go each day to just see what’s going on. However, due to the smaller size you do lose a lot of the activity in more niche communities and the sheer volume of posts/comments compared to Reddit. That’s the biggest downside. Still, you also lose the incessant ads/bad UI/UX decisions and ever accelerating late stage capitalism driven enshittification so that’s a big plus.
Yeah, I love it and actually prefer it to my old reddit experience for general browsing.
What isn’t quite there yet is the ability to like, sit down all day and scroll and post in a community dedicated to my current hyperfixation of the week. Be it guitar maintenance, some indie game, or whatever.
But reddit also didn’t have that when I started using it. Excited to hang here and watch the garden grow
But reddit also didn’t have that when I started using it.
reddit also didn’t have to compete with reddit.
No but it was competing with Digg and Slashdot until Digg screwed the pooch. It’s been a while, but reddit really owes its size and popularity to Digg 2.0 and the fiasco of bad decisions driven by investors.
I’m talking mostly about the vibrant niche communities the comment above mentioned. That all happened well after the Digg and slashdot stuff. Niche communities grew on reddit relatively unchallenged.
Sure, reddit could have a similar meltdown to Digg, but I don’t think it’s a forgone conclusion. Social media has inertia. The bigger a platform is is the harder it is to lose people, because the mass is the feature.
Wasn’t reddit competing with Digg, or whatever else was popular at the time?
I came to reddit from fark, before the digg migration or exodus or whatnot. There was also stumbleupon, and the others are all lost to me.
Some of us old folks remember when it had to compete with Digg.
A far more popular competitor that made some unpopular decisions and lost their user base to reddit.
“can’t scroll all day”
I keep saying that’s a positive thing for other productivity, but sadly, that’s not happening for me. Turns out, I want to sit and bum just as much as I always did before. I’m more likely to actually read articles, but I know meta gets more screen time now. As you said, lemmy doesn’t have those full niche communities. I know, sacrilege to admit around here.
I know, sacrilege to admit around here.
It’s not, but we also try to promote active communities to a wider audience on !newcommunities@lemmy.world
Is there also something like m.lemmy.world/posts/lemmy.world/c/upcomingcommunities ?
I’m sure this gets repeated on Lemmy all the time, but I feel like the quality of Reddit posts, even in niche communities about guitar maintenance or whatever, has really gone downhill in the past 10 years or so.
This might come off as mean, but I’ve noticed a significant dumbing-down in terms of what people contribute to Reddit communities but also what people expect to be spoon-fed by those communities. And it’s all presented as this sort of democratization of hobbyist knowledge, where it’s every hobbyist’s duty to educate newcomers on all of the absolute basics and persuade them of why they should care about any of it.
Maybe this is just a side effect of Reddit recommending subreddits to non-subscribers and pushing to become a Facebook-type service for “regular” people - after all, that’s how they make the line go up.
I still prefer old-school forums, which tend to be more insular, less accessible, and expect you to arrive with a modicum of understanding or at least RTFM first. To be blunt, I miss the days when the internet was primarily for geeks.
i think thats somewhat of an advantage
However, due to the smaller size you do lose a lot of the activity in more niche communities and the sheer volume of posts/comments compared to Reddit.
That also leads to a lack of diversity of opinions.
Same as reddit when it was new.
I’d actually say Lemmy feels larger over the same timeframe, but that’s just sticking my thumb up in the air sort of measurement.
The problem with growth is that too much, and it ends up trolls and bots making up the majority, and too little growth means it withers on the vines.
With federation (and the ability to defederate), I think the ideal ground can be found. We’ll see though!
When I started using Reddit, it was a circlejerk.
Part of the difference I see on Lemmy is that there can be multiples of the same topic area being discussed on different instances with no connection between them and no straightforward method of determining which instance will have the more active discussion.
Active subscriber count should be the more active one, but I agree.
Ideally we’d have native multi a communities right now, so I could see all of my subscribed Linux communities in my Linux multi, all of my subscribed ttrpg in the ttrpg multi, etc.
Definitely an improvement that could be in place. I think letting the user combine the groups to see would be best, because then you can group how you’d like. Having multiple communities with similar topics is no different than reddit, but reddit has multis.
Usually the number of monthly active users for the comment is a good indication
Of course, but you’ve still got to hunt through a dozen instances to find the most active ones.
i think there’s plenty diversity outside of .world
That’s part of the issue. There’s a hundred instances that each have their own version of most of the subs, and none of them can see each other without users having to find and follow each of them, or at least look at them to find the most active 2 or 3.
There’s also a wide and endlessly customizable variety of web/mobile clients, something reddit will apparently never have again.
e: Federation is pretty cool, too.
Once upon a time, there was Then Reddit, and Now Reddit was Then forums. One day, Future Lemmy will be Now Reddit, and Now Reddit will be Now Forums.
Is water an effective alternative to Soda Pop? yes i’d like to think so
I was a 15 year Reddit veteran and modded a couple dozen communities over there. I’ve moved over here with no regrets. The only thing that takes me back to Reddit is search results, and that’s getting less and less as more people have abandoned it and deleted comments.
The amount of bots there now is astounding. It’s making me believe in the Dead Internet Theory.
Platform-wise, it’s already proven that it’s a viable alternative (with some advantages even - the federated nature for one), but content-wise, it has A LOT to catch up (because let’s be honest - in addition to all the bullshit and toxic people, Reddit has tons of useful information and good people still).
Well, I deleted my r account the day they fucked over the app developers. Been here since, so I guess it’s a decent alternative. Not as much current content and it’s 90% politics on the front page… That can be filtered out though.
The militant Linux missionaries though, they get blocked. They show up in most tech threads and it got old a year ago.
Hello my dear friend. Can I ask you what distro you are running?
WRONG here’s why Arch is the best, and I know because I spent 13 years getting my first install running
Yeah the politics is annoying at this point, it feels like 60% on the front page is politics. I’m glad when the US votes are finally over.
