I’ve been here since the great Reddit Exodus and have seen some good and some bad.
What have you liked and disliked about being on Lemmy so far?
Do you see your usage going up or down?
Voyager is close enough to Apollo, so happy on the UI side.
Miss having MLB game live threads that made watching along and commenting with strangers fun.
One major issue with lemmy is centralization, its just leading to another reddit with everyone being concentrated on crappy major instances. Like, .world and beehaw is known to have some of the worst moderation, but that’s where a lot of people are concentrating. Centralization also leads to those few servers pushing every other instance around with the threat of defederation.
That said i find the people of lemmy to be generally better than the people of Reddit (who are in turn better than Twitter) at least. If you’re in anime lemmy you’re probably going to be talking to otaku, same for every other niche on lemmy even if it’s small. Much less chance of getting involved with the new puritan movement or children.
And it’s already my new primary form of social media!
There’s a lot of things here I didn’t realize Reddit had lost over the years. A big one is how comments don’t get lost in the deluge of a popular post, and the top comments aren’t low effort jokes that weren’t funny on the last 3 posts. There’s also a joy in finding new communities (like this one!), that fades once you’re adding the thousandth x-porn or meme sub.
Although content was pretty slim at the start, over the past month or two I’ve had moments where I didn’t realize I was on Lemmy instead of Reddit or vice versa. (Reno for reddit is great, because it’s a shit app. Best way to stop going on there is to get disconnected due to multiple API requests. Shoutout Voyager for being great.)
Reddit has also gotten significantly worse since the exodus, which is a bittersweet feeling as a former head mod whose sub got banned for joining in the protest. I miss the glory days, but I’m fucking glad it’s dying. (Dipshit admins didn’t remove me when they re-opened it, so I passed it over to someone who’s still on there.) I’m happy to see Lemmy is gaining steam.
Negatively, I think a lot of people over here are seriously terminally online. I’ve read, bar none, some of the worst takes I’ve ever seen in comments here. (I’m not talking about my comment history, fwiw, although the dude who equated guns to cars is pretty up there.) The “hivemind” leans quite left, which I honestly like, but it does feel like there’s very little nuance for dissenting opinions. That being said, fuck nazis, and fuck reddit for allowing them to disperse their hatred under the guise of “sharing ideas”.
Fuck me, that was a bit of an essay
Short essays are kind of what I designed this community for, so you are directly on point!
I agree with absolutely everything you said above.
the top comments aren’t low effort jokes that weren’t funny on the last 3 posts
Someone quoted a Simpsons episode to make a point, let’s spend the next 20 comments quoting the rest of the episode at each other
Sounds good. Let’s do the exact same thing when this gets reposted
My usage will probably go down. Lemmy has the same flaw of every “vote up/vote down” site: groupthink wins. Bray what the majority believes, you get voted up. Say something the majority doesn’t believe, you get voted down. Truth or falsehood doesn’t matter in either direction, only popularity.
Lemmy is doomed to become like every other vote up/down site: filled with popular opinion at the top, without any regard for whether the opinion involved is true or not. This makes it essentially useless except as a place to make yourself feel better by seeing how everybody agrees with you … if you’re a member of the majority opinion.
You’re not wrong. I’ve tried to see if we could shut off downvotes for our community, but no luck. Admins also don’t have an interest in turning it off instance-wise.
The best I can do for now is make it a sidebar rule, but that’s… not adhered to by outsiders trying to hit the “fuck you” button to get their tiny bit of dopamine. Doing what I can though to make this a better sub!
I’m thinking about moving to Reddthat.com as they disabled downvotes.
I also think that public downvotes could help with that.
Yes, the (perceived) anonymity of up- and down-votes definitely contributes to the negativity. But I’d rather remove the voting period. “Truth does not change with the number of votaries” and all that rot.
It’s true that upvotes could be a way to astrosurf, but as they are public at least you can identify bots and vote manipulation
I’m not even talking about astroturf, though. I’m talking about groupthink.
Yes, that as well
I wish there was more variety in the userbase. It’s too easy to predict which kind of comments receives love and which hate.
Needs more posts.
I don’t see as many insightful comments as I did on Reddit, but that’s just a function of the number of comments/users.
I like that there are enough posts to keep me entertained.
Really insightful or just creative and well-worded variations on what people “already know”?
The latter are very common, even here. Truly insightful comments are vanishingly rare anywhere there’s an up/down vote system.
As an example, if I were to comment on someone’s post about the evils of the Chinese government (with the inevitable mention of Tiananmen Square in 1989) with the truth, that would be downvoted to perdition. Hell, there’s a good chance the post would be removed. I would almost certainly be branded a “tankie”. Because truth is not an issue in populism. Popularity is. And the popular opinion says hundreds to thousands of students were massacred in Tiananmen Square when in reality the truth of the matter is no students were massacred and the massacre that did happen didn’t happen in Tiananmen Square.
You see the real massacre happened several kilometres away and was of protesting labour. The student gathering in Tiananmen Square was a sideshow to the real perceived threat the Chinese government was reacting to. A mild annoyance vs. the perceived existential threat of the nationwide labour protests that even included elements of the PLA. But bring that genuine insight, not just rewarmed and creative expressions of popular opinion, into a thread and you’ll be voted into nothingness.
Lemmy had an opportunity to improve on Reddit. The (openly communist) developers of it decided instead to just make their own Reddit with leftist leanings and blackjack and hookers.
There’s a lot of smart people here, but I feel you’re correct. There’s no need for smart people to show themselves when everybody agrees with them or they’re afraid to give a dissenting opinion.
It feels like we’re all knowledge workers. I fit into the middle aged, D&D playing, politically left, software developing dad demographic. It feels like most of the posters here check many of the same boxes.
As someone who is not, boy does it get annoying hearing shit like “just change jobs and you’ll get a big raise!”
Sorry for that, the software people tend to forget they live in a very comfortable bubble.
The funniest thing is that if people actually decided to “learn to code” as the common mantra goes, software types will be the first hurt as a surplus of labour in their field presses down salaries.
That already happened, at least where I live. I make only slightly less than an entry level dev as a tradesman at a grocery store. And all the dev jobs are in Vancouver where the cost of living is about 30% higher. But they’re not making 30% more than I am.
deleted by creator
Really, wow, because the amount of furry porn and femboy memes I’ve had to block on Lemmy is astounding. It’s fucking everywhere here.
Removed by mod
