Title basically. I was here at the very start of it all and really enjoyed it. However I felt it lost its uniqueness within a few months of mass migration and started turning a bit like reddit again so I deleted my old account. However Reddit has only gotten much much worse since, and Lemmy has stayed about the same. So here again.
Diversity has increased by a lot. It’s not just circlejerking about Linux anymore. Only positives in my book.
Yeah, I feel like when I first came here every third post was about Linux and every third post was about star trek. A lot of the remaining third was beans. Now only every tenth post is Linux and trek.
So we need more beans…
That is one interpretation
Yeah, but what if you enjoy the Trek, Linux, and beans?
I posted about lentils today. Does that count?
Its the linux of food so yes.
I use Mint, by the way.
Manjaro. Hate me.
I respect your life choices, even if I don’t agree with them.
Everyone has their preferences and that’s cool. I think we can respect their individual choices. The important thing is that they’re not talking about using Arch.
Actually, they kind of are…
btw
Endeavour. I don’t hate you, only pity…
It’s not just circlejerking about Linux anymore.
Aw, that’s sad…
I find a lot of the communities can be pretty negative. Lots of people talking about how bad things are. It would be nice to see more positive outlooks. But maybe that’s just a sign of the times.
if you try to talk about positive things they downvote you into oblivion, and/or comment about how stupid and wrong you are or you’re an ignorant boomer or you’re a rich privileged jerk.
you’re not allowed to be happy or enjoy anything if they are miserable. miserable people want everyone to be miserable with them.
Be the change you want to see! Stick with the positivity and don’t worry what other people say, you can do it! Don’t look at down votes, or better still move to an instance that doesn’t accept down votes if it bothers you.
Lemmy needs more Cat and Guitar forums, but political speech is far more open.
true and the lunatic leftist fantasists have been put back in their box, but the population is less than 5% of what it peaked at in the early days
It feels more like reddit now, but still is populated by a certain type of person that would seek out Lemmy. Mostly techy, left of center+, over age 30+, etc. I enjoy it.
techy ✔️
left of center✔️
over 30✔️
oh no. incoming targeted marketing
Heyy! Im not old ye…ahhh, who am I kidding, you’re right.
I meet all those criteria except that I’m an eight year-old dog. But nobody knows that…
people here are mostly over 30? 😭
My main gripe with mainstream Reddit now is the engagement baiting that people are falling for all the time. “What are you thoughts on [Controversial Topic]?” If there is a new exodus from Reddit coming, I really really really wish all the baiting to be left behind and moderators to remove it on the Fediverse.
there has been a huge uptick in engagement bait here since the new year. i have had to block people who post it on almost a daily basis the past two months.
What do you think about engagement baiting?
it’s stupid and if i see a user repeatedly doing it I block them so I don’t have their nonsense posts in my feed.
no way it worked
Yes and we should at least downvote it while we have critical mass
I like it here, I only lurked on reddit. There isn’t much reason to comment when it seems that everyone was in a competition for “who can post the best zinger comment first”
Zinger? I hardly know her!
This deserves gold.
edit: you’re welcome!
Thank you kind stranger
But that competition exists everywhere even on Lemmy. Any platform that provides this system of comment votes and sort by most liked will always be like that.
True but right now the amount of users made commenting worthwhile to me too
there are increasingly a greater number of nutjobs, spammers, and hostile/miserable/angry people. my block list is like 300+ now. 6-9 month ago it was like 12 people.
2 years ago it was mostly super nerds just nerding about.
I’m curious what your threshold for blocking is. I don’t block anyone. I appreciate dissenting opinions. I can totally appreciate that there are bad actors out here, but a blocklist of 300+ sound like a curated echo chamber.
Feel free to block me.
people calling me/others names, spamming agendas, or generally being hostile nutjobs pushing some extremist agenda and accusing anyone who isn’t in agreement with them as being the enemy, and that the enemy should be killed.
oh and people who personally harass you, like going around commenting on multiple unrelated comments you made to repeatedly call you names, and downvote you, of course.
And that all sounds absolutely reasonable. I’m just having a very different experience on Lemmy, and that’s the main reason why I found it odd, so appreciate your clarification.
And this is not to say I haven’t stumbled upon some shitheads, it’s just the frequency is low enough to be not so noticeable, not something I really put effort into addressing. If it were higher for me, I’m sure I’d find myself doing the same thing you are.
I have been on here for about 20m this morning, and blocked 5 people already.
Why? Because they made hostile/unhinged replies in another threads insulting other people over an opinion or a story.
Based on your description, it looks like you are visiting Lemmy.ml a lot.
there are plenty of other nutjob instances than .ml
Fair.
This actually means that Lemmy has a progress in moving along the adoption curve. These are both very good and somewhat bad news.
Less lurkers and more people making comments over time. This thread is a great example.
Honestly? Not much.
Well, I guess that I am just too lucky to able to find it so easily. 😂
It has gotten much better. More content and general activity and nutjobs at .ml and similar got mostly isolated from the rest of the network.
I think fediverse is really shaping up as a strong reddit alternative. Most pop subjects are mirrored here and the vibe is very similar to early reddit so there no real reason to go to reddit other than super niche communities like of a tv show or something.
Most props go to the lemmy.world team as it kept a consistent big sane network running that keeps the project stable! If .world never happened I think Lemmy would have remained cess pool of social rejects like most reddit alternatives like Voat or lemmy.ml
lemmy.ml is like a degenerate wading pool of piss and misinformation.
If you haven’t been banned there you have not truly lived. Let us come together in our detest.
It is actually sad that some good comunities try to occur there and are forced to deal with the consequences of whole instance’s fame.
That’s the great thing about decentralization - we can migrate very easily!
If you haven’t been banned there you have not truly lived
Damn, you guys really make me feel like I’m missing out lol
You don’t have to try hard or even do anything particularly bad I think I got a ban for calling a mod ‘my ruski friend’ or something iirc. They have that super rare brittle bone disease but it’s only in their brain.
Thanks for info, that’s what I was looking for, it means not leftist I assume.
The ml in Lemmy.ml stands for Marxist-Leninist. Anything past that is for you to unpack; in my uninformed opinion, however, it seems that .world has an irrational hate boner for .ml.
I’m hard as a rock for it!
Lemmy didn’t have much content at first so you would run out of things to read after a while. It felt friendly at first, but certain topics still set off people at lemmy to the point I thought about leaving. Then lemmy seemed to improve and I could talk about those topics again, but now there are more trolls (even ones that seem to follow you around since they troll each post or comment talking about something) and spam bots that weren’t there before. I think a lot of conflict on forums like this has to do with miscommunication, but sometimes people are just mean and there isn’t a fix.
I fart in your general direction. >:(
I feel it’s changing positively, as instance admins and our tool-sets mature, and more and more people are becoming permanent residents as they’re either permabanned on reddit (so they have no alternative) or they recognize the value of a system that is not and cannot be controlled by a corporate entity and they US billionaire interests behind it.
However I’m also concerned that our yet small size has protected us from truly existential issues like dedicated spam and propaganda orgs, especially those who would utilize GenAI to be more covert. I’ve already published tools like the fediseer to help prepare for this, but I really hope to see more people per-emptively getting ready for this. I see way too many doe-eyed admins firing up instances without a care in the world, open registration, no captchas, no botnet protections etc and they either burn out and close shop after a few months of firefighting, or get defederated, or they have to re-learn a painful lesson the rest of us did.
This does give me an idea, we do need a more holistic “So you want to open a threadiverse instance” guide to give such pointers to new admins and way to get support from others. Hmmm…
deleted by creator
I arrived during the API debacle.
Some things are better, content and activity.
Some things are worse, spammers, AI proponents who harrass you despite the clear community-wide dislike of the plagarism machine, fascist chuds trying to mainstream rascism, misogyny, and ableism.
Basically each new wave is another usenet September equivalent, and it feels like we’re approaching the eternal september epoch as lemmy becomes more widely used. Soon we’ll have to deal with state actor bot-nets if we aren’t already.
Its gotten significantly less optimistic and more cynical. Its in my opinion more of a reflection of the state of the world than a Lemmy specific issue but it affects Lemmy users more because this isnt a space that allows people to live in ignorant bliss.
I run on another reddit alternative that was apparently an offshoot refuge after Squabbler shit hit the fan (so extremely niche yet somewhat active community) with a completely different demographic of users to Lemmy (mostly middle-aged centrists/liberals that couldn’t tell apart a Linux distro from a macbook), and I can tell you.
It’s universal.
I posted something the other day about how nice it was to wake up and have your feet hit a warm rug that’s been baked in a sunbeam first thing in the morning, and shityounot the replies I immediately got ranged from “Why even bother getting out of bed” and a list of things that are “far superior” to a warm rug. Just blatant whataboutism all the way down, and almost made me consider that if I had posted the opposite, about how much I dislike that sort of thing, if people would have then flipflopped and disagreed lol
Then I came to Lemmy for a break, and the first post I saw was a photo of someone’s pet bunny next to some food they’d ordered, and every single comment was about how OP was a bad person and should be ashamed of themselves for using a delivery app. It was fucking wild.
I think it’s genuinely just the state of the world right now. Everyone’s enraged as hell and seemingly have zero real world outlets for it. So it all just gets funneled into stranger interactions online.
I just try not to read replies and generally move on with my day rather than absorb all that insanity. If people really need an outlet or whatever that badly they can go scream at ChatGPT for an hour lmao
The extremists are a bit much but otherwise I like it here.
This is the biggest change from my perspective as well. 3 years ago, I could participate in the news and politics posts, but I feel very discouraged since the patience and nuance feels gone.
How much of it is individuals vs how much is the US pissing people off, I couldn’t say, but the amount of people looking to push personal agendas has taken over the main communities and I won’t comment there anymore for the most part.
I scroll them for headlines and read the article if it’s from a good source and mostly skip the comments.
Every other community has largely improved though. There is a bit more attitude I think, but everything is much better here than at reddit. I just got diagnosed with sleep apnea and now that I’ve been feeling better I’m catching up on manga, so I’ve been scrolling reddit some for those topics, and whenever I check out other random topics while I’m there, it is way trashier than I remember.
I’m still getting new followers and commenters in my posts, so the userbase still seems to be growing here.
i love how no matter what i say… i get attacked from every extremist side.
you could say ‘i like that the sky is blue today’ in a political post and have people telling you you’re a nazi, a shitlib, or you’re a brainwashed by propaganda. they don’t even seem to read what you write so much as just make up stuff in their heads that what you said is some dog-whistle about ‘who you really are’.
it’s hilarious but also baffleingly sad to see how many warped people are so clouded by their blind rage and hate or self-righteousness they can’t even take innocuous facts of the matter as some sort of political propaganda.
I just try to stay informed of what’s going on, but I don’t sweat the global or national news anymore. I try to see how I can help my friends and coworkers and my neighborhood more instead. Those are issues I can chip away at and see progress with.
I feel the ones being the loudest in these communities aren’t actually doing much in real life or they’d be a little more constructive in what they say here. People interested in making society better, I’d think, would have to take a bit more of an open arms approach when dealing with people they don’t really know or you’re hurting your movement more than helping it. With the world getting worse rather quickly, I don’t have time for talkers like that.
totally. I have been political active since I was a teen, I’ve worked on campaigns, I’ve worked with and in city government etc. It’s mind-blowing to me how people are totally ignorant of the good they can do… because they just want to sit around and day-dream about the world magically getting better and being angry at other people who don’t agree with their dreams. Like going and volunteering at a polling place… is too ‘lowbrow’ for them but a simple thing they could do to actively make their life and the world around them better.
The world really isn’t getting worse, it’s just that people selectively ignore good news and exaggerate bad news, and completely lack comparative context, or totally reject it. They WANT to sit around and get-off on being doomers. The world and societies are complex, they don’t follow the neat little highly simplified narratives people want it to and they throw tantrums that it doesn’t, rather than try and realize how limited their understanding of it is. The people who rant and rave typically are ignorant of the most basic facts and structures of what they are ranting about.
I think it’s hard seeing the actions and misdeeds of our leaders becoming more transparent. Like you said, I don’t think the world is worse, but it feels more in our face. Before we had real time communication across the world, we’d never know a thing about all these things all over. I don’t think I can devote that much time to stuff on that scale. It feels good focusing on the microcosm around me.
I want to continue to look for things close to me I can work with. Someone’s got to worry about things in a national or global scale, but it doesn’t need to be me, and I’m ok with that.
they don’t even seem to read what you write so much as just make up stuff in their heads that what you said is some dog-whistle about ‘who you really are’.
Lol I was just saying this the other day about the last time I bothered checking replies. A simple question I asked started a civil war in the comments, and I couldn’t believe how strongly people were personally attacking each other based on the random comment of some stranger that they decided to imbue with all these extra meanings.
It’s just a bunch of angry people looking for outlets for their emotions, the actual meanings behind the words don’t matter.
The biggest change for me was losing Lemm.ee. That was a blow. I had probably the most thriving (not by much) synthesizer community. I haven’t had the heart to try and start it back up elsewhere.
I’ve been in fediverse since API debacle, I feel the same vibes as I do on Reddit, both the good parts and bad.
For example, same controversies on Reddit also exist here, and have the same talking points and flamewar nature. I had an opinion about Pitbulls (that an owner should be far more responsible than the average owner - I know, controversial take), which got me banned from that sub and several other furry related subs. Which is something that also happens on Reddit when you tick off a moderator of several subs
So for the most part, I’m just a lurker that comes here to get some memes. Sometimes I share my opinion if I feel like it. But I don’t necessarily feel that it’s an upgrade from Reddit in terms of communities.
Getting banned in communities you’ve never been to bc the admin disagreed with you in a public channel is keeping the Reddit pettiness alive.
Also, the lack of nuance is the same. If you have an opinion in a political comm, you basically have to write a novel describing your stance or people will take your brevity as an opening to attack you.
Still, there are some really great communities that respect diversity, are truly supportive, and kind that make me feel ok about the world.
The pettiness goes even farther than that. I’ve been banned from whole fucking instances because I downvoted bad content on /all. So not even interacting more than once or twice IN PASSING with a sub is enough for some power hungry twat to ban you from an instance with these petty tyrants
Sounds like you got banned from places that wouldn’t be worth hanging out at in the first place. Fuck em ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ if someone is that quick to get triggered by a gesture of disagreement, they couldn’t possibly have a worthwhile community under their watchful gaze.
this happened to me two days ago.
i got banned from several communities i’d never even knew existed. i must have pissed off someone who modded them.
weirdly enough i don’t recall that happening to me on reddit, but i didn’t post much outside of my hobbies and local subreddit.
and on the flip side, i have blocked dozens of people who just incessently promote their own instance/communities that are absolutely insane/toxic places if you look at them.
