I happen to like it very much.
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It completely replaced Reddit for me. I love the project. It is getting better and better.
same :)
For better or worse, me too.
People singing praises, but it needs to improve, i shouldnt need another website to find communities; also the state of fractured communities with same name that dilute content.
On the flip side, major communities being hosted on defederated instances is a concern.
Which ones are those? Maybe I can’t even see them
I know beehaw defederated from lemmyworld and they have some pretty big communities on there. That’s just an example that I know of because my first account was beehaw. I’m sure there are others.
Ah makes sense
I can still see beehaw content because they didn’t defed with lemmy.ca, but I’ve avoided posting to their communities. They feel like gated communities, which wasn’t productive to community building.
i just blocked beehaw communities because i don’t want to accidentally get into a discussion there. If they want to isolate themselves, that’s fine, they can exist as their own little thing.
Which is great to do, we can like something and want it to improve at the same time.
Better blocking feels like a priority for me because it would quell most of the defederation issues.
- instance only defederates from illegal content / scams
- users block instances, communities, and users they don’t want
- recommended block lists that users can import (from the instance, from somewhere else, etc.)
This also reminds me that Lemmy needs better mod tools. I think that’s part of the reason Beehaw defederated
Oh for sure, I think the only reason some communities are clean is because they aren’t that big yet.
I’ve only had a handful of threads spiral out of control, and it was a mess to clean up each one. The button to remove something is right next to the button to make someone a mod. Also once something is removed, it’s inaccessible to everyone including the mods. At one point I removed something and couldn’t ban the user because the comment was gone. It was a spam bot though so I got them a little while later.
Another issue: blocking users will block all their content, even if they post in comms that you moderate. So if you’re a mod you need to avoid the feature, otherwise the user that you blocked might go rogue in the comms that you mod and you’ll only see it after it’s too late.
This also reminds me that Lemmy needs better mod tools.
What if “we” (users in general, specially mods) created some communal wishlist in some highly visible space, exclusively for mod features? Not just for the Lemmy devs, but for anyone who wants to code a third party tool.
Beehaw did that in one of their pinned local posts
Beehaw is fairly isolated from other instances, so odds are that the visibility wasn’t that great, but I’ll give it a check.
Im going to say it. I’m going to plug sync, again. Sync has this cool feature where it includes a list of instances and communities on them. It’s a very cool and handy option.
Which website are you using to find communities?
I’m finding new communities just fine via the All feed
As others have said, it doesn’t quite have the user base to reach critical mass. A lot of my old favorite subs aren’t here.
Also…the user base isn’t as diverse. I used to click through to see the comments on Reddit to find those comments that provided fresh perspective, gave more context, or explained nuance. You’d click on some thread about Trump’s latest legal troubles and get some real information about why things are moving slowly or why the defense made a particular choice. Or go into a thread about some upcoming video game being cancelled, or Google plan being changed or whatever, and get an actual analysis about how the financials don’t work, or maybe how the market changed, or how some users were abusing the system.
On Lemmy, I often find myself just skipping the comments. They seem much more uniform, all just repeating the popular line: variants of “Ha, fuck Trump!” “Lol, Russia sucks!” “Company X doing this should be against the law!” etc. I can usually predict what the comments are going to be without bothering to read them, and rarely do I come out with new information. It feels much more like an echo chamber.
Part of it is just that there’s not as many users, I think, so there’s just not as many posts and thus fewer ‘gems’. Also, I think that the users who made the effort to migrate from Reddit probably skew younger, tend to be more uniformly left-leaning, and a larger share will be students or programmers as opposed to lawyers or carpenters or auto mechanics.
The especially annoying thing is that the same thing seems to have happened on Reddit. Yeah, I still moonlight there when I run out of content on Lemmy. And the number of comments seems to have dwindled, and the viewpoint diversity seems to have narrowed there, too. Maybe the normies just gave up and left.
A lot of us have tried out Mastodon and it seems like a pretty great alternative to both Reddit and Twitter, due to the user base.
I do wish it handled threads better though. It’s still as screwed up as Twitter when it comes to that.
Even the memes here, which accounts for like 90% of the everything feed, are the same 3-5 ideas recycled in different formats. I agree with most of the people here, but I miss that I didn’t on Reddit.
To add to this: there is a not insignificant chance that the posts you see come from The_Picard_Maneuver, every time.
This might sound weird but there are a lot more assholes here than reddit.
On Reddit you can expect some percentage of the people to be assholes because some percentage of the population are assholes… but here, heaven forbid you go against the grain of the narrative.
As opposed to reddit, where most of the people are nice and some are assholes, here only some are nice and the majority are assholes.
People are a little too enthusiastic about their opinions here. It’s kind of not great. I’m just here to enjoy myself and pass the time.
I envision a reddit clone with a “Live and let live” ethos where the only voting options you have are “Meh” and “That’s just like your opinion man.”
You’re absolutely right! And people keep saying that they’re nicer here which is not the case at all!
Counterpoint. It depends massively on what communities you use. So there’s a not so small possibility that both you and the people you disagree with are right.
That’s true. Some of the communities are great… but there were way way more, way larger, way more active communities on Reddit that were great in the same way too.
I would normally agree with you, but I usually see this in communities like ask Lemmy. And it’s not usually about disagreements. Most of it is people just being complete assholes because they misunderstood something. Now, I know assholes are every where, and that’s not the problem. It just annoys me when I see comments like “everyone is more friendly here”.
My experience is the opposite. Both platforms are full of assholes tbh, but reddit is like nothing but, here you can occasionally have actual discourse, though I assume that will change before long.
I think it’s a numbers thing. The larger the user base, the more the average skews towards being mellow/nicer.
That is interesting… I don’t have the same experience, at all. Quite the opposite really.
For now, I find it kind of boring. On reddit, I used to spend more time in comment sections than regularly scrolling. Now I don’t really do that, because there are either no comments or the comments are the same.
When I started using lemmy with the default sorting option (‘active’ i think?), I would see the same posts for days, now I use top 6 hours and that problem is fixed, but lemmy now feels like a news site with comments. Also I am European, but it feels like 50% of content is some local American politics. I don’t care about my own town’s politics, so I don’t care about that guy from Minnesota either.
A post from asklemmy hasn’t shown up in my feed in a long time and I kind of forgot it existed, but looking into it, looks like one of the only interesting places here, so I guess, I have visit it more often.
Curating a good subscribed feed and community blocklist has been my trick.
Linux/FOSS Bros are ruining it for me more and more every day.
Not even with my comments, but others. I’m so sick of seeing basic comments extremely downvoted because “ThaTs NoT OpeN sOurCe”.
Like a post a was reading a few minutes ago about Microsoft Paint being updated, and someone said it was Windows 11 exclusive, and the other guy said Windows 11 isn’t half bad. The comment is super downvoted, because Linux best, Windoze BAD!
You’re going to drive away people who just want to have a conversation if you guys don’t learn how to be normal, holy shit. I’m a tech bro and you’re driving ME away.
Open source, left is good, right is not, there is no center, eat the rich. Oh and because I can’t buy a house the world is fucked. Fucking billionaire landlords.
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With the Reddit migration, Lemmy has been primarily liberal, not left.
Unfortunately
Indeed
I think it’s inevitable that lemmy attracts these kinda people. At least for me, I got out of Reddit not just because of the API decisions, but because I just don’t like the idea of having 0 control over my services. The API thing was just a wakeup call.
I’d say that I’m “part of the problem” in terms of shilling for FOSS software, but I was the same back on Reddit. So it’s gonna be my type of people that come in here.
Either that or tankies
I think many people don’t understand this is the entire point of being on Lemmy. They just want Reddit without ads, but without FOSS we would sooner or later become Reddit. So of course we are going to care about FOSS.
It’s the same with people who use Linux but say they don’t care about FOSS. Linux is Linux because it’s FOSS. Otherwise it would just be Chrome OS or Android.
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It’s always awesome when an example presents itself in the comments below.
There is way too many of you assholes bringing up stuff that’s totally irrellevant to most people. You found one thing that is important for you and don’t accept that other people don’t give a shit
You found one thing that is important for you and don’t accept that other people don’t give a shit
Some of them became the very things they dislike: the sports fan that never shuts up about their sport, the religious person proselytizing, the obnoxious ads…Just for that one thing, like you say.
I agree with only two of those 3. Pull out your knife, we fight!
That last sentence is so true. I love FOSS and tech, but there are cases where proprietary software is better, and that’s okay. Let’s be objective, not an echo chamber.
Discussion is difficult. This place feels like a club sometimes, and if you don’t subscribe to the exact same ideals, you just get shouted down. I’m here for discussion, and dissenting opinions, but it just isn’t allowed to exist here.
To add on to this; Smugness is rampant. It reminds me of Linux user Groups in college. More than half the time was spent shitting on Windows (Reddit), and if you dared to ask a question you were ridiculed for not knowing it, or people who put more effort into telling you to look it up yourself than it would take to answer you in the first place. I can echo the same club mentality as I’ve on more than one occasion described why a particular political idea isn’t viable based on votes in Congress only to be dismissed without any counter argument as “I don’t understand _____”. So there really is no discussion, it’s essentially just shitposting and piling on, and if I liked that I would have stayed on Facebook.
We need more kind diverse people.
At this point, I don’t even care if they’re kind, I just want discussion.
I often delete comments before I even post them, knowing that it just isn’t worth it most of the time.
Deleting before I post is something I’ve done too. Sometimes you just need to type it up, but it doesn’t need to be sent. I get it.
shitting on Windows
Let’s start. Windows 2000 when came out had more scalable networking than Linux.
To be fair that was true on Reddit too. And is true on spaces such as twitter as well. I think it’s just a symptom to anonymity that people treat each harshly and consider others’ views less than their own. There are just trigger topics you have to avoid because there doesn’t exist an online platform where productive discourse is going to happen.
It was similar, but on reddit there was enough people to occasionally get someone interested in genuine discussion. This comment chain is the most productive conversation I’ve had on Lemmy. In fact it’s the only one.
I like Lemmy, but I do have some problems with it. Based on my experience.
All the big Lemmy instances is biased for the Left wing, like Reddit is.
If you go against the popular opinion. You will get dogpiled. To be fair, this happens everywhere. But I was hoping Lemmy will be different. So it’s mainly on me for hoping.
The niche communities are dead or dying. This a population problem, but it still sucks.
They need to give us (the users) the ability to block instances.
Outside that stuff, I like Lemmy.
When you say “left wing”. I assume you use the US political reference, right?
Just so you know, in a lot of places, “US left wing” is further right than the most (non-fringe) right wing party there is.
And as such, the perception of politics in the US goes from “insane but maybe a step in the right direction” to “absolute evil and/or destructive/immoral”
My point, which I’m not trying to make to annoy or offend you, but you might want to reflect on: A lot of what is considered “political left wing” in the US, is “common sense” elsewhere.
So, you running into discussion forums is not necessarily that they are “left wing”, but rather not deprived of morality, and share a different set of common sense values of creating a society that is fair, the vulnerable and sick are taken care of, no one is exploited, etc etc. That just happens to be “socialism” according to Americans, and otherwise the full political spectrum in my country as to the nuances on how to best achieve that.
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It’s not really “coping”. Other than that, you are right about a lot of points. I am providing a Eurocentric point of view, as you put it. I have no other perspective or insight to share.
US politics are certainly lacking in morality relative to European farts. If listening to 5 seconds of Trump doesn’t convince you, or the recent Republican debate… No rational mind or argument will.
It depends on the topic. What right-wing views of the Muslim world, India, etc. are we talking about? Women’s rights, other human rights issues aren’t going to go over well in any mainstream western focused site. US right-wing views are just a bunch of bad faith arguments. The smugness is one thing, but we don’t have to be tolerant of intolerance.
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Find me one that isn’t based on a lie. It’s been a long time since it was just a matter of disagreement. I’m not throwing the term out, it’s true.
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FWIW, I agree with you on both points. I also think the right has a huge issue with “bad faith” arguments though (way more so than the left).
e.g. the decade long “replacement for Obamacare” that’s so much better and perpetually going to be released just after X. This is before Trump even entered the picture.
I’ll give you another example, guns. I think the right has a point that it’s a mental health issue, but they’re not actually willing to change policies in a way that makes mental health care more accessible, so it’s an incomplete solution/there’s no way to actually get the job done.
Election fraud is another. I’m all for ensuring elections are done with integrity; however, when the efforts to “fix election fraud” aren’t supported by real issues when they enter a court of law (where there’s real skin in the game, not just words), and when these efforts are targeted at disenfranchising democrats and changing little in rural areas that’s a huge red flag. For a specific example, see 1 ballot box per county during COVID (an urban county with over a million people could have the same number of ballot drop boxes as a rural county with a few thousand). Another example would be the absurdly long polling lines in Georgia and the laws attempting to ban people from even giving folks waiting in those lines water.
Independent state legislature theory was also another hellish policy idea out of right wing think tanks that would allow state house legislatures to outright negate votes (fortunately the US supreme court killed that – but it should give you an idea for how dirty Republican reps are willing to be and where their moral compass is resting).
i.e., there are potentially interesting policy points in the right’s voting base. However, the right’s politicians are completely off the rails (and operating in a way that I don’t believe any American should support – both in demeanor and policy).
Border control…There is a strong push amongst actual leftists to open our borders completely
Who is saying that? Right-Wing Media? There is no significant movement to completely open our southern border, nor is it something the current administration is demonstrably moving toward. What is happening is right-wing media creating a strawman in bad faith to misrepresent liberals opinions on the southern border. For example, not wanting to build a border wall doesn’t not equate wanting an open border. Just like not wanting to buy a Suburban doesn’t mean I want to walk to work. The border wall has been a thirty year grift that Republican politicians use to line the pockets of their donors through bloated contracts. Republicans have controlled the Presidency for 12 years over the last two decades. Why wasn’t it already done? If you look into it, you’ll find significant logistical issues including there being a river and terrain that isn’t friendly to construction. There are areas where an existing wall cuts off US Citizen’s farms and ranches, and where Border Control can’t easily get to. Then there’s the topic of Circular migration where preventing some migrants from leaving would double-down on your social services problem you mentioned.
Another one would be the police abolition movement. I think there is good reason why every functional country on earth has a police force.
This one again is not in any supported by any politicians or most people. “De-fund the Police” is a poor slogan any way you look at it. Yes, there are people that mean in literally. I can’t blame them. The truth is there are areas of this country where the Police act more similar to organized crime than a protection force. This is not literally true the vast majority of the time, but you can’t go 2 days without hearing about a situation where there’s corruption, or unneeded escalation that causes another civilian death. The movement I’d like to see is to Reform the Police, but that doesn’t really sound great in a protest march does it? Police should de-escalate situations, not escalate them. We hear these stories of mentally ill people who are not violent getting shot because someone calls the police to get them help, and the responding officer starts yelling with their gun out making everyone nervous and the mentally ill person gets shot. Or we see stories of overreacting to children, even arresting them for minor disobedience. We see an “us vs them” mentality coming out of the Police where they refuse to hold their own accountable. All of these things should be agreed upon universally imo. I’ve said this to some Gun-Loving friends before. Why should “he had a gun” be a reason for a cop to shoot you dead without getting your day in court? Last I checked conservatives are way into the 2nd Amendment, so this universal love for the Police, especially when they do wrong is puzzling to me.
I think the problem here is often not the ideology, but the way people go about it. I’m left-wing but I basically can’t stand to talk to other left-wingers about politics as they’re so sanctimonious, disrespectful, and hypocritical online. So the problem isn’t that a platform is left-wing, but rather that there’s left-wingers on it if you follow that logic. Please note I said if you follow the logic, not if you agree with it…before I get dog-piled on for saying something non-flattering about liberals.
Then there’s Lemmygrad…
And Hexbear
Yea, it’s a problem with most people who’re heavily into politics these days I think. They’re more concerned with dunking on the people that don’t follow their beliefs than they are actually discussing issues. If they run into someone that isn’t part of their echo chamber they can’t handle it and start throwing insults.
“We must eat the billionaires. This is all the fault of capitalism. No wonder that’s how they make their profit.”
This sort of thing is ‘leftist’ everywhere.
Yeah, the US version.
My point, which I’m not trying to make to annoy or offend you, but you might want to reflect on: A lot of what is considered “political left wing” in the US, is “common sense” elsewhere.
No problem, no foul. We good.
the ‘right wing’ believes climate change is a hoax. you’re struggling with a failed conception of ‘both sides’ politics. please receive a plot update.
You’re straw manning the hell out of anyone you don’t perceive to be on your side, you’re the average leftist lemmy shitposter people are complaining about in this thread.
you’re simplifying a complex situation
I wish some of the niche communities were more active but overall I like it very much. It’s my go to diversion.
It’s a solid meh.
I came for a reddit replacement and instead I found an interesting subset of what I got at Reddit. And it is not better content or engagement wise. It’s useful but niche, and therefore less useful overall than Reddit was.
It’s organic, and full of Internet weirdos, feels like reddit of decades ago, except everyone kinda knows each other here.
Sometimes the reddit circlejerks do flare up though.
I’m getting very tired of the privacy nuts. I get that it’s important, but I don’t want to hear about it all the fucking time. I also miss my city subreddit, but I’d rather hear about how Google’s fucking me over for bajillionth time than use the Reddit app.
Agreed. Foss, privacy, Linux. Topics that are too high a proportion of all Lemmy posts.
I mean, Lemmy itself is FOSS, and the vast majority of instances are running on Linux. The main reason I am here and not on Reddit is that Lemmy is FOSS.
Lemmy wasn’t specifically built for being primarily a platform for discussing the things it was built on. It makes sense there’s a nice lively community for all of those topics, but they are so out of whack proportion wise with the types of content I want to see.
Yes, reading Lemmy you’d think Linux has a 90% market share.
Outside of amd64 desktops it kind of does.
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I LOVE the idea of Lemmy and the decentralized web and people coming together to forge our own way. But there’s a far too high ratio of elitism, smugness, arrogance and belittlement to people that just want to discuss the things we enjoy. It is just really unfortunate. I don’t engage very much, or at all really so I understand part of that is on me, but every discussion I find I’d like to chime in on is already polluted by assholes. It’s just disheartening.
As one of said assholes, the biggest problem I have with Lemmy is that it’s stuck trying to be both the Old Internet in which directness was prized and encouraged no matter how acerbic, and Comfort Internet for nonpartisans.
When these two crowds mix there’s going to be discomfort.
And freedom from participation in politics is hiding in privilege to some very real extent, so in some ways I don’t know how to be sympathetic to your plight.
But all politics is ragebait, isn’t it? I’ve come back to this general feeling that we need more rage, not less.
The doctrinal conflicts on the Internet are yet to be resolved. We still have the disaffected rightwing types who haven’t really had it sink in yet that they failed and their loser is and was always a loser. We still have moderate idiots who think that ‘both sides’ need to curtail their extremists.
It’s an irony that one of the Left’s strengths is dogmatism, because I do think there’s dogmatic leftists here that I find insufferable. I didn’t used to dislike male feminists as much as I do now, but let women represent women’s issues.
In the meanwhile, the leftist dogma of No Platforming Stupid Rightwing Shit needs to be more formidably advanced.
It’s good but it doesn’t feel like there are many vibrant communities with their own subculture. I know I’m part of the problem. I’ve heard people say 90% are lurkers, 9% are posters, and 1% are content creators. I’m clearly in that second category.
Better than me! I’m the 90%, but have found myself wishing more people posted, so…
