Gonna just say it. As a longtime Lemmy user I’m really not a fan of a lot of the people coming over from Reddit. It’s probably just a small but vocal minority and confirmation bias on my part, but I get the impression that they are trying to turn Lemmy into Reddit, toxicity, entitlement, stupid challenges and all.
When we’ve had two major debacles before Reddit even opened back up, one about “how dare these unpaid admins try to lessen their workload with sign up questions”, and the other about “how dare instances block other instances that are being used as proxies for forwarding spam and bot content into their own instances.” The people from reddit seem to still think they’re on Reddit and any perceived inferiority that Lemmy has compared to Reddit is seen as just as bad as Reddit’s corporate decisions. A few people even trying to go to an instance with the intent of “converting” the existing users who may be socialist or communist, by commenting abuse on their posts of course, just like how they presumably do it on Reddit.
People also seem to be refusing to learn what federation is and how that works, despite it being literally the most important aspects of Lemmy. This is evident in people telling instances who block spam or troll ridden instances to “mind their own business” as if that content doesn’t get forwarded over to and show up on the main pages of other instances, you know, what the fediverse was designed to do.
FYI, Reddit has opened back up. Spez has made it clear that he will never tolerate subreddits shutting down and inconveniencing you again. If you’re so unwilling to even adopt a different mindset and perspective when coming to Lemmy, I think it’s best if you went back. Plenty of us came here because we didn’t want to be on Reddit.
Last thing and a pet peeve of mine: stop calling yourself a refugee. You left a meme website for another meme website because you didn’t like one aspect of the management, the entire decision and migration probably took less than an hour of you sitting in your comfortable house in front of a computer. To compare that to being a refugee speaks volumes about your entitlement and privilege. And it’s especially ironic considering what real refugees go through to save themselves and their families, that you won’t even answer a few registration questions.
It’s reasonable for the early adopters who built the house to be salty when they get a flood of noobs tracking in mud on the clean carpet. But everyone’s a noob at some point in their digital life, so that’s why it’s important to try to take cues from the culture you are joining and be willing to learn. Don’t get insulted - just chill a little and try to engage with the community on its own merits. Give it a few weeks before you decide you know what it should be and what it needs.
I didn’t hear about lemmy until the reddit dustup so i’m a noob too. I picked my instance by going into a bunch of instances, looking at the communities list and applying to the one that had the most content that interested me. It’s not rocket science to find where you fit. If you can put together a couple coherent sentences, you shouldn’t fear a mild application question. Now i’m getting annoyed by the flood of subreddit dupes, pointless memes, reddit-centric chatter and such, so i imagine it’s way worse for the OGs. Reddit is dead. Let it die. Make better comunities, don’t resurrect the zombie corpses of subreddits that were just pointless repost karma farms anyway.
Things will settle down in a few weeks once we get into mid july, i reckon. People with short attention spans will complain and then wander off. People who find a better instance fit will shift, or even start new instances. Bugs will cause problems and get patched, and then there will be new bugs. There will be defederation drama. It’s all good. Don’t be insulted, settle in. Then in a few months or years when we get a fresh flood of inconsiderate noobs with “rebuilt the thing we left” energy, you get to be the OG yelling about all the mud on the carpet.