Lemmy is so good right now because there’s no commercialization here.
My ublock has been at a constant “0” on this site since I’ve started. A youtube tab will have over a hundred by the end of a 10 minute video.
And hopefully never will be. It seems like the people hosting instances aren’t in it for the money. Particularly the *.world guys have other fediverse projects big enough that they could’ve done something like, say, add ads to it.
The .world sites are being financed by a patreon and other donations. They even make their finances public every few months.
The reasons to develop it also are ideological and not ecological ones.
For me it is lack of commercial interests (ads hidden in post), lack of bots, and lack of "funny meme and jokes’ posts.
lack of "funny meme and jokes’ posts
This is it for me. The Pavlovian posting and upvoting of shitty jokes in every. single. thread. I haven’t bothered with reddit’s comment section in years because of it. Here, the comments so far seem chill and appropriate for the posts.
The Narwhal bacons at midnight, fellow hydrohomie
I too choose this man’s hydrohomie
I hated this one the most
The same shitty jokes at that, over and over and over again.
That’s the other thing, people wouldn’t do that if it didn’t get them karma every single time. Karma isn’t publicly displayed on Lemmy, and if the vision of very spread out communities comes to fruition it also just wouldn’t make sense anyway.
Yes, I hope Karma won’t be as prominent as on reddit, limiting jokes to those that are appropriate.
Agreed. On top of this I noticed a pretty hard decline in Reddit once the CCP bought a portion of reddit. Keeping business out of Lemmy will keep it honest for sure.
I missed that, they bought a stake in Conde Nast or how come?
We can always make funny memes
please don’t randomly start some ageism crap suddenly now please. the vibes are good because we collectively experience self-efficacy against the corporate super power that is reddit. All people should feel welcome on lemmy
I think it’s cause everyone here has to actually try and make meaningful content here as opposed to being jaded and doom scrolling while posting among hundreds of others - and getting told to use the search function. Every post rn has an impact so the vibes are good!
It’s buggy but will get better. Feels hands off here because everyone is just happy to be here and few are pushing an agenda cough OP ageism comments
Forums aren’t sliding with lame jokes or immediately have the focus of conversation moved away from the actual content.
Feels like people talking instead of bots arguing and I’ll work with buggy apps or browser versions forever if it helps maintain the current lemmy experience
lemmy looks like it does now because it’s first of all and most importantly small.
the reason why it’s small is that there are barriers for entry, be it effort needed to understand federation for the first time or choosing instance. “ooh just choose anything it’s not that hard” shut the fuck up. it’s a barrier because you can see that numbers are quite low, and just because you’ve come through it already doesn’t mean it’s not there
but there’s bigger issue. depending on instance and how do you count, some 95%+ of new active users could have been rexxiters. this means that by coming there they have to leave reddit, and that means leaving communities that were there
average person isn’t stupid or malicious or unenlightened plebeian. average person is just. average. because of small lemmy’s size people there are subject to strong selection bias, namely on gaussian distribution of “how much do you care about moving there” that’s far right tail that sits there. what are reasons for that, for every person that would be a bit different. some of these are FOSS enthusiasts or techlibertarians or softcore anticapitalists. this has some serious implications. some were banned from reddit but want replacement (some of these were shown door already, like exploding-heads).
now, crossection of “people who cared to come there” and “programmers” is reasonably big, as evidenced by programming.dev, but for any other unrelated topic there’s much less. crossection of “people who care” and “people who are good at identifying mushrooms” or “aviation fans” or whatever is small, maybe too small to form new community. these people would need to leave reddit and their community and come there, doing nothing because they have no other fellow mushroom identificators to talk to. so, many don’t. there’s also probably negative selection of specific kind of people like some conspiracy theorists, at least for now
if you want to see lemmy grow, you would see dilution of that concentrated techbro sentiment with people who are otherwise average, but these people are also there to form new, specialized communities. you might want to gatekeep them out with some eternal september scenario, but it most likely won’t work. personally i think that lemmy needs to grow a few times over for these “unrelated communities” to form, and then things will get pretty sustainable
another thing is that there’s no ads and no selection for hostile content or conspiracy theories, and that might be related to how lemmy’s algorithm is not driven by engagement, at least that’s how it looks like
Great post. Lemmy right now reminds me of Reddit 15-16 years ago. Mostly tech workers or tech hobbyists who know far more than an average person and thus aren’t put off by something new and different. I don’t think Lemmy is very complicated as a concept and it boggles my mind that people are saying “making a new account on Lemmy.world or Kbin.social is too complicated for normal people.” Yet I see it written all the time, sometimes here but mostly on reddit. And who knows; maybe the latter is a disinformation campaign since we know reddit pulls sneaky shit like that all the time (and targeting Lemmy, like with the warnings they placed on links at one point).
Lemmy’s barriers to entry also somewhat remind me of early Facebook after they expanded to several universities. You needed to have an email address from one of those univerisities in order to create an account. So, not so much self selection in that scenario but another gate to keep people out.
I can respect Tildes’ decision to become invite-only (with a very limited number of invites) for that reason. Lemmy, I think, is prioritizing growth at the potential cost of future community. Tildes is doing the opposite. I don’t think one is necessarily more correct. And, with Lemmy, there are tons of alternatives waiting in the wings. Hopefully a balance can be struck.
I think the real test comes when the first wave of good third party apps are released. Sync, in particular, seems very promising given the developer’s reddit app. Anything that can make it easier for people.
i think the biggest barrier is leaving fully formed communities on reddit, not technicalities of lemmy
for more information, please re-read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Hey I just said I reqllly found your comment really informative and insightful, and albeit I have some vague ideas on how it is part of survivorship bias, i can’t quite tell what you refer to?
What I’m talking about is mostly negative bias so I might be wrong
Thanks for your time :)
if you want to explain why lemmy looks like it does now, you can just look at the people who got there, but if you want a clearer picture you should also look at people who didn’t. failure to do that introduces survivorship bias. currently most of new users comes from reddit, so you already have ready-made set of failed lemmy users
and also there’s obscure reference to scarfolk council
Not just fewer kids. But fewer conservatives too.
Gosh, I love it here.
Conservatives love having corporate masters, so they’re all staying on reddit.
You know, it’s so funny (though obviously not in an enjoyable way per se) how those folks are so selective and picky about freedom. Like freedom is OK when it’s the freedom to enter a supermarket without a mask, but it’s not OK when it’s the freedom to express your gender. And as in this example, when it comes to corporate masters…
Don’t you just love capitalism? And don’t you just loooooove capitalists? It’s honestly frightening how reminiscent it is to the way the fascists took power in 1930s Germany.
And by the way, I’m noticing a parallel with how much they not only embrace conservative evangelical Christendom, but also act like it’s the epitome of freedom and liberty - the American Dream, if you will. If you attend one of the US’s most notorious fundie schools, you’re not allowed to stay up late, mingle with the opposite gender too much, attend dances, or be pretty much anything other than cishet (and implicitly, cishet white male). The irony of how said school is named “LIBERTY” University never seems to die on me.
Conservatives love giving lip service to freedom, but they hate anyone actually exercising their freedom.
Basically they only care about appearances and are devoid of any actual substance. That’s why they scream “virtue signaling” so much. Since they have no real virtue, they can’t conceive of anyone else having any either.
I think you need to consider the immense capability of humans for self-deceit, false logic and just think and act driven by emotion and then post-hoc using thinking to fit some explanation for it.
Also there are way more people who never learned to think in a structured way than there are people who have, plus even the former can be subtly sawed by their own wants, needs and fears (it mostly happen at the level of interpreting things with many possible interpretations and our judgment of the likelihood of various explanations where there are various possibilities, in my experience).
My point being that you can’t really “read” them as thinking things through and then knowingly choosing to deceive: I think that at least the ones who just parrot that stuff do not at all internally operate like that.
Sounds like a win-win for everyone.
well not entirely. We seem to have a migration of r/conservative here. I looked. It is discretely awful.
Truth social. Lol.
Moving to Truth Social is just trading one corporate master for an even bigger corporate master.
Fewer conservatives, yes. If it wasn’t for the harcore tankies and trolls it would really be perfect. But it’s very close, much better than Reddit.
A lot of the political discussion I’ve read on here has also been pretty well thought out. I feel like people are taking time to explain their perspective more and even if in general it’s been more left leaning there is definitely more nuance. I was surprised by the quality of some of the discussion around the end of affirmative action.
Removed by mod
based
I think it’s more just because we’re early adopters and the first wave of refugees.
We’re building something here - and right now, for some it’s a new home, for some of us this is something big - a place that resists monetization. This isn’t just the fresh new version of social media, built by cool people who have the best intentions and a vision (I think most of them did, at least initially)
Admins go bad, already some of the instances I’m on have people starting to look at not just paying for servers, but making a profit. And if they can live off the donations - fine, more power to them.
But when someone comes knocking with a bag of money, what are they going to do? They can sell us out, but they can’t go far before we leave… What do we miss out on? The content will either follow or we’re missing out on content elsewhere.
And we can mitigate it further - too many talented people care too much to let this idea die. We’re going to face difficult times, but it’s a new ephemeral Internet built on top of the one stolen from us - it doesn’t start or end with a reddit clone.
And I think that’s why we care - because this time is different. It can’t go bad the way everything else does. It relies on no one, and it’s built from all of us
This place is ours. No kings, no masters, no capitol, no capital
Well put, almost made me feel inspired till I remembered we’re just nerds on the internet hahahahaha
The internet was made for nerds to be on it.
I think it’s more just because we’re early adopters and the first wave of refugees.
Yes, and because there are some little hurdles in the signup process. Having to select an instance isn’t really that big of a deal, but it will actually stop quite a few people.
The people who do make it through care or are invested enough to join and are less likely to shit the place up. It’s a self-selection process.
I think the influence on Reddit was deeper than a lot of people have considered. The hivemind was so strong it made it difficult to have decent and useful discussion, even the puns that muddied down nearly every post’s comments achieved that end. The amount of posts I’ve seen of people feeling much more comfortable actually interacting on Lemmy, in my mind, lends weight to how Reddit wasn’t a place for objective dialogue. That’s why it felt so adolescent, like sitting at a high school lunch table.
Yes, I got ground down by the same same discourse and tropes on post after post. I got especially enraged by “Came here to say this”, which added literally nothing of value to the debate but would usually, somehow, have loads of upvotes
this
/s pls don’t hurt me
Came here to say this.
/s hurt me daddy
that’s why they do it: karma farming. And that’s why I’m totally opposed to have Lemmy display user’s karma anywhere
Reddits culture has become so…tiring. My interaction dropped significantly in recent years and more often than not I delete my comments as I’m typing them because I already know the response.
I wouldn’t say it felt adolescent. Adolescence is full of misunderstandings about the world, but usually there’s at least some internal logic where you can see how a wrong understanding is logically taken to the wrong conclusion. The start and end are both wrong, but the steps from the start to the end are right. At least that was what I remember from my days of adolescence.
Reddit actually felt more lazy than adolescent. It’s like most people just couldn’t be bothered to think (or read for that matter). The vast majority of comments just felt low-effort or even no effort (like the case where people just comment “This”) and opinions are formed solely on “what’s the first feeling I get” than then get defended into absurdity, because changing your opinion with new information is a cardinal sin on Reddit. Sometimes you could get an intelligent discussion but, especially in recent years, you get the equivalent of a thumbs up if someone agrees with you or just straight up hate if someone disagrees.
I’m so happy I haven’t read a single pun or lyric/TV show spam thread since coming here. They were becoming unbearable, even worse then the proliferation of video shorts.
Enjoy while it lasts, Eventually everything turns to shit
That’s very on point. We will have the same discussion in a decade about this platform as we have it now with Reddit. Maybe even sooner? Who knows.
Will we? What kind of evil business decisions can an open protocol make? If the developers decide to do something ridiculous everyone can just refuse to go along.
Everything is about community. Usenet all but disappeared because it got overrun with selfish assholes. It’s not that hard for a community to be killed by its own membership. There are many examples both online and off.
Moderation isn’t the answer, or at least not a complete answer, because Reddit brought to the fore that moderators can be selfish assholes, too. If I understand what’s behind certain recent defederation decisions, those selfish assholes are already here.
Explicit federation (and defederation) is an interesting twist on decentralized, but it is unlikely to be a panacea.
I think we’re all running the Red Queen’s Race. Some of us are forever doomed to run away from the selfish assholes and the selfish assholes are forever doomed to chase us in the hopes of finding a place to showcase themselves. They are not and never will be happy to just be selfish assholes in their own spaces because that would be neither selfish nor asshole-ish.
Usenet lost out to the convenience and better styling options available on Web 2.0. Not because of it’s users.
Perhaps, but my personal experience was that Usenet was well on its way to being a dumpster fire of trolls, creeps, and spammers before the Web 2.0 technologies were more than a glimmer in anyone’s eyes.
And no repost bots. Reddit top posts are so filled with trash reposts I have seen the 69420 times like I am looking back my primary school homework
Agree. But it’s not kids, it’s stupid people of all ages. Same thing happened with Reddit and with the Internet as a whole. Used to be you had to be a little smart to know you wanted to be on the Internet and figure out how to get it working. Then same was true of forums and IRC. Then same was true of Reddit. But then Reddit changed formats trying to be a TikTok style quick content scroll app, so idiots who just want to scroll started using the site and quality of discussions went down. I hope Lemmy grows but I hope the sign up process stays as it is, to weed out the extra stupid.
I think you‘re onto something. I read a lot of comments of people thinking the fediverse is too complicated to deal with and while I disagree - but also think it has issues - there does seem to be a barrier of entry for a good portion of people in the form of „inconvenience.“ So whoever is here really wants to be here and not just be an anonymous arse. I don‘t think you gotta be particularly smart, you gotta step out of your comfort zone.
Hmm this is also a good point. I’ve been explaining to redditors that Lemmy is not that complicated and only takes a couple minutes to get started. But reading this, now I’m hoping Lemmy can find the balance between number of active users and quality of content. I’m wondering if my spreading the word on reddit was a bad idea.
Maybe the “work” required to make the jump to Lemmy will be enough to keep lower quality content (for whatever reason) at bay for a bit longer, though. Of course, it won’t last forever. All we can do is make our communities good spaces from the get-go and try to maintain them carefully as we grow.
Which part of it is supposed to be complicated? I’ve seen this argument many times, and while I’m still trying to figure out the user interface(s), the whole idea is pretty basic
Yes, this exactly. I’m starting to suspect that either someone very misinformed or someone with an agenda started spreading this rumor.
It just takes one person to reaffirm that it really is “too much work to switch” and “you aren’t lazy for not trying” to keep a lot of folks in place.
This kept me off Lemmy until the blackout. I was interested prior to that, but so many people said it was complicated, I figured I’d look into it at some vague point in the future when I had time to untangle the fediverse. Then the baclout happened, and what do you know I had time, and lo and behold it was easy. I’m now a bit annoyed I was dissuaded for so long based on BS about it being complicated.
I just had to find an instance (or “site”) that allowed sign-ups and register. My first account was on Kbin since it seemed less buggy on mobile. I feel like they think something’s complicated just because it’s on a website, or because there are multiple options.
I can‘t tell you since I also disagree. I did basically the same thing I did on Reddit, I only got thrown off seeing multiple „subs“ with the same name.
Some people complained how complicated „explanations“ are. I saw these types of comments on the Reddit Alternatives sub.
Getting one’s head around the concept of instances is hard for some people who aren’t used to dealing with tech beyond the basic social platforms.
Is it one social media platform, or is it a bunch of individual ones? The fact that the answer is “it depends” is confusing. Especially when you get into defederation and cross-platform interaction.
Very true. I often make the mistake of thinking that if something makes sense to me pretty quickly, it will be just as quick for others.
We should remember that those of us here now are more likely to be uniquely interested in this tech and thus more able to wrap our heads around these concepts without being deterred. We could always do a better job making it accessible for beginners who don’t benefit from the same background.
It was the worst thing to witness on reddit. A post with tens of thousands of likes and only a handfull of comments
I boosted from 1k karma to 20k by searching ‘pun’ on every top joke each day for a week.
It’s enough that good/bad posts get boosted up/down by votes without them generating Karma.
Intelligent answers aren’t always the most popular…
Reddit karma wasn’t about popularity or intelligence. It was about who got there first. If you shotgun enough comments into brand new threads your karma will skyrocket.
Also, making comments on the top comments. Plus that’s the only way for new replies to have visibility once a thread has over ~1000 replies.
When I was a kid I thought grown ups were annoying, when I was in my 20s I thought teenagers were annoying, in my 30s I think people in their 20s are annoying. People will always have something to complain about others. “Kids” is just a different group for different people.
I’m 32 and indefinitely can relate. Every generation has been worse than the last since time immemorial, apparently.
What do you mean? I’m 16/f/cali
I disagree. Terrible take. It’s never wise to discount, alienate, or exclude our youth. Growth is the name of the game and they’re the ones who are going to be ushering in hopefully a better future. Who will they learn from if not us? You want them stewing with each other?
No. We maintain whatever nebulous internet “culture” we like and establish rules. Anyone, young or old, who doesn’t adhere can suck eggs. That way young people learn how to act and we can hear them tell us about all the ways we need to better society.
Truly I believe that the children who develop during this time of overstimulation and rapid technological advancement will emerge maybe a bit… maladapted but better than us. Humans can be so resilient especially under supportive circumstances. Our intelligence is adaptive. So if you want to make a great internet community, maintain your respect for our kids.
So im new here for the obvious reason. This is my first comment here.
I hope to find more people with your mentality. It was nice to see a good reasoned response to a situation. So i guess i just wanted to say thank you for giving me hope that reddit shitting the bed is going to be the best thing since digg shit the bed
Ciao!
Lol omg thank you!!! That is really nice of you to say!! Weirdly, you replied to MY first comment here so welcome fellow newbie! We’ll try to keep this place one we’d like to be in together.
Wholesome AF but I agree. It’s my first comment using wefwef anyway, maybe 2nd or 3rd on lemmy? I was going to reply “this is the way” to your other quote lol. But you’re spot on, and honestly, anyone who disagrees probably underestimated the number of young folks on Reddit, Digg, etc. in the first place. I’ve been on the interwebz since IRC days and showing new folks how to act is the way you build communities. It doesn’t matter how old they are and nobody would ever know if they were lying about their age anyway. Cultivate good hoomans. Soooo tl;dr cheers!
Yes!! Cultivate good hoomans 100% we are on the same page.
Kids should never have been on Reddit, imo. Not because of their comments or the content they produce. But Reddit, and I guess social media in general, is for someone who can think critically and has some experience in life. Because there is so much garbage on there.
There are absolutely kids under 10 using Reddit right now, and they’re getting introduced to the adult world by some of the sleaziest dysfunctional adults around. And even if they don’t get that deep into Reddit, it’s still not a healthy place for them. It’s not healthy for adults, we all know that, but kids on Reddit are growing up with it as a major contributor to their worldviews.
You know, it’s basically GIGO. Adults can, in theory, understand that what Reddit says is opinion (often extreme and bizarre opinion) and not fact, but kids won’t.
I haven’t been here much since I joined last week, but one thing I noticed is I’ve barely seen any typos on Lemmy. While I definitely don’t mind seeing the occasional typo, the number of spelling mistakes was getting annoying, and it’s gotten progressively worse over the last year or so.
How do you even make any typos with all the autocorrect nowadays is beyond me.
Autocorrect is the cause of many of my typos
Autocorrect catches all my typos, and for that I’m eternally grapefruit
My autocorrect on my Galaxy s22+ is actually a detriment to me… It constantly changes “me” to “Mr” or “MT” and dumb shit like that… I spend more time correcting ‘autocorrects’ than typing text… Why is it so bad suddenly??
As someone with dyslexia I definitely still find a way sometimes.
I personally don’t use auto correct for a couple reason, so typos still happen from time to time.
What are the reasons if you don’t mind me asking? I write in 3 languages on the same mobile keyboard and it does a fantastic job correcting my spelling.
Test comment
In my experience as a fellow polyglot, Google’s autocorrection is good most of the time, and horribly unusable once in a while. At one point it attempted to correct every single word in a sentence.
it’s simpler when you use speech to text, or use autocorrect dictionary of wrong language
I think people here might be more conscious of what they post, due to the relatively low quantity of things being posted here. On larger platforms, what you write is more likely to be overlooked, so people care less.
Ya bro u damn rite finalysumeonre has the guts to say it. I hope dis comunity stay crispy
My pet peeve is when people put a space before the full stop or the exclamation mark. Something like this !
No kids? I am a kid
It’s past your bed time. Stay off my lawn. Get a jawb! Cut yer hair! Stop smokin’ the devil’s grass!
I’m ostensibly an adult and I love the devil’s lettuce.
I’m a coffee and cannabis in the morning type person. Some people may find it slows them down, but it helps me with creativity and seems to wake me up more than just coffee.
God bless
Stop smokin’ the devil’s
grasslettuceFTFY
