FOSSDLE PieFedWhy do people on reddit seem to hate Lemmy/Mbin/other federated link aggregators?
submitted by Yingwu edited
I was just reading this post https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1gmv76n/is_reddit_going_to_remain_the_primary_space_for/ and many barely see the fediverse as an alternative and they seem to have a negative bias towards it. Super ironic when it comes to the self-hosting community. Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views. But it doesn't really matter when it's federated and FOSS. I think it's clear-cut that the selfhosting community on Lemmy is a perfect alternative to reddit. Why is there such a negative bias?
Lemmy has a toxic puddle problem. If your first experience with Lemmy is sauntering into a community and getting chased out for not agreeing with someone hard enough, something like that, you'll probably just go back to Reddit and say 'that place is full of whack jobs'.
And the default sort, kinda hard to dodge
My experience is a little better with comments sorted by “top” instead of “active”. “active” seems to promote controversial comments because they get the most replies.
What is the default sort on Lemmy.World btw - is it Local, or All?
For me without an account, it is All. Which means that they'll see all the tankie stuff, and most will immediately want to nope out (I'm currently sitting at 100% of every person I've ever told about Lemmy irl).
On the bright side, PieFed adds a warning label to messages on communities located on Beehaw (about their differences in moderation policies), and surely could do the same for lemmy.ml - in fact I saw such a message this morning (sth sth warning do not criticize China or Russia or you are likely to be banned - quite neutrally yet helpfully worded, very much to the point), though now can't seem to reproduce, so perhaps it's in testing.
I saw that on ML you might get banned for stuff like calling Xi Jinping a Winnie. But not for an opinion. Especially about Russia.
Why is that tankie?
That post criticizes "any western leader" talking about human rights and shows photos of bombing gaza below it, if I interpret it correctly. It certainly is whataboutism, but I don’t see how it is directly used to justify anything else, even though that might be thought behind it and be more clear after reading more posts of that person. Though I’d rather use the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, since that’s a more direct human rights violation than supplying Israel with money, weapons and defense support.
I never said that that image proves that the originator is a tankie. For one, such content turns people away from the Fediverse, regardless if offered by a conservative, a leftist, a tankie, or whoever. Mainly why I included it is that it is an example of content offered on an instance known to have tankies. See e.g. https://feddit.nl/post/16246531.
What "makes" them a "tankie" instance is that they literally deny that the Tiennamen Square massacre involved any fatalities (and ban anyone from every community on Lemmy.ml, even ones that you've never posted or commented in) if you say otherwise. They are really quite open about it too - it definitely is no secret, though you won't see it immediately upon looking at the sidebar for the instance, so usually people from the Western world (which they seem to be so against in many of their more politically aligned communities) have to discover that fact on their own, then get disappointed (especially those considering themselves liberal and therefore a bit "left-leaning", not knowing just how far left the scale really goes, i.e. nearly every American is fairly right-leaning, when using the global rather than USA scale).
But more generally, if that instance wants to make fun of the West, particularly Americans, that's fine - do their thing - but then why is it so shocking when Americans get offended by that? All the more so when reading the sidebar of such places as e.g. Lemmy.World and Lemmy.ca, but then the content federated from Lemmy.ml's communities work according to an entirely different set of rules.
As we try to entice people over here from Reddit, it's confusing to them to have all these conflicting sets of rules and behaviors - e.g. in some instances people are allowed to behave as trolls, even encouraged to do so apparently by their admins, but then they also come out and do it here as well, where it is a violation of the rules.
Anyway, again, I'm not using that image to try to prove tankieness - that's already been established. This is content from tankies, as the person I replied to said "that place is full of whack jobs", and this whataboutism seemed a kind of illustration of that, not proof.
Could you please tell more about Beehaw's "moderation differences"?
I am not certain I can explain it, but for one thing they have defederated from two of the largest instances including Lemmy.World, bc they wanted a narrower range of experiences yet the mod tools would not allow them to keep up with vetting the flood of content from them and thus their userbase would have been "exposed" to it.
The mantra is "be nice", but I also saw people discussing literally murder of "others" who they disagreed with, like they voted the wrong way, or didn't vote despite being in a deep blue USA state or something. So I have no idea of what the criteria really is.
In any case, people report being banned from there at the drop of a hat, bc their mods are quite zealous. Which can be quite shocking to someone coming from a place that has significantly looser moderation practices.
So anyway the label I see for a post hosted on a Beehaw community says:
And then that link goes to Beehaw's own description of their own policies. I love this approach! It's quite friendly - it allows Beehaw to speak for itself, and rather than penalize the instance for being different, yet it addresses the interface between it vs. the wider Fediverse that is more used to content such as appears on Lemmy.World, which again has significantly looser standards (due in large part to severe lack of moderation efforts, which in turn relates to lack of development of tools that mods seem to consider sufficient).
Beehaw is a bit fragile. They'll remove any comment they don't like if it offends their current sensibilities.
It's very hard to convince people that fedi is a healthy place when the default servers are incredibly toxic. I wish they would at least advertise it as such, maybe hide the default from the number one spot. There are several servers up there that accept users that are way more chill.
Also for new selfhosters making it easier to say "these are some problem instances that are commonly blocked, if you want to start out with them". I know that starts a new problem of "but then who decides" and it causes more splintering, but for a lot of posters it's overwhelming the firehouse of vitriol that comes in at first.
just wanted to drop that for the selfhosters there is https://fediseer.com/ which provides an API (which makes getting a crowdsourced and up to date whitelist easy)
But https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.ml received 15 endorsements, from some major well-known/top instances, with such kind words as "popular with our users", and one going so far as to state "friendly staff; well moderated" - WELL MODERATED!? Tbf it did receive a single censure, and 2 hesitations (from places that I've never heard of before).
I was not here prior to the Rexodus - maybe it was (more) true then? Even if so, that info seems out of date. And then even if it is the singular instance for which that is true, that is still a fairly major deviation - e.g. the graphic that I showed in my comment above this was shared to both lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml, while others are shared also with hexbear.net. Banning lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net thereby helps but does not eliminate the "leak" that occurs when that identical content spreads out to the entire Fediverse via lemmy.ml.
e.g. the #1 rule on https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/ states to not perform "Attacks on users or groups", though I constantly see anti-Western nation attack wording and graphics posted on those 3 (maybe now after the USA elections it will suddenly cease, having already served its purpose?). For Lemmy.World to act as a delivery vector for that content, despite how it violates their ToS - how is that all that much different from allowing CSAM to spread, which likewise did not originate from Lemmy.World, yet if the latter chooses to allow itself to be the method of delivery to all of its users...?
Well anyway, thank you for your helpful addition of the link. Though I think there is more to the story as I outlined here.
Take a step back, you sound ridiculous. CSAM is not the same AT ALL as someone criticizing the west for letting Israel bomb the shit out of Gaza. If you are used to reddit, you are used to more conservative views. You have never experienced views that would be considered radical leftist. I am from the US, the republican and democrat parties are very conservative. Reddit only deals with these two parties' views for the most part. I found nothing wrong with the screenshot you took. There is no leak that needs to be plugged, try experiencing more views to broaden your horizon. There is nothing wrong with saying the US is a fascist hellhole and is complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. Some of Europe is also heading that way too. It is not against TOS to point that out. You are being a "lib" which is really just saying you are being a reactionary. The big three you hate so much are not afraid of telling you when you have reactionary views and how dumb they are, if you want someone banned for being mean to you then go to beehaw, it is against their rules to say anything that doesn't coddle you.
*ARE* we a healthy service though? Setting aside how any social media can be addictive, Lemmy in particular is incredibly toxic. It can be MADE into something that is far more tolerable, but it is not that way fresh out of the box, for a new user - particularly a mainstream one - who does not know what they are doing, e.g. how to block, what an "instance" even is (neither Reddit nor X has an equivalent), etc.
Blaze, when he preaches about the benefits of Lemmy on Reddit to entice new users to come here, mostly tells people to choose lemm.ee, and even specifically mentions the tankie issue for those who are worried about it, specifically regarding lemmy.ml. However, lemm.ee does not block e.g. hexbear.net's ChapoTrapHouse, nor does it block even the incredibly offensive lemmygrad.ml. I almost left the Fediverse entirely when I commented in each of those, and received WEEKS and WEEKS of replies (EACH) to what I considered an innocuous comment (e.g. "at least Biden lowered gas prices, which is not nothing imho?") - I could do nothing (that I knew of) to halt it. Nor, having arrived in them via All, did I have the first inkling of what those communities were all about, or those instances. I did not consent to that! Having read the rules of e.g. Lemmy.World, and coming as I had from Kbin.social, I was not expecting anything remotely close to... THAT!?!?!
So I understand why my irl friends have all absolutely refused to use Lemmy, and moreover give me a dirty look for even having suggested it. It's nasty. *WE* (who use Linux btw) know how to manage software, and can make it into something beautiful. But a day-1 noob with a guest or fresh account, trying to compare this place to Reddit, will not likely stick around long enough to see what we do.
As for the rest, I most definitely get what you are saying, and there are a couple of recent(-ish) posts in !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca that cover those topics in more detail, if you want!:-)
hm, maybe lemmy needs the feature to disable response notifications for specific posts or threads. Though that’s the less problematic scenario. The biggest issue in federated networks is when somebody is determined to stalk and pester you, though I haven’t heard of that happening here so far. But you *could* comment under each and every post of another user, since you can see all posts. And there is no way to stop that if they are persistent as they can just create a new account on a new instance anytime they get blocked or banned.
Oh I've seen it - some people receiving downvotes between replying to me and me seeing their content, which I thought was odd so I checked out their post history and literally everything had been downvoted. Obviously that's a sort of troll attack (except one case where the person said that they were doing it to themselves, so as to imprint upon themselves how worthless those scores really are). Admins can see such and ban accounts doing it, but some instances allow automated signups so there can be an unlimited number of accounts that would need banning though, if someone were determined enough to keep making new ones.
But that's not what drove my irl friends away - that was content that e.g. made fun of the Western world & society, and which they considered "extremist", and did not want to see so they left. And as others have noted, if you remove politics and Linux, then other than Star Trek what else do we even have here?
A community, that's what. But that takes awhile to see, yet they were already gone.
That's also reddit tho...
Yeah whatever, that's a feature. Reddit became worse once it became a safe place for conservatives and center-right liberals to gather.
Conservative, TheDonald, KiA, red pill, et. all made Reddit worse.
I don't want a second Reddit. Can better avoid eternal September issues if they self select to fuck off
But I guess that's what .world is for.
A lot of communities on Lemmy have a 'scene kid' subculture and they will just harass people right off the platform for not being true enough to the cause, despite being for the cause.
You got a bunch of raindrops. They want to become a hurricane. They simply need a warm breeze but shit blows sideways instead. The corners of Lemmy where movements could be happening are basically mosh pits
I'm not trying to argue with you or correct you or anything, just pointing out why this is bad, how it shouldn't be as it is, but it's on deaf ears to the people I'm lamenting about. And you're correct, a 2nd Reddit would suck, but Lemmy could be better if those people were being better.
If there's anything anyone mad about anything in the world should know, by know, don't attack people on the same team, welcome them in
I don't quite understand your point. Do you maybe have some examples to understand better?
I actually blocked most of those groups but one was some climate community on another instance. There was a post where someone asked what they could do personally to help prevent climate change, and it was full of political theory as a response.
Someone said they actively boycott Starbucks because the CEO flies a jet in order to commute to Seattle to California, and if the government won't do anything they felt like the least they can do is just commit to never giving them and their lobbyists a single penny ever again.
And they were downvoted to like -20 and had a dozen people attacking them over shifting the blame from the corporations to the working class by framing it in such a way that the working class should have any responsibility for the actions of the corporation. It was like watching a bunch of picketers calling someone a scab.
And I'm just reading it like "what the fuck guys, you're sitting around discussing political strategies that have so far done absolutely nothing, they're doing something, they have a point, the lobbyists make the laws, so defunding the lobbyists does make a lot of sense. He's flying in a jet to work because people give him money, helllLLLOOOooo."
Someone even went so far as to argue that a lot of people need to go to Starbucks because they might need a quiet space to study or hang out, so I jumped in pointing out that most municipalities have a library at the minimum, and people were fine before coffee shops were everywhere, and I got downvoted and jumped on by half a dozen people for not understanding the plight of others.
Homeless people need somewhere to go, so I'm an asshole for suggesting that other people could go to Starbucks less? Beats the hell out of me
In some climate forum, for no reason other than to win a stupid internet argument over the responsibility of emissions, everyone began defending the necessity of Starbucks of all things. Seriously. And at the same time, consumers shouldn't have to endure hardships for the climate because they should instead focus on affecting policy, in order for places like Starbucks to change, because they're fucking horrible. In my mind I was just like "well are corporations good or bad, or at the moment are they just convenient as both in order to use that person as a punching bag?" but noped right out.
It was basically a rat's nest of tangled up incongruent statements that all led back to 'fuck that person for saying they make a very small effort to do something towards a corporation as opposed to attempting to reshape politics'
So yeah, shit like that.
Maybe a simple "while I disagree with A due to B, it does have some merit because of C. But in my opinion I think D is more effective, and if you'd like to learn more about D, here are some resources! :)"
I'd argue that at this point, sticking to the collective vs individual dichotomy of climate attribution and action potential is climate action delayist. When your argument relies you or your group intentionally doing absolutely nothing to combat climate change, you don't really have climate change in mind.
Leftism sometimes cares more about class than its very foundation, the environment, to understand why there is a problem with blame-shifting.
I've seen this in a similar fashion in relationship advice forums: Commenters not engaging with the issue or person, but knee-jerk reacting with advising instant breakup.
Number 1 comment is
If r/selfhosted has to rely on reddit as it can't be fucked selfhosting, what chance do other subs have.
I have found Lemmy selfhosted communities excellent, they are not a large as Reddit but there are plenty knowledgeable people, often seflhosting their own little reddit.
The irony of a self hosted community refusing to self host...
Honestly back during the API fiasco I was honestly expecting the mods their to make their own instance together. The fact they didn't blew me away
Almost everyone in the linked Reddit post seems to be supportive of Lemmy, or even Lemmy users. Even the people who tried it and stopped seem generally warm to the idea and just think it needs polish.
I'd say that this comment section is way more vitriolic than that one lol
Doesn't !selfhosted@lemmy.world have like 40k subscribers? Top ten Lemmy community by sub count, iirc.
Bingbingbing!
The people still exclusively on Reddit are on Reddit because they don't like the Fediverse or they're unwilling to change their habits. Had they liked it and been genuinely open for change they would have made the switch, or at least used both platforms.
This is not so much true for the average user, as they might not be aware of the federated alternatives at all, or they might think it sounds too hard. But it's absolutely true for the self-hosting community.
Besides other factors mentioned in this thread, there's also
Older userbase makes this place a lot more useful, outside of politcs and news subs you are dealing with who can provide good information, ie how reddit used to work.
Drama has its place... it is provocative and it gets people going... we need more engagement! We are deff getting there too, meme subs were spamming all 1 year ago, now there is enough threads to keep a reader busy without fluff memes.
I agree with you that both things have their upsides; and frankly, I don't even think that we should be pandering to the immigration leftover wallowing in Reddit. Growth is good, but growth should never come at the expense of the community that you're trying to grow.
However I feel like those points help to explain why the "lol lmao" crowds hate this place.
Banned
I would never support banish anyone, just to be clear. I know that sentiment is popular around here and reddit.
Everyone within reason should be able to express themselves here that's entire point of fediverse being the front page of the internet, a proper one!
Younger folk do seem to self select out of place that won't an echo chamber but that ain't a young folk thing..
Just check politics on lemmy.world 🤡
My concerns about the "immigration leftover" is not their opposing views, but their behaviour. I don't want to deal with the "waaah the world revolves around my belly, why are you too stupid to understand that?" crowds and their incessant whining.
Because people off Reddit hate everything that its not reddit
People on Reddit. We’re the people off Reddit :)
I was a redditor for 13 years, I now hate reddit. There is hope
As someone who used to be vehemently anti-lemmy, it's a few different reasons.
1) It's something new. Honestly is as simple as that. Most redditors are straight up threatened by new features, new looks, new anything. New Reddit is an example of that. To be fair it is hideous but it's also drastically underused according to reddits own metrics. This just stays consistently with everything. People prefer old subs to new, prefer old users to new, old memes to new. Why? Dunno. Could be as simple as just that they know it so it's comforting.
2) The propaganda that reddit put up against Lemmy was pretty insane. The first few mini-migrations set people up with weird expectations and a lot of them bounced back to reddit with weird notions. Some of it was based on shitty admins or shitty servers (cough lemmy.ml cough) but other things seemed to be almost coordinated against Lemmy. By the time that the big migration from Reddit killing off third party apps/API use a lot of people had heard one or two things and just started spreading it. Redditors often don't source material and just kinda spread rumors or 'feelings' or upvote one idiot who seems like he knows what he's talking about while blatantly lying. This has never gone away. The same idiots keep whining and being dismissive.
3) Redditors are *hateful.* Not purely hateful people or anything but the atmosphere encourages hate and division. I still browse reddit occasionally and I'll check the comments out about a post. It's always so bitter and angry, snapping out at one another. When every crab in the bucket is pulling you down, you get stuck in that habit too. Until you break free of reddit you don't realize just how bitter it's making you. Lemmy doesn't have those vibes and it can be really off putting to someone still in that bitterness. Kindness and people getting along almost comes off as stupid and naive so you just kinda dismiss the entirety of Lemmy as a whole.
4) This is a conspiracy but I'm positive that Reddit admins are purging a lot of references to Lemmy that don't show the site in a positive light. When the API shit was happening people kept pointing out that certain communities that were supportive of Lemmy suddenly got locked behind a NSFW curtain that forced users to be logged in to read the community. A lot of people talked about how certain posts and stuff were being removed, especially ones critical of Spez. I don't think they stopped that campaign and I think they still try to demonize the hell out of Lemmy. Could be because China has a significant hand in reddit now or it could be because Spez has a tiny dick and a tinier ego. Dunno. But I think they're weighting the scales.
Reddit 100% was censoring and shadow banning any kbin or lemmy mentions.
I wouldn't even be surprised if reddit actively promoted or even creates negative comments. There was a precedent of people abandoning Digg so they were clearly very aware and afraid.
At the end of the day it's impossible to tell with these incredibly opaque networks. It's even hard to confirm comment visibility as Reddit employs data fudging and shadow banning.
Just another reminder that nothing any closed source social media says should be trusted, ever.
Out of curiosity, what made you change your mind and give it a chance? Any breaking point on Reddit's side, or just boredom or a sense of adventure?
In regular migration studies there's always talk of puah and pull factores; reasons for wanting to leave where you are, and reasons for wanting to go to the destination. While I personally like it here, I guess we are currently depending more on push factors than pull factors to attract people from Reddit.
Star Trek.
It's not even remotely a surprise to anyone that I'm a dedicated Trekkie and have been for quite some time. Also not much of a surprise to those aware of the Trek fandom that sometimes it can be kinda bitter towards shows that don't fit a certain trend. I happened to like one of those shows and was looking for a place to talk where it wasn't just constantly being bitched about. I was just googling around and found Startrek.website so I set up an account on lemmy.world to watch stuff over there for a couple months before eventually joining that instance. My original account still exists on lemmy.world and it's fairly early in the run of a lot of things. I've also gotten a few messages to that account simply because it's a single first name that other people wanted.
Anyway I started posting Trek memes to Risa and it went overboard. Before I realized people were making memes about me and I just sort of stuck around. Startrek.website showed it's administrators to be flagrantly abusive of not only their power but also of just people so I set up Stamets on this instance. Rest is history.
You got that wrong. That was a measure taken by these communities to demonetize reddit. Reddit doesn’t put ads on NSFW subs. Any profile that posts on an NSFW sub also gets their profile switched to NSFW afaik. Moderators got banned for these NSFW tags.
r/PixelDungeon is the only sub that I’m aware of that completely moved to lemmy. Withe the main mod and developer of the most popular fork moving to lemmy. The sub is still open, but it has a "bookmark" called "Lemmy" and a "link" called "Lemmy Community" that directly links to the lemmy community. The sub is still open and automod responded to any new post that the sub moved to lemmy … at least for a year or so, it doesn’t post that any more.
And there are some obvious down sides. To my knowledge lemmy has not implemented flairs or post tags, which get used excessively by some communities to categories and sort their content. !pixeldungeon@lemmy.world fell back to putting text tags into titles like "[DEV]" and "[OC]" and then use the search for this. But that is merely a work around. The sidebar links to these searches, but since instance-relative links are not a thing they are fixed links to lemmy.world.
The search itself is still inconvenient, because you can just "search this community". You always have to explicitly select a community to search it and have to enter the search term before selecting the community. Edit: that’s of course only true for the front-end (lemmy-ui) I use, dunno if all have that issue
I doubt regular end users will ever get warm with distributed federative networks. A lot of people already seem struggle with email. All tend to flock to a few big instances. For lemmy you also need some basic awareness of these systems. You can’t find everything and to expect that will always go wrong since you only search what your instance knows and never for everything. There are great projects like lemmyverse, but you need to know about them. People who don’t know about them will either just not find the communities they are looking for or they’ll start duplicate communities. The problem of not finding something is smaller on big instances but also more fatal, because their duplicate communities will displace the ones that were started on smaller instances but did not federate well yet.
And everything, the development and hosting, is solely carried on the shoulders of a few volunteers. That will always result in instances popping up and disappearing over time, with development speed varying depending on interest and free time the developers have.
The biggest selling point is not to replace reddit but to be connected with the rest of the activitypub fediverse. That you can see peertube channels as communities here. That mastodon users can comment on lemmy posts eggcetera
No, I do not have it wrong.
There was a protest to mark things NSFW, correct, but what I'm talking about was something else. Kbin and Lemmy communities were marked in such a way that it was impossible to look at unless logged in. While logged in it wasn't marked as NSFW. It also wasn't a choice of the subreddit moderators. They were blocked by reddit admin themselves to force people to be logged in to see information on how to transfer to Lemmy.
Seems to me most people in that thread seems relatively open minded? The people dismissing Lemmy completely appears to be downvoted, and people seem to have a nuanced understanding that it's a better platform in theory but sadly less active.
I'm sure they're right. I'm a slow person who thinks there's plenty of activity over here, but if you're used to the adrenaline of Reddit it must feel a little small town-y.
To be honest except on things like sports and politics, reddit kind of feels like a ghosttown too. So many posts with huge amounts of upvotes and like 2 bot generated comments. The power commenter types seem to have left after the exodus and been replaced by lots of people who scroll and like but don’t really venture much into comments.
Sunk Cost Fallacy
100%. That's why it took me until the end of June to join Lemmy even though the blackout was on June 12th.
And I was already hating Reddit before the blackout. But FOMO made me stay and I feel bad about it.
Also; tribalism.
I completely forgot about this term. Sums up everything
We are having a great time over here in the Fediverse, and they are jealous. So we will continue to have a blast, just to piss them off.
Devs are allegedly Marxist-Leninists.
Redditors dont understand that devs dont exactly have full control of open source software, that different instances are not operated by the devs.
Edit: Lemmy devs to be specific
I don't get the hate against the lemmy devs tbh, they have their (perhaps controversial) political views but they leave everyone that's not on their site alone and it feels like they develop lemmy pretty impartially
sure they might ban you off ml but that's their site and they get to do whatever they want with it, just like every other instance
i mean network effect is a thing i guess but that's not as important on lemmy where there are usually similarly large communities about generic things on most major instances
Exactly .... it's also a double standard because reddit is basically a capitalist model of the same digital system but no one ever complains or criticizes it.
The socialist digital creators built something and shared it freely with everyone and also don't exert control over anyone.
The capitalist digital creatures built something and locked it up, monetized it and are using the user's efforts as the basis for the business only the owners make money on and have complete control over everything.
It's amazing because it's a fantastic metaphor for the two platforms.
Calling them "socialist digital creators" is misleading at best, if not an outright insult to socialism.
They are marxists-leninists who whitewash the crimes committed by the USSR and CCP. They support the genocidal invasion by Russia, a country that is neither socialist or democratic; it's an authoritarian capitalist oligarchy.
There is no double standard. You don't see the CTO of reddit running a subreddit dedicated to whitewashing the Pinochet regime and/or western colonialism in Africa or Asia.
Reddit is run by sketchy and corrupt individuals, it is possible that in a just world we would even call them criminals. Lemmy's marxists-leninists are openly supportive of genocidal actions and brutal authoritarian leadership. There is no comparison.
Could provide a link to a comment or a quote where the devs whitewash the crimes or support genocides?
My man, the head developer of lemmy is the admin of lemmygrad. He has a fucking Mao picture in his profile!
Don't even try to weasel your way around this. This is not going to work with me.
I hate these people. Pathetic larpers living in democratic countries while supporting authoritarianism and genocide. And when I say hate, I don't mean it in the internet slang way ("hater").
How should I put this without breaking any rules? I genuinely wish they meet the same fate as "Donbas Cowboy", Russell Bentley:
Pretty sure that's only true about Lemmy. There are other threadiverse apps. The mistake is people calling the threadiverse lemmy.
Yep, though the alternatives are not quite there yet software wise, but MBin and Piefed aren’t that far behind..
I'm on a pretty old version of mbin (I have some modifications I made for federation issues back when it was kbin). I need to spend a weekend to pilot an upgrade and make sure I can run it safely live.
But even then it's better in some ways already and I never feel like I'm missing something from lemmy. But I think just calling the whole thing lemmy puts off people that are seeing things through a political lens.
yep. as an mbin cheerleader, i evaluated both and kbin was better looking and perfectly functional from the start. no app required. no custom user-land css.
but what really bothers me is the conflation of lemmy and fediverse. theyre used almost interchangeably. other platforms get lost in the discussion.
Alledgedly?
Marxist Leninst is a nice way to put it, they support Putin, Xi. Zhedong and Stalin.
Thankfully as you say, it’s FOSS with free federation and defederation. Admins only have control over lemmy.ml.
Also there are plenty of alternatives. Both PieFed and Mbin are perfectly fine platform with, as far as I know, no tankie developers associated with them.
Mbin isn't
I mean, read the post? They explain themselves pretty well there. Or are you linking it with hopes we'll brigade or something?
Lemmy hate comes down to two or three things: they don't like communists, or they're confused by it. Or they're waiting for it to be bigger.
That would require making a reddit account. Ew.
No idea, quit Reddit over a year ago for fedia/lemmy. Never used x/twitter either, i use mastodon.
I mean that's basically the crux of it. That, and some moderation drama, and the software being very buggy a year ago giving people a bad first impression, and Lemmy still being susceptible to spam.
It'll take some time before Lemmy (and the Threadiverse as a whole) improves its reputation and moves on from the "it's a tankie website" take. That said, a lot of people in that thread are making the case for Lemmy, so it's mostly just people worried it's not as popular.
The last 2 reddit userbase diasporas were wildly more different than all of the previous ones combined.
When voat became a thing everyone already knew ahead of time that it's ranks would be filled with facists; but it took a while for lemmy to earn its tankie stereotype and I'm also glad that lemmy's design helps ensure that it'll have more stamina that voat or any of the other reddit user digital refugee camp platforms that came before it.
Even if it's not as popular, I'd say the community might still be more solid in some cases. And that people are more responsive, especially with quality answers. I've noticed you're chastised way more on reddit if you ask a "stupid" question.
I definitely avoided Lemmy the first go-round with the API fuckery because it seemed from the outside like basically just a tankie protest Reddit in a similar way to how Voat was just a neo-Nazi protest Reddit. To the Lemmy devs' absolute credit, they don't push new users toward any of those, though.
I thought one day after having had a Mastodon for some time that I might not have given Lemmy a fair shake, so I went back and ended up finding that most instances are basically normal Reddit fare but honestly less shitty than Reddit proper (there's a trade-off that posts are less frequent and that small, niche communities can attract unwanted attention by having their posts almost immediately show up in 'all').
Yup, things have definitely improved, especially with more extremist instances like lemmygrad being defederated and phased out. I do also want to give a shoutout to the devs for not pushing their stance and letting the platform grow naturally.
Just gonna put this out there. The devs push their stance plenty. Within their scope to do it from their echo chamber. Other than stopping development there's little they could currently do to impact growth in any way. And there have been issues with their development focus that have negatively impacted growth. Recalcitrance to focus much on moderation tools for instance. As well as at least reported issues difficulty contributing to the project by others. Though that at least is hearsay.
I think it helps to think of it this way: WE are using THEIR platform.
They don't need mod tools that work for communities and users located on a different instance as much as say Lemmy.World since the devs/admins simply use the instance-wide ban hammer for their own space. Hence that is not their focus. You can go to the trouble to learn Rust, and then fight with them to get your modifications accepted or...
Actually, I need to modify my statement above: YOU are using THEIR platform, but for those of us on Mbin, PieFed (which I'm on right now, and two new instances just opened up including one now in the USA), and soon Sublinks will come too (January was at some point a target iirc?), we have already moved on. None have reached feature parity yet tbh, though even so there are a lot of features that exist that Lemmy itself lacks, so there's that, and being written in common languages should help enormously with them catching up.
So whether these are "as good as Reddit", well, beauty is in the mind of the beholder. It's not a clear win either way, but they are getting closer to being comparable.
Can you actually point to any instances of the devs dragging their feet on accepting changes or is this just conjecture? I've contributed to Lemmy, and plan to do so in future, and my experience is that they're fairly accepting of changes.
I wouldn't hold my breath. I keep an eye on the project Matrix, it's pretty quiet.
Piefed is much more promising.
Not desalines or any ML controlled group. All they did was create a Reddit like interface to the platform. After being driven from Reddit for their intolerance.
I sometimes post from Mastodon to servers running this and other software. In fact the reason I'm on world. Is specifically due to its relation to mastodon.social. one of the bigger Mastodon instances I use. It's got nothing to do with a software. If Rud and the other admins decided tomorrow to migrate the database to a different backend. I don't think there would be much outrage or many people would care. In fact I'm certainly probably will in the future. As soon as a back end is available that provides significantly better Community / magazine moderating tools. Since I will significantly whiten the load on server administrators. Since things can be done at the community level instead of at the server all the time.
The instance I first chose straight up disappeared, so yeah. It wasn't an easy migration.
In contrast to reddit, whos leadership never made any controversial decisions. /s
Fediverse
Threadiverse refers specifically to the subset of the Fediverse with threaded conversations, like Lemmy and Mbin.
Sounds too much like Threads, the invasive corporate thing which can get fucked. Never going to market for them.
don't let them change the meaning of our words then
Likewise the heroic nerds of the Threadiverse coined the term months before Threads was even announced, and they would be hard pressed to give it up to some scumbag billionaire.
It's an epic culture war being fought between two largerly agreeing parties.
that is a personal problem, not a general protocol based one.
It is a marketing problem.
The higher-score comments there *don't* seem to be particularly hostile to Lemmy. They talk about legitimate concerns like whether Lemmy as it exists now could deal with a Reddit-size volume of data, The top comment at this time speaks favorably of !selfhosted@lemmy.world.
Of course people who are still using Reddit are more likely to view Reddit as favorable or acceptable and alternatives as problematic, or not quite *there yet*. I'm actively Fediverse-first in my use of social media, but I still end up on Reddit quite a bit for niche interests because that's where the most people are.
its a chicken and egg thing. the fediverse cant scale if we arent pressured to fix scaling issues. we need users to highlight the pain points so we can fix things that allow those users.
Main reason is people are too lazy to change their ways and don’t want to feel like they’ve been making the wrong choice all along.
we are like their penal colony in revolt, maybe
So are we going with Lem-stralia, Lem-Rok Nor, or Lem-giers as our colony name?
The feel of Lemmy communities is a little different than Reddit, even if the software features are mostly analogous and there are many Redditisms used.
Your average commentor/poster will stand out more in a small community, there's less of being able to post and then slink away.
People have gotten used to a lot more comforting features of modern Reddit, Lemmy in both the users and in the software has more of a "Reddit 10-15 years ago" feel to it.
mbin is a bit less hostile (native reddit) looking than lemmy
What do you expect from a bunch of lazy T_D chuds, bots, and n00bz
Ha haaaa! Right? Up top!
For the same reason Youtube is doing with Odysee and Peertube - money - walled garden.
Honestly, in my experience since I fully moved to Lemmy:
Almost any subreddit is more mature than any Lemmy channel.\ This isn't just number of users (but that's a huge problem that has been mentioned here a lot), it means that the chance you'll run into a mod who is a tinpot despot is pretty high, and there is nothing you can do about it if you're not willing to sit alone in a alternate community.
You can just post from a different lemmy instance.
That doesn't remove the toxic mod.
How many alts and sock puppets do you think the average person should have? This doesn't sound healthy
There is no way to remove toxic mods. That's why you have to work around them.
You only need one at a time. I use to spin up an entirely new reddit account whenever I got a ban on any sub. That's what you can do on Lemmy.
Yeah, like I said, that doesn't sound healthy
It has nothing to do with health. It is literally impossible to use a system like reddit/lemmy over the long term and not get hit with rando-bans that come out of nowhere and are completely unavoidable.
I'm not talking about getting a legit ban where you break the rules of the sub. In that case it is pointless to do "ban evasion" because you will likely repeat the behavior that got you banned. I'm talking about when you get a completely unavoidable and random ban. You WILL get those if you use a system long term.
1) the post already said why:
2) further compounded by issues such as (a) overall lack of moderation, which further depends on (b) better development of moderation tools, and (c) guides explaining how things work, bc it can be fairly confusing, e.g.:
Though someone answered (I think incorrectly):
Interestingly, from my old instance discuss online, I see no hits at all to that term among community names - https://discuss.online/search?q=selfhosted&type=Communities&listingType=Local - meaning that nobody from that instance has subscribed to it yet.
Which is why things like Categories of Communities (already fully functional on PieFed) are so helpful to guide people to what they may be looking for.
3) And I haven't even begun on the whole tankies connotation of moving here.
No - apparently not, it's only clear to you, not them, for all the reasons listed above and likely more besides. We would have to build it first, before they will come... and even then I would expect a long delay. In the meantime, Lemmy MAUs (Monthly Active Users) are actively declining, whether they are returning their traffic to Reddit or not.
Banned
I haven't been on reddit for over a year, but I cannot imagine that topics like say atheism don't polarise. What makes you think it is the case?
I am pretty sure most people are here for idealogical reasons so lack of things is a nothing burger for them.
Normies only care about ease of use and network effect. Until fediverse brings usability, we aint even compete for the network.
Normie here, Lemmy is pretty easy to use imo. I think the transition is happening now kinda like the Internet in the 90s or online dating in the 10's.
Ofc I just got here and I'm using Voyager.
A theory I have is that everyone who hates reddit eventually left leaving the milk bags brains. I was mod of r/mapporncirclejerk and left when I saw my mod queue get exponentially worse. My friend told me it was because the decent people left for Lemmy.
Now I'm mod of !cartographyanarchy@lemm.ee and it's sooooo much easier.
I used to lurk, thank you for your service 🫡
Idk I find Lemmy easier to use. I go to Lemmy site -> I use site
I go to reddit -> I get asked to turn of my VPN -> get asked to login -> get asked to download mobile app -> accept cookies -> I finally use site.
Damn reddit is so much easier
Yes 🐸
secondary reason why i left reddit, they don't respect a person who respects him or her self... not long after i learned that's corpo's MO and that's how i become radicalized linux enjoyer haha
Us vs them too. It's different, people hate change. So now there is a them and an us..
I can conjecture some things, though I can't be 100% sure on either:
First, maybe it's fanatics/fanboys that don't like competition making their platform less relevant. Second, it's paid actors complaining. Third, it's robot accounts making posts. Fourth, as proposed in the OP, people are getting the wrong impression due to noisy and problematic bubbles. Fifth, people being scared of leaving their comfort zone. Sixth, a mix of either some or all the previous possibilities.
And seven, seven, n-n-n-n-no tomorrow
Grumpy young boomers
Get off my internet!
I'm pretty sure most just don't know about us or don't care
Anyone still left on Reddit is either too ignorant about the alternatives to Reddit to even have an opinion or is actively trying to keep people on Reddit for Reddit.
I left reddit after a cyberbully situation because I defended a nonbinary person in a post in the sega dreamcast subreddit.
Deleted by moderator
Gender is not inherently sexual, you’re the one making this weird.
Banned
What the fuck are you even talking about
Interesting choice of words...
We aren't Russian bots?
I was just thinking about this because I've been going through and blocking every political community. I've found that when that is gone, there's really not that much left aside from random technology focused stuff, some memes, asinine twitter screenshots, and a fuck ton of linux stuff. And the comments sections of seemingly unrelated posts often devolve into political shit slinging. I'm on an instance that blocks lemmygrad and hexbear so I can imagine it's far worse for the ones that don't. I'm starting to sour on lemmy too because there's basically nothing here of interest to me anymore.
Confirmed that the ones that don't block hexbear and lemmygrad.ml are significantly worse:-).
I like !lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world, but there's less than a post a day to it. At some point it's up to us to build what we want to see in the world, which is harder when there are fewer of us - so if becomes a cache-22 where we need more people to make new content but we would need more content to attract new people.
And apparently mod tools here are inadequate, though hopefully improving.
Well said. I’m feeling this way too.
The biggest point is tankies and the toxic "left" people here and that Lemmy has some major problems regarding stability and the ability to effectively moderate.
Another point is that Lemmy has in may places worse moderation than reddit.
yet this is exactly what the fediverse was designed to work around. giving the power back to the users. when .ml decides to block a bunch of shit due to butt-hurt mods, communities can be moved elsewhere without everyone having to make new accounts.
These many places tend to be the biggest and most popular places...
agreed that we need to work on scaling out horizontally. i think that ironically poor moderation will help with this over time. it took reddit 20 years to get where it is.
Lemmy instances are a pain in the ass to keep working, most people with a life won't do that and people without a life are usually extremists.
sounds like a lot of conjecture to me. i think there is hope in groups owning, operating and funding their own instances. software platforms will get better over time. funding pathways will get better over time.
i dont think we should just toss our hands up and say 'nope, too hard. only jerks need apply'
Yeah there are clearly some toxic people who won’t tolerate anything different than them. They can be leftists or rightists who are gonna hate you for whatever reason.
I didn’t have this feeling on reddit to be honest.
And it’s a shame because I’m censoring myself because of this on some subject where I could bring another point of view.
The people you are probably referring to exist on like, two instances. Everybody always ends up on the ".ml" ones for their first experience and is immediately horrified by the hardcore tankie content. That's because those specific instances are run by actual Marxist-Leninists.
Well it happened to me mostly in technology communities where my job as a police man in a country without too much corruption was giving me a different point of view than people who were seeing a corrupt government spying on them all the time.
I haven't seen a single "right" person on Lemmy, except when you count the Stalinists as right (wich they kinda are)
And I hate that there are so many of them.
Yeah to be honest it’s true that I’ve only seen lefties. I’m sometimes on the left side and sometimes on the right side, but it’s crazy how you can’t really express an opinion without being insulted or other things..
You can't say anything without people hating on you. I'm a actual social Democrat and therefore the worst enemy of tankies and Stalinists.
I don't care what they say about me, I care when they are in charge of anything and ban people for other opinions, wich happens a lot.
I am getting to know that lemmy.ml guys are bad, so do you all avoid subbing to lemmy.ml communities? I have bunch of their communities subbed so not sure if I should move away or not.
That was the first instance out there, so amany early adopter communities are hosted there. I've blocked a handful problematic users and all the communist stuff and other topics I don't agree with or care about, but by and large it's alright.
Hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml are instances I've blocked altogether.
For some reason after reading this (because I'm very new to Lemmy), your post made me feel like that squiggly thing / slime inside the box that wanted freedom, then the moment it takes a step outside, got punched back in and now is happily being inside the box, even if its cramped.
I think it was a meme too.
Yeah, but I do feel that way (after taking a look there)
Many people left lemmy.ml for that reason. Some of us even left Lemmy altogether - e.g. I'm writing this to you from PieFed, which allows blocking of all users from Lemmy.ml (Lemmy itself does not support that - its "instance blocking" only stops communities from an instance, but not users).
I block all .ml communities that pop up on my feed. Somewhere between 200-300 on my blocklist by now (not all exclusively from .ml of course, but most of them).
Why not block the entire instance in your settings?
Because that isn't an option.
It is. Go into your account settings -> blocks and at the bottom is a section for blocking instances.
I've got Lemmy.ml in there. You'll still see comments from their users and posts from users in other communities but you shouldn't see any of their communities in your feed.
It's not. I'm not using Lemmy.
Some of the communities are fine, but make sure that you never EVER talk about politics in any way. And even then, why support such a place that has such a reputation? Most communities - though not all - have counterparts elsewhere. Judge for yourself, though it's nice to at least know that you have options:-).
In fairness, people outside of the instance may legit be receiving the brunt of their more extreme members coming out from the echo chamber and talking shit elsewhere. Then again, why choose to be *inside* that echo chamber, even if the toxicity is dialed way down?
And there are answers to that question that may depend on your circumstances: e.g. !Firefox@lemmy.ml is by far the largest Firefox community across the entire Fediverse. Also the ire of people inside Lemmy.ml is mostly directed at the primarily democratic capitalist Western society, but you may not feel impacted by such as much, as e.g. they make fun of the USA.
Only you know what will work best for you:-).
Most lemmy.ml users and communities are perfectly fine. I didnt notice a higher number of problematic users from ml than from other instances mine is federated to. I think hexbear and lemmygrad and a bunch of nazi instances are defederated.
.ml is mostly a linux-centric hub. anything else is just a distraction