What are your thoughts on the Lemmy ecosystem?
I’ve been trying it out for the last week. I have my own opinions, but I’d like to hear others and see if we have common ideas on what is good/bad/indifferent about the Lemmy ecosystem.
Platform-wise, it’s already proven that it’s a viable alternative (with some advantages even - the federated nature for one), but content-wise, it has A LOT to catch up (because let’s be honest - in addition to all the bullshit and toxic people, Reddit has tons of useful information and good people still).
I imagine we all have different use cases, my idea of Lemmy succeeding may not be your idea.
That being said, as a replacement for Reddit, where I can scroll through the top say 50 posts once or twice a day, it absolutely fits the bill.
Engagement is much better for me here, I imagine due to the smaller size of the community, that lends itself to their being much less useless garbage comments and much more constructive or informative discussion.
The above being said, I do wish there were more people here.
Wholeheartedly agree. Not too many more though I hope. Once a platform reaches a certain point all the general public arrives and everything goes to shit. You have to keep your corner of the internet nerdyish to avoid this. Been true since the early 2000s for forums and then social media.
Effective? No. Considering the purpose of all internet communities is to grow and have diversity, it’s not effective. Aside from the currently low number of users, the fact that you can have the same community in different instances means a community will never grow large enough. Add to that the “you’re literally killing children if you’re a centrist” people and all the tankies, and what you have here is a leftist circlejerk that will remain small and irelevant enough to suit its need to be an echo chamber without any actual diversity. So maybe it’s effective from that point of view? Idk.
Aside from the currently low number of users, the fact that you can have the same community in different instances means a community will never grow large enough.
Isn’t !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com an example of a community which grew large enough to become the reference?
Not sure. I can’t remember right now why I blocked dbzer0 completely, but my filters are blocking this instance. Which I guess is another side of the same coin: defederation (and allowing entire instances to be blocked) also contributes to fragmentation of communities. I had no idea the largest piracy community is on dbzer0, so I would subscribe to another piracy community on another instance, and thus split the memberships even more.
I personally think it’s a ton better. The platform is a bit less mature, but the people are much nicer and the filtering/blocking is lightyears ahead
And you can say fuck without being auto banned or something. Not a big thing but sometimes it’s nice to not have to sugarcoat everything.
I wanted to ironically say something mean to you, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it :(
I’m autistic, I would’ve thanked you for the compliment
I’m guessing that filtering helps make it nicer, I see way more nasty and extreme shit on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit. I want to like Lemmy, but I can’t recommend it to anyone I know because of how toxic the base experience has been.
May I ask what you filtered out to make it seem like “the people are much nicer” on a day to day basis? Genuine question, not sarcasm.
Same as I did when using reddit. I add a filter almost every time I see something that I feel like doesn’t belong on my feed. Comment sections are also filtered on the app I use.
I can screenshot and dm you my list of filters, if you’d like. I would prefer not posting them publicly
No. Lemmy posts are always left leaning. There is no right and no center. Thats disheartening. Next to that most communities are too small so no viable discussions follow. Most communities die in months.
Then again, reddit.com doesnt exist anymore because some schmucks have taken over, resulting in obtrusive ads, profiling and tracking.
I dont post on reddit anymore. Still follow some subs though because they just dont have an alternative.
I went from 1 source (reddit) to several(lemmy, mastodon, 4chan, 9gag). And still it feels empty. Mostly because while some memes are nice, 4chan is filled with morons and 9gag… That’s a “racist app” according to its own users. But it doesn’t stop there. A lot of posts there are just vile. Not just right wing nut job, no, they are worse. And masto is mostly the same as lemmy.
Tbh, Lemmy leaning strongly to the left is a big plus for me. I mean, it’s easy to find right leaning or centrist communities everywhere. A clearly left leaning space is a gem I’m happy to help preserve and nurture. I’m saying that without offense in mind. But I feel the majority of social networks / boards / microblogging sites lean farther to the right than Lemmy.
Current reddit is not like “reddit” anymore for a while… nothing is forever
I just love it here. But I also know that while most communities are really nice, we rely a lot on two (2) individuals who provide a sizeable part of Lemmy’s content (Picard and PugJesus). We should all try to do our part!
And FlyingSquid
@fossilesque@mander.xyz : am I a joke to you?
And both of them indeed!
So far so good. Its like the early days of reddit and I dread all that trash I left behind there coming here. I only miss sipstea.
What is sipstea?
You could make our own community for that, but that’s not my business. “Kermit sips tea”
That one?
We have less people, We have a better signal to noise ratio. So far we seem to have been spared the idiot community rules, like the moderators of r/music telling you that you need to go to tip of my tongue to crowdsource a list of songs with a certain theme, well they only accept a very narrow genre of music. Upvotes and down votes don’t absolutely sink or blow up a post, you can say something relatively controversial here and not have it get buried.
We have some discoverability problems that they’re working on. We’re lacking a lot of niche interests. You’re not going to find a sub here for every trade and game that exists. A significant amount of our traffic is just posts from other places with a minimum amount of discussion.
Upvotes and down votes aren’t magically universal across every node. Some of the smaller fringe nodes can end up with delays and receiving posts.I stopped reading Reddit At the very beginning of the API wars. It’s honestly so much more healthy here.
It satisfies my social media addiction, but will be years before it shows up on many search results.
As much as I’d like it to be, it doesn’t have the network effect/popularity that Reddit does. It covers maybe 70-80% of my Digg+ needs, but there are many topics/subs I want that Lemmy just doesn’t have.
“Be the change you want to see” is always there: if a topic/sub doesn’t exist, you can always create it yourself. But no good deed goes unpunished, so you’re now the owner/moderator…
Also, !fedigrow@lemm.ee is dedicated to community growing
it’s effective for wasting my time in a less frustrating manner, for whatever that’s worth
Depends on what you mean “effective.”
The structure is very similar, and on the surface, it works about the same way. So in that sense, yes.
The lack of centralization improves on reddit - no authoritarian rule-making, no limitation of content by the laws of a single country, etc. - but also adds flaws. The biggest one is the potential for redundant groups on different servers, but also a concern is the potential for someone taking down their server and leaving the users high and dry. (I don’t know exactly what happens to the content in this case, but that could be another issue.)
Practically speaking though, it is not a meaningful replacement for reddit because it is lacking content. I browse “all”, and get fewer total posts that I saw on reddit on my 20 or so subscribed subreddits alone.
Community is the key. Community is what made reddit, and lemmy doesn’t have a developed community. Yet. We can get there, and then discover what other problems with the platform are.
I feel like the decentralization brings some downsides in the quantity of bad actors, extremist views, and the like.
The open platform certainly has an overwhelming advantage over Reddit in other ways, but there seems to be a higher number of trolls, shitheads, wackos, etc and in some cases entire instances dedicated to them.
While these people get banned on Reddit, Lemmy hasn’t yet solved this moderation issue; user accounts are basically disposable and moderation is super distributed, so it’s easy to abuse.
Heres the thing, this is what huamns are. A shithead may be a shithead to one but a golden god to another. A truly open forum will reflect that. Moderation effectively splits different views and both can thrive without interaction with one another (echo chambers). I personally dont mind extremist views because it reminds me they exist and I am of sound mind to ignore them. However, I know not everyone is and I know the dangers of letting extremest views go unchallenged. I doubt technology can help us cover both fronts (open forum of ideas without echo chambers). Education can probably do a lot more. We need to be better humans, accepting of others and critical of ideas instead of people.
higher number of trolls, shitheads, wackos, etc
That’s because they’re actual humans and not 95% bots like Reddit.
Defederation is pretty effective
It works for me because I’m into a lot of the stuff discussed on Lemmy. My biggest problem with reddit was that at some point they seemed eager to smoosh all the subs together into one big Basic Betty fest. For example having r/all be a mandatory sub and having a million default subs…It kind of felt like towards the end everyone was discussing the same stuff on every sub, and it was basically the same stuff being discussed on Twitter (and many posts were just pics of tweets).
I know Lemmy kinda has some similar issues, but because the whole ecosystem is its own niche it still works for me.
Nah. Lemmy is nothing like Reddit, it’s actually good.