Actual Discussion

Needs more posts.

I don't see as many insightful comments as I did on Reddit, but that's just a function of the number of comments/users.

I like that there are enough posts to keep me entertained.

My biggest issue with Lemmy so far is that it feels like we've got an awful lot of lurkers, and whilst that's fine I do struggle with the idea that the place lacks content, whilst also having a relatively quiet userbase.

It puts a lot of strain on a few people to bring the content. If those people don't bring it, it can be pretty quiet, especially on the smaller communities.

There’s a lot of things here I didn’t realize Reddit had lost over the years. A big one is how comments don’t get lost in the deluge of a popular post, and the top comments aren’t low effort jokes that weren’t funny on the last 3 posts. There’s also a joy in finding new communities (like this one!), that fades once you’re adding the thousandth x-porn or meme sub.

Although content was pretty slim at the start, over the past month or two I’ve had moments where I didn’t realize I was on Lemmy instead of Reddit or vice versa. (Reno for reddit is great, because it’s a shit app. Best way to stop going on there is to get disconnected due to multiple API requests. Shoutout Voyager for being great.)

Reddit has also gotten significantly worse since the exodus, which is a bittersweet feeling as a former head mod whose sub got banned for joining in the protest. I miss the glory days, but I’m fucking glad it’s dying. (Dipshit admins didn’t remove me when they re-opened it, so I passed it over to someone who’s still on there.) I’m happy to see Lemmy is gaining steam.

Negatively, I think a lot of people over here are seriously terminally online. I’ve read, bar none, some of the worst takes I’ve ever seen in comments here. (I’m not talking about my comment history, fwiw, although the dude who equated guns to cars is pretty up there.) The “hivemind” leans quite left, which I honestly like, but it does feel like there’s very little nuance for dissenting opinions. That being said, fuck nazis, and fuck reddit for allowing them to disperse their hatred under the guise of “sharing ideas”.

Fuck me, that was a bit of an essay

I use it for quick reading material while doing other stuff and to monologue. I’m a spectator that likes to give my lengthy opinions unprompted, but otherwise open comments purely for reading material. This colors my thoughts hugely.

I like that it’s not Reddit. Didn’t like that company. I have found Lemmy users to be a lot more willing to stand up against corporations and boycott acceptable products due to ethics— something very lacking in society now and a massive contributor to the disrespect companies treat consumers with. For enjoyers of certain niches, it has good content and good people. For me, the community is a much needed reprieve from a world that feels increasingly consumerist and accepting of evil.

I don’t think the discussions are very high quality. They don’t contain as much useful information or corrections as Reddit, which due to user count had more relative experts. Misinformation is nearly as bad here but less insidious because Reddit misinformation was sneakier, but it’s more obnoxious so it elicits more confusion than annoyance like it did on Reddit (which is better, to be fair). Comment sections feel repetitive due to lack of unique ideas or analysis, and they usually will not delve further than knee jerk reactions to parent commenter knee jerk reactions. So much so that I strongly believe that, if Lemmy was fed into an LLM, 95% of comment sections could be more efficiently created by bots. It’s a lot less civil than most of the new internet, vitriol and bad faith arguments that never acknowledge the other commenter’s statements are common. Lemmy is wildly tribalistic with little room for disagreements, even minor. This makes for poor reading material.

So it does remind me of the older Internet, before the forced civility and mainstream use that leads to deeper discussions. I sound critical but a lot of this is nostalgic, and I like it. While I’d love for Lemmy to improve, these flaws are familiar and some part of me is glad to see them again. Reddit was kind of feeling stale and sterile by the time I left, and I expect it’s significantly worse now (and quite possibly actually mostly bots). And the benefits, primarily the anti-consumerism, is refreshing.

Honestly speaking, I wouldn’t say Lemmy is good and I could never suggest it to “normal” people. But I like it, and it makes for solid quick reading material, which alone offsets the negatives.

Oh, and the questionable quality discussions here make it easier to stop reading comments and reconnect with real life. This past week I found myself actively watching the waves on a beach. Back on Reddit I used years worth of beautiful places as a backdrop for what felt like more interesting information on the app, and sometimes came off as an ass for doing so. I would never return to Reddit for that alone, and I think it’s part of why I’m okay with Lemmy staying this way.

I wish there was more variety in the userbase. It's too easy to predict which kind of comments receives love and which hate.

I like that the community is pretty cool and you make a post it will probably gain good quality engagement more so than Reddit. Downside is there aren't many people so smaller communities are pretty much stagnant and dead.

Usage is pretty much the same, still doomscroll, respond, post.

First and foremost is that it is decentralized. I don't mean that in any technical sense where the workload is distributed and the network is resilient against the loss of nodes. I mean that it's easy to go "instance shopping", because the decentralization has created another level of categorization.

Most people standing up and moderating a server seem to have a vision comparable to, but larger than that held by someone creating and moderating a community. That allows for larger collectives of like-minded people. As a result, I almost never filter by subscription, but by "local". As a result, I often find myself participating in communities that I would never subscribe to.

Perhaps related to that, one of the things I see on lemmy is that people are generally polite. If I'm getting downvoted for something, I usually know why. I can either infer the reason by rereading and thinking about it a bit or someone tells me in a comment. It's not that there are no drive-by downvotes, but they're much less common than on Reddit.

Also, I see people getting thanked for sharing more often than on Reddit, and those thank-you notes get upvoted by more than just the direct participants. And when the beneficiary responds in kind ("thanks for reading") that also garners upvotes from more than just the direct participants.

Discussions don't seem to devolve to fighting as often. When they do, they seem to be less abusive and peter out quicker.

That's the positive. On the negative side, I find that it's more common to see upvotes without continued discussion. I learn so much by bouncing ideas around and having people ask for clarification, provide counterpoints, provide examples or counterexamples, etc. I occasionally get frustrated that an opinion in its infancy just seems to disappear into the ether, trailing a voting history behind it.

Voyager is close enough to Apollo, so happy on the UI side.

Miss having MLB game live threads that made watching along and commenting with strangers fun.

I like the small community vibe. I've read some arguments that the negative effects associated with social media might come from the fact that it caters to everyone.

The idea is that normally businesses wouldn't try to sit a whole bunch of hunters next to a whole bunch of vegans, but social media companies do just that. In fact, the heated arguments between these groups drives engagement, which means their algorithms are incentivized to make opposing groups angry at each other.

There are no algorithms driving engagement on Lemmy. There is no incentive for instance owners to gain as many users as possible. Lemmy is more of a small forum that links to other small forums, which is actually what the internet looked like before search engines and social media existed.

Using Boost and still learning. What gets me most is seeing the same post linked a dozen times because each instance has its own news group.

For me is the lack of recommendations and the usability to discover new communities organically as in reddit.

I'm finding the politics incredible grating.

You find a post on All, then realize after commenting on an article or meme that you've wandered on to a political instance, wherein you not believing in some niche black and white viewpoint wholeheartedly results in getting shat on.

I like the memes and commenting on articles, but I'm exhausted by all the politics everywhere all the time.

I like most everything else, federation is actually pretty good, the server admins do a great job keeping things running, and the 3P apps are getting really solid (the android obes are awesome).

I'll skip repeating what others have already said but add the default UI needs to be less cramped on desktop. Not sure about mobile as I've had a mostly positive experience on Sync (thanks to competition from a selection of 3rd party apps btw but I digress)

Well they haven't been asking me to use the app every three seconds so there's something.

So far so good and it keeps getting better.

I’m in 👍

One major issue with lemmy is centralization, its just leading to another reddit with everyone being concentrated on crappy major instances. Like, .world and beehaw is known to have some of the worst moderation, but that's where a lot of people are concentrating. Centralization also leads to those few servers pushing every other instance around with the threat of defederation.

That said i find the people of lemmy to be generally better than the people of Reddit (who are in turn better than Twitter) at least. If you're in anime lemmy you're probably going to be talking to otaku, same for every other niche on lemmy even if it's small. Much less chance of getting involved with the new puritan movement or children.

And it's already my new primary form of social media!