When I was on reddit I wasn’t exposed to so many people with extreme absolutist views who will stop at nothing to maintain the echo chamber.
Very few people here are able to make concessions.
I just feel like every time I get on here I go away angrier. We won’t attract new users if we’re like this
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I haven’t noticed that at all. Whenever I see an argument made in good faith, there’s frequently contrary responses that delve into the actual issues and discuss some of the nuance around them. I found Reddit far worse (especially the default subs).
On Reddit, any comment reply I got was usually someone telling me to kill myself or correcting some boring pedantic thing. On Lemmy they usually make me think about the issue some more, and they’re never frothing-at-the-mouth aggressive.
But it might also depend a lot on what communities you spend time in, what instance you’re on, and what instances you have blocked.
Whenever I see an argument made in good faith, there’s frequently contrary responses that delve into the actual issues and discuss some of the nuance around them.
I am in agreement, I have found this to be the most refreshing part of the platform. Many more people on Lemmy as compared to reddit seem much less likely to take every single thing at face value only in my experience. I have had some extremely interesting and informative conversations here in which some very good points were brought up because people were more interested in discussing the topic instead of other users opinions of the topic.
Maybe you’re in the wrong communities. There are a lot fewer people here than on Reddit, so you’ll run into the same people more frequently.
I’m not sure what concessions you’re looking for. If someone is being a troll, or just boneheaded, block them for a month or two or forever.
This is a long reply, but understand that I don’t intend a mean tone here, I am just speaking my honest thoughts in response to your question.
When I was on reddit I wasn’t exposed to so many people with extreme absolutist views
You have entered a place with many groups of people with many views, and you are paying attention to the loudest ones. I can understand that can be upsetting to someone if they haven’t spent a lot of time outside of reddit. Surely on Twitter you would have seen more of this kind of thing, but it really depends on what and who you pay attention to. In my case, people always talked about how volatile Twitter was, but that was never my experience, because I was on it strictly to follow various artists. I just ignored everything else, or otherwise often just didn’t bother myself with other people’s thoughts on there.
who will stop at nothing to maintain the echo chamber.
Lemmy, functionally, is a collection of echo chambers, and chambers of many other kinds depending on how you leverage it. Some - often the loudest - do devoutly believe in the things they believe in and will talk about it all the time.
Reddit was/is arguably a single large echo chamber, but you may have not noticed this because that chamber aligned with your personal thoughts and opinions.
What you are describing sounds more like someone who has left an echo chamber with a set of strong ideals and entered a place with many multiple strong ideals rather than someone who has entered one, as your chief complaint sounds like you don’t enjoy that there are multiple groups of people who believe in different things than you as strongly as you believe in what you do.
Very few people here are able to make concessions.
What concessions do you want, or think are necessary? You have the options of blocking the communities or people you disagree with, or creating an account on an instance which defederates the instance/s you primarily disagree with and/or has rules for its communities that you identify with. You can also install an extension and filter stuff based on keywords:
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/471718-lemmy-post-keyword-filter
If what you want instead is simply for most other people to believe in what you believe then unfortunately I just don’t think that’s a realistic expectation to have for the international public.
I just feel like every time I get on here I go away angrier.
Well, you can try the above things to ignore the things that make you angry, otherwise I spent my first year on Lemmy working on tolerating and contending with the thoughts of people other than me instead - of course I have blocked some communities and some people as I agree some are more trouble for me than I find worth in, but generally speaking I think forcing myself to learn to control my own feelings when I see a complete stranger say something I personally disagree with has made me a more patient and better rounded person.
Personally, if someone says something I disagree with, that is just how the world is, and I know this is the experience of every person on the planet to some degree, so I have no expectation that my thoughts and feelings are special to anyone else.
It is just is not possible for every single person to be in agreement on every single thing, so it is useless for me to be mad about other people’s thoughts. Sometimes, I think it is useful however, to express your reasoning to other people, even if some of them hate you for it and even if you feel it’s at your own expense because otherwise how would anything work socially between anyone in the world. But even at that, I don’t think I ever feel the obligation to.
I have learned that for my peace of mind, there is a line to walk such that I never feel my opinions or feelings are innately righteous, and that they are not pointless either. I find believing this about other people’s thoughts and feelings as well helps me to meditate on why people think and feel the things they do; to reach an understanding of those things even if I disagree with them.
We won’t attract new users if we’re like this
I have a contention with this for a couple reasons.
I think that if the objective of Lemmy as a platform were user count, it would be a business instead of software, and I am glad it is not a business. That is what attracted me to it, and I am not too concerned if other people aren’t. Lemmy probably will never attract a lot of people like normal social media, because it isn’t a business and has no marketing as a result. In some ways I think Lemmy could even be made worse by having a population like reddit or twitter.
The idea of “we” is unclear here compared to traditional social media. Do you mean “we” the users on the instance, “we” as in all users on all Lemmy instances, “we” all users on all activitypub based social media platforms?
Depending on what you mean, “we” could both care and not care about attracting more users, and want to or not want to work toward that, at the same time, because it depends on what and who you actually mean.
You’re posting to a community in Lemmy.ml so I have some guesses about what you might mean, but Lemmy.ml is not Lemmy, and many users on it do not hold ideals similar to reddit users in the slightest. Remember, “Lemmy” is just the software.
So the question “is Lemmy worse than Reddit/Twitter” is like saying “Is Firefox worse than Facebook”, though I know this is not what you meant.
My answer to your actual question as a result is Yes and No, at the same time, because it depends on which instance you are on, which instance you are looking at, if you leverage the blocking and filtering available to you, and your ability to contend with people who are different than you.
This.
It’s something that I had to learn, coming from Reddit, too, and is a difficult paradigm shift to process: the fact that there is no “Lemmy” more than there are, rather, “Lemmys”.
Also, as a (now former) Reddit user for the longest time (>10 years), I daresay that the diversity of opinions is honestly more similar to how Reddit used to be, in terms of there being VASTLY different communities and therefore VASTLY different sets of beliefs from community to community. Reddit may be a lot more homogenized now, but back in, say, 2010? It was way more diverse. Closer to how Lemmy is now.
Yes, I recall the content of reddit being much better around the same time you describe. There was a vast amount of actual original content produced directly by the users there at the time, and the quality of discussion was very good.
Over time as more people joined it, it seemed to become more and more of a sort of parody of itself, sort of like when you make a friend and introduce them to your group of friends, and they begin to use an inside joke that existed before they were there. Sometimes it’s still funny, but it is an odd feeling that when this new friend tells the joke, you can tell they don’t exactly understand why it’s funny themselves.
Reddit to me felt like this to the nth degree when I left. I suppose it really is a result of some kind of “herd” behavior; people just acting a specific way or saying specific things because they saw other people doing or saying the same things, but to the point it no longer goes any deeper than that and becomes bereft of any real meaning or deeper thought or variety.
Yes, it saddens me greatly to see how far Reddit had degraded. It was an amazing place back then. Then, again, I suppose the whole Web has changed. It’s much more compartmentalized now, and even worse, much more corporatized. Walled gardens, echo chambers, the whole nine yards.
Yes, there were echo chambers even back then, but it wasn’t as...well, I guess the word I would choose is “sanitized”. It was free-er, whatever that word may have meant. Honestly, I feel sad when I hear people say the Internet is magical. Because yes it can be from time to time, but they don’t know or remember or care that it used to be so much MORE magical.
The Internet used to be Leeroy Jenkins; now’s Leeroy’s gone and it’s just a rich executive in a suit trying to peddle the newest software as a service. :(
If you ever think you’re not in an “echo chamber”, it’s because you have internalized the ambient point of view as Truth.
It’s a rather healthy thing I think for communities to maintain boundaries, and that includes ideological ones. When you enter into a community you must accept the responsibility of understanding that community not only from your current perspective but also on it’s own terms. If you cannot reconcile this new point of view with your own then your simply in the wrong place.
Also, as anyone here should be able to tell you, it is not the goal of Lemmy to grow, it’s goal is to exist. Growth as a goal is it’s own ideology, and in any case Lemmy’s ability to exist and grow in so far as it has is proof of the general correctness of it’s ideals this far.
Smaller communities tend to make the radical groups stick out more.
There were no doubt those types of people on Reddit, but they were easier to ignore since they were unmistakabley a minority.
I dont use Reddit becase of it’s shitty commercial explotation. I was never on Twitter.
This is the internet, people who disagree with you are on it.
All three of the sites you mention are big places and we have no way of telling what things you have and which you haven’t been getting exposed to.
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If you’re looking for political discourse yes, this place is garbage. Nothing but fringe BlueAnon conspiracy theorists, and a very small contingent of equally fringe alt lighters.
But the Lemmy software is far, far better than Reddit’s and the instances run smoother. If you can bear not talking about politics or the news, I’d recommend sticking around!
Both Lemmy and Reddit are mostly echo chambers. If you don’t agree with the hive mind, you’re down voted.
If it was an echo chamber, no one would be disagreeing in the first place.
If they do, they get down voted.
