I imagine there’s excitement for the increase of activity but worries about the potential toxic side of Reddit coming along too.
I’d especially be interested in the Lemmy devs’ opinions.
I’m in Lemmy for, like, two years? Mostly lurking. I’ve been looking for alternatives for longer than that though.
I feel like the monsoon is mostly welcome. Content quality may decrease a bit, but the quantity will make up for it. And quantity is what has been missing IMO.
In special I’m hoping for specialised instances about some subjects that I enjoy. I like the Lemmy instance but stuff like anime and conlanging “feels” off-topic here.
Quantity has a quality all its own. I’m glad everyone here is so welcoming and looking forward to seeing how things develop.
Just to note, I just came from Reddit. I’m hoping for a critical mass of folks so we get those niche and specialty communities.
In special I’m hoping for specialised instances about some subjects that I enjoy. I like the Lemmy instance but stuff like anime and conlanging “feels” off-topic here.
Do you mean for subscribing to the communities of these new instances, or would you completely switch to that instance (create a new account there)?
I’ve noticed some lags/asyncronity with non-home instance content. I guess it would make sense to be home wherever is the most and best fitting communities. But that would also mean leaving behind the stuff of the current account.
I’d be using those instances alongside lemmy.ml. I want to talk about anime, but I don’t want to just talk about anime; and here I get some nice tech-related content.
Oooh you’re into conlangs too?
Yup. I got a few of them, although they’re mostly too incomplete to use for conversation. Most of them for a constructed world.
In special I feel like I should be able to help newbies with phonetics and phonology. Not just “how to read the IPA”, but also stuff like “how to choose phonemes and allophones that fit the goal of your conlang”.
Hear hear!
I expect to be some bumps on the road, but the Lemmyverse was really quiet until recently. Now it’s gaining so much life and shaping into an active and pleasant platform :3
I’m all about it! Great to see a platform take off when it’s centered around being ad free and open sourced.
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I think the nature of the fediverse ends up serving as a barrier to entry to the “average” social media user. This is probably why Mastodon hasn’t replaced Twitter despite all the dumb things that they have done with the site. As much as people dislike the idea of gatekeeping, I think a moderate amount is necessary to prevent a lot of low effort content that gets promoted on other platforms.
As someone who has been on Reddit for the past 10 years or so, I noticed a dip in quality of r/all and a change in the community when new Reddit came out. Probably because the UI of new Reddit seemed to be geared toward a “feed” style of content consumption, similar to FB or Twitter, so people from those platforms started joining in large numbers and changing the culture. It seems like the recent migration/exodus from Reddit comes mainly from old.reddit users who value discussion and the “forum” style more (new.reddit users probably don’t care about 3rd party apps since they just use the official app anyway), so hopefully the quality of content and discussions doesn’t suffer too much.
This is where the duplicated communities in lemmy’s federation works for you. As the big instances get flooded with content that is low quality but highly upvoted (as happens in big subreddits), you can also subscribe to communities about the same topic from smaller instances.
I think the conventional way this is handled on Reddit is separating memes and fluff into one one community (subreddit) and more discussion based content into another community. It works on Reddit because even if the memes get more engagement in an absolute sense, each subreddit has it’s own yard stick for what is doing well, so a discussion that makes it to the front page of its own subreddit will make it through to the front page of users who are subscribed, alongside the memes. I don’t yet know enough about how Lemmy ranks posts to know if this will work, but hopefully it will.
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Can give you some examples? That is definitely not my experience, the few subreddits I visit often only have memes every once and while and they often get removed quickly by the mods redirecting them to dedicated meme subreddits.
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Sure, when it’s r/all by top. But a massive part of it is subreddits, which then constitute the front page. The majority of my Reddit front page isn’t memes, because my main subscriptions are things like acting, patientgamers, askhistorians, piano, etc. Which don’t have many, if any, memes posted.
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Yeah I totally agree with that! I think it’s a basic side effect of the way the voting algorithm works - namely that early votes count for a hell of a lot, and so memes/pictures get those early votes much earlier than discussion posts do - because it’s much quicker to look at a picture, than it is to read a long text post.
So the good thing about smaller (especially smaller and well-moderated) communities, is that there’s enough space for text posts to breathe, without competing with memes for vote ascension space. But that doesn’t erase the problem of meme/image supremacy in r/all and r/popular.
Subs that regularly hit /r/all kind of lose their own identity
This is what I am hoping will happen. With the current reddit structure, for each topic, you have multiple communities -
- The noob-friendly one that is not actively moderated and has a lot of reposts and garbage content
- The offshoot that was created because the main sub went downhill. Has stricter moderation and content policies.
- The meme offshoot that was created because the main sub banned memes.
- The circlejerk version.
/r/gaming is garbage, /r/games is for discussion. /r/StardustCrusaders is a fan-art dump, /r/Shitpostcrusaders is a meme juggernaut The mods of the Game of Thrones subreddit wouldn’t allow people to shit on the show, so /r/freefolk was formed, and that also served as a template for stuff like /r/titanfolk.
Anything that gains critical mass will break down into multiple sub communities. It’s inevitable.
I like this model, although circlejerk can be the meme version too. Even a fairly quiet sub like /r/baduk/ begat /r/badukshitposting/ and it works well.
Cant respond, too many notifications to read and problems to fix.
Let me clean my backlog of unfinished projects (now less with reddit API soon to be dead), learn rust and kotlin to start helping :)
excited to see more users
welcome :)
I am pretty happy about it. There’s nothing wrong with more users!!
I’m just happy to see more users and more activity. I admin an instance, so I’m not too worried about toxicty, as I can dump any regular sources of trouble
It’s all quite amusing to see.
I’m a new user here and saw the influx of Digg users on Reddit. It did change the site and we got a mix of more less-thoughtful discussion but also a lot more content which was funny and interesting. I’m thinking Reddit might not survive this as a global forum, following in the footsteps of Digg
I’ve been thinking about the issue of less-thoughtful discussions from large numbers of users. I think the phenomenon is inevitable. I also think community topics being duplicated across the federation will help with this.
Let’s take technology for example. So !technology@lemmy.ml might end up as the most reddit-front-page feeling, with !technology@lemmy.ml a little less comment-memey, then smaller instances having progressively smaller communities that better reflect the focus of the instance’s overall slant.
The best analogy for communities and instances might be newspapers or TV channels. You’re going to get a sports section on CBS, NBC, WaPo, whatever. They will largely publish the same stories, but with very slightly different feels. As you get into smaller publications, like say the regional publication from your state’s sportshub city, they will tailor to the interests of that particular area.
As users, we not only get to choose how broad the interests of the communities we subscribe to but we also get to subscribe to communities that are redundant (for lack of better word) so that we can stay in touch with very broad looks across an interest while having more focused and perhaps higher-quality discussions at the same time.
I’m excited to see new communities, more communities, more participation. I’m dreading the inevitable periodic and maybe frequent drops of servers as they struggle to cope with the influx and admins learn how to scale.
EDIT: oh shit, my eyes just skipped right over the whole of “before” in the title
Oh no, we’re the ones ruining lemmy. Sorry everyone haha.
I’m hoping they utilize c/popmemes to its fullest potential.
I’m excited, but at the same time worried about the technical side of things. How the load can/will be managed, what can we do to help, etc.
@Uncreativechap All I can say is I am hopeful that on the political topics there will be a more diverse set of opinions and more mindful discussions, beyond the level of If you don’t agree with me, you’re clearly a glowie who supports US atrocities or the likes. Not to mention having more intellectual voices promoted and discussed than the one of Noam Chomski for example (with all due respect to his work on documenting US Government abuses and not only).
Otherwise, there will be a switch from lemmy.ml is overloaded, use other instances instead to Every instance is overloaded, use lemmy.ml and lemmygrad instead (in the best case scenario).
I joined the Beehaw instance a bit ago with a small exodus from Tildes, another Reddit alternative. It’s been nice to see the community grow and grow steadily as time progressed, and seeing the Reddit refugees makes me hopeful for the platform’s strength going into the future regardless of what Reddit does with its API (or other features).
As for the toxic side of Reddit, I’m more concerned for the devs in having to deal with the reports, but as a Reddit mod myself, I don’t think it’ll be too bad. At least on Beehaw we have a supportive community and I’m reminded of a video talking about the userbase of the early UseNet and how they dealt with the first spammer (not necessarily their methods, but the fact that they rose up as a community to enforce a community rule). Hopefully we can see that here (i.e. “the report button exists”).
Edit: a detail
a small exodus from Tildes
I’ve seen Tildes being proposed as a Reddit alternative along Lemmy, what was the exodus about?
From what I remember, it had to do with the moderating decisions of the person behind Tildes.
I’m also wondering about this. I remember seeing Tildes promoted a few months ago but haven’t seen any mentions of it recently.
I’m a long time (mostly lurker) user on Tildes and I’m wondering this too. I just did a quick search over there and I don’t see any mention of it, so it doesn’t seem like the exodus was publicly advertised at first glance.
