As a long time Reddit user, there’s something about Lemmy and the fediverse that feels really refreshing and new. I think it has to do with a few things…
- People are more respectful of each other and interested in discussion and being social.
- Less trolls (users are probably older?)
- Due to it not being absolutely huge, I feel like people will actually see my posts and comments instead of being lost in a sea of content. I suppose once Lemmy grows this will change, however the cool thing about the fediverse are the new servers. So you can stick to the server when you want smaller community discussion and go to “all” when you want more populated threads.
- The clean UI feels refreshing and clean, almost like the early internet.
What have you noticed? Do you find it refreshing too?
Ok so let me throw out some old timer wisdom. This is what the social media/forums/the Internet are like when the cream is skimmed off and the 90% of users who only browse, and the 8% who only vote are gone. Enjoy it while you can. The summer always ends.
This is exactly it. I haven’t come across a forum where the “summer syndrome” wasn’t permanently present in a decade. I’ll be lurking around here to see if this is going to finally be it.
I was a bit late one the social media train, isn’t that where the “Eternal September” thing came from?
That’s because way back in the past, every September, a bunch of students who’d never had home internet access would have access via university for the first time. It would take some time for them to pick up the culture, so there’d be a month or so of questionable posts.
Unfortunately some communities don’t seem to exist without the froth. The FIRE community seems difficult to recreate here, or local subs. But do you all remember when r/Bitcoin was mostly programmers?
The FIRE community could use the existing Mr. Money Mustache forums. Only hiccup is, I believe, that it is difficult to get a new account (not sure why that is, maybe that’s an old problem and it’s easier now). I’ve lurked that forum for years; they seem like a friendly, helpful, well regulated, un-frothy bunch.
I love The Good Place! To get a Mr money mustache account, you have to know the answers to a few questions covered by the blog. If anyone needs help, PM me. I’m a long time follower of the FIRE community and can assist.
If bad Janet poops because she chooses to and ends conversations with long farts, I’m a bit afraid of what a very bad Janet does…
Absolutely, my first thought was this is what internet was in the 90s and 00s. Slow, good yarns, and lame jokes.
Tbh there’s already too many memes here though. Half my front page is 196 and German me_irl sometimes.
Yea but dont be too hard on the kids. We were sticking frogs in virtual blenders and abusing the /blink/ tag at their age, so let them have their fun.
You can block those communities if you want.
I guess I want some memes not all memes
The funny thing is on Reddit I was mostly a lurker/content consumer. There was little incentive to actually post because your post or comment was likely to just be drowned out in the absolute torrent of other posts/comments. Here I’m actually able to be heard.
silky smooth apps. not overwhelmingly populated and serious.
There aren’t any bots here promoting a narrative, or auto-downvoting people. From around 2015 until its final days, Reddit was manipulated by business and political entities to steer groupthink. Turning off reddit unplugs you from the Matrix, so to speak.
On Lemmy specifically: its a higher barrier to entry, there’s less karma chasing here. Especially if you aren’t on one of the larger Lemmy instances. It feels like a community and not like karma-whoring. In my preferences, I turned off viewing the number of votes a comment has, which is nice.
Agree, agree, agree, agree!
I’ve had more traction on my posts and comments in the month or so I’ve been on lemmy than the entire 14 years I was on reddit. I’m glad I’ve moved, couldn’t give two shits how it does from here out, I’m away.
It’s nice to be able to speak without being drowned out by cave-fascists.
I think the lack of a karma equivalent, and thus karma farming, results in much more thought out and unique posts/comments.
Torn between replying with “this!” as a meme about how generic responses like that are used to farm karma and making a joke about how “of course someone with only 1 reputation point would say there’s no karma equivalent.” Idk how reputation works and if its only internal to instances or a shared across instances. But its possible it does become a karma equivalent in the future.
Reputation seems borked at the moment, it counts downvotes but not upvotes so I’m sitting at -34 right now lol
Boosting is the only way for reputation to go up. I boosted you for science.
I’m not sure I feel comfortable taking advice from a person with -51 reputation…
Ooo everybody come look at Mr. Non-controversial over here with his +40 reputation.
We have learned from experience.
Interesting! I gave you a boost as well, also for science. Funny how we all seem to be tinkering and figuring what does what here.
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It adds your comment to my profile feed if anyone is following me. I think it’s a way to work better with Mastodon like sites but I don’t really know. I understand that @ernest is in the midst of changing that.
Lol, I think the first one would definitely have flown over my head without explanation. Also, I don’t know if it’s instance specific, but I can’t seem to find my reputation on my profile, neither on feddit.de/lemmy-ui or Jerboa. Where do you get that information?
Maybe it could be useful for moderators or admins to access that information? But that also poses the risk of accounts “reputation-farming” like on reddit to sell the account to some bot-farm that uses it for astro-turfing or sth similar.
I’m not 100% sure, but I think the reputation thing is a Kbin feature, at least everyone I’ve seen mention it so far has been on a Kbin instance.
I do not think Lemmy has the same thing, but don’t quote me on that!
There is a thing called Reputation (IIRC) tucked away in your profile. Im not sure if that’s a true karma equivalent. Also not sure what you can do with it.
It doesn’t matter what you can do with it. You couldn’t really do anything with karma either.
I think there’s many contributing factors. I actually was thinking about the same thing before I found your post, and the answer that came to mind outside of some of the ones people posted here was:
It feels like a breath of fresh air because we’re outside the Walled Garden. We’re not trapped on a platform who’s soul has been crushed and wrung for every penny’s worth like Reddit or Twitter. And we can see that there is a world on the Internet besides the Walled Garden and that fact is very liberating. It makes you feel like you don’t have to go back.
Yeah man. Lemmy definitely has that early internet feel. I love it. Hope you’re having a good day.
It is indeed refreshing. But not sure how long it will last.
We’re not all trapped in the same building anymore. You can just move to a different instance and still have the same software experience but with the community you prefer.
Just wait until September… ;)
Haha, I was around then, when AOL got big it was like, well there goes the neighborhood.
The flood will eventually come
I’m realizing that a few weeks ago I wanted a lot of people to flock to Lemmy and away from Reddit. At this point I just don’t think about Reddit anymore and find myself hoping Lemmy doesn’t get too popular because of everything that comes with that (trolls, meme posters, bots)
By now, we’ve all been around the internet long enough to know that good things never last. That’s really life: Everything’s impermanent. Lemmy will probably suck someday, as will much of the fediverse. But I’m grateful it’s good right now and for the foreseeable future.
I have hope that as the big corporations enter the Fediverse and start enshittifying it, some of us can sneak off to new instances that just don’t federate with them. Then the masses can enjoy their Meta-branded Fediverse, and the tech bros can make their money from it, while the rest of us carry on quietly in a parallel one.
It could suck someday, but it doesn’t suffer from the same things that made myspace -> facebook -> reddit suck. No money hungry executives profiting off underpaying employees to implement features no one asked for and selling astroturfing as a service. At least it doesn’t seem that there’s astroturfing as a service here yet.
No money hungry executives
I think that’s going to be the key difference. You can destroy something good, but to really destroy it takes an executive.
You’re right. The fediverse is definitely in a better position to ward off the suck.
We didn’t think those things would suck initially either. Facebook was amazing around 2004 - 2006 before it opened up to the general public.
I don’t think I know a single person who ever thought Facebook was “amazing”… Even back then.
Before it opened up to the general public, we used it to organize parties, share photos without concern, and keep in touch with friends that went to other colleges. There wasn’t anything else like it.
Let’s hope it keeps that glimmer!
The fediverse is a great system for moderation. I’ve been on Mastodon for years now and it’s stayed pretty pleasant.
I’m a recent reddit semi-convert (haven’t left Reddit entirely just yet) and I’m loving it so far
As much as I’d love to think otherwise, i think a significant amount of the good feeling and comradery that we’re seeing now is due to us being in a bit of a honeymoon phase. You saw the same thing on Mastadon after the Twitter migration, everyone was singing kumbaya and holding hands, but overtime it started to regress a bit (though not nearly as much) towards a more “twitter” feel.
I’m sure over time it’ll stop being quite so feel-good and happy, but the fact that it’s community run and less centralized will help a lot in the long run i think. A lot of the friction and tension on Reddit was due in one way or another to it’s centralization - if you had a popular subreddit that was run by shitty mods, there wasn’t much you could do about it. here, you can just create a new version of the same sub on a different instance, and it’s a lot easier for people to “move” over to the new one.
I think the lower population helps a lot as well, right now the majority of the people on Lemmy are good faith users who care about the platform and want it to succeed. When you have 100’s of millions of users like Reddit does, you’re going to get a lot more bad faith users and people who just want generic content to scroll on
Soon we’ll all be strangers and snobs and kick each other in the ribs to say hi
I think it has people with above average reading comprehension because amount of people I saw that said opening a Lemmy account is too hard and they couldn’t manage to do it is way too high
Early adopters of any innovation likely have certain personality traits that make them able and willing to assess a new technology and learn/overcome some obstacles to use it. Maybe those traits translate into pleasant, respectful online communication?
ETA: I need to see if I still have my old grad school copy of Diffusion of Innovation. It might have some answer in there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
ETA1: Most everyone seems thoughtful and patient. So maybe those are early adopter traits?
That’s my thinking. As an example the people who usually end up answering people’s tech queries are the most likely to end up here.
What does
ETAmean?Edited To Add. :)
My wife is a teacher at a small district. She’s watched student’s abilities drop over the past twenty years and the time of covid left them severely lacking. Yes. Their writing skills are practically not there. It’s truly sad.
Yeah that’s true! If an article is posted, the discussion shows that people really did read the article!
i joined reddit in 2015 when the site was already heaving with content and users. good for killing time and consuming, but not for engaging in the community. right now lemmy/kbin is in the sweet spot where there’s enough people to talk to but not so many that i can’t be heard.
It’s not run to maximize shareholder value
That was my favorite part! Don’t you just love being a tiny cog on the capitalist wheel of despair?
I just wish the orphan crushing machine wasn’t so slow. JUST DO IT!!! Or preferably don’t and stop sucking, but I know that won’t happen.
Even if they were to come out fire spez and go say ‘our bad let’s stop and talk about this’ I’m still not going back.
On reddit I deliberately refrained from up/down voting because I hate feeding capitalist algorithms. I’m trying to unlearn that habit now.
At least here there is no algorithm I think?
The only algorithms here are for sorting posts based on activity and recency, rather than trying to maximize engagement so you see more ads. Also it’s all completely open source.
Certainly there’s some kind of algorithm behind sorting by Hot or Top Day or whatever, but it’s not trying to sell me stuff or sell my preferences to anybody
