It’s not the kids, not the lurkers, not the mods… y’all just nice people. Lemmy’s got a good vibe going… or at least enough windows that we can close if the vibe gets shit.
I think it’s just survivorship bias, kinda like mastodon. The people inclined to come here are probably anti-corporate, and sick of current social media’s bullshit.
I think the barrier to entry also helps a bit. The folks willing to put up with the rough edges that Lemmy has are also likely willing to participate with the intent of making Lemmy a success rather than just “hangers on” as it were. With a 1600% growth in “active” user population, there are definitely a ton of lurkers, yet. Once it becomes more approachable, we’ll see if the community feeling that Lemmy has begins to tarnish and fade as the volume of interaction and content rises.
I was thinking the same, especially after seeing several posts “demanding” Lemmy to change this and change that.
I mean, that’s not to say there’s no room for improvements, but if the first thing some people do when going to a new platform is wanting changes to meet their personal way of doing things, instead to try and adapt first to how the platform works and learn from it, in my opinion it means those people are not really interested in being here and make lemmy succeed, they’re just following the “flavor of the month” and won’t last long here anyway.
I think the fediverse being not so intuitive might be a very good thing actually, it can act as a sort of filter so it doesn’t succumb to the masses ruining everything, hopefully.
Sometimes I worry I might be being too snobby by thinking it’s a good thing there’s a small barrier to entry here, but the quality of the discourse is SO much better than Reddit it’s hard to argue with the results.
Totally agree, it’s amazing how many people can be discouraged by a small bump over the road. Kinda like how free mobile games have millions of downloads but games that are like, a dollar, are lucky if hit a thousand (and the gap in quality is astounding most of the time).
The barrier isnt that high in my opinion at least. Its just signing up to any instance in lemmy and thats it. I choose shitjustworks cuz they seemed level headed and i heard some nasty rumors about some of the other bigger lemmy instances so that was another factor on it i guess.
I have been thinking this over the past week on reddit every time I see a “Lemmy/Kbin needs to sort out X, Y and Z otherwise it’s going to fail massively.” or “Lemmy/Kbin is impossibly hard to use/sign up for”. Usually with CAPITAL LETTERS and emojis.
Like… ok. I don’t think you’ll be missed with that attitude. At least for the time being.
I read Haiku (OS) has no future recently and I think a similar thing is happening here.
Do we want to “have a future” or do we just want to be a cool place doing cool shit for ourselves?
Yeah “having a future” is always under the lens of “marketable/corporate profits” anyway. Some people don’t understand that sometimes, humans just want to build nice things because they want to!
To be fair, I had some of those complaints with the instances initially being linked. It clicked when RIF linked to Lemmy.World in its final update message. It didn’t have dumbass hoops to go through, just a straight forward email, username, password, you’re in system like the first few things I was seeing. That and many people were over explaining it and just confusing the hell out of people.
If a person if truly interested in moving to a place with better discourse, they’ll make the effort. If not, they should stay on Reddit.
I’m excited about the fact that people who are anti-corporate usually are the same people that will moderate and build community for free just because they want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. If all content creators and moderators find their home here Reddit will only have takers and lurkers left!
I know I’m being naive but I’m enjoying my little dream of utopia 😄
I’m just here because of Reddit dick move, not that I hate all companies, the transition was quite nice that is to projects like https://wefwef.app and the upcoming Sync for Lemmy!
Just deleted my reddit account. This is now my new scrolling home… lol
Same. Goodness I love this. It’s so peaceful.
Thank you.
Same, I used redact to delete my post and comment history and then deleted my 12 year old account.
Same, I used redact to delete my post and comment history and then deleted my 12 year old account.
Me too!
I’m going to leave mine up as a sort of testament to eleven years of my life. My last comment is, and will continue to be unless something drastic changes, some argument I was having with somebody about how to fix housing shortages, like the one in California.
17 days ago as of now. Weird feeling.
I deleted every single comment and post on the seven or so accounts I was able to remember passwords for, and then deleted the accounts. That also meant I got to see about ten years worth of comments and posts. There are some phases of life I’d rather not be preserved for posterity’s sake.
deleted by creator
Yep me too also deleted all posts & comments. Lets hope thry don’t restore them though
Deleted my 9-year account yesterday and never looked back. Reddit has become so toxic these past few weeks and Lemmy has been such a breath of fresh air.
In Italy we call it “mountain path behavior”: just like in our mountain paths, as long as it is few people you meet you behave cordially and in a friendly manner, but it changes when the number of people goes up.
This is a great term. Thank you for sharing. My first upvoted comment on Lemmy.
I agree, it feels like something good is starting to rev up.
Pretty awesome to be part of something new and growing.
It feels somehow nostalgic and exciting. Makes it lot easier to forget Reddit.
It’s new. It’s exciting. It’s like Reddit was ten years ago
I think a lot of us have been chasing the high of what Reddit was a decade ago
There were some really great years before the quality just took an absolute nose dive
Here is hoping Lemmy can catch the same magic in a bottle
I think it will. There is no reason it doesn’t because there was nothing technological exceptionnal with Reddit.
I think so, too. The comment sections remind me a lot of Reddit’s when I first joined in early 2013 — more thoughtful comments and less shitposting to get the most upvotes.
It seems like the biggest hurdle is going to be getting the more niche communities going on Lemmy.
I agree with both of those sentiments! And as for niche communities, the challenge I’ve seen has been that they need a kind of critical mass in one place to take off…but at least on Reddit, that has sometimes led to homogeneity of thought and shouting down of any opinion that doesn’t 100% fall in line with the hivemind.
For example, I’m a big fan of the video game Life Is Strange, and there’s a major decision in that game that completely recontextualizes the story depending on which choice you make. On Reddit, /r/lifeisstrange as a metaphorical single organism has made one specific choice its accepted orthodoxy - any speaking about the other choice is downvoted and seen as blasphemy.
It’s especially frustrating to me since I have nuanced opinions about both sides, seeing various arguments for each. I don’t come down firmly in favor of either. But the almost-religious polarization means that my viewpoint is seen as sacriligeous because it’s nonconformist, but not bold enough against the orthodoxy to be supported by the blasphemers.
There were ups and downs along the way, once I’d figured out the subreddits I was actually interested in and filtering out the stuff I didn’t want to see I have mostly had a decent time on Reddit. Spent one year on Apollo and bacon reader then purchased sync 9 years ago… Most of the complaints of the official app flew right over my head and I was pretty happy about it. I’m still absolutely enjoying this new little bit of the Internet for sure.
It’s not like reddit you say? Time to be an asshole to everyone for no good reason /s
I think it’s partly a selection effect of who bothered to come here. On the positive end, scrolling All is more likely to show things relevant to me I wouldn’t have found.
On the negative end there are few comments to interact wjth
On this platform I’m much more likely to actually type out a comment, even when there are a just a couple (or none!). I feel like people will actually read it.
the “active” sorting helps a ton, on reddit if you were late to a post and had something to say you were lucky if anyone ever switched to “new” comments or it was a random person years later replying to you
I read this!
Haven’t really seen nearly as much toxic content on Lemmy as of yet. Might actually start interacting instead of rolling my eyes at every other comment lmao
Feels like there’s less contrarianism, and people are less interested in being negative for no reason.
There’s still some negativity, but it seems much chiller overall.
We can never escape this. It’s human nature.
Oh, there’s plenty of toxicity on Lemmy, but it’s been fairly successfully isolated to the offending Instances due to active admins. Hopefully that keeps up.
The admins/mods/community have been pretty united in rejecting toxicity. Any maga/racist posters are usually downvoted to hell such that the only positively ranked posts in their communities are antithetical to maga/trump/racism.
Lemmy.world is a bit slow for me RN but given the immense growth on Lemmy, it’s to be expected. I’m still on Reddit but hopefully I get to see more niche content here! I read /r/CredibleDefense and /r/CombatFootage, would be great if they were on Lemmy too.
Yeah, votes are slow for me now (5 seconds until a vote “registers” in the UI), but somehow loading entire posts with their comment chains is fast.
Maybe is because there are like servers for some actions but I am not sure of how that works
Same earlier. It’s smooth for me now though. Very responsive. Seems like the server upgrade paid off.
Edit: Posting replies is still buggy and slow but that’s to be expect so early on.
I, for one, will not be missing the Reddit ads.
I’m all for it!
It’s good because it’s lessening the “hardship” of leaving reddit. Imagine leaving reddit and there’s literally no alternatives out there that match that format. Imagine if it was just Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube, and whatever else, but nothing else that matched that sort of long stream of post headlines that Reddit has done so well. The others kind of do a similarish thing (post streams), BUT me personally I like this condensed headline format, I don’t want to see a ginormous posts that takes up half the page and I have to waste valuable microseconds scrolling past it to get to the next giant post.
I’m an info addict and I want to see twenty posts on a page, briefly scan through them and keep scrolling down, just droves and droves of headlines that I can react to and completely skip past reading the article and go straight into commenting on it like I’m an expert on this thing I didn’t even know about 5 minutes ago.
I tried to feed my info need without Reddit; rss feed readers, tech blogs with comments.
It felt empty as I realised the discourse was tipping the balance on what I was seeking out.
Multiple Lemmy instances with the iOS Memmy app feels like I’ve benefited from getting off Reddit.
I’m an info addict and I want to see twenty posts on a page, briefly scan through them and keep scrolling down, just droves and droves of headlines that I can react to and completely skip past reading the article and go straight into commenting on it like I’m an expert on this thing I didn’t even know about 5 minutes ago.
lol are you me?
Absolutely.
Just don’t criticize Joe Biden or the knives come out. 😳
It’s nice people, the culture of Lemmy, and the amount of users
On reddit, if you wanted to chime in on a thread that was popular enough to reach your feed, it was probably too late to make a comment that would stand out, since the people who comment on it early would get the upvotes, reach the top, and drown out your input.
Here at least, the comment sections, number of users, and the way “Hot” is sorted allows people to feel like their input matters, rather than just trying to make short quips to farm the most karma. The lack of a karma system or comment/post awards also helps this, as people aren’t as incentivized to just farm upvotes.
And of course, the bulk of Lemmy’s platform as of right now is built on people who left Reddit because they cared about their communities, and had strong opinions on how an online forum ought to be fairly run, leaving the more apathetic users behind. Naturally, this means most of Lemmy’s users care about their community, and share that common bond.