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.

  • vxnxnt
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    11 months ago

    I’m actually quite pleased at the new influx of users! There’s finally a good amount of activity and real discussion going on here, instead of just posts with links to articles with zero comments and no real OC.

    Aside from that, I have enough faith in the moderators and the structure of the platform itself that there shouldn’t be too much of a toxicity problem. Honestly, my own biggest fear is just that a lot of the new users here lose interest and move on, returning the platform to its earlier days.

    For now, I just hope that the servers don’t go down in flames when the 12th comes around. I can’t wait to see how this platform will look further down the road though!

    • @Lets_taco_bout_it@lemmy.ml
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      1611 months ago

      I literally just signed up and this is the first comment I’ve read. I feared we might be seen as outsiders so thanks. I’ve been banned from Reddit for quite some time but lurked on RIF. Hopefully Lemmy can scale in time.

      • vxnxnt
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        411 months ago

        I hope you enjoy your stay here! And if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask. We’ll be more than happy to help.

    • @Pisck@lemmy.ml
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      811 months ago

      I have enough faith in the moderators and the structure of the platform itself that there shouldn’t be too much of a toxicity problem.

      My concern: Are there enough moderators for the deluge coming?

  • @lemmy_steve@lemmy.ml
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    4011 months ago

    I’m an ex Reddit user. It seems inevitable that the Reddit admins will lock out third party access - I could be wrong but based on recent years, Reddit doesn’t like to listen to it’s community.

    I hope that the toxicity stays away, but it’s likely there will be toxic users at some point. My main gripe with Reddit was the lack of actual reading. Most mainstream subs were just memes / circlejerks / pics. I’d much prefer to learn something or read something of value over “lol-ing” at a pic.

    I’m keen to see how Lemmy grows.

    • @zipdog@beehaw.org
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      1311 months ago

      Wanting to learn something hits the nail on the head. I recently came to the realization that I used to learn things on reddit, especially in the comments. Not sure when that stopped but it’s why I had been wishing for an alternative for a while.

      • @jayknight@lemmy.ml
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        411 months ago

        I still learn things there. I keep my subscriptions pretty clean and tailored to really interesting things, but have a mulrireddit called “fun” where I can browser brainlessly and have a laugh.

  • comfy
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    11 months ago

    Honestly, while most people here have been alright, toxic newcomers have been a problem and I consider this place ill-prepared to handle them in a bigger wave than this one.

    There has already been an observable culture shift, and some nasty screaming when some newcomers used to being a majority are challenged in their views and shocked to find a nontrivial pushback. And I feel that lemmy.ml will undergo a similar event to /r/antiwork if there isn’t staff action taken , where the place loses all its values and just becomes a sanewashed recuperated place that feels cheated when its founders keep saying what they said from the start. People largely just don’t read rules or sidebars, it seems, and realize lemmy.ml explicitly says it isn’t a general unthemed instance for everyone. It’s broad, but not ‘reddit’ broad, nor (pretending to be) politically neutral. Relevant source

    Edit: I realize this may come off as “why aren’t other people doing more things!”. I realize the staff/devs are overloaded, I’m not blaming them to telling them to drop things. But I regret how few moderating/admin staff were recruited, and we’re seeing how many communities were made 4 years ago and have no active moderation, nor culture to avoid this becoming ‘reddit but here’.

    • @pleasemakesense@lemmy.ml
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      1211 months ago

      I don’t know how to interpret “everyone should feel welcome here” other than it is for everyone. As far as culture shift, it really is impossible to maintain the more “fringe” leftist culture with an increase in users, marxist-leninist simply do not exist in large enough numbers. I don’t really see why lemmy.ml shifting its majority political leaning would be something negative to you, since the only thing that would happen would be more discussion in the comments, and if discussion isn’t something desirable, places like lemmygrad do exist

      • comfy
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        811 months ago

        I’m not even talking about the M-Ls, I mean even as broad as anti-capitalism and tech/FOSS. There was a meta discussion a while back I started seeking clarification on what “leftist” in the lemmy.ml blurb means, suggesting something less vague. Because to the devs, it evidently doesn’t mean ‘progressive capitalists’.

        This isn’t just some preference, because these factors are precisely why Lemmy won’t become another reddit disaster. And no, they’re not niche groups. Even on reddit, these communities are substantial!

    • GuyDudeman
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      211 months ago

      I really hope you’re not talking about me here. I feel like you might be.

      • comfy
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        11 months ago

        No, not you, you’re fine. This main person I had in mind was an active (self-admitted) troll who was literally incapable of discussion.

  • Communist
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    3511 months ago

    Been here patiently waiting for quite a while… this is what i’ve been waiting for, for reddit to finally fuckup bad enough that people move over.

  • Lvxferre
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    3511 months ago

    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.

    • @averagedrunk@lemmy.ml
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      411 months ago

      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.

  • @cecirdr@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    I’m new here from Reddit. I was a former Digg user. Over the past few years, Reddit has gotten swamped with spam and low quality content. I was most at home there on the niche subreddits that were still earnest and not spammy. I hope things stay that way over here.

    I’ve made a small donation to help Lemmy grow. It’s not much, but scaling up to handle the escapees is a big deal. Having the money to grow and build robust processes to keep content thoughtful and helpful is important. While I love the funny posts and memes sometimes on reddit, it’s really infested the popular subreddits to the point of being excessive. Ergo, I tend to hang out in smaller spaces where the dialog is more “straight up”.

      • @cecirdr@lemmy.ml
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        911 months ago

        I went here because I could do a one time donation. I plan to see how things go and eventually set up a recurring one though.

        https://opencollective.com/lemmy

        I found it on the main lemmy page where you sign up for a server. It probably needs to be posted in more places, like on the communities pages. (there’s a patreon site too where you can donate)

      • @Link@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        Here is their donation page with all three currently supported options.

        I don’t know much about Open Collective, but LiberaPay does not take a cut (only the fees of the payment processors) so I would discourage you to choose Patreon.

        Edit: Actually there are more options listed since you can also donate crypto.

  • alex [they/them]
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    3011 months ago

    Well:

    • I’m annoyed at calling people who dislike an app and choose another website “refugees”
    • I’m happy that we’re going to have more activity
    • I hope more instances will be built and maintained, because I don’t think the large number of new members can be moderated effectively if they keep flocking to the same handful of instances
    • When in doubt, I hope moderators will be too strict rather than not enough, especially in the beginning to make sure the behavioural expectations are very clear
    • @General_Butt_Naked@lemmy.ml
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      211 months ago

      Hopefully it’s moderated much less. Don’t see how it wouldn’t be since it would probably take more effort. The excessive, special interest driven moderation is what really killed reddit long before this api issue.

      • Grander
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        711 months ago

        Mods should have never been allowed to moderate more than like 3 subs at most.

        • @JasSmith@lemmy.ml
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          711 months ago

          I agree. “Powermods” became a thing 10 years ago and it’s been terrible for the site. Advertising companies pay teams of people to ensure subreddits remain advertiser friendly, and friendly to their portfolio of products. Reddit tolerates this because those moderators are free labour, keep the site clean, and post lots of “content.” I’m hopeful that, if Lemmy takes off, federation will allow us to wall off obvious cases of abuse without administrators stepping in, as they have done again, and again, and again on Reddit.

  • @FalseAerobics@beehaw.org
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    11 months ago

    I’m one of the new ones, but I’ve been aware of and interacted with Lemmy and Mastodon for at least a couple of years.

    For me, I liked what I saw but felt like they lacked enough of the network effect to convince my nontechnical friends to make the jump with me. That made me concerned that they would shrivel up and die. I’d recently been interacting a bit more though, Mastodon especially, since I’d say its gained a good amount of traction given Twitter’s…cancerous CEO. Every couple months I found myself downloading Tusky and Jerboa to mess around, but hadn’t made it a habit.

    Reddit’s API changes were a line in the sand for me though. I decided I didn’t care about my friends following anymore, and I was ready for a smaller community again, with less rage bait and predatory capitalism.

    Does that make me the wrong sort of refugee?

    • @Poopasite1@lemmy.ml
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      511 months ago

      I’m on the same boat as you. Especially being ready for a smaller community. Things will definitely be different but there might be a silver lining to how this all plays out.

    • @Pisck@lemmy.ml
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      411 months ago

      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.

    • Sun-Spider
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      11 months ago

      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.

  • @samhaingrim@lemmy.ml
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    2311 months ago

    I hope the reddit echo box ‘our way or the highway’, ‘everything is a pun’ mentality doesn’t transfer over as well

        • Deebster
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          211 months ago

          Yeah, when a simple bots can post most of the replies. E.g. if post.contains("r/theydidthemath") { post.reply("/r/theydidthemonstermath"); } then it’s gone too far. There are some good, creative ones, like The Old Reddit Switch-a-roo, but they’re too few and far between.

      • @ISOmorph@feddit.de
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        611 months ago

        To each his own I guess. To me it’s too much of the same regurgitated over and over again like a meme that stopped being funny years ago

    • @MBM@lemmy.world
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      111 months ago

      When someone shares a personal story about his wife’s struggle with cancer and the top reply is “I also choose this guy’s dead wife”

  • @const_void@lemmy.ml
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    2211 months ago

    It’s good. This place was pretty much a ghost town a few months ago with only a few users posting.

  • @metaltoilet@beehaw.org
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    1911 months ago

    It’s fricking amazing. There is regular conversation and places that have been dead for years are reviving themselves.

  • SmokeInFog
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    11 months ago

    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