Just wait and let Reddit have another controversy

You know, there was a great blog recently that wrote about this, that now is the perfect time to popularize the fediverse. That’s because as tensions with the US are rising, more people in europe are looking for alternative internet platforms to communicate over. So the fediverse can jump in here and offer itself as an alternative.

It’s quality and quantity. The quality has held despite a drop in users.

This is my experience too; I haven’t really noticed a change. I still see about the same number of conversations and the same depth of conversation as I always have here. I was very surprised that the change in user count was so high.

I wonder if there’s a committed/stable subsection of the userbase, that is mainly responsible for posts and comments, and has largely stuck around throughout? And then most of the swings in user count are from people who were less active to begin with?

It is. It’s one of the reasons i’ve pivot back to reddit these last few months.

1. More then Reddit this place is an echo chamber for the far left anti capitalist crowd. While I don’t mind a discussion, everything over simplified to EAT THE RICH was getting tiresome.

2. No company or institution is here. If I have a problem with my [insert device or appliance here] chances are good someone on reddit will reply and 50/50 there is a useable answer somewhere. Here it just stays silent. Or you get the anti capitalist reply that everything is fucked and we should just eat the rich.

3. There are no real gaming or device or brand communities. Want to ask something about modding game x? Not here. Want to hook up with other players of game y? Not here. Want to know how to fix your [household appliance here]? Not here…Have a problem with mainboard from brand z? Not here.

4. When you ask something here about Linux or any other gpl software the answer often times boils down to RTFMI! (I= idiot) That also happens on reddit to be honest. But here it’s just more extreme. And I know I’m an idiot. That’s why I asked. I’m too stupid can someone please explain.

5. Where the fuck is LJDawson. Sync is dead it seems.

And yes. Reddit more and more feels like an AI test site. For example the AITA posts are getting more and more out of this world. They are unbelievable, that’s just for clicks. So the enshittification is not slowly but very fast becoming a problem and within a few months it will be another youtube, unusable. But for now… It’s the best we have.

The quality has held despite a drop in users.

I feel like I’m going mental over here because this has not been my experience. The quality has always been spotty, but the last few months I’ve noticed more and more posts linking to awful “news” rags or no source at all. Worse, I rarely see people questioning the lack of quality information, simply gobbling it up because it aligns with their world view. Plus 70% of the comments on this platform could be generated by a classic r/subredditsimulator style bot and nothing would change; the same 5 points about AI, capitalism, and Linux are made in every thread in the exact same style every day.

And yes I’m mostly talking about news communities because Linux comms are usually fine but repetitive and while I’d love to interact with non-news content there just… isn’t much being made.

Indeed, I believe that the Fediverse is a paradise island where one can escape the noise created mainly by AI bots on centralised, proprietary social networks, but many users get a dopamine rush from eliciting an emotional response on the network, and that rush is provided by Reddit’s algorithms.

i’m sick of how awful and ignorant the vast majority of comments here are. and how they have to conflated outlandish beliefs with being morally correct.

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Disable the display of the voting system. That’s what I do, and it’s the reason I can use Lemmy. It won’t solve the political doom and gloom part, but it really helped me with the anxiety that comes from the rejection of others to my ideas, or the dopamine boost when a collective accepts and praises my comments. Try it.

Yeah I’m turned off from interacting. I got banned (I’m guessing since I can’t even reply to people) from world news when Maduro was kidnapped and I mentioned that my Venezuelan friends were hopeful. As this was scary but good news. And my god how I got flamed. Theres no room for conversation I got tagged, replied to, people made fun of me and that’s it. I wasn’t even allowed to interact anymore so it looks like I just said something and ran away.

I’m not even close to center, yet it’s all or nothing with politics here. It’s seriously become reddit 2.0. Pathetic.

The info hygiene here is really bad. I thought people here would be better about finding well sourced informative articles to talk about but its the same news slop that dominates other platforms. This is a discussion forum so posts should have something worth discussing. Spamming the same trump action over and over doesnt create any discussion.

Scrolling through the news community is so depressing there is no comments because everyone is thinking “what do you want me to say its bad its awful”

I don’t like how broad Lemmy assumes default interests are, though then again showing everyone the average interests may statistically be the best initialization point.

Every time I’m shown a community I’m totally uninterested I make sure to go in and block it from my feed. Likewise with aggressive or otherwise pathological users. It gets better.

the only way to not have an echo chamber where people vote with their emotions is to have an enlightened gnosticism user-base which is obviously very difficult to get and nurture but i’m trying :)

the best way to do this is to cultivate an atmosphere of discussion and in-depth thought regularly, which you can do by engaging with these discussions and seeking enlightenment yourself.

why beat yourself up. you know good content won’t be rewarded or seen.

only the ragebait. the internet is not information driven anymore, it’s dopmine driven.

it’s the super highway of rage and hate.

I get bummed that the political stuff has really taken over. I find myself spending more and more time just working on my own content and answering people’s comments than browsing the other communities. It’s draining scrolling past so much stuff to find the fun bits, but I don’t want to just block it and not see how our platform is developing as a whole.

A lot of communities have rules that posts need to be titled the same as the source article, which, while it prevents editorializing, it also brings all those ragebait headlines here. Plus I’d like to see Lemmy users’ opinions moreso than an article I could just read myself. I’d probably prefer more of the political post to be thoughts/feelings and then discussion is backed up by decent articles rather than an article being the post and comments are just all steered back to a single, often inflammatory article.

If half our content is just reposted mainstream media, why would one expect our comment sections to look any different than the comment sections of those mainstream sites?

This is it. People are leaving because there are problems and not enough resources to fix them. Because that’s dEcEnTtAlZaTioN.

Yeah the corn movement barely helped and you still have people whining or raging in the comments regardless of subject matter. I just want muh memes

I’ve seen a rise in calls to violence. This is not cool.

Fully agree. Its user base is self selecting for the people who are most easily fed up with the mainstream platforms (i.e. Reddit). It seems like the most eager to jump ship set up camp first and it has resulted in an extremely sanctimonious community. They don’t want more users. They want everyone to be exactly like them.

Sad but true

Other than that, It’s a pretty good platform

I’ve told people about Lemmy before. I got the same reaction everytime.

“It looks like it’s just people talking about computers.”

And their interest dies. Which tells me there needs to be more diversity of active communities. No one wants to come to a small platform, create a new dead community, and talk to themself.

Yeah. They could move to an unpopular toxic trash fire.

I thought this too at first: I expected Piefed to have been the main cause. But, it turns out that Lemmy monthly active users have dropped by around 30k, while Piefed has risen to about 5k

I know there tends to be a disagreement about this on Lemmy, but this is also what I have observed.

For example, If someone has a computer problem and its windows, there’s a good chance the top comment will be “Stop, use linux”. Almost any conversation can turn into “you’re supporting capitalism”. It discourages people from wanting to post and engage, because of the likely hood of something turning into an argument. Not everyone has the mental bandwidth for it, and they just want a place to come and chill.

Hell I used to be active in making Cassettefuturism grow when lemmee was a thing, and we’d get people coming into that niche community to argue with us about our hobby.

The difference between Reddit and Lemmy was that niche communities would usually not hit the front page and you could be off in your own little corner. Here since things are smaller, you are more likely to run into some niche communities through discovery.

This. This is the main complaining I see over the Fediverse when I try to suggest it to people. They enter Lemmy to give it a check and go “It’s all politics?”

Welcome! The thing worth knowing is that corporate social media has intentionally trained you to expect zero friction because that’s the basis of their business model - to trap you. Once you spend a bit of time or watch a YT video and understand how lemmy works, it’s not that complicated at all.

Consider that things worth doing in life are not so easy that they suck you in. No one gets in shape at the gym on accident. A small bit of effort pays off here.

Yeah part of the issue here is that there are so few users that the more niche topics just don’t get a lot of traction.

For example, I help mod the Washington Capitals hockey team community, but mostly it’s just two of us talking. We recently decided to stop posting game day threads for every game, because there’d be one comment in them (usually me), if we were lucky - and we were the last NHL team community to end the game day threads; most stopped long ago. The overhead just wasn’t worth the reward. We decided we’d focus more on the general Hockey community, hoping to build that out a bit.

(We didn’t give up entirely - we posted a sticky thread that is for all games, and we’ll make a top level comment for each game in there, asking people to respond to that comment for that game. If they don’t, not a major issue. This way we still have the forum for the game discussions without having to worry about posting it every time.)

I think part (though not all) of the issue is discoverability. There’s other communities where this isn’t as prevalent, but a) they’re not always easy to find, and b) for this as well as other reasons, they might not be super active (if people don’t know it exists, who’s posting?)

I get around the first bit by trawling All New once and a while. One feature I will say I liked on reddit was the random community function. But while I like that it’s a smaller userbase here for some reasons, it does mean less diversity of interests.

My group is not political =3

Or about Linux

https://lemmy.world/c/IndepthIndie

On a long enough timeline, every Lemmy thread eventually becomes one of the following:

1. ACAB

2. Trump bad

3. FOSS good

4. Reddit bad

5. Socialism (generally, via vanguard party) good

6. Tankies (i.e. #5) bad

Not that I disagree with most of the above, but we need some normies in here to balance things out, so invite them and don’t demonize them. That’s made trickier by Reddit banning people for talking about the Fediverse/Lemmy, so you have to be clever about it.

amen. i want to nerd out and make jokes and listen to people’s stories and gain insightful from other people.

but now i have weirdos going into my history from such threads and telling me that if i think there is any subtlely to social or personal or moral issues, than I’m evil incarnate.

Well, if you leave there will be one less person who would post something that’s neither Linux nor Trump. Be the change you want to see in the world. Stay out of spite, invite more people like you over, post whatever you want, and shove them into Linux posters’ faces!

That’s why i run the !mars@discuss.tchncs.de community. It’s a very niche interest topic but i found no other good-quality community discussing martian settlement so i made my own. And i figure if the quality is good enough, it might be enough to bring in other users from other platforms simply to have good discussions.

I have checked the mars subreddit on Reddit but it’s full of idiots and people who are just generic naysayers or people who saw 1 youtube video and now think they’re experts or sth.

I have been using “social software” for decades now. In the early 90s I ran a single line BBS networked across Canada and USA (every modem in the network called the nearest modem and we shared posts this way). I went to friendster (before that “makeoutclub”, if anyone remembers that thing), myspace, then piled onto facebook like everyone else.

The only thing that seems to make a social media tool relevant is when a critical mass of young people, in that 15-30 demo, decides that it’s time to adopt a new social media platform. This has been because they want a place away from their families, but there’s also all kinds of memetic reasons behind it that have nothing to do with function.

Young people need to flood to open source, distributed networks like Lemmy. I don’t mean to be a token old guy and speak poorly of an entire generation, but I’m not impressed with the embracing of Tiktok, Facebook and reddit. I find it hard to take anyone with a cause who inhabits these spaces seriously. I told my niece about why Facebook sucks, and she said “that’s so boomer.” Like, wtf?

So yeah. Young people, stop using twitter and all that junk. I promise if you come here I’ll go somewhere else.

pretty much. i have been here for over two years. in the past few months it’s become more and more frustrating and i’m getting harassed/attacked/banned, always from bad faith actors that whose grade school reasoning is ‘i know you are but what am i?!’ type justifications. they only reply to call you names and tell you how wrong you are and how right they are.

it’s the same idiots who ruined reddit who can’t tolerate anyone who thinks differently than them and then screech about how tolerate and open minded they are and if anyone disagrees with them the are a stupid facist bigot.

people forget, but redditque was a think people actaully practiced and made reddit a really cool place. people would argue, but they generally didn’t ban/block/harass each other. nobody in first decade of reddit went around downvoting/reporting all my posts. but that’s just how shit is now on the internet too many unwell nutjobs who want to punish people who type words they don’t like.

I haven’t seen any slurs in my feed, maybe jump instances?

you know what? that might be it!

But do we want whatever users are still on Reddit? If they all come here, we will have to find a different place

As someone who’s never made a post…

Thanks, WhirlpoolBrewer.