- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- fediverse@lemmy.world
It became the only reliable source of information I had. People posted links with a minimal amount of commentary, picking and choosing the best content from other social media networks. They’re not doing it to “build a brand” because that’s not a thing in the Fediverse. It’s too disjointed to be a place to build a newsletter subscription base.
People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement. Not in this article so much. I’m sure there were fewer posts in the past too. But what I found is that there are real people on here and you don’t have to wade through bots and shills which makes this community feel much more whole to me.
While that’s true, I don’t believe it to be a fundamental property of the medium or federation in general. I think what we are experiencing is the result of lack of mainstream attention and traffic.
The people here are much less demographically diverse than the public at large, and have intentionally sought out this space and others like it, so they have more of a sense of ownership and community about it. The more attention it gets, the more the demographics will change to reflect the broader public, and the more it will become like a public space, complete with all the ills that come with that, like advertisers vying for attention, shills posing as enthusiasts, and influencers saying what will get them the most followers, rather than what they think.
I believe it would take extensive moderation and amazing tools to keep places like this the same as they gain users. I haven’t ever seen a community survive that kind of growth and retain its original spirit, but I also haven’t seen one with no profit motive. If we can get the moderation tools where they need to be, there could be hope!
True, Lemmy feels this way almost exclusively because it’s small and hasn’t been noticed by mainstream media enough. The second that changes this place will become what reddit was pre-ipo.
We take it for granted that as the fediverse grows in numbers and nodes that it will continue to stay mostly contiguous.
My hope is that it will always be a little too disjointed to hold that kind of attention for long.
Also, there is no central power that has to make the line go up. I remember reddit like before 2014 and that was much like here in many ways (in an older kind of way, more racism and smut), but they just had to shoehorn in moar users more and more and more, and forbid any troublesome subs (while leaving other troublesome ones ofc.).
So IMO there is a real difference, we cannot grow too big or we’d just split off into new entities.
This is how I see it. If fedi proper becomes mainstream then us old heads will just recreate the old fedi and guard who we federate with very closely.
Most people aren’t here for commerce, so I think it makes sense to keep some areas aggressively social only.
Malls versus parks or libraries kind of thing.
There is no effective way to ban a person. As long as that remains true, moderation tools don’t really matter.
Israel alone is putting $760 million into propaganda. Lemmy may not be big, but it’s worth 0.2% of that budget.
And that’s just Israel.
I think that’s trying to solve the wrong problem.
If I had awesome moderating tools, identifying and deleting comments that violate the policy would be effortless. I would not need to ban a person, which as you aptly point out, can reappear forever. But, I can ban all of his violating comments, which are, after all, the true target and violation, not the commenter.
I think the community is a good size right now. Popular enough that we guarantee getting any content of relevance I care about, but not popular enough to have all the problems you mentioned. I hope the community stays this size and off the radar indefinitely.
I actually like the slower pace. There’s no constant stream of content but I find that helps me to moderate my usage. It also helps me take a more active role because I don’t just see what I’m subscribed to. I’ll hop over to the top posts over the last 6 hours and find something that’s really hot elsewhere, or I’ll hop on to scaled and find something obscure. It’s slower and cranky but it embodies a lot of the old elements of scrolling that I miss.
Yeah, there’s definitely still some bullshit and editorialized clickbaity headlines to sift through, but it’s not nearly as much and overall the content here feels much more human.
There’s just not much incentive to generate engagement for the sake of it (unless you’re funhole), and far fewer bots and bad-faith trolls in general. Not to say there’s none though.
As soon as there is “unlimited” content, the vast majority of said content is shit
Maybe I would have thought this at one point? I remember when you could get to the bottom of the All feed in one session.
Lemmy is probably the fastest paced social I go on now. I’ve got my people I follow on masto and a handful of forums. So coming to lemmy from those feels downright metropolitan.
Lemmy as far as I can tell is mostly dup posts and blind links, especially links to youtube. The absence of Spez is of course priceless, but otherwise Lemmy is duller than plenty of single-issue blogs or forums, or even the still-decaying corpse of Usenet. That article is about Mastodon, which has a different crowd than Lemmy does. I’m not big on the “follower” model though, so I’m not there very much.