I have noticed that I interact a lot more in Lemmy than I ever did in any social media. Let it be Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… I am used to be the lurker, but here for some reason things are different. Wonder if more people feel like I do.
With reddit having way more people and being only a casual browser, I would never make it early enough to a post to contribute in a meaningful way. Whatever I would have said would be commented dozens of times before I got to the thread. At best my comment wasn’t made yet, but I’d be sure someone with more knowledge on the subject would’ve contributed in greater depth soon.
Here I see plenty of posts hours old with no comments. There’s a greater chance whatever I might say won’t get buried or overshadowed.
Agreed. What you say matters here. Your post won’t be buried with only you for an upvote.
I do, and it’s not for entirely altruistic reasons either.
When I’d open a thread on reddit, if I wasn’t there within the first hour of being up or first dozen or so comments, it was almost guaranteed that whatever I said would get buried and the effort I spent formulating my comment would basically be wasted. So there was very little incentive to engage with meaningful discussion just for the sake of discussion. On Lemmy, most posts struggle to get over a hundred comments at most, and even more struggle to get past ten. So, if I spend time developing my reply, I have a higher chance of that comment getting seen and other people in the community engaging with me, which is the entire point of leaving comments, IMO.
Agreed. Comments here are more meaningful for being rare. Even comments disagreeing with OP or replying from a different point of view are often well thought out and meaningful.
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It certainly doesn’t help that Lemmy had and still has absolutely no sensible way to actually surface niche communities to its subscribers. Unlike Reddit, it doesn’t weigh posts by their relative popularity within the community but only by total popularity/popularity within the instance. There’s also zero form of community grouping (like Reddit’s multireddits) - all of which effectively eliminates all niche communities from any sensible main view mode and floods those with shitty memes and even shittier politics only. This pretty much suffocated the initially enthusiastic niche tech communities I had subscribed to. They stood no chance to thrive and their untimely death was inevitable.
There are some very tepid attempts to remedy this in upcoming Lemmy builds, but I fear it’s too little too late.
I fear that Lemmy was simply nowhere near mature enough when it mattered and it has been slowly bleeding users and content ever since. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, though.
Agree to everything but the doom. Yes, most people will only give 1 chance to a platform, but we haven’t churned through most people yet. Most people are yet to honor Lemmy with their first visit, at some point in the future. We will be better prepared than ever. This wil be true for a long while. So I think we should make (reasonable) haste, but nothing is lost yet. In the long run, we’re still growing.
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I agree. On Lemmy, saying the wrong thing on the wrong community is like stepping on a landmine. The ideological differences are wild. Maybe I just need to get used to this and block the worse communities. It certainly feels very hostile. Especially from leftwing users and communities.
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Well said. I suppose we can all be guilty of this, and this is why I try to engage with people of with many different ideological positions. It’s not always comfortable to confront out own beliefs and biases, but I do think it makes us more well-rounded.
Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!
You want an honest answer?
No. No I don’t.I comment and share links at about the same rate as I did when I was primarily on Reddit. I’m less interested in Reddit these days and probably split my time 50-50. I’m pissed at what they did and continue to do, and the quality of the content has clearly taken a hit across the broader Reddit community but it’s still SO MUCH BIGGER than the entire fediverse that there is hundreds if not thousands of times the people and content.
I’ve tried to get a couple of groups off the ground, but I’m just not that guy and wasn’t on Reddit either.
I am not commenting on Reddit much anymore tho, due to the aforementioned behavior by Spez et al.
that’s honest.
i miss reddit, too. been 3.5 months since leaving and i used to spend 12 hours or more at a time scrolling and reading. it was like a good friend or partner.
but i really NEVER posted there. and i do here, sometimes.
Hey, thanks for being honest about it.
You’re right, the sheer size of Reddit means it’s hard to deny that the variety of discussion topics is much greater than on Lemmy. The decentralized servers model also means it’s slightly more difficult to find and grow small communities.
What I like though is that in general, posters on Lemmy, even the ones that repost old memes from elsewhere, try to genuinely engage with other commentors.
I findyself upvoteing way more on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit.
Lemmy feels very different to me as well. People seem more mature, skeptical, genuinely left-leaning, interested in discussion, and the moderation isn’t totalitarian. Plus Reddit really seemed like it was controlled by moderators with an agenda. I’m not a flagrant asshole (I think), yet I was banned from a few subreddits for not following seemingly arbitrary rules. For example, I was banned from my city’s subreddit for making a post asking a question that wasn’t directly about the city, it was more about the state’s culture/history. I just wanted to know what my neighbors thought. Apparently someone decided that wasn’t what the subreddit was for.
I also have found the discussions more mature, usually, even in some cases where the other person is to my right or left on the political spectrum (I am in the progressive / social democrat range). Of course there are always some that post in bad faith but it seems like the ratio of those to others is lower here, thankfully.
On R×ddit, I wrote about a scary experience I had and posted, not thinking much of it. Weeks later, someone in a server I frequent sent me a YouTube link and asked “isn’t this you??”, as they recognized my R×ddit username. It was a video of someone reading out my post and giving it much more exposure than I would have ever wanted.
It spooked me to realize that R×ddit is now just a content farm. Posts will be picked up for videos, news articles, Facebook fodder, etc. Most of that shit is 20000% fake anyhow. What’s even the point?
Give me a smaller community any day. The moment people start farming Lemmy for content to read out in their YouTube videos? That’s the moment I bow out.
That’s an interesting perspective that I really hadn’t thought about much but you’re totally right. Glad I was always more of a lurker there.
Dp you think Lemmy would not be one if they were as popular as reddit.
How naive.
The best you can do is using different alts to avoid recognitions with your main username.
A LOT more. It’s also in part because I’m not being stalked by Nazis which I was on Reddit, but I feel so much more comfortable talking here in general.
Heeeey, nazi stalkers. Not bad bruh.
What did you do to get that kind of attention?
So I have a fake white supremacist Facebook account where I befriend white supremacists and then I would take their photos and put them on r/beholdthemasterrace. It was absolutely glorious to mock those inbred hooded motherfuckers, but then some of them found out their faces were put on Reddit, and they complained to the Reddit admins who opted to permanently ban me as a result. Yes, Reddit took the side of Nazis.
But before my ban they were all messaging me telling me why the white race was superb and all their usual kind of bullshit.
Not surprised at all. Hope you’re enjoying the fediverse.
Loving it! Firefish and Lemmy are my happy internet places.
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Well if you have swastikas tattooed on your face I don’t know what you expect.
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Why did it happen to you?
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Yes, definitely. I’m more willing to share my honest opinion. For me, the fear of downvotes was real. I also sorted Reddit posts by Hot, and I rarely felt motivated to connect on a post that already had 1000 comments.
Keeping up with all the comments and the fear of being repetitive made it impossible indeed
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not really, I mostly interacted with niche communities on reddit that haven’t made the switch
Nope, I’m a lurker by nature. Back to my hideyhole I go.
I’m both. sometimes I comment alot, most of the time i lurk…there are some good contributions from some peeps that i like to keep encouraging them to post (pug jesus) because it is interesting content…thats what im here for anyway.
Yes and no. Reddit has more niche interest groups that don’t exist here.
There are fewer people at Lemmy who only exist to blast threads with tired old jokes and memes so there is room for well thought-out comments to get more visibility.
I come here for discussions and so far most of the posts seem to welcome it, leading to more desire to engage.
