I was just reading this post https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1gmv76n/is_reddit_going_to_remain_the_primary_space_for/ and many barely see the fediverse as an alternative and they seem to have a negative bias towards it. Super ironic when it comes to the self-hosting community. Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views. But it doesn’t really matter when it’s federated and FOSS. I think it’s clear-cut that the selfhosting community on Lemmy is a perfect alternative to reddit. Why is there such a negative bias?
Anyone still left on Reddit is either too ignorant about the alternatives to Reddit to even have an opinion or is actively trying to keep people on Reddit for Reddit.
I left reddit after a cyberbully situation because I defended a nonbinary person in a post in the sega dreamcast subreddit.
Gender is not inherently sexual, you’re the one making this weird.
@ayyy Need to look up the term gender dysphoria in the DSM. Stop mutilating children so that they have no reproductive potential as adults.
Interesting choice of words…
Almost everyone in the linked Reddit post seems to be supportive of Lemmy, or even Lemmy users. Even the people who tried it and stopped seem generally warm to the idea and just think it needs polish.
I’d say that this comment section is way more vitriolic than that one lol
@PeriodicallyPedantic @Yingwu This is what I meant by Reddit being more tolerant of opposing views than lemmy.
The biggest point is tankies and the toxic “left” people here and that Lemmy has some major problems regarding stability and the ability to effectively moderate.
Another point is that Lemmy has in may places worse moderation than reddit.
Yeah there are clearly some toxic people who won’t tolerate anything different than them. They can be leftists or rightists who are gonna hate you for whatever reason.
I didn’t have this feeling on reddit to be honest.
And it’s a shame because I’m censoring myself because of this on some subject where I could bring another point of view.
I haven’t seen a single “right” person on Lemmy, except when you count the Stalinists as right (wich they kinda are)
And I hate that there are so many of them.
Yeah to be honest it’s true that I’ve only seen lefties. I’m sometimes on the left side and sometimes on the right side, but it’s crazy how you can’t really express an opinion without being insulted or other things…
You can’t say anything without people hating on you. I’m a actual social Democrat and therefore the worst enemy of tankies and Stalinists.
I don’t care what they say about me, I care when they are in charge of anything and ban people for other opinions, wich happens a lot.
The people you are probably referring to exist on like, two instances. Everybody always ends up on the “.ml” ones for their first experience and is immediately horrified by the hardcore tankie content. That’s because those specific instances are run by actual Marxist-Leninists.
Well it happened to me mostly in technology communities where my job as a police man in a country without too much corruption was giving me a different point of view than people who were seeing a corrupt government spying on them all the time.
Lemmy has in may places worse moderation than reddit.
yet this is exactly what the fediverse was designed to work around. giving the power back to the users. when .ml decides to block a bunch of shit due to butt-hurt mods, communities can be moved elsewhere without everyone having to make new accounts.
These many places tend to be the biggest and most popular places…
agreed that we need to work on scaling out horizontally. i think that ironically poor moderation will help with this over time. it took reddit 20 years to get where it is.
Lemmy instances are a pain in the ass to keep working, most people with a life won’t do that and people without a life are usually extremists.
sounds like a lot of conjecture to me. i think there is hope in groups owning, operating and funding their own instances. software platforms will get better over time. funding pathways will get better over time.
i dont think we should just toss our hands up and say ‘nope, too hard. only jerks need apply’
For the same reason Youtube is doing with Odysee and Peertube - money - walled garden.
Us vs them too. It’s different, people hate change. So now there is a them and an us…
- the post already said why:
I would love to move away from reddit but it’s hard when this is where the base of my favorite communities still exists.
- further compounded by issues such as (a) overall lack of moderation, which further depends on (b) better development of moderation tools, and © guides explaining how things work, bc it can be fairly confusing, e.g.:
How do I find selfhosted communities on Lemmy? If I search for “selfhosted” I get one community (Run It Yourself) with around 3K subscribers and very little activity. Is that it?
Though someone answered (I think incorrectly):
I think the biggest one is 40k on lemmy.world and it’s called “selfhosted”. You must be on a Lemmy server that doesn’t show that community for some reason. There are ideological rifts on Lemmy that can cause some servers to splinter like that.
Interestingly, from my old instance discuss online, I see no hits at all to that term among community names - https://discuss.online/search?q=selfhosted&type=Communities&listingType=Local - meaning that nobody from that instance has subscribed to it yet.
Which is why things like Categories of Communities (already fully functional on PieFed) are so helpful to guide people to what they may be looking for.
- And I haven’t even begun on the whole tankies connotation of moving here.
I think it’s clear-cut that the selfhosting community on Lemmy is a perfect alternative to reddit.
No - apparently not, it’s only clear to you, not them, for all the reasons listed above and likely more besides. We would have to build it first, before they will come… and even then I would expect a long delay. In the meantime, Lemmy MAUs (Monthly Active Users) are actively declining, whether they are returning their traffic to Reddit or not.
Speaking from a third-world country, there are 2 main weaknesses the fediverse has for us:
- selfhosting is not easy or cheap for us, so we can only use what it’s already there… And it’s basically all in english, so most people are out.
- meta has everyone grabbed by the balls and people are happy like that (for some reason), anything new or different is met with endless excuses.
There used to be a mexican instance called Mujico, but they were forced to use a whitelist by constant troll attacks… But they also federated with grad so I can’t feel bad about it. I don’t know if it still exists but the last time I checked it had zero activity.
Sunk Cost Fallacy
Also; tribalism.
100%. That’s why it took me until the end of June to join Lemmy even though the blackout was on June 12th.
And I was already hating Reddit before the blackout. But FOMO made me stay and I feel bad about it.
I am pretty sure most people are for idealogical reasons so lack of things is a nothing burger for them.
Normies only care about ease of use and network effect. Until fediverse brings usability, we aint even compete for the network.
Normie here, Lemmy is pretty easy to use imo. I think the transition is happening now kinda like the Internet in the 90s or online dating in the 10’s.
Ofc I just got here and I’m using Voyager.
A theory I have is that everyone who hates reddit eventually left leaving the milk bags brains. I was mod of r/mapporncirclejerk and left when I saw my mod queue get exponentially worse. My friend told me it was because the decent people left for Lemmy.
Now I’m mod of !cartographyanarchy@lemm.ee and it’s sooooo much easier.
I was mod of r/mapporncirclejerk
I used to lurk, thank you for your service 🫡
Idk I find Lemmy easier to use. I go to Lemmy site -> I use site
I go to reddit -> I get asked to turn of my VPN -> get asked to login -> get asked to download mobile app -> accept cookies -> I finally use site.
Damn reddit is so much easier
-> I get asked to turn of my VPN ->
Yes 🐸
secondary reason why i left reddit, they don’t respect a person who respects him or her self… not long after i learned that’s corpo’s MO and that’s how i become radicalized linux enjoyer haha
@secret300 @sunzu2 Odd, I just use it from Firefox on my desktop. It does want me to accept cookies, that is how websites maintain a login session since otherwise http is a stateless protocol.
well you need an account to shit post tho…
so you need to log in
if you want to login you will get in VPN bullshit or your browser is hardened. if they can’t track you, they essentially don’t want you to use their slopware.
but yes, you can read reddit old, that’s what people should use when they do research IMHO
Seems to me most people in that thread seems relatively open minded? The people dismissing Lemmy completely appears to be downvoted, and people seem to have a nuanced understanding that it’s a better platform in theory but sadly less active.
I’m sure they’re right. I’m a slow person who thinks there’s plenty of activity over here, but if you’re used to the adrenaline of Reddit it must feel a little small town-y.
To be honest except on things like sports and politics, reddit kind of feels like a ghosttown too. So many posts with huge amounts of upvotes and like 2 bot generated comments. The power commenter types seem to have left after the exodus and been replaced by lots of people who scroll and like but don’t really venture much into comments.
Main reason is people are too lazy to change their ways and don’t want to feel like they’ve been making the wrong choice all along.
I can conjecture some things, though I can’t be 100% sure on either:
First, maybe it’s fanatics/fanboys that don’t like competition making their platform less relevant. Second, it’s paid actors complaining. Third, it’s robot accounts making posts. Fourth, as proposed in the OP, people are getting the wrong impression due to noisy and problematic bubbles. Fifth, people being scared of leaving their comfort zone. Sixth, a mix of either some or all the previous possibilities.
And seven, seven, n-n-n-n-no tomorrow
What do you expect from a bunch of lazy T_D chuds, bots, and n00bz
Ha haaaa! Right? Up top!
Besides other factors mentioned in this thread, there’s also
- selection bias: people with a positive view of Lemmy already migrated, so the leftover is bound to have more negative views
- older userbase: older people use language in a different way, talk about different topics, and dig into those topics in a different way. That often makes younger people throw a tantrum.
- group identity: for those “AS A SNOO” we’re basically apostates.
Older userbase makes this place a lot more useful, outside of politcs and news subs you are dealing with who can provide good information, ie how reddit used to work.
Drama has its place… it is provocative and it gets people going… we need more engagement! We are deff getting there too, meme subs were spamming all 1 year ago, now there is enough threads to keep a reader busy without fluff memes.
I agree with you that both things have their upsides; and frankly, I don’t even think that we should be pandering to the immigration leftover wallowing in Reddit. Growth is good, but growth should never come at the expense of the community that you’re trying to grow.
However I feel like those points help to explain why the “lol lmao” crowds hate this place.
My concerns about the “immigration leftover” is not their opposing views, but their behaviour. I don’t want to deal with the “waaah the world revolves around my belly, why are you too stupid to understand that?” crowds and their incessant whining.
Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views.
I mean that’s basically the crux of it. That, and some moderation drama, and the software being very buggy a year ago giving people a bad first impression, and Lemmy still being susceptible to spam.
It’ll take some time before Lemmy (and the Threadiverse as a whole) improves its reputation and moves on from the “it’s a tankie website” take. That said, a lot of people in that thread are making the case for Lemmy, so it’s mostly just people worried it’s not as popular.
Threadiverse
Fediverse
Threadiverse refers specifically to the subset of the Fediverse with threaded conversations, like Lemmy and Mbin.
Sounds too much like Threads, the invasive corporate thing which can get fucked. Never going to market for them.
Likewise the heroic nerds of the Threadiverse coined the term months before Threads was even announced, and they would be hard pressed to give it up to some scumbag billionaire.
It’s an epic culture war being fought between two largerly agreeing parties.
don’t let them change the meaning of our words then
that is a personal problem, not a general protocol based one.
It is a marketing problem.
i agree. bending over for people butthurt about meta seems like a great way to limit your market artificially.
then again, i named my public instance moist
Wouldn’t it also cause confusion for some people to say Threadiverse while other people refuse to say that and instead use Fediverse?
Ofc strictly speaking both are true.
Hehe, Forumverse? :-)
In contrast to reddit, whos leadership never made any controversial decisions. /s
Even if it’s not as popular, I’d say the community might still be more solid in some cases. And that people are more responsive, especially with quality answers. I’ve noticed you’re chastised way more on reddit if you ask a “stupid” question.
The last 2 reddit userbase diasporas couldn’t be any more different than all of the previous ones combined.
When voat became a thing everyone already knew ahead of time that it’s ranks would be filled with facists; but it took a while for lemmy to earn its tankie stereotype and I’m also glad that lemmy’s design helps ensure that it’ll have more stamina that voat or any of the other reddit user digital refugee camps before it.
I definitely avoided Lemmy the first go-round with the API fuckery because it seemed from the outside like basically just a tankie protest Reddit in a similar way to how Voat was just a neo-Nazi protest Reddit. To the Lemmy devs’ absolute credit, they don’t push new users toward any of those, though.
I thought one day after having had a Mastodon for some time that I might not have given Lemmy a fair shake, so I went back and ended up finding that most instances are basically normal Reddit fare but honestly less shitty than Reddit proper (there’s a trade-off that posts are less frequent and that small, niche communities can attract unwanted attention by having their posts almost immediately show up in ‘all’).
Yup, things have definitely improved, especially with more extremist instances like lemmygrad being defederated and phased out. I do also want to give a shoutout to the devs for not pushing their stance and letting the platform grow naturally.
Just gonna put this out there. The devs push their stance plenty. Within their scope to do it from their echo chamber. Other than stopping development there’s little they could currently do to impact growth in any way. And there have been issues with their development focus that have negatively impacted growth. Recalcitrance to focus much on moderation tools for instance. As well as at least reported issues difficulty contributing to the project by others. Though that at least is hearsay.
I think it helps to think of it this way: WE are using THEIR platform.
They don’t need mod tools that work for communities and users located on a different instance as much as say Lemmy.World since the devs/admins simply use the instance-wide ban hammer for their own space. Hence that is not their focus. You can go to the trouble to learn Rust, and then fight with them to get your modifications accepted or…
Actually, I need to modify my statement above: YOU are using THEIR platform, but for those of us on Mbin, PieFed (which I’m on right now, and two new instances just opened up including one now in the USA), and soon Sublinks will come too (January was at some point a target iirc?), we have already moved on. None have reached feature parity yet tbh, though even so there are a lot of features that exist that Lemmy itself lacks, so there’s that, and being written in common languages should help enormously with them catching up.
So whether these are “as good as Reddit”, well, beauty is in the mind of the beholder. It’s not a clear win either way, but they are getting closer to being comparable.
Evan Prodromou and the Social Web Working Group (SocialWG) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are the creators of ActivityPub
Not desalines or any ML controlled group. All they did was create a Reddit like interface to the platform. After being driven from Reddit for their intolerance.
I sometimes post from Mastodon to servers running this and other software. In fact the reason I’m on world. Is specifically due to its relation to mastodon.social. one of the bigger Mastodon instances I use. It’s got nothing to do with a software. If Rud and the other admins decided tomorrow to migrate the database to a different backend. I don’t think there would be much outrage or many people would care. In fact I’m certainly probably will in the future. As soon as a back end is available that provides significantly better Community / magazine moderating tools. Since I will significantly whiten the load on server administrators. Since things can be done at the community level instead of at the server all the time.
Fair point about the ActivityPub protocol being an entirely different set of developers yet still the “Lemmy” software that you are currently using - both the backend Lemmy implementation of ActivityPub and also the web UI (unless you are using an alternate approach via an app, in which case that brings up a third in the API for Lemmy) - owes its ownership entirely to the same team that also administers the Lemmy.ML instance.
Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views
And the above quote I presumed to refer to lemmy.ml (and others like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net; though that is only the beginning of what some people might consider “problematic” e.g. beehaw has defederated from lemmy.world, and the midwest.social admin has been caught banning people merely for downvoting their comment), since I recalled several discussions on Reddit (before the Rexodus) about the “problematic devs” which referred to the “tankie admins” on lemmy.ml (and worse yet lemmygrad.ml). Ofc there were other issues with other instances such as exploding-heads, but that would not seem to intersect at all with the “devs”.
But yeah there could be problematic Mbin instances too? Though I don’t recall ever hearing any discussions of those.
And similarly with PieFed, or Sublinks.
Speaking of, several places have announced wanting to switch from Lemmy to Sublinks when it becomes available, due to the back-end compatibility that is expected to have, when/if-ever it is released (January was some kind of a target date at some point iirc?). That includes Tesseract on dubvee.org, beehaw, and even Lemmy.World.
In the meantime, I have not heard any updates about Sublinks for almost half a year now, though PieFed is entirely functional today - e.g. I am speaking to you from it now. Though it’s not terribly polished, e.g. I can no longer see your user- or instance name due to the way that comment replies are handled, nor any of the background context except your last reply to me and the OP, and quite often upvotes do not show in the proper color so I end up hitting it multiple times (upvote, oops the number went down, I must have already done it previously even though it wasn’t showing in the green indicator color, so hit upvote again, then repeat the next time again, and/or with other comments as well). Though it has some REALLY nice moderation enhancement abilities - caveat: I am not a mod so haven’t seen the actual tools, or even know if such exist. Nonetheless it is exciting to see those developments that have happened already:-).
You can go to the trouble to learn Rust, and then fight with them to get your modifications accepted or…
Can you actually point to any instances of the devs dragging their feet on accepting changes or is this just conjecture? I’ve contributed to Lemmy, and plan to do so in future, and my experience is that they’re fairly accepting of changes.
I don’t know Rust or much about the Lemmy codebase. Possibly people were simply complaining about a time delay - a large part of that being understandable due to the nature of how Federation works, i.e. you don’t want to cause corruption even among servers running older versions of the software.
soon Sublinks will come too (January was at some point a target iirc?)
I wouldn’t hold my breath. I keep an eye on the project Matrix, it’s pretty quiet.
Piefed is much more promising.
Thanks for the additional insight:-).
The PieFed devs indeed seem very responsive, and I have great hopes for it too.
Though I don’t know if e.g. Lemmy.World would consider switching to use it as they were hoping to do with Sublinks. For it providing a “social media platform” it is coming along nicely even if currently lacking polish, though from the perspective of migration of existing content into… well perhaps that’s doable as well but I definitely know far less about that:-).
The instance I first chose straight up disappeared, so yeah. It wasn’t an easy migration.
