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?
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.
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.
The last 2 reddit userbase diasporas were wildly 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 camp platforms that came before it.
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.
