I think my favorite thing about Lemmy is that it feels like Reddit used to. Less negativity, more engaged users (I think). I know it will be fun to watch Reddit die, but if I put spite aside what I’m really mad at Reddit about is more about what Reddit became and maybe part of that is when the general internet user started going to Reddit and it became less like the small community it was years ago. Feel free to disagree or share an argument 😉
Yeah, I see the shitty part of reddit is moving here now, doing internet arguments again.
Conversation about hot topics is going to happen no matter what. As long as it stays respectful I think it’s ok.
Many of them are not staying respectful though.
They have a fresh start on a new place, and they just choose to be miserable and brought the reddit over here.
Since a lot of the exodus was prompted by conflict, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a higher proportion of folks here who speak conflict as a first language, at least for a while.
I kind of feel like without purposeful and diligent pruning, all online communities sink down to the lowest common denominator. That’s hard to manage since a community is as much a vibe as it is conforming to a set of explicit rules. Personally I like the tildes.net code of conduct, since that’s basically a similar philosophy.
Well that’s a stupid take and you are dumb.
(Sorry, I know, not funny…) 🤦♂️
More seriously, while I deleted my Reddit account, I haven’t tried to avoid landing on some Reddit threads linked from Lemmy, and for the past few days I’ve looked closer at comment sections, because I’m noticing I had forgotten how rotten they were compared to here. So much pointless aggressivity.
I think it’s credible that if Lemmy was to keep growing, that issue will also keep growing as you have noticed. So, a bit like op, I’m hoping it only grows big enough to keep the open source projects interested and staffed; but not so much so that most of the sucky aggressivity stays on Reddit or elsewhere permanently.
I repeat this a lot, but I think the most important thing to do is to stay sincere and not be a defeatist. No arguing just to win, but no hugbox mentality either.
I have no doubt at all that the reddit admins and powermods were algorithmically pushing flame bait and hatred (especially to the political subs) to drive traffic to the site, so now that we’ve have a place where that isn’t possible (yet, at least), I’m interested to see if that’s just the nature of political discussion on the Internet.
I don’t know, I think even in real life people get silly when discussing topics they have strong feelings about, and politics seems to be one of them fairly often.
I guess all I’m saying is I understand your point and it makes sense to me, I’m probably just a bit less hopeful than you are (and I commend you for it!)
Hey, whatever you do is your business, I’m just here to promote “Barbie”.
I definitely hope the… simply massive amount of information stored there is archived in some way. I was troubleshooting some technical issues for a very niche hardware and software application this morning and the only sources I could find were on reddit.
I feel similarly about Discord. There is so much technical knowledge and information that would be lost in the blink of an eye if Discord shut down.
!datahoarder@lemmy.ml did a great job archiving all of reddit and making it available on archive.org. 13.23 billion archives and counting. So personally I just grab reddit links, change them to old.reddit.com and put them in the wayback machine
I helped a lot of people with niche hardware and software troubleshoot things for years on Reddit, I’m planning to leave my comments up because of that.
The amount of times I would search for something to only find threads of people asking about an issue followed by comments that say “deleted by [X software on github] in protest for [issue that was solved years ago]” and responses praising the deleted comment for helping them is too damn high.
Or hell trawling the internet archive for dead sites trying to find solutions.
I don’t want people to have to go through that.
I don’t care where my answers come from, I just want to troubleshoot crap in a timely manner.
Tbh the problem with Discord is that its search and indexing functions just suck ass in the first place. I already treat anything posted in Discord as ephemeral information that stops existing once it leaves my view. In that sense i hope lemmy instances for tech support/ troubleshooting take off. Much easier to archive.
Best case scenario for reddit, I think, would be for its IPO to fail, spez and investors call it quits, and it eventually ends up maintained by a not-for-profit foundation in the way that, say, Wikipedia or Blender is.
Either that or it dies, its database published or scraped, and ends up accessible through archive.org or something similar.
EDIT: or a crowdfunded buy-out by John Oliver 😆
I believed this up until the blackout protests started happening, and Reddit shit the bed in responding to the protests.
I went back and sorted through my top comments in tech support, home improvement, other troubleshooting Q&A type subreddits, across my different accounts, and started editing those answers to be short phrases summarizing what the comments used to be. I’ll eventually remove them, too, but maybe the indexers will update their cached copies to be the totally unhelpful versions they are now.
They are, I get results. My worry is they are not aggregated/unified. Some lemmy instances don’t have ‘lemmy’ in their name, and I’m not sure if they would show up in a search “X + lemmy”.
Lots of reddit will find themselves unwelcome in Lemmy and by various instance admins. They may make their own instances, but depending on the content that comes from them, they may even be defederated from ours.
Lemmy is community owned, community run, and community focused. There is no profit motive. There is no logic to keeping people on your instance or interacting with it who work to its detriment. Just having more people on your instance doesn’t mean “one additional customer”.
They may make their own instances, but depending on the content that comes from them, they may even be defederated from ours.
It is WEIRD how much I feel like I’ve been here before.
My first days on the internet were around the time that both email lists, and IRC chat, were popular. IRC chat was a bit more centralized than this perhaps in management, but in many ways the concepts were similar: multiple servers, interlinked, and if the admin of one server had a problem with the admin of another, they could delink from each other. IRC, a protocol that was popular 30 years ago and has been largely dead for at least 10, was basically the OG fediverse of instant messaging.
Anyways, there’s a massive amount of promise with this. It’s more or less what Reddit was originally meant to be: Each team fully in charge of their own subreddit, and Reddit admins only there to make sure that each subreddit played nice with each other subreddit. In a fediverse context, it’s almost exactly the same, except the responsibility for cutting off subreddits that don’t play nice lies with the managers of each “subreddit” (instance).
I realize that instances are not magazines and so on, and this analogy has technologically weak comparisons, but I think the principle works.
I realize that instances are not magazines and so on, and this analogy has technologically weak comparisons, but I think the principle works.
I do think that we will start to see communities getting their own hosted instances. A light novel/manga I read has an entire instance devoted to communities about the series, and I’ve seen some chatter in the selfhosted community about making an instance for selfhosted/datahoarders/FOSS in general, though we’ll see if that actually pans out.
I really like the model of a community of communities being in containerized into one shared, dedicated instance.
Lots of reddit will find themselves unwelcome in Lemmy and by various instance admins.
Do you have some examples?
It’s difficult to point directly to examples as their posts tend to be deleted, and deleted posts will also hide the rest of the thread. This thread had portions of its OP chronicled before it was taken down though. Basically they were complaining about everywhere they went on Lemmy their posts were deleted or they were banned for “criticism”. They never directly said what their criticisms were, but I can only assume they’re the types you wouldn’t elaborate on when trying to get people to side with you over “censorship”.
I’ve seen multiple others have a hard time when expressing homophobia, and getting their comments or accounts removed. When the owners of the instances can’t profit off you like Reddit does, lending their resources to you is done out of kindness and goodwill, and if you step on that, there’s little reason to hold back haha
I think I disagree. I have heard this a lot on Reddit and I’ve heard it about Twitter, Google Plus and a bunch of other social networks and I’ve been on small ones and huge ones alike. Honestly, to me, when a social network is large it includes both nuanced discussion and there more casual posting. I don’t see why both can’t exist on the same site and I feel like it often does exist on the same site.
I also think people have a huge range of interests, some of which might be quite niche and having a large user base means these niche communities can thrive. When I’ve used smaller social networks, this typically has been the problem. They often have their tech communities covered and they often have other large common hobbies and interests covered, but if you take for example learning welsh or theremin music or something else, then you typically only get communities about those things on larger networks.
