Just a little rant. When I first visited Lemmy Sites a couple of months ago it felt empty. Besides the really mainstream community pretty much everything else just felt empty.
Meanwhile though traffic has increased a lot and I feel well entertained by the traffic in c/hfy c/noncredibledefence c/keepwriting c/worldbuilding and so on. It is certainly less than Reddit but often quality is substancially higher and is “enough” to keep me entertained.
Also I like that you can actually post something without running into a bazillion deletes, bans and moderator shitshat because your post was two words to short, not NCD enough and so on.
Sure, the C64 community on Lemmy is laughable. So is the ARMA community. I still use REddit for that. Also I often check up stuff on r/hfy and r/NCD but since one week I have been prefering Lemmy for that.
Also my longer posts don’t get eaten up any more. God, three weeks ago most posts with 3k an more just got lost without feed back. Nowadays I have even manges posts around 20k without breaking them up. Though the editor is still lacking for longer posts. On Reddit I can copy-paste pretty much anything from Libreoffice into Reddits Editor (which is also pretty lacking but differently lacking). On Lemmy I have to run most text through a little perl script to get them even using correct line breaks perl -pe ‘s/\n/\n\n/’ and different sizes for Headlines are much to few to select from.
Not perfect, not even very good but definitely promising.
You know what will be even better. One instance for all communities. So everyone knows and subscribes to the same community.
Or if someone can come up with a better idea so that everyone doesn’t depend on one instance.
Slowly? Lemmy is easily as entertaining as Reddit and it is just getting going.
I certainly hate the people here a lot less. I like how it isn’t the same garbage comments on every post where they hyper analyze videos frame by frame just to call things fake.
On the opposite end it seemed like there was an inflooding of low quality “FB-type” posts. Non-interesting wedding and new baby in /r/pics followed by hundreds of “congrats!” and a sprinkle of “who gives a shit go back to FB” response posts. Predictable dichotomies once reddit got too mainstream.
I’ve been spending a majority of my time on here when I do my “Redditing”. I only visit the old site for niche topics. I spend as little time as possible there, I don’t upvote or downvote anything, and I don’t comment either. It’s read-only for me out of principle. I save all interactions for the fediverse.
I doubt all the communities will rebuild elsewhere, but I’m okay with that. Some fragmentation is necessary. Smaller communities make individual voices louder, and you have less ugly “sidedness”. When humans get into a critical mass IRL they can start to do strange things, I think we see this in social media as well.
I don’t think people really understand that reddit is an 18 year old product. Their original site was iterated on for 10 years before they stopped building on it.
Lemmy will get there and beyond. As the fediverse attracts more users, it will also attract more contributors. I’m starting to learn Rust myself in hopes I can contribute to the project at some point down the line.
The flip side is there are some people who have been here a long time tho…
But they’re almost exclusively rightwingers who were ip banned from reddit. Like the exploding heads instance is/was over a year old, and those people were insanely annoying before everyone defederated.
The more time goes by, the more regular people join and water down that extremism
Yeah I mean looking at the stats of new users, that watering down has already happened to the point where any extremeist shit is statistically insignificant by now. 99%+ of people here are just looking for a replacement reddit and that’s all, rather than some censorship haven where they can chat their extreme views.
Yeah Reddit 10 years ago was very different than Reddit now. Too many people demand* a 1 for 1 replacement right now.
*You don’t even need all those people. It was plenty good 10 years ago.
That was the best era. The source code was open sourced, subreddits members know each other pretty well, the most prolific reditors are not reposters or super-mods. Actually fun AMAs and community-initiated events (meetups, secret santa, etc). Now it’s all gone, replaced by a TikTok clone.
I was on reddit before the digg exodus, and the current state of lemmy feels somewhat reminiscent of those times. When communities are smaller there is just a completely different feel than the 1 million+ subscriber goliaths some subreddits became.
I also think you’re going to see Lemmy continue to grow overtime because it does not need to be a Comercial success. It doesn’t need to go through the new owners, whims or financial needs. It’ll just continue to slowly grow until someday it overtakes Reddit. The mere fact that it can’t be taken down is in itself a huge advantage/defense.
Its getting there, and there is some entertaining content on here (comments and posts). But I think we are still missing the super high end responses. No matter what the topic, one or two people would jump on and have deep specialised knowledge of the field - be it naming an insect from a blurry image or commenting on a geopolitical situation. I still see lots of posts that generate nothing more than “huh” or “wow” type comments.
When that starts appearing more broadly, I think the quality here is going to take another leap.
I think that’ll only really start to happen once you start getting more of the general population on here.
Reddit always had a reputation for being dominated by techy people, that is significantly more so the case here.
Signing up for Lemmy, even knowing where to start is a bigger leap than it is over there. Personally I’m hoping third party apps will be able to help with that by offering some kind of setup wizard with easy options of suggested instances to join.
I’m hating all the Reddit spillover commenters that take the internet way too fucking seriously. They were easily the worst part of Reddit.
When I first seeked asylum here, people were being sarcastic in the comments and everyone knew, dark humour was being pushed, and there were no Well Actually Guys around. Now there’s a big uptick in petty “discussions”, know-it-alls, and those losers that break your comment up gaslit straw man style, to just put words in your mouth to try make you look like an asshole.
I’m hating all the Reddit spillover commenters that take the internet way too fucking seriously.
Says the person ranting about Reddit users destroying Lemmy. Maybe you’re part of your own problem.
They were easily the worst part of Reddit.
That would be /u/spez, but okay, bro.
When I first seeked asylum here, people were being sarcastic in the comments and everyone knew, dark humour was being pushed, and there were no Well Actually Guys around.
First of all, it’s not your internet. Not everyone is as “intelligent” as you think you are and sarcasm is actually hard to detect in text.
Second of all, not everyone appreciates dark humour because it can be very.offensive, just like using derogatory terms like “Well Actually Guy”. If you want people on Lemmy, you need to make it a safe space for all.
Also, your account is only 5 weeks old.
Now there’s a big uptick in petty “discussions”
So, now you’re just anti-discourse? How is Lemmy meant to grow if comment section are empty, you bigot?
know-it-alls
Again, derogatory.
and those losers that break your comment up gaslit straw man style, to just put words in your mouth to try make you look like an asshole.
Oh, shit.
There definitely are types of posts where breaking it down like you did is necessary. But those are usually the exception of mostly absolutely fine posts that may just have been worded weird or not mirror the majority’s opinion.
I’m yet to see too many comments like in your example, but I’ve had a couple of rundowns with people about veganism as I had on reddit. Though I assume the subject itself is just polarising enough that the platform of discussion is irrelevant.
haha it’s funny i felt the opposite - when i got here at the beginning of the ‘exodus’ i already felt like Lemmy was a small but thriving little community that i enjoyed much more than reddit.
not sure why some want it to be just like reddit but the fediverse. i don’t and i’m glad it’s a smaller bunch of people and hope it stays that way.
@ruud@lemmy.world mentioned starting lemmy.world on a mastodon instance. I made a few communities to post some pics. reddit hords piled in 2 days later complaining it needed to be more like reddit. meh
reddit exists in birdbox universe and went outside and took its blindfold off