Gonna just say it. As a longtime Lemmy user I’m really not a fan of a lot of the people coming over from Reddit. It’s probably just a small but vocal minority and confirmation bias on my part, but I get the impression that they are trying to turn Lemmy into Reddit, toxicity, entitlement, stupid challenges and all.
When we’ve had two major debacles before Reddit even opened back up, one about “how dare these unpaid admins try to lessen their workload with sign up questions”, and the other about “how dare instances block other instances that are being used as proxies for forwarding spam and bot content into their own instances.” The people from reddit seem to still think they’re on Reddit and any perceived inferiority that Lemmy has compared to Reddit is seen as just as bad as Reddit’s corporate decisions. A few people even trying to go to an instance with the intent of “converting” the existing users who may be socialist or communist, by commenting abuse on their posts of course, just like how they presumably do it on Reddit.
People also seem to be refusing to learn what federation is and how that works, despite it being literally the most important aspects of Lemmy. This is evident in people telling instances who block spam or troll ridden instances to “mind their own business” as if that content doesn’t get forwarded over to and show up on the main pages of other instances, you know, what the fediverse was designed to do.
FYI, Reddit has opened back up. Spez has made it clear that he will never tolerate subreddits shutting down and inconveniencing you again. If you’re so unwilling to even adopt a different mindset and perspective when coming to Lemmy, I think it’s best if you went back. Plenty of us came here because we didn’t want to be on Reddit.
Last thing and a pet peeve of mine: stop calling yourself a refugee. You left a meme website for another meme website because you didn’t like one aspect of the management, the entire decision and migration probably took less than an hour of you sitting in your comfortable house in front of a computer. To compare that to being a refugee speaks volumes about your entitlement and privilege. And it’s especially ironic considering what real refugees go through to save themselves and their families, that you won’t even answer a few registration questions.
I recall these kinds of threads on Reddit when Digg was imploding, the OG Reddit hipsters were annoyed at the influx of users and the change it brought to discourse on the platform.
But the fact is, if we want Lemmy to grow, it’s going to change.
There is no value in growth for the sake of growth. Lemmy isn’t a commercial platform that needs to keep getting VC money to stay afloat. Only thing that actually matters is sustainability.
Sustainability comes from having enough people to do development, people willing to host servers, and users to create content. All these things are already present and Lemmy can go on indefinitely without any major growth.
In fact, rapid growth can be a net negative because it brings a lot of toxic behaviors from Reddit. When there’s a slow trickle of users coming in then they adjust to existing norms. When there’s a horde of new users they become the norm and overwhelm the existing community.
Lemmy has seen a rapid uptick in client development since the Reddit drama kicked off. I think it’s an absolute net win, and the nature of federated instances and communities means you can always create/find the old school Lemmy environment you miss.
A move away from corporate overlords is an absolute net win.
I agree in general, federated nature of Lemmy does mean that people can always have their own smaller communities with their own rules. More people moving away from corporate platforms is generally a good thing as well in my opinion. This is ultimately the way the internet was envisioned to work where we have a bunch of servers run by regular people as opposed to being centralized around a handful of corporate platforms.
My main point was that slower steady growth can help people adjust to the better aspects of the fediverse, and there is no rush to grow.
I think a really important thing to consider here is how much of Reddit’s culture was a result of bots and dark patterns. I think people will actually adjust fairly quickly and once sign ups start to settle a sort of diffuse equilibrium of cultures and attitudes will form that will generally look very different from Reddit. All that said, I think the foundational culture that we establish now will prove to be incredibly important. I think this is a great argument for why existing communities may choose to stay in the medium-weight class. Thereby avoiding the growth boost that comes from being the largest community.
EDIT: Also important to note, I feel like this is gonna be a slow, slow process. We really have no idea when sign-ups will settle and could be looking at months or days of Reddit hemorrhaging users. I think we’ll have a better idea after things kick off on the 30th.
I think you’re onto something with Reddit culture being driven by bots. I went on Reddit for the first time in a few weeks yesterday and the front page just felt so… Fake. Especially compared to a place like Lemmy that feels more like the old-school Internet - Real people having real conversations, instead of just trying to meet a status quo and a particular tone of voice. It’s refreshing here. I don’t want it to become Reddit 2.0.
(Disclaimer: I came here recently from Reddit.)
Me too and I don’t want Lemmy to be Reddit. This place as some bugs and it will take me time to get used to the way this site works vs Reddit.
But I love it here and don’t want any harm to come to it. And I loved the difficulty of signing up. To me that was the best part to be approved.
I agree with this 100%. That affects both the types of interactions, and the types of users.
When Reddit really took off 12 or so years ago, it was primarily a forum for discussion. I loved it because there would be in-depth, respectful, quality discussions on almost every page. I spent hours debating science and politics and technology and relationships and other things of substance with other intelligent respectful open-minded people.
For a few years now, Reddit has been trying to become a quick content scroll app- bombarding the user with page after page of memes and videos and low effort crap that only holds attention for 12 seconds but results in another page load and thus another ad impression. In ‘new reddit’ and the apps, there’s very little focus on discussion or comments. Just quick content to flip through.
And that affects the discussions on Reddit (quality discussions are now the exception rather than the norm) and also the people who join and stay at the site. There’s a lot more animosity, assumption of bad faith, etc.
But I also think that because Lemmy’s design DOESN’T push people into quick content, but IS focused on discussions, that trend can reverse. People who want quick content will quickly grow bored here and leave. And we can keep the discussions respectful and open-minded.
I also think that the ‘welcome to lemmy’ posts should talk more about community and culture; what sort of interactions users should and shouldn’t expect here. That should include an explicit warning that if you’re going to start arguments and assume everyone else is an idiot, this probably isn’t for you, but if you want to have good respectful discussions this is your new home.
EDIT: Also important to note, I feel like this is gonna be a slow, slow process. We really have no idea when sign-ups will settle and could be looking at months or days of Reddit hemorrhaging users.
THIS THIS THIS. A lot of folks call the migration to Mastodon from Twitter a ‘failure’ because Mastodon didn’t immediately jump to 100 million monthly active users lol. There was a spike, but a lot of folks went back to Twitter. But we now see more spikes every week or so when some stupid shit happens on Twitter, and with every spike, more and more people stick around. We get about 2000 new users an hour on Mastodon across all servers. Now at 12 million MAUs, up from wayyyyyy less than that earlier last year. Growing slowly is the key, a migration won’t be instant.
This site is full of neolibs posting propaganda on the World News sub. It’s annoying.
As one of the folks who came from Reddit when everyone else did, sorry. :(
It makes sense that any mass exedous from some other community will greatly change the destination community, and much of value will be lost in the process.
So, is there anything I can do to help preserve and embody what I’ve helped destroy? I’ll definitely keep in mind what you’ve said here about “toxicity, entitlement, and stupid challenges,” and I’ll learn more about federation and keep an open mind. Any other advice how we former Redditors can help keep what made Lemmy great before hordes of Redditors flooded it?
Any advice how we can help even enrich the Lemmy community and make it better than we first found it?
I don’t want to go back to Reddit. And I don’t want to be a pariah or paracite here. And I accept that those who were on Lemmy have wisdom to share that newcomers can benefit from.
So, is there anything I can do to help preserve and embody what I’ve helped destroy? I’ll definitely keep in mind what you’ve said here about “toxicity, entitlement, and stupid challenges,” and I’ll learn more about federation and keep an open mind. Any other advice how we former Redditors can help keep what made Lemmy great before hordes of Redditors flooded it?
Ive been here longer then this guy, and submitted feature requests and bugs that got fixed/implemented.
It’s fine, don’t let anyone make you feel guilty, it’s OK to ask questions, voice your opinions and suggest criticism.
You can donate to lemmy, i heard there is more work to be done on moderation tools and maybe that can help.
Also on reddit there is a subreddit called linux4noobs , maybe there should be a lemmy4noobs, if you are willing to moderate that could help.
I realized now just how much I sounded like some kind of Lemmy early adopter supremacist in this thread, for that I apologize. I didn’t mean to be a dick.
I guess just take a good look at Reddit and Lemmy, and try and identify toxic elements to be avoided. Things like attacking mods and admins for perceived underperformance, plenty of people have talked about Reddit’s switch from discussion to fast content and how that culture can clash with Lemmy which is still discussion oriented, trying to push for stupid challenges, stuff like that. Things that shouldn’t be done on any social media platform. I’m not saying to make Lemmy its absolutely unique thing or an exclusive thing or preserve its ‘culture’ or anything, just very not excited that toxic elements from Reddit which Lemmy had more or less avoided until now are being brought to Lemmy. Not to say that Lemmy is free of its own toxicity, hell I’m probably part of the problem and also need to work on that, but being our own toxic elements is no excuse to keep them either. Don’t pick them up.
It’s cool that you want to be open minded and respectful but you really don’t need to lick this guy’s boots or anyone else proclaiming some kind of exceptionalism for participating on some web forums before you or I did. I can appreciate it probably feels unwelcome seeing a community you were comfortable in change with an influx of new people but there’s some glaring ironies to what this guy is saying and it pretty much just boils down to gatekeeping.
It’s particularly amusing how he has managed to engineer vicarious offence at people calling themselves refugees because of the lack of real hardship compared to real refugees yet cannot see the “go back to where you came from” written between and sometimes even on the lines of every sneering paragraph. There’s an overall lack of awareness that’s sadly ironic for the author of this polemic against newcomers and their supposed lack of awareness.
No, I think you’ll be just fine being yourself and not walking on eggshells for people like this, frankly they needs a cold shower and a dose of reality.
People have to come from somewhere. Since Lemmy is “Reddit like” and Reddit is the biggest of its type, well that’s what’s where people are going to come from. I mean if you don’t new get users you’re not going to have a community.
I first took a look at Lemmy some time ago and honestly is was like, “hey man, this party is dead.” It wasn’t until the recent influx of users that Lemmy got active enough to keep my attention.
There’s always going to be clueless people that don’t understand how things work. Rather than complain about them I’d rather try to be positive and help them. Though some people just can’t be helped and you have to let them slide.
Another issue is the more people you get into a community the wider the range of attitudes. You will get people that don’t have nice things to say and there’s no avoiding that. It’s something that has to tolerated. Of course moderation can help a lot, but it’s not going to preclude anybody from ever getting offended.
