I happen to like it very much.
It completely replaced Reddit for me. I love the project. It is getting better and better.
People singing praises, but it needs to improve, i shouldnt need another website to find communities; also the state of fractured communities with same name that dilute content.
On the flip side, major communities being hosted on defederated instances is a concern.
I know beehaw defederated from lemmyworld and they have some pretty big communities on there. That’s just an example that I know of because my first account was beehaw. I’m sure there are others.
Which is great to do, we can like something and want it to improve at the same time.
Better blocking feels like a priority for me because it would quell most of the defederation issues.
- instance only defederates from illegal content / scams
- users block instances, communities, and users they don’t want
- recommended block lists that users can import (from the instance, from somewhere else, etc.)
This also reminds me that Lemmy needs better mod tools. I think that’s part of the reason Beehaw defederated
Oh for sure, I think the only reason some communities are clean is because they aren’t that big yet.
I’ve only had a handful of threads spiral out of control, and it was a mess to clean up each one. The button to remove something is right next to the button to make someone a mod. Also once something is removed, it’s inaccessible to everyone including the mods. At one point I removed something and couldn’t ban the user because the comment was gone. It was a spam bot though so I got them a little while later.
This also reminds me that Lemmy needs better mod tools.
What if “we” (users in general, specially mods) created some communal wishlist in some highly visible space, exclusively for mod features? Not just for the Lemmy devs, but for anyone who wants to code a third party tool.
As others have said, it doesn’t quite have the user base to reach critical mass. A lot of my old favorite subs aren’t here.
Also…the user base isn’t as diverse. I used to click through to see the comments on Reddit to find those comments that provided fresh perspective, gave more context, or explained nuance. You’d click on some thread about Trump’s latest legal troubles and get some real information about why things are moving slowly or why the defense made a particular choice. Or go into a thread about some upcoming video game being cancelled, or Google plan being changed or whatever, and get an actual analysis about how the financials don’t work, or maybe how the market changed, or how some users were abusing the system.
On Lemmy, I often find myself just skipping the comments. They seem much more uniform, all just repeating the popular line: variants of “Ha, fuck Trump!” “Lol, Russia sucks!” “Company X doing this should be against the law!” etc. I can usually predict what the comments are going to be without bothering to read them, and rarely do I come out with new information. It feels much more like an echo chamber.
Part of it is just that there’s not as many users, I think, so there’s just not as many posts and thus fewer ‘gems’. Also, I think that the users who made the effort to migrate from Reddit probably skew younger, tend to be more uniformly left-leaning, and a larger share will be students or programmers as opposed to lawyers or carpenters or auto mechanics.
The especially annoying thing is that the same thing seems to have happened on Reddit. Yeah, I still moonlight there when I run out of content on Lemmy. And the number of comments seems to have dwindled, and the viewpoint diversity seems to have narrowed there, too. Maybe the normies just gave up and left.
Even the memes here, which accounts for like 90% of the everything feed, are the same 3-5 ideas recycled in different formats. I agree with most of the people here, but I miss that I didn’t on Reddit.
This might sound weird but there are a lot more assholes here than reddit.
On Reddit you can expect some percentage of the people to be assholes because some percentage of the population are assholes… but here, heaven forbid you go against the grain of the narrative.
As opposed to reddit, where most of the people are nice and some are assholes, here only some are nice and the majority are assholes.
People are a little too enthusiastic about their opinions here. It’s kind of not great. I’m just here to enjoy myself and pass the time.
You’re absolutely right! And people keep saying that they’re nicer here which is not the case at all!
Counterpoint. It depends massively on what communities you use. So there’s a not so small possibility that both you and the people you disagree with are right.
I would normally agree with you, but I usually see this in communities like ask Lemmy. And it’s not usually about disagreements. Most of it is people just being complete assholes because they misunderstood something. Now, I know assholes are every where, and that’s not the problem. It just annoys me when I see comments like “everyone is more friendly here”.
For now, I find it kind of boring. On reddit, I used to spend more time in comment sections than regularly scrolling. Now I don’t really do that, because there are either no comments or the comments are the same.
When I started using lemmy with the default sorting option (‘active’ i think?), I would see the same posts for days, now I use top 6 hours and that problem is fixed, but lemmy now feels like a news site with comments. Also I am European, but it feels like 50% of content is some local American politics. I don’t care about my own town’s politics, so I don’t care about that guy from Minnesota either.
A post from asklemmy hasn’t shown up in my feed in a long time and I kind of forgot it existed, but looking into it, looks like one of the only interesting places here, so I guess, I have visit it more often.
