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?

  • Stamets@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    97
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    12 days ago

    As someone who used to be vehemently anti-lemmy, it’s a few different reasons.

    1. It’s something new. Honestly is as simple as that. Most redditors are straight up threatened by new features, new looks, new anything. New Reddit is an example of that. To be fair it is hideous but it’s also drastically underused according to reddits own metrics. This just stays consistently with everything. People prefer old subs to new, prefer old users to new, old memes to new. Why? Dunno. Could be as simple as just that they know it so it’s comforting.

    2. The propaganda that reddit put up against Lemmy was pretty insane. The first few mini-migrations set people up with weird expectations and a lot of them bounced back to reddit with weird notions. Some of it was based on shitty admins or shitty servers (cough lemmy.ml cough) but other things seemed to be almost coordinated against Lemmy. By the time that the big migration from Reddit killing off third party apps/API use a lot of people had heard one or two things and just started spreading it. Redditors often don’t source material and just kinda spread rumors or ‘feelings’ or upvote one idiot who seems like he knows what he’s talking about while blatantly lying. This has never gone away. The same idiots keep whining and being dismissive.

    3. Redditors are hateful. Not purely hateful people or anything but the atmosphere encourages hate and division. I still browse reddit occasionally and I’ll check the comments out about a post. It’s always so bitter and angry, snapping out at one another. When every crab in the bucket is pulling you down, you get stuck in that habit too. Until you break free of reddit you don’t realize just how bitter it’s making you. Lemmy doesn’t have those vibes and it can be really off putting to someone still in that bitterness. Kindness and people getting along almost comes off as stupid and naive so you just kinda dismiss the entirety of Lemmy as a whole.

    4. This is a conspiracy but I’m positive that Reddit admins are purging a lot of references to Lemmy that don’t show the site in a positive light. When the API shit was happening people kept pointing out that certain communities that were supportive of Lemmy suddenly got locked behind a NSFW curtain that forced users to be logged in to read the community. A lot of people talked about how certain posts and stuff were being removed, especially ones critical of Spez. I don’t think they stopped that campaign and I think they still try to demonize the hell out of Lemmy. Could be because China has a significant hand in reddit now or it could be because Spez has a tiny dick and a tinier ego. Dunno. But I think they’re weighting the scales.

    • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      61
      ·
      edit-2
      12 days ago

      Reddit 100% was censoring and shadow banning any kbin or lemmy mentions.

      I wouldn’t even be surprised if reddit actively promoted or even creates negative comments. There was a precedent of people abandoning Digg so they were clearly very aware and afraid.

      At the end of the day it’s impossible to tell with these incredibly opaque networks. It’s even hard to confirm comment visibility as Reddit employs data fudging and shadow banning.

      Just another reminder that nothing any closed source social media says should be trusted, ever.

    • aasatru@kbin.earth
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      27
      ·
      12 days ago

      Out of curiosity, what made you change your mind and give it a chance? Any breaking point on Reddit’s side, or just boredom or a sense of adventure?

      In regular migration studies there’s always talk of puah and pull factores; reasons for wanting to leave where you are, and reasons for wanting to go to the destination. While I personally like it here, I guess we are currently depending more on push factors than pull factors to attract people from Reddit.

      • Stamets@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        19
        ·
        12 days ago

        Star Trek.

        It’s not even remotely a surprise to anyone that I’m a dedicated Trekkie and have been for quite some time. Also not much of a surprise to those aware of the Trek fandom that sometimes it can be kinda bitter towards shows that don’t fit a certain trend. I happened to like one of those shows and was looking for a place to talk where it wasn’t just constantly being bitched about. I was just googling around and found Startrek.website so I set up an account on lemmy.world to watch stuff over there for a couple months before eventually joining that instance. My original account still exists on lemmy.world and it’s fairly early in the run of a lot of things. I’ve also gotten a few messages to that account simply because it’s a single first name that other people wanted.

        Anyway I started posting Trek memes to Risa and it went overboard. Before I realized people were making memes about me and I just sort of stuck around. Startrek.website showed it’s administrators to be flagrantly abusive of not only their power but also of just people so I set up Stamets on this instance. Rest is history.

    • Baŝto@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      8 days ago
      1. […] certain communities that were supportive of Lemmy suddenly got locked behind a NSFW curtain […]

      You got that wrong. That was a measure taken by these communities to demonetize reddit. Reddit doesn’t put ads on NSFW subs. Any profile that posts on an NSFW sub also gets their profile switched to NSFW afaik. Moderators got banned for these NSFW tags.

      r/PixelDungeon is the only sub that I’m aware of that completely moved to lemmy. Withe the main mod and developer of the most popular fork moving to lemmy. The sub is still open, but it has a “bookmark” called “Lemmy” and a “link” called “Lemmy Community” that directly links to the lemmy community. The sub is still open and automod responded to any new post that the sub moved to lemmy … at least for a year or so, it doesn’t post that any more.

      And there are some obvious down sides. To my knowledge lemmy has not implemented flairs or post tags, which get used excessively by some communities to categories and sort their content. !pixeldungeon@lemmy.world fell back to putting text tags into titles like “[DEV]” and “[OC]” and then use the search for this. But that is merely a work around. The sidebar links to these searches, but since instance-relative links are not a thing they are fixed links to lemmy.world.

      The search itself is still inconvenient, because you can just “search this community”. You always have to explicitly select a community to search it and have to enter the search term before selecting the community. Edit: that’s of course only true for the front-end (lemmy-ui) I use, dunno if all have that issue

      I doubt regular end users will ever get warm with distributed federative networks. A lot of people already seem struggle with email. All tend to flock to a few big instances. For lemmy you also need some basic awareness of these systems. You can’t find everything and to expect that will always go wrong since you only search what your instance knows and never for everything. There are great projects like lemmyverse, but you need to know about them. People who don’t know about them will either just not find the communities they are looking for or they’ll start duplicate communities. The problem of not finding something is smaller on big instances but also more fatal, because their duplicate communities will displace the ones that were started on smaller instances but did not federate well yet.

      And everything, the development and hosting, is solely carried on the shoulders of a few volunteers. That will always result in instances popping up and disappearing over time, with development speed varying depending on interest and free time the developers have.

      The biggest selling point is not to replace reddit but to be connected with the rest of the activitypub fediverse. That you can see peertube channels as communities here. That mastodon users can comment on lemmy posts eggcetera

      • Stamets@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        8 days ago

        No, I do not have it wrong.

        There was a protest to mark things NSFW, correct, but what I’m talking about was something else. Kbin and Lemmy communities were marked in such a way that it was impossible to look at unless logged in. While logged in it wasn’t marked as NSFW. It also wasn’t a choice of the subreddit moderators. They were blocked by reddit admin themselves to force people to be logged in to see information on how to transfer to Lemmy.

  • simple@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    78
    arrow-down
    9
    ·
    edit-2
    12 days ago

    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.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      56
      arrow-down
      10
      ·
      edit-2
      12 days ago

      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’).

      • simple@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        30
        arrow-down
        10
        ·
        12 days ago

        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.

        • Eldritch@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          22
          arrow-down
          6
          ·
          12 days ago

          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.

          • OpenStars@piefed.social
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            15
            arrow-down
            3
            ·
            12 days ago

            I think it helps to think of it this way: WE are using THEIR platform.

            They don’t need mod tools that work for communities and users located on a different instance as much as say Lemmy.World since the devs/admins simply use the instance-wide ban hammer for their own space. Hence that is not their focus. You can go to the trouble to learn Rust, and then fight with them to get your modifications accepted or…

            Actually, I need to modify my statement above: YOU are using THEIR platform, but for those of us on Mbin, PieFed (which I’m on right now, and two new instances just opened up including one now in the USA), and soon Sublinks will come too (January was at some point a target iirc?), we have already moved on. None have reached feature parity yet tbh, though even so there are a lot of features that exist that Lemmy itself lacks, so there’s that, and being written in common languages should help enormously with them catching up.

            So whether these are “as good as Reddit”, well, beauty is in the mind of the beholder. It’s not a clear win either way, but they are getting closer to being comparable.

            • flamingos-cant@feddit.uk
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              4
              ·
              edit-2
              12 days ago

              You can go to the trouble to learn Rust, and then fight with them to get your modifications accepted or…

              Can you actually point to any instances of the devs dragging their feet on accepting changes or is this just conjecture? I’ve contributed to Lemmy, and plan to do so in future, and my experience is that they’re fairly accepting of changes.

              • OpenStars@piefed.social
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                12 days ago

                I don’t know Rust or much about the Lemmy codebase. Possibly people were simply complaining about a time delay - a large part of that being understandable due to the nature of how Federation works, i.e. you don’t want to cause corruption even among servers running older versions of the software.

            • Blaze (he/him)
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              11 days ago

              soon Sublinks will come too (January was at some point a target iirc?)

              I wouldn’t hold my breath. I keep an eye on the project Matrix, it’s pretty quiet.

              Piefed is much more promising.

              • OpenStars@piefed.social
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                11 days ago

                Thanks for the additional insight:-).

                The PieFed devs indeed seem very responsive, and I have great hopes for it too.

                Though I don’t know if e.g. Lemmy.World would consider switching to use it as they were hoping to do with Sublinks. For it providing a “social media platform” it is coming along nicely even if currently lacking polish, though from the perspective of migration of existing content into… well perhaps that’s doable as well but I definitely know far less about that:-).

            • Eldritch@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              12 days ago

              Evan Prodromou and the Social Web Working Group (SocialWG) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are the creators of ActivityPub

              Not desalines or any ML controlled group. All they did was create a Reddit like interface to the platform. After being driven from Reddit for their intolerance.

              I sometimes post from Mastodon to servers running this and other software. In fact the reason I’m on world. Is specifically due to its relation to mastodon.social. one of the bigger Mastodon instances I use. It’s got nothing to do with a software. If Rud and the other admins decided tomorrow to migrate the database to a different backend. I don’t think there would be much outrage or many people would care. In fact I’m certainly probably will in the future. As soon as a back end is available that provides significantly better Community / magazine moderating tools. Since I will significantly whiten the load on server administrators. Since things can be done at the community level instead of at the server all the time.

              • OpenStars@piefed.social
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                12 days ago

                Fair point about the ActivityPub protocol being an entirely different set of developers yet still the “Lemmy” software that you are currently using - both the backend Lemmy implementation of ActivityPub and also the web UI (unless you are using an alternate approach via an app, in which case that brings up a third in the API for Lemmy) - owes its ownership entirely to the same team that also administers the Lemmy.ML instance.

                Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views

                And the above quote I presumed to refer to lemmy.ml (and others like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net; though that is only the beginning of what some people might consider “problematic” e.g. beehaw has defederated from lemmy.world, and the midwest.social admin has been caught banning people merely for downvoting their comment), since I recalled several discussions on Reddit (before the Rexodus) about the “problematic devs” which referred to the “tankie admins” on lemmy.ml (and worse yet lemmygrad.ml). Ofc there were other issues with other instances such as exploding-heads, but that would not seem to intersect at all with the “devs”.

                But yeah there could be problematic Mbin instances too? Though I don’t recall ever hearing any discussions of those.

                And similarly with PieFed, or Sublinks.

                Speaking of, several places have announced wanting to switch from Lemmy to Sublinks when it becomes available, due to the back-end compatibility that is expected to have, when/if-ever it is released (January was some kind of a target date at some point iirc?). That includes Tesseract on dubvee.org, beehaw, and even Lemmy.World.

                In the meantime, I have not heard any updates about Sublinks for almost half a year now, though PieFed is entirely functional today - e.g. I am speaking to you from it now. Though it’s not terribly polished, e.g. I can no longer see your user- or instance name due to the way that comment replies are handled, nor any of the background context except your last reply to me and the OP, and quite often upvotes do not show in the proper color so I end up hitting it multiple times (upvote, oops the number went down, I must have already done it previously even though it wasn’t showing in the green indicator color, so hit upvote again, then repeat the next time again, and/or with other comments as well). Though it has some REALLY nice moderation enhancement abilities - caveat: I am not a mod so haven’t seen the actual tools, or even know if such exist. Nonetheless it is exciting to see those developments that have happened already:-).

    • eldavi@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      12 days ago

      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.

      • Something Burger 🍔@jlai.lu
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        32
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        12 days ago

        Threadiverse refers specifically to the subset of the Fediverse with threaded conversations, like Lemmy and Mbin.

        • Sentient Loom@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          15
          arrow-down
          6
          ·
          12 days ago

          Sounds too much like Threads, the invasive corporate thing which can get fucked. Never going to market for them.

          • aasatru@kbin.earth
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            10
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            12 days ago

            Likewise the heroic nerds of the Threadiverse coined the term months before Threads was even announced, and they would be hard pressed to give it up to some scumbag billionaire.

            It’s an epic culture war being fought between two largerly agreeing parties.

              • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                4
                arrow-down
                3
                ·
                12 days ago

                i agree. bending over for people butthurt about meta seems like a great way to limit your market artificially.

                then again, i named my public instance moist

                • OpenStars@piefed.social
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  9 days ago

                  Wouldn’t it also cause confusion for some people to say Threadiverse while other people refuse to say that and instead use Fediverse?

                  Ofc strictly speaking both are true.

                  Hehe, Forumverse? :-)

    • superkret
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      12 days ago

      The instance I first chose straight up disappeared, so yeah. It wasn’t an easy migration.

    • Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      12 days ago

      Even if it’s not as popular, I’d say the community might still be more solid in some cases. And that people are more responsive, especially with quality answers. I’ve noticed you’re chastised way more on reddit if you ask a “stupid” question.

    • Lemmchen
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      12 days ago

      In contrast to reddit, whos leadership never made any controversial decisions. /s

  • _bcron_@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    62
    ·
    12 days ago

    Lemmy has a toxic puddle problem. If your first experience with Lemmy is sauntering into a community and getting chased out for not agreeing with someone hard enough, something like that, you’ll probably just go back to Reddit and say ‘that place is full of whack jobs’.

    And the default sort, kinda hard to dodge

    • FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      12 days ago

      My experience is a little better with comments sorted by “top” instead of “active”. “active” seems to promote controversial comments because they get the most replies.

    • OpenStars@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      12 days ago

      What is the default sort on Lemmy.World btw - is it Local, or All?

      For me without an account, it is All. Which means that they’ll see all the tankie stuff, and most will immediately want to nope out (I’m currently sitting at 100% of every person I’ve ever told about Lemmy irl).

      img

      On the bright side, PieFed adds a warning label to messages on communities located on Beehaw (about their differences in moderation policies), and surely could do the same for lemmy.ml - in fact I saw such a message this morning (sth sth warning do not criticize China or Russia or you are likely to be banned - quite neutrally yet helpfully worded, very much to the point), though now can’t seem to reproduce, so perhaps it’s in testing.

      • Shatur@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        12 days ago

        I saw that on ML you might get banned for stuff like calling Xi Jinping a Winnie. But not for an opinion. Especially about Russia.

      • Baŝto@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        8 days ago

        Why is that tankie?

        That post criticizes “any western leader” talking about human rights and shows photos of bombing gaza below it, if I interpret it correctly. It certainly is whataboutism, but I don’t see how it is directly used to justify anything else, even though that might be thought behind it and be more clear after reading more posts of that person. Though I’d rather use the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, since that’s a more direct human rights violation than supplying Israel with money, weapons and defense support.

        • OpenStars@piefed.social
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          8 days ago

          I never said that that image proves that the originator is a tankie. For one, such content turns people away from the Fediverse, regardless if offered by a conservative, a leftist, a tankie, or whoever. Mainly why I included it is that it is an example of content offered on an instance known to have tankies. See e.g. https://feddit.nl/post/16246531.

          What “makes” them a “tankie” instance is that they literally deny that the Tiennamen Square massacre involved any fatalities (and ban anyone from every community on Lemmy.ml, even ones that you’ve never posted or commented in) if you say otherwise. They are really quite open about it too - it definitely is no secret, though you won’t see it immediately upon looking at the sidebar for the instance, so usually people from the Western world (which they seem to be so against in many of their more politically aligned communities) have to discover that fact on their own, then get disappointed (especially those considering themselves liberal and therefore a bit “left-leaning”, not knowing just how far left the scale really goes, i.e. nearly every American is fairly right-leaning, when using the global rather than USA scale).

          But more generally, if that instance wants to make fun of the West, particularly Americans, that’s fine - do their thing - but then why is it so shocking when Americans get offended by that? All the more so when reading the sidebar of such places as e.g. Lemmy.World and Lemmy.ca, but then the content federated from Lemmy.ml’s communities work according to an entirely different set of rules.

          As we try to entice people over here from Reddit, it’s confusing to them to have all these conflicting sets of rules and behaviors - e.g. in some instances people are allowed to behave as trolls, even encouraged to do so apparently by their admins, but then they also come out and do it here as well, where it is a violation of the rules.

          Anyway, again, I’m not using that image to try to prove tankieness - that’s already been established. This is content from tankies, as the person I replied to said “that place is full of whack jobs”, and this whataboutism seemed a kind of illustration of that, not proof.

        • nomous@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          11 days ago

          Beehaw is a bit fragile. They’ll remove any comment they don’t like if it offends their current sensibilities.

        • OpenStars@piefed.social
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          11 days ago

          I am not certain I can explain it, but for one thing they have defederated from two of the largest instances including Lemmy.World, bc they wanted a narrower range of experiences yet the mod tools would not allow them to keep up with vetting the flood of content from them and thus their userbase would have been “exposed” to it.

          The mantra is “be nice”, but I also saw people discussing literally murder of “others” who they disagreed with, like they voted the wrong way, or didn’t vote despite being in a deep blue USA state or something. So I have no idea of what the criteria really is.

          In any case, people report being banned from there at the drop of a hat, bc their mods are quite zealous. Which can be quite shocking to someone coming from a place that has significantly looser moderation practices.

          So anyway the label I see for a post hosted on a Beehaw community says:

          This post is hosted on beehaw.org which has higher standards of behaviour than most places. Be nice.

          And then that link goes to Beehaw’s own description of their own policies. I love this approach! It’s quite friendly - it allows Beehaw to speak for itself, and rather than penalize the instance for being different, yet it addresses the interface between it vs. the wider Fediverse that is more used to content such as appears on Lemmy.World, which again has significantly looser standards (due in large part to severe lack of moderation efforts, which in turn relates to lack of development of tools that mods seem to consider sufficient).

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      12 days ago

      It’s very hard to convince people that fedi is a healthy place when the default servers are incredibly toxic. I wish they would at least advertise it as such, maybe hide the default from the number one spot. There are several servers up there that accept users that are way more chill.

      Also for new selfhosters making it easier to say “these are some problem instances that are commonly blocked, if you want to start out with them”. I know that starts a new problem of “but then who decides” and it causes more splintering, but for a lot of posters it’s overwhelming the firehouse of vitriol that comes in at first.

      • OpenStars@piefed.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        12 days ago

        ARE we a healthy service though? Setting aside how any social media can be addictive, Lemmy in particular is incredibly toxic. It can be MADE into something that is far more tolerable, but it is not that way fresh out of the box, for a new user - particularly a mainstream one - who does not know what they are doing, e.g. how to block, what an “instance” even is (neither Reddit nor X has an equivalent), etc.

        Blaze, when he preaches about the benefits of Lemmy on Reddit to entice new users to come here, mostly tells people to choose lemm.ee, and even specifically mentions the tankie issue for those who are worried about it, specifically regarding lemmy.ml. However, lemm.ee does not block e.g. hexbear.net’s ChapoTrapHouse, nor does it block even the incredibly offensive lemmygrad.ml. I almost left the Fediverse entirely when I commented in each of those, and received WEEKS and WEEKS of replies (EACH) to what I considered an innocuous comment (e.g. “at least Biden lowered gas prices, which is not nothing imho?”) - I could do nothing (that I knew of) to halt it. Nor, having arrived in them via All, did I have the first inkling of what those communities were all about, or those instances. I did not consent to that! Having read the rules of e.g. Lemmy.World, and coming as I had from Kbin.social, I was not expecting anything remotely close to… THAT!!!

        So I understand why my irl friends have all absolutely refused to use Lemmy, and moreover give me a dirty look for even having suggested it. It’s nasty. WE (who use Linux btw) know how to manage software, and can make it into something beautiful. But a day-1 noob with a guest or fresh account, trying to compare this place to Reddit, will not likely stick around long enough to see what we do.

        As for the rest, I most definitely get what you are saying, and there are a couple of recent(-ish) posts in !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca that cover those topics in more detail, if you want!:-)

        • Baŝto@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          8 days ago

          hm, maybe lemmy needs the feature to disable response notifications for specific posts or threads. Though that’s the less problematic scenario. The biggest issue in federated networks is when somebody is determined to stalk and pester you, though I haven’t heard of that happening here so far. But you could comment under each and every post of another user, since you can see all posts. And there is no way to stop that if they are persistent as they can just create a new account on a new instance anytime they get blocked or banned.

          • OpenStars@piefed.social
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            8 days ago

            Oh I’ve seen it - some people receiving downvotes between replying to me and me seeing their content, which I thought was odd so I checked out their post history and literally everything had been downvoted. Obviously that’s a sort of troll attack (except one case where the person said that they were doing it to themselves, so as to imprint upon themselves how worthless those scores really are). Admins can see such and ban accounts doing it, but some instances allow automated signups so there can be an unlimited number of accounts that would need banning though, if someone were determined enough to keep making new ones.

            But that’s not what drove my irl friends away - that was content that e.g. made fun of the Western world & society, and which they considered “extremist”, and did not want to see so they left. And as others have noted, if you remove politics and Linux, then other than Star Trek what else do we even have here?

            A community, that’s what. But that takes awhile to see, yet they were already gone.

        • OpenStars@piefed.social
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          12 days ago

          But https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.ml received 15 endorsements, from some major well-known/top instances, with such kind words as “popular with our users”, and one going so far as to state “friendly staff; well moderated” - WELL MODERATED!? Tbf it did receive a single censure, and 2 hesitations (from places that I’ve never heard of before).

          I was not here prior to the Rexodus - maybe it was (more) true then? Even if so, that info seems out of date. And then even if it is the singular instance for which that is true, that is still a fairly major deviation - e.g. the graphic that I showed in my comment above this was shared to both lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml, while others are shared also with hexbear.net. Banning lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net thereby helps but does not eliminate the “leak” that occurs when that identical content spreads out to the entire Fediverse via lemmy.ml.

          e.g. the #1 rule on https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/ states to not perform “Attacks on users or groups”, though I constantly see anti-Western nation attack wording and graphics posted on those 3 (maybe now after the USA elections it will suddenly cease, having already served its purpose?). For Lemmy.World to act as a delivery vector for that content, despite how it violates their ToS - how is that all that much different from allowing CSAM to spread, which likewise did not originate from Lemmy.World, yet if the latter chooses to allow itself to be the method of delivery to all of its users…?

          Well anyway, thank you for your helpful addition of the link. Though I think there is more to the story as I outlined here.

          • YarrMatey@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            11 days ago

            Take a step back, you sound ridiculous. CSAM is not the same AT ALL as someone criticizing the west for letting Israel bomb the shit out of Gaza. If you are used to reddit, you are used to more conservative views. You have never experienced views that would be considered radical leftist. I am from the US, the republican and democrat parties are very conservative. Reddit only deals with these two parties’ views for the most part. I found nothing wrong with the screenshot you took. There is no leak that needs to be plugged, try experiencing more views to broaden your horizon. There is nothing wrong with saying the US is a fascist hellhole and is complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. Some of Europe is also heading that way too. It is not against TOS to point that out. You are being a “lib” which is really just saying you are being a reactionary. The big three you hate so much are not afraid of telling you when you have reactionary views and how dumb they are, if you want someone banned for being mean to you then go to beehaw, it is against their rules to say anything that doesn’t coddle you.

    • thoro@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      7
      ·
      edit-2
      12 days ago

      Yeah whatever, that’s a feature. Reddit became worse once it became a safe place for conservatives and center-right liberals to gather.

      Conservative, TheDonald, KiA, red pill, et. all made Reddit worse.

      I don’t want a second Reddit. Can better avoid eternal September issues if they self select to fuck off

      But I guess that’s what .world is for.

      • _bcron_@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        12 days ago

        A lot of communities on Lemmy have a ‘scene kid’ subculture and they will just harass people right off the platform for not being true enough to the cause, despite being for the cause.

        You got a bunch of raindrops. They want to become a hurricane. They simply need a warm breeze but shit blows sideways instead. The corners of Lemmy where movements could be happening are basically mosh pits

        I’m not trying to argue with you or correct you or anything, just pointing out why this is bad, how it shouldn’t be as it is, but it’s on deaf ears to the people I’m lamenting about. And you’re correct, a 2nd Reddit would suck, but Lemmy could be better if those people were being better.

        If there’s anything anyone mad about anything in the world should know, by know, don’t attack people on the same team, welcome them in

        • 5714@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          12 days ago

          I don’t quite understand your point. Do you maybe have some examples to understand better?

          • _bcron_@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            10
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            12 days ago

            I actually blocked most of those groups but one was some climate community on another instance. There was a post where someone asked what they could do personally to help prevent climate change, and it was full of political theory as a response.

            Someone said they actively boycott Starbucks because the CEO flies a jet in order to commute to Seattle to California, and if the government won’t do anything they felt like the least they can do is just commit to never giving them and their lobbyists a single penny ever again.

            And they were downvoted to like -20 and had a dozen people attacking them over shifting the blame from the corporations to the working class by framing it in such a way that the working class should have any responsibility for the actions of the corporation. It was like watching a bunch of picketers calling someone a scab.

            And I’m just reading it like “what the fuck guys, you’re sitting around discussing political strategies that have so far done absolutely nothing, they’re doing something, they have a point, the lobbyists make the laws, so defunding the lobbyists does make a lot of sense. He’s flying in a jet to work because people give him money, helllLLLOOOooo.”

            Someone even went so far as to argue that a lot of people need to go to Starbucks because they might need a quiet space to study or hang out, so I jumped in pointing out that most municipalities have a library at the minimum, and people were fine before coffee shops were everywhere, and I got downvoted and jumped on by half a dozen people for not understanding the plight of others.

            Homeless people need somewhere to go, so I’m an asshole for suggesting that other people could go to Starbucks less? Beats the hell out of me

            In some climate forum, for no reason other than to win a stupid internet argument over the responsibility of emissions, everyone began defending the necessity of Starbucks of all things. Seriously. And at the same time, consumers shouldn’t have to endure hardships for the climate because they should instead focus on affecting policy, in order for places like Starbucks to change, because they’re fucking horrible. In my mind I was just like “well are corporations good or bad, or at the moment are they just convenient as both in order to use that person as a punching bag?” but noped right out.

            It was basically a rat’s nest of tangled up incongruent statements that all led back to ‘fuck that person for saying they make a very small effort to do something towards a corporation as opposed to attempting to reshape politics’

            So yeah, shit like that.

            Maybe a simple “while I disagree with A due to B, it does have some merit because of C. But in my opinion I think D is more effective, and if you’d like to learn more about D, here are some resources! :)”

            • 5714@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              11 days ago

              I’d argue that at this point, sticking to the collective vs individual dichotomy of climate attribution and action potential is climate action delayist. When your argument relies you or your group intentionally doing absolutely nothing to combat climate change, you don’t really have climate change in mind.

              Leftism sometimes cares more about class than its very foundation, the environment, to understand why there is a problem with blame-shifting.


              I’ve seen this in a similar fashion in relationship advice forums: Commenters not engaging with the issue or person, but knee-jerk reacting with advising instant breakup.

  • Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    38
    ·
    12 days ago

    Number 1 comment is

    Reddit ain’t going anywhere fast.

    If r/selfhosted has to rely on reddit as it can’t be fucked selfhosting, what chance do other subs have.

    I have found Lemmy selfhosted communities excellent, they are not a large as Reddit but there are plenty knowledgeable people, often seflhosting their own little reddit.

    • secret300@lemmy.sdf.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      11 days ago

      The irony of a self hosted community refusing to self host…

      Honestly back during the API fiasco I was honestly expecting the mods their to make their own instance together. The fact they didn’t blew me away

  • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    30
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    12 days ago

    Devs are allegedly Marxist-Leninists.

    Redditors dont understand that devs dont exactly have full control of open source software, that different instances are not operated by the devs.

    Edit: Lemmy devs to be specific

    • Jumuta@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      33
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      12 days ago

      I don’t get the hate against the lemmy devs tbh, they have their (perhaps controversial) political views but they leave everyone that’s not on their site alone and it feels like they develop lemmy pretty impartially

      sure they might ban you off ml but that’s their site and they get to do whatever they want with it, just like every other instance

      i mean network effect is a thing i guess but that’s not as important on lemmy where there are usually similarly large communities about generic things on most major instances

      • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        28
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        12 days ago

        Exactly … it’s also a double standard because reddit is basically a capitalist model of the same digital system but no one ever complains or criticizes it.

        The socialist digital creators built something and shared it freely with everyone and also don’t exert control over anyone.

        The capitalist digital creatures built something and locked it up, monetized it and are using the user’s efforts as the basis for the business only the owners make money on and have complete control over everything.

        It’s amazing because it’s a fantastic metaphor for the two platforms.

        • Alphane Moon@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          10
          arrow-down
          4
          ·
          12 days ago

          Calling them “socialist digital creators” is misleading at best, if not an outright insult to socialism.

          They are marxists-leninists who whitewash the crimes committed by the USSR and CCP. They support the genocidal invasion by Russia, a country that is neither socialist or democratic; it’s an authoritarian capitalist oligarchy.

          There is no double standard. You don’t see the CTO of reddit running a subreddit dedicated to whitewashing the Pinochet regime and/or western colonialism in Africa or Asia.

          Reddit is run by sketchy and corrupt individuals, it is possible that in a just world we would even call them criminals. Lemmy’s marxists-leninists are openly supportive of genocidal actions and brutal authoritarian leadership. There is no comparison.

          • Shatur@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            12 days ago

            Could provide a link to a comment or a quote where the devs whitewash the crimes or support genocides?

            • Alphane Moon@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              arrow-down
              3
              ·
              edit-2
              11 days ago

              My man, the head developer of lemmy is the admin of lemmygrad. He has a fucking Mao picture in his profile!

              Don’t even try to weasel your way around this. This is not going to work with me.

              I hate these people. Pathetic larpers living in democratic countries while supporting authoritarianism and genocide. And when I say hate, I don’t mean it in the internet slang way (“hater”).

              How should I put this without breaking any rules? I genuinely wish they meet the same fate as “Donbas Cowboy”, Russell Bentley:

              Bentley, 64, was a fixture in the low-level Russian incursion in Ukraine dating back to 2014. Calling himself the Donbas Cowboy, Bentley became a popular figure on Russian propaganda networks for his criticism of the U.S. government.

              Bentley’s wife, Lyudmila, then claimed that Russian soldiers from a tank battalion abducted him.

              According to the Investigative Committee, Vansyatsky, Agaltsev, and Iordanov tortured Bentley on April 8, and he died shortly afterward.

              Vansyatsky and Agaltsev are suspected of blowing up a car with Bentley’s body in it and ordering Bazhin to get rid of what was left of his remains.

              • Shatur@lemmy.ml
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                11 days ago

                My man, the head developer of lemmy is the admin of lemmygrad

                No, he is not. Check admins section on lemmygrad.ml, which profile do you think belongs to dessalines? He is only admin of lemmy.ml.

                He has a fucking Mao picture in his profile!

                It’s a controversial figure, but it doesn’t mean that the dev supports crimes or genocides.

                How should I put this without breaking any rules? …

                You judge people who support genocide, I get it and I here with you. But wishing death upon others because of their opinions? That’s just hypocrisy.

                • Alphane Moon@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  11 days ago

                  No, he is not. Check admins section on lemmygrad.ml, which profile do you think belongs to dessalines? He is only admin of lemmy.ml.

                  Are you sure about that? Why does this page state that:

                  Lemmygrad was created by dessalines and Farmer Heck.[a] It has over 34,000 posts and over 360 active users.[2]

                  With a further clarification that Muad’Dibber (who is currently an admin) is dessalines

                  Currently known as Muad’Dibber and Black Tulip, respectively, on Lemmygrad.’

                  Is Muad’Dibber not dessalines?

                  It’s a controversial figure, but it doesn’t mean that the dev supports crimes or genocides.

                  Controversial figure? Mao was a brutal dictator that directly caused an inordinate amount of deaths and suffering. He is no better than Stalin, Pinochet, Hitler or Pol Pot.

                  Since he runs lemmygrad, he most definitely supports the genocide of Ukrainians in the occupied territories. Before you start acting out, I’d like to see you and your family try and speak Ukrainian in the occupied and try and publicly oppose russian occupaiton. I think the example I provided with the “Donbas Cowboy”, Russell Bentley, should give you an idea of what life is like there.

                  And then there is also their support for the genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang.

                  For you this is just random internet drama. I am not going to tolerate any degenerate LARPer shilling for russia and the CCP.

                  You judge people who support genocide, I get it and I here with you. But wishing death upon others because of their opinions? That’s just hypocrisy.

                  These are not mere opinions. These scoundrels wish me, my family and my fellow citizens harm in the most pathetic way possible; by LARPing online as marxist-leninists. It is reasonable to want them to end up like “Donbas Cowboy”, Russell Bentley. This a just and fair end for Western LARPers who whitewash genocide.

    • FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      38
      arrow-down
      10
      ·
      12 days ago

      Alledgedly?

      Marxist Leninst is a nice way to put it, they support Putin, Xi. Zhedong and Stalin.

      Thankfully as you say, it’s FOSS with free federation and defederation. Admins only have control over lemmy.ml.

    • r00ty@kbin.life
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      14
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      12 days ago

      Pretty sure that’s only true about Lemmy. There are other threadiverse apps. The mistake is people calling the threadiverse lemmy.

        • r00ty@kbin.life
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          12 days ago

          I’m on a pretty old version of mbin (I have some modifications I made for federation issues back when it was kbin). I need to spend a weekend to pilot an upgrade and make sure I can run it safely live.

          But even then it’s better in some ways already and I never feel like I’m missing something from lemmy. But I think just calling the whole thing lemmy puts off people that are seeing things through a political lens.

          • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            12 days ago

            yep. as an mbin cheerleader, i evaluated both and kbin was better looking and perfectly functional from the start. no app required. no custom user-land css.

            but what really bothers me is the conflation of lemmy and fediverse. theyre used almost interchangeably. other platforms get lost in the discussion.

    • cabbage@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      12 days ago

      Also there are plenty of alternatives. Both PieFed and Mbin are perfectly fine platform with, as far as I know, no tankie developers associated with them.

  • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    26
    ·
    12 days ago

    Almost everyone in the linked Reddit post seems to be supportive of Lemmy, or even Lemmy users. Even the people who tried it and stopped seem generally warm to the idea and just think it needs polish.

    I’d say that this comment section is way more vitriolic than that one lol

  • Zier@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    26
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    12 days ago

    We are having a great time over here in the Fediverse, and they are jealous. So we will continue to have a blast, just to piss them off.

    • cabbage@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      12 days ago

      Bingbingbing!

      The people still exclusively on Reddit are on Reddit because they don’t like the Fediverse or they’re unwilling to change their habits. Had they liked it and been genuinely open for change they would have made the switch, or at least used both platforms.

      This is not so much true for the average user, as they might not be aware of the federated alternatives at all, or they might think it sounds too hard. But it’s absolutely true for the self-hosting community.

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    edit-2
    12 days ago

    Besides other factors mentioned in this thread, there’s also

    • selection bias: people with a positive view of Lemmy already migrated, so the leftover is bound to have more negative views
    • older userbase: older people use language in a different way, talk about different topics, and dig into those topics in a different way. That often makes younger people throw a tantrum.
    • group identity: for those “AS A SNOO” we’re basically apostates.
    • edit: personal drama between higher ups is more visible here than in Reddit.
  • Rakenclaw@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    17
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    12 days ago

    No idea, quit Reddit over a year ago for fedia/lemmy. Never used x/twitter either, i use mastodon.

  • cabbage@piefed.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    12 days ago

    Seems to me most people in that thread seems relatively open minded? The people dismissing Lemmy completely appears to be downvoted, and people seem to have a nuanced understanding that it’s a better platform in theory but sadly less active.

    I’m sure they’re right. I’m a slow person who thinks there’s plenty of activity over here, but if you’re used to the adrenaline of Reddit it must feel a little small town-y.

    • FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      12 days ago

      To be honest except on things like sports and politics, reddit kind of feels like a ghosttown too. So many posts with huge amounts of upvotes and like 2 bot generated comments. The power commenter types seem to have left after the exodus and been replaced by lots of people who scroll and like but don’t really venture much into comments.