As a long time Reddit user, there’s something about Lemmy and the fediverse that feels really refreshing and new. I think it has to do with a few things…
- People are more respectful of each other and interested in discussion and being social.
- Less trolls (users are probably older?)
- Due to it not being absolutely huge, I feel like people will actually see my posts and comments instead of being lost in a sea of content. I suppose once Lemmy grows this will change, however the cool thing about the fediverse are the new servers. So you can stick to the server when you want smaller community discussion and go to “all” when you want more populated threads.
- The clean UI feels refreshing and clean, almost like the early internet.
What have you noticed? Do you find it refreshing too?
I feel like people who moved to Lemmy from reddit are really incentivized to help it grow, so I am constantly seeing encouragements for people to interact / upvote / post content, which is great. I think that the community here is very motivated, and so even though there are less people, you get more engagement.
This is a huge part of it. People are in “this is my new home, I’m gonna wash the dishes just this once!”. I imagine things will calm down later.
yeah, that’s pretty much what happened with Mastodon, as far as I can tell. There are still folks there, but it is much quieter now vs when I first joined it.
i dont feel that its quiet, more that people have settled in, the users that stuck with masto use it religiously
just like how people used twitter
I’ve experienced this as well and have enjoyed it. Thanks for sharing.
Yep, I try to upvote everything and comment as much as I can. I’m still confused about how to post to specific instances on Jerboa though. Like I’m typing the name but it’s not showing up in the dropdown
The most discouraging thing that happened was that when I wrote a long and thoughtdul comment and press send, Jerboa gives me the “java type blabla” error, and I lost everything I typed. Then I don’t wanna type it again and I just give up on commenting
Hopefully these issues will be fixed soon! As I understand it it’s not even an issue with Jerboa specifically.
There was a time where the internet was a place for fun. Purely fun! No profit-based platforms, no mass abuse of users, no privacy violating practices, no forced ID verification, and no political correctness censorship enmass.
This age was known as The Golden Age of the Internet. It was something I saw gradually disappear like a frog being slowly boiled in water.
I’d like the hope we can one day come back to this era. The Golden Age was an escape from reality, while this corporate ran bullshit has been nothing but profit focused greed with a constant reminder of reality.
I cannot express in words how amazing the Golden Age was. We never knew we were in it until it was one day gone. Decentralization and freedom from centralized entities may allow the Internet the perhaps return to the Golden Age. An age where the Internet purely exists for everyone to have fun in and be able to express themselves freely without censorship.
That’s sort of what I feel like this is - or at least that’s what I’ve felt from browsing Lemmy. No ads and no ragebait/doomscrolling. There’s nothing requiring that I stay engaged - in a way it’s almost respectful of my interests and time.
If I were given the opportunity, I wouldnt swtich back to the state of " the good old internet" .
It was full of popups and viruses. DL speed was 3kbps on good days. Hence without any form of streaming. Depending on operator, you had to pay for the landine communication between your PC and the provider. If a family member picked up the phone from another room while you were using the modem, you got dcded. Of course, one coulnt be joined by phone when he was using internet.
You have to weigh the pros and cons.
Just because we go back culturally, doesn’t mean we have to go back technologically as well.
Ok so let me throw out some old timer wisdom. This is what the social media/forums/the Internet are like when the cream is skimmed off and the 90% of users who only browse, and the 8% who only vote are gone. Enjoy it while you can. The summer always ends.
Absolutely, my first thought was this is what internet was in the 90s and 00s. Slow, good yarns, and lame jokes.
Tbh there’s already too many memes here though. Half my front page is 196 and German me_irl sometimes.
Yea but dont be too hard on the kids. We were sticking frogs in virtual blenders and abusing the /blink/ tag at their age, so let them have their fun.
You can block those communities if you want.
I guess I want some memes not all memes
This is exactly it. I haven’t come across a forum where the “summer syndrome” wasn’t permanently present in a decade. I’ll be lurking around here to see if this is going to finally be it.
I was a bit late one the social media train, isn’t that where the “Eternal September” thing came from?
That’s because way back in the past, every September, a bunch of students who’d never had home internet access would have access via university for the first time. It would take some time for them to pick up the culture, so there’d be a month or so of questionable posts.
The funny thing is on Reddit I was mostly a lurker/content consumer. There was little incentive to actually post because your post or comment was likely to just be drowned out in the absolute torrent of other posts/comments. Here I’m actually able to be heard.
No repost bots, karma farming, or idiots (mostly). The learning curve to joining the fediverse filters out your average facebook/twitter type that Reddit is filled with today. Lemmy right now is how Reddit was a decade ago
The learning curve to joining the fediverse filters out your average facebook/twitter type that Reddit is filled with today.
Let’s call a spade a spade lol this is honestly it.
Agreed. All of the comments against the protests on Reddit kind of give it away in how little they seem to actually understand how Reddit works and what made it great for so long. They see it as just another feed for them to browse and not a community to foster and participate in. Lemmy feels so great in comparison.
It is still full of geekery: the sociopaths are not yet here. See:
Great read. I am fanatic then. 🫣
Thanks for the article.
So gatekeeping can have positive intentions.
This is how Reddit felt 15 years ago. This too can slide in the wrong direction, so we’ll have to be cautious
There’s no way to prevent it entirely. A larger community will slide that way.
I do think that it can be less encouraged though.
One key difference I found is the lack of user karma. You have no incentive to post something “just to get karma” because there is no global karma on your profile.
This encourages to post what you want to post instead of posting something that someone posted years ago because it’s easy free karma
I just noticed that thanks to your comment. I hope it stays that way on Lemmie - karma farming leads to a lot of low quality content, including bot reposts
If Lemmy accounts with a plausible history ever become valuable like Reddit accounts are, we could see the same behaviour without karma just to build up a history. But for now that seems a long way off.
It is indeed refreshing. But not sure how long it will last.
By now, we’ve all been around the internet long enough to know that good things never last. That’s really life: Everything’s impermanent. Lemmy will probably suck someday, as will much of the fediverse. But I’m grateful it’s good right now and for the foreseeable future.
It could suck someday, but it doesn’t suffer from the same things that made myspace -> facebook -> reddit suck. No money hungry executives profiting off underpaying employees to implement features no one asked for and selling astroturfing as a service. At least it doesn’t seem that there’s astroturfing as a service here yet.
You’re right. The fediverse is definitely in a better position to ward off the suck.
We didn’t think those things would suck initially either. Facebook was amazing around 2004 - 2006 before it opened up to the general public.
I don’t think I know a single person who ever thought Facebook was “amazing”… Even back then.
Before it opened up to the general public, we used it to organize parties, share photos without concern, and keep in touch with friends that went to other colleges. There wasn’t anything else like it.
I have hope that as the big corporations enter the Fediverse and start enshittifying it, some of us can sneak off to new instances that just don’t federate with them. Then the masses can enjoy their Meta-branded Fediverse, and the tech bros can make their money from it, while the rest of us carry on quietly in a parallel one.
Just wait until September… ;)
The flood will eventually come
I agree. If lemmy continues to grow, inevitably some servers will be shit, but I imagine there will be other non-federated or less-federated instances. beehaw has already started down that path.
Trolls are generally looking for maximum carnage, so I imagine there’s less incentive / reward posting somewhere like lemmy.
As an experienced shitposter, the shittiness of the posting often correlates directly with the inability of moderators to clean it up.
I find it a lot more like old forums, and there is a loooooot less ragebait (post about Matt Walsh and his piss fetish, Tim pool and his homoerotic fascism, etc).
It’s very refreshing and I find myself spending less time on here (searching for interesting content) but more time engaging (instead of lurking)
I like that I can block entire communities. Never gonna see those weird people that obsess over certain public figures, positively or negatively, again 😍
But that’s the thing, on R no matter what you blocked they still pop up in other feeds…so many “news”, meme etc. featuing those shits and here…nada. My thoughts are most of thier shit is bot driven, so here it wont get traction (yet) and if they do its easily avoided!
Here, people still feel as guests whereas on reddit, people stayed long enough to feel the place is their’s.
(“old timers shouln’t have to deal with this shit again”)
Exactly, I am very new to Lemmy and have been met with nothing but open arms from every community. Reddit at times definitely felt more elitist.
It seems like the people who actually cared about Reddit and the community left for Lemmy (and others). It definitely shows.
Reddit will learn very quickly that there is nothing particularly special about it. It’s a forum. With the people who posted and moderated on there being chased away or even banned, there isn’t going to be much of value left on Reddit going forward.
Yeah, couldn’t have put it much better myself. I’m fine with it, let them stay.
It will probably continue as a shell… Like Digg, Facebook and other failed social medias that once were golden.
Yeah, I don’t think Reddit is going anywhere, but it won’t be as good as it used to be.
The only thing special about Reddit now it that it became insanely popular and got its hooks into millions of people. Those who are interested in actual discussion will go elsewhere, and those who want to mindlessly doomscroll reposted memes and have ads shoved in their face will stay. That’s where they belong.
I think because everyone has their own corners, the common spaces don’t need to be as toxic. Also, Lemmy’s population is self selected because of the still high bar to entry. Lemmy basically feels like early Reddit. The hostile influence of moderators and the backlash anger everyone feels from being mistreated by them into silence is not yet here.
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As much as I’d love to think otherwise, i think a significant amount of the good feeling and comradery that we’re seeing now is due to us being in a bit of a honeymoon phase. You saw the same thing on Mastadon after the Twitter migration, everyone was singing kumbaya and holding hands, but overtime it started to regress a bit (though not nearly as much) towards a more “twitter” feel.
I’m sure over time it’ll stop being quite so feel-good and happy, but the fact that it’s community run and less centralized will help a lot in the long run i think. A lot of the friction and tension on Reddit was due in one way or another to it’s centralization - if you had a popular subreddit that was run by shitty mods, there wasn’t much you could do about it. here, you can just create a new version of the same sub on a different instance, and it’s a lot easier for people to “move” over to the new one.
I think the lower population helps a lot as well, right now the majority of the people on Lemmy are good faith users who care about the platform and want it to succeed. When you have 100’s of millions of users like Reddit does, you’re going to get a lot more bad faith users and people who just want generic content to scroll on
Soon we’ll all be strangers and snobs and kick each other in the ribs to say hi
