I imagine there’s excitement for the increase of activity but worries about the potential toxic side of Reddit coming along too.
I’d especially be interested in the Lemmy devs’ opinions.
It’s fricking amazing. There is regular conversation and places that have been dead for years are reviving themselves.
Love it, welcome everyone!
I’m in Lemmy for, like, two years? Mostly lurking. I’ve been looking for alternatives for longer than that though.
I feel like the monsoon is mostly welcome. Content quality may decrease a bit, but the quantity will make up for it. And quantity is what has been missing IMO.
In special I’m hoping for specialised instances about some subjects that I enjoy. I like the Lemmy instance but stuff like anime and conlanging “feels” off-topic here.
Quantity has a quality all its own. I’m glad everyone here is so welcoming and looking forward to seeing how things develop.
Just to note, I just came from Reddit. I’m hoping for a critical mass of folks so we get those niche and specialty communities.
It’s good. This place was pretty much a ghost town a few months ago with only a few users posting.
I’m new here from Reddit. I was a former Digg user. Over the past few years, Reddit has gotten swamped with spam and low quality content. I was most at home there on the niche subreddits that were still earnest and not spammy. I hope things stay that way over here.
I’ve made a small donation to help Lemmy grow. It’s not much, but scaling up to handle the escapees is a big deal. Having the money to grow and build robust processes to keep content thoughtful and helpful is important. While I love the funny posts and memes sometimes on reddit, it’s really infested the popular subreddits to the point of being excessive. Ergo, I tend to hang out in smaller spaces where the dialog is more “straight up”.
What’s the link to donate?
I went here because I could do a one time donation. I plan to see how things go and eventually set up a recurring one though.
https://opencollective.com/lemmy
I found it on the main lemmy page where you sign up for a server. It probably needs to be posted in more places, like on the communities pages. (there’s a patreon site too where you can donate)
Here is their donation page with all three currently supported options.
I don’t know much about Open Collective, but LiberaPay does not take a cut (only the fees of the payment processors) so I would discourage you to choose Patreon.
Edit: Actually there are more options listed since you can also donate crypto.
I’m an ex Reddit user. It seems inevitable that the Reddit admins will lock out third party access - I could be wrong but based on recent years, Reddit doesn’t like to listen to it’s community.
I hope that the toxicity stays away, but it’s likely there will be toxic users at some point. My main gripe with Reddit was the lack of actual reading. Most mainstream subs were just memes / circlejerks / pics. I’d much prefer to learn something or read something of value over “lol-ing” at a pic.
I’m keen to see how Lemmy grows.
Wanting to learn something hits the nail on the head. I recently came to the realization that I used to learn things on reddit, especially in the comments. Not sure when that stopped but it’s why I had been wishing for an alternative for a while.
I still learn things there. I keep my subscriptions pretty clean and tailored to really interesting things, but have a mulrireddit called “fun” where I can browser brainlessly and have a laugh.
I hope the reddit echo box ‘our way or the highway’, ‘everything is a pun’ mentality doesn’t transfer over as well
Aww, but Reddit pun threads are fun.
They’re fine when appropriate. It’s nauseating how they’re inserted everywhere.
Yeah, when a simple bots can post most of the replies. E.g.
if post.contains("r/theydidthemath") { post.reply("/r/theydidthemonstermath"); }then it’s gone too far. There are some good, creative ones, like The Old Reddit Switch-a-roo, but they’re too few and far between.
Agreed, I hope there is room for pun threads here too.
Once you’ve seen the Anne Frankly one more than a few times, you’ll have had enough
When someone shares a personal story about his wife’s struggle with cancer and the top reply is “I also choose this guy’s dead wife”
I joined the Beehaw instance a bit ago with a small exodus from Tildes, another Reddit alternative. It’s been nice to see the community grow and grow steadily as time progressed, and seeing the Reddit refugees makes me hopeful for the platform’s strength going into the future regardless of what Reddit does with its API (or other features).
As for the toxic side of Reddit, I’m more concerned for the devs in having to deal with the reports, but as a Reddit mod myself, I don’t think it’ll be too bad. At least on Beehaw we have a supportive community and I’m reminded of a video talking about the userbase of the early UseNet and how they dealt with the first spammer (not necessarily their methods, but the fact that they rose up as a community to enforce a community rule). Hopefully we can see that here (i.e. “the report button exists”).
Edit: a detail
a small exodus from Tildes
I’ve seen Tildes being proposed as a Reddit alternative along Lemmy, what was the exodus about?
From what I remember, it had to do with the moderating decisions of the person behind Tildes.
I’m also wondering about this. I remember seeing Tildes promoted a few months ago but haven’t seen any mentions of it recently.
I feel that the majority of the toxicity will be left on reddit, but the good guys will surely come
Only been here for a couple of years and haven’t yet gotten a feel for the platform. I hope Lemmy can handle the traffic spikes, I’ve already seen tildes.net go down lately.
Well:
- I’m annoyed at calling people who dislike an app and choose another website “refugees”
- I’m happy that we’re going to have more activity
- I hope more instances will be built and maintained, because I don’t think the large number of new members can be moderated effectively if they keep flocking to the same handful of instances
- When in doubt, I hope moderators will be too strict rather than not enough, especially in the beginning to make sure the behavioural expectations are very clear
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That’s a good point, thanks for adding some nuance :)
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Hopefully it’s moderated much less. Don’t see how it wouldn’t be since it would probably take more effort. The excessive, special interest driven moderation is what really killed reddit long before this api issue.
Mods should have never been allowed to moderate more than like 3 subs at most.
I agree. “Powermods” became a thing 10 years ago and it’s been terrible for the site. Advertising companies pay teams of people to ensure subreddits remain advertiser friendly, and friendly to their portfolio of products. Reddit tolerates this because those moderators are free labour, keep the site clean, and post lots of “content.” I’m hopeful that, if Lemmy takes off, federation will allow us to wall off obvious cases of abuse without administrators stepping in, as they have done again, and again, and again on Reddit.
Admins also strong armed mods/subs to enforce community guidelines and TOS that was clearly agenda driven
I’m one of the new ones, but I’ve been aware of and interacted with Lemmy and Mastodon for at least a couple of years.
For me, I liked what I saw but felt like they lacked enough of the network effect to convince my nontechnical friends to make the jump with me. That made me concerned that they would shrivel up and die. I’d recently been interacting a bit more though, Mastodon especially, since I’d say its gained a good amount of traction given Twitter’s…cancerous CEO. Every couple months I found myself downloading Tusky and Jerboa to mess around, but hadn’t made it a habit.
Reddit’s API changes were a line in the sand for me though. I decided I didn’t care about my friends following anymore, and I was ready for a smaller community again, with less rage bait and predatory capitalism.
Does that make me the wrong sort of refugee?
I’m on the same boat as you. Especially being ready for a smaller community. Things will definitely be different but there might be a silver lining to how this all plays out.
I am also very similar to you. I just got my first lemmy instance running. I love the idea that I could have a reddit like tool that I can host myself and control. But I need active community and subs that I’m interested in.
I’m a new user here and saw the influx of Digg users on Reddit. It did change the site and we got a mix of more less-thoughtful discussion but also a lot more content which was funny and interesting. I’m thinking Reddit might not survive this as a global forum, following in the footsteps of Digg
I’m all about it! Great to see a platform take off when it’s centered around being ad free and open sourced.
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This is where the duplicated communities in lemmy’s federation works for you. As the big instances get flooded with content that is low quality but highly upvoted (as happens in big subreddits), you can also subscribe to communities about the same topic from smaller instances.
I think the conventional way this is handled on Reddit is separating memes and fluff into one one community (subreddit) and more discussion based content into another community. It works on Reddit because even if the memes get more engagement in an absolute sense, each subreddit has it’s own yard stick for what is doing well, so a discussion that makes it to the front page of its own subreddit will make it through to the front page of users who are subscribed, alongside the memes. I don’t yet know enough about how Lemmy ranks posts to know if this will work, but hopefully it will.
