Lemmy

The “Not enough mod tools” complaint is valid and I hope that improves as the platform moves forward.

I DO NOT get the disdain for the Lemmy userbase. I’ve been here for the past 4-5 months and can say I’ve had so many more meaningful and fulfilling conversations here on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit in the 10 years I was there.

I think it’s the same situation as between a small town and a big city. Reddit is huge and with a large number of people; you’re going to statistically get a larger number of assholes. Not to mention there are tens of thousands of people commenting on anything that hits r/all, so there’s no chance someone else is going to read your 1 comment that is drowning in a sea of other comments.

Lemmy feels more like a small town. Things move a little slower here, but there’s less competition to have your voice heard, and I end up seeing some of the same users time and time again across the Fediverse. I think that smaller feel means more people have a chance to see your content without it getting drowned out by the masses, which means more opportunity to make connections.

Some people suck, but Lemmy has been fucking awesome for me so far and I love this place because of that.

As a 10+ year reddit user who has switched 98% to Lemmy, only checking reddit on my computer every couple days: Lemmy is completely fine, and I have seamlessly transitioned from Reddit.

Its userbase is more technical than Reddit's, and there's not as much content. But it is a perfectly good Reddit alternative. I find it isn't as addictive as reddit, which is awesome. I just wish there were more educational communities akin to AskHistorians, AskScience, etc.

Lotta people coming here from Reddit expecting 1:1 replacement, and then get pissy that the 2 man dev team that's just trying to keep up with this sudden burst in activity isn't at parity with the multi-million dollar company that's been developing their site for almost 2 decades.

Honestly, I'm just tired of the constant comparison. Lemmy can be it's own thing. It's a work in progress and it has a lot of promise, but for anyone looking for their reddit experience, there's really only one place to get that.

"I don't like Reddit.

Its interface is ugly as sin. There are fewer users there and they're all pretentious, extremely liberal, and anti American."

-Some Digg user circa 2008/2009 (probably)

The only times I've seen toxicity like this is ironically whenever there is a big wave of reddit user influx, things usually settle down for a while as they adapt to the cultures here (or get banned), it's not as much of an Eternal September as much as it is a Irregularly Scheduled September.

Most of the active comms here are smaller but better quality than their subreddit equivalent. You even get good discussions here on memes sometimes. (Politics and News here still could be better, though.)

For someone who's been very unhappy with the state of social media for quite a while, Lemmy is a breath of fresh air, even though there are definitely growing pains.

I'd rather deal with this supposedly "toxic" lemmy userbase than sift through a thousand comment post where 900 are bot reposts on reddit

Lol, the user doesn't seem to realize that if everywhere you go and comment, if absolutely everyone is an asshole, then maybe it's you that's the problem...

Guy is hundred percent right. Lemmy is a echo chamber for a certain demographic as vast majority of users are in it.

We either have tech, or politics. Literally every topic ends up in either. We also don't have the differing opinions aspect as just about every debater talks like they're just the different shade of the same color.

Even spicy news that would make any other site a warzone of opinions just echo chambered here. Literally everyone agrees on one conclusion and random two comments that disagree with that having at least -15 points.

TL;DR: no. Definitively no.

NTL;R: Okay... let me chew on this.

Lemmy as a whole is definitively more toxic than Reddit

For me, at least, non-contributive ("toxic") [see footnote*] behaviour would be: assumptions (including witch hunting), decontextualisation, "didn't read but still replying lol lmao", insults, "I dun unrurrstand", whining + entitlement, and "chrust me" = "I take you for gullible". And those things happen far, far less in Lemmy than in Reddit.

For the poster complaining about Lemmy, "toxic" would be, instead:

• pedants - pedants are fine as long as context-aware. And even then, I don't recall a single pedant screeching at my L3 broken English here, unlike in Reddit.
• purity testers - this can be interpreted 1000 ways.
• concern trolls - yet another thing far more present in Reddit than here...
• contrarians - "oh no what I say should be put in a holy altar, how do you dare to disagree with MEEEEEE?". Sorry but contrarians are leagues above the sort of circlejerking that you see in Reddit, where you'd get 1000 weaboos screeching because you wrote "animes".
• "ackshyually" - refer to what I mentioned already about context. Those "ackshyually" are caused by decontextualisation, that happens far more often in Reddit.

I know that what I'm going to say is anecdotal, but it's still worth sharing: I see the difference specially because I used to moderate a small Reddit sub, and I mod a Lemmy comm nowadays. People here are more reasonable and contributive; I barely need to intervene here, and even then 99% of the time it's like "don't do that" "okay". In Reddit though? Well.

I was on Lemmy.word for slightly over a month and posted many times across numerous communities and instances, so I definitively gave it my best shot.

Depending on which instances yours federates with, you'll get a different experience. lemmy.world and lemm.ee in special tend to gather Reddit-like critters alongside a few good posters, so instances where behaviour is a bit more monitored (such as beehaw) tend to defederate them.

Also Lemmy has backend issues

I'm no coder to claim that the issues are "backend" or "frontend". Instead I'll say the issues that I see:

• papercuts, like the bell icon staying even after you checked all messages
• a lack of mod tools
• rarely lemmy.ml (the instance that I'm in) slows down.
• In the past it used to show errors and refuse to load, but I don't recall this happening nowadays. ~~And it never showed a downtime banana.~~
• can't cross-instance linking posts in a convenient way

So... come on, the platform works. It has its issues, it's likely worse from lemmy.world due to the amount of posters, but it works.

Bad actors

Name them. Otherwise it boils down to "chrust me". Unless referring to the CSAM event below.

lemmy.world comm being bombarded with CSAM [...] Imagine if a subreddit had to be shut down because of this.

I seriously believe that the approach taken by the lemmy.world admins to close down !lemmyshitpost was more sensible than the actions that I'd expect any Reddit instance (oh wait, there's only Spez's) to take. If the same happened in 2023 Reddit, here's what would likelyhappen:

• subreddit mods ask for help to the admins, "we're being bombarded with CSAM". They hear admin crickets in return.
• mods lock subreddit to avoid the bombardment. u/ModCodeOfConduct forces them to reopen.
• mods eventually give up and leave. The sub becomes unmoderated and attracts paedophiles until you got a full paedo ring..
• the paedo ring grows large enough to get a mod outrage of 9001 subs.
• Spez deletes the sub while making a public announcement, like "WE SNOOS STAND AGAINST PAEDOPHILIA!" (cough former Reddit admin Aimée Challenor cough cough)
• the original userbase of the subreddit has no equivalent community to go to, because unlike in Lemmy you're expected to have a single sub per subject.

and sees an influx of kinder people

Dude. You're in Reddit. That's the pot calling the kettle black. Reddit makes even Faecesbook's community look wholesome in comparison, it's on par with modern Twitter. Lemmy is considerably nicer than Reddit.

And if you still want something nicer there's always Beehaw. I'm being serious - for people who want/need an environment with more monitored behaviour, it's a go-to place. Provided of course that you don't want to eat the cake and have it too, by behaving in a way that you don't want others to, otherwise they'll show you the door.

eh, reddit leans left but there's a good chunk of far right extremists that have infiltrated a lot of subs especially politics ones and turned them to shit.

lemmy leans left but instead of the extreme right we have lots of extreme left and tankies,namely from 2 particular instances.

both kinds of extremists never make any sense, are complete snowflakes, and live in some sort of weird alternate reality where in some cases I can't even tell of they are extreme left or right, they both trend towards extreme levels of authoritarian dick sucking

It sounds like the real complaint is that it's different.

Because yeah it's certainly not more toxic. That's laughable. My interactions here have been overwhelmingly better than on reddit.

And the other complaints boil down to "it's small and new, yuck"... Yeah that's a good thing usually. There have been terrible attacks with CSAM but people are handling it and luckily I've never seen a single image like that. On reddit it was not uncommon to see mutilated humans without wanting to even though there was far more time and resources available to prevent that

• joins Lemmy.world, notoriously mismanaged instance
• stereotypes the rest based on one experience

I honestly just wish the internet would go back to individual forums. Lemmy is great for a reddit alternative, but I think old school forums were just better overall

I know forums still exist, obviously, but they're kind of shitty right now.

lol people are def nicer here. This guy just misses his little friends.

bad actors can spam disgusting shit all over the damn place to the point where one relatively large community (I believe it was c/shitposting on Lemmy. world but I can't remember for sure had to be shut down by the mods for a while because it was being bombarded by CSAM.

I guess he hasn't heard of, I think it was r/AHS, that did exactly this routinely to get subreddits they didn't like shut down.

Oh I agree. Maybe not toxic per se, but extremely out of touch. I think what happened is it just became a bigger echo chamber, because from the already echo chamber reddit, all the people who are the type to switch to the fediverse (privacy focused, foss lovers) are on lemmy, with their opinions being spouted back at them, so it feels like everyone agrees, when really they're a minority.

The biggest differing opinion between reddit and lemmy that I see is lemmy's insistence that absolutely everyone should switch to linux. Of course I saw that on reddit a bit too, but it always had some pushback.

And of course there's also the ignorance of the fediverse's problems. Like people just can't comprehend why someone wouldn't switch to Mastodon or Lemmy.

This doesn't apply to all topics though. There is still some good discussion here. Sometimes it can be better than reddit.

What's weird is I don't experience this on hacker news. People seem to be a lot less out of touch, and have a wider variety of opinions. Not entirely sure why, maybe because it's had time to mature?

Every complaint about the users is a complaint you can make about every other online community 🙄 Just go through the effort of blocking the jerks and the communities/instances they congregate and spawn from.

One thing I've noticed about the alternatives subreddit, is there is a lot of people persuading people against alternatives. It's almost like there was some organising to persuade people there was no alternative.

I mean, when you factor in you'd probably get removed, or shadow-banned, or have your posts removed for mentioning Lemmy, it feels like there is a multifaceted approach to discouraging folk from leaving the reddit teet.

While there is an element of truth, it's scattered in with exaggeration and only focussing on negatives. The objective was to say Lemmy bad, staying good.

No way is Lemmy more toxic than reddit. I find those "well ackshually" folks are much less here.

Never really understood the thought process "If I move to a different place, it'll definitely be magically free of arseholes and people I disagree with." It's just not reflective of reality - wherever you go, there'll be arseholes. Just build your Subscribed feed, dip into All occasionally to se what else is out there, find an instance that takes moderation seriously and aren't actual fascists and block the strays that occasionally make it through.

And OOP is right to say Lemmy has backend issues. The dev team of 2 people is too small and they really need to make safety a massive priority ASAP. Being able to block instances as a user is a big step forward (planned in the next major release I believe) but both mod and admin tools need to be much better and they need to do a lot more to tackle CSAM hits. I hope they're taking note of the various projects @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com has begun to tackle these issues.

In terms of the size of the Lemmyverse, I don't really give a shit about that. What I care about is quality rather than quantity and it stands to reason that as quality continues to improve (as I believe it is) then quantity will follow in its wake.

OOP seems to forget that Lemmy only got as big as it is right now about 4 months ago - of course there's a lack of niche communities and of course there's a lack of tools. Poor old Ernst developing KBin got hit with tens of thousands of users for software that wasn't even out of Alpha.

The best things we can do as users is create good content, encourage discussion etc even when it feels like we're talking into the void. Because sooner or later, if the content is good, people will engage. We're not at that tipping point yet but it'll come if we put the effort in.

/u/spez aliases are getting grumpy.

He is not wrong. I have had to block and get rid of other instances on Lemmy, because they are filled with toxic motherfuckers, and elitist Linux users

maybe it needs a little curation, but once you've blocked the instances, communities and users that are personally annoying to you, it's a fun and engaging place with the usual share of human noise. Maybe some people are happy to have reddit choosing what deserves to reach your eyes, I like to do it myself :)

I definitely see a lot of toxic comments on here but I think that's mainly from reddit outcasts trying their hardest to be sassy. Sassy unhelpful comments on Reddit won the most karma so it can be helpful to remind them that that doesn't actually work here

I think that, perhaps, the user is trying to use Lemmy as Reddit, rather than using some of the fantastic quality of life improvements that evaporated with the API nonsense.

For example, blocking users and communities (and soon instances). Some users and communities, even if I enjoy them or the instances that they are on, sometimes are just too toxic for me. And that isn't to say that the comms and users necessarily are (sometimes they are) but, that sometimes engaging with some comms and users either causes undue stress or temptation to get involved in an Internet fight. That's not behavior that is good for us, even if it sometimes feels good in the moment.

I'm hoping (and have suggested) that a "timeout" feature gets added to allow one to readily self-regulate and disengage when they find that interactions are approaching the sorts that are algorithmically encouraged on commercial social media platforms. The outrage machine is just terrible and I've found myself much happier and in a better headspace since leaving such platforms. Added bonus is that transphobia actually gets taken seriously on most instances and, while it doesn't technically impact my as a cis guy, I'm much happier knowing that people are able to feel safer to be themselves (or come to terms with themselves).

As for the complaint about people being more likely pedantic or correct people on technical details, I love that - finding out that I'm wrong about something is fantastic because that means that I learned something. When there's topics, like tech, where there are often correct and incorrect answers and they change or get added to regularly, one really needs to leave the ego at the door. We're all humans (and bots and human facsimiles), which means we'll be wrong from time to time. It's a fact of life, effectively in environments where there are a lot of knowledge-workers and the medium of communication is directly related to the topics.

Personally, I'd like to see more comms regarding to digital circuit design and open-source silicon.

I have noticed this too. It's better just to not interact. At the end of the day, I just wanted a better link aggregator than what reddit became and it works nicely for that.

Like some of the top-ranking comments here are saying, that place has a very large proportion of people who were coming from the banned subreddits like The Donald, various straight-up hate communities, and typical alt-right groups. So naturally, alternatives that were founded by anarchists and socialists (raddle, lemmy.ml) were almost always disregarded there, possibly with the exception of the Wolfballs admin (I can't remember too well if they got much attention with the 'they're not all like that' line)

It's always funny to me to see newer users complain about a lot of political (incl. FOSS) users in an inherently political project, which was picked by many precisely because its political values prevent the for-profit shittery that reddit.com has been doing for 15 years, and that alt-right social media alternatives frequently do whenever they get enough users. Yes, we're going to voice our concerns when people show up at the door and want this to be just like reddit was, or bring over the uncritical mainstream ignorance we came over here to avoid.

The outlined issues don't seem to be lemmy exclusive, but then again, I've spent quite a short time here.

The toxicity is caused by the society, not by the platform. From my experience, one can always find a more toxic subreddit.

Reddit is just as much moderated by volunteers, that's the reason I started using reddit. Also, having corporate admins doesn't make the platform any more spam resistant.

If anything I would expect these problems to be more prevalent in smaller (lemmy) platforms and stabilize with growth to reddits level.

Now I'm not trying to defend lemmy, but being even more community driven I want it to succeed and become what reddit used to be.

Maybe I'm being unfair, but somehow when I read complaints like this about "purity" and "insufferable" and all that, I always assume it's "they downvoted and insulted me when I made a bigoted joke about like transpeople or something".

Mf acts like CSAM and rampart porn spamming bots are not a thing on Reddit. That's some neat cherry picking right there. Here's the thing, at least rightwing nutcases are far less prevalent here due to defederations.

I bet that dude said something racist and got dogpiled. I only see toxic comments on lemmy when I say something racist.

It absolutely is an echo chamber, and it gets really toxic. This place is extremely xenophobic and it's very exhausting.

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