It’s worth noting that some users might be attracted to Lemmy due to its smaller, more niche communities and the sense of belonging that comes with being part of a smaller, specialized group. Others might be drawn to Lemmy’s technical aspects, such as its use of ActivityPub and its potential for customization and modification.
Some users might also be deterred from Lemmy, but please do not let this distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
I haven't seen this shit in years. I used to browse reddit and that shit would always crack me up. This one time I was browsing at like 3AM and everyone was asleep. I laughed so hard I woke my little brother up. My dad came out of his room super pissed off. He just glared at me and walked straight out to the garage. When he came back he beat living shit out of me with a set jumper cables. Anyway, I stopped browsing reddit late at night after that.
Overall it's less toxic than Reddit, as evidenced by how many people were lurkers there but here actually feel comfortable enough to open up and contribute.
I note that you are on Lemmy.World, which blocks some of the most well-known trolling instances. That indeeds helps a ton, though means that the experiences of someone who joined e.g. lemm.ee instead are going to be quite different.
As a Reddit refugee myself,I can't disagree with that. But I will clarify that there's generally two kinds of Reddit Refugees, though:
The kind that got fed up with Reddit and wants to be part of something better
The people who were banned from Reddit and think this is some kind of safe haven to continue acting on their worst impulses that got them banned elsewhere.
Meh. Maybe I'm just not in the wrong corners of the Lemmy fediverse, but honestly I'm not really seeing very many of the banned finding their way here. That was a huge problem in the cesspools like Voat, but for whatever reason it seems like Lemmy has mostly been spared, in my limited experience at least.
That said, yeah there's a fair amount of blunt talking and general mild misanthropy, but frankly I almost welcome that as a change from the overmoderated sterility of corporate spaces like Reddit which have to think in terms of advertiser-friendliness.
Yes exactly. When reddit pulled that api pricing shit, I just got up and left. I came here expecting shitposts, braindead "hot" takes, piss-poor reading comprehension, and americans acting like they're the only country in the world. I got exactly what I expected and I couldn't be more satisfied, 10/10 would nuke my reddit account again.
Yea no. Try having a nuanced discussion on any (insert heated topic here) on Lemmy and watch the labels fly out faster than the ejaculate of a post pubescent 15 year old.
It seriously cannot get any worse. Bring on users from any platform. Lemmy sucks and i thank the mods of smaller subs that post diligently about enthusiast topics to add content that isnt dystopian sad sack circlejerk
Honestly I'd rather be called a lib tankie 100x than get banned because I said the wrong thing to an actual fascist. Leftists infight, none of us are above that, so one always has to remember that the vegan prick you're arguing with will still eat the rich with you.
We often talk about toxic newbies, but sometimes we don't pay enough attention to how we ourselves changed as a result. Make them feel welcome, and see how much Lemmy changes back.
If you (yes, you, reader) are new to Lemmy, have my wholehearted "Welcome"! Hugs on demand, cookies right there, make yourself comfy :)
Avoid politics-oriented communities unless toxicity is your thing. Start with any instance (most likely you chose lemmy.world as your starting point?), but explore others and what they have to offer. You can even be on several of them if that's your thing! Enjoy!
I was here 2y before the exodus, it's absolutely not just the newbies. Maybe some other -ies...
I for one welcome the shit out of the newbies, I'm thankful to have them and want more, and for them to bring their niche interests with them. They help filter some of the toxicity out.
yay cookie, thanks,
i moved away because anytime i asked a question on any reddit subreddit by posting the question (as i should) it got spam downvoted to the point i became unable to make posts anywhere due to "low karma" : , )
(it was just a basic question and every comment under it and the post got spam downvoted for nor reason)
Luckily, here, while admins can see how many up- and downvotes you have, it doesn't influence anything, and that's by design; besides, it's unlikely that any proper implementation of karma system is possible in a federated network for individual users.
True, but Reddit had the right conditions for toxicity to grow and begin to run rampant. Lemmy, with its decentralized nature, should limit the spread of any toxic communities.
I dont think it will limmits it at all it will spread so u end uo wirh multiple communities for the same thibg with different flavours of toxicity. We already have that with world news ie the .ml flavour of toxicity vs the other instances with differing flavours
You should check out Facebook, Twitter, IRC, NextDoor, 4chan, 9gag, or any other Internet forum (including comment sections of news articles). Reddit does not hold exclusive rights to any “right conditions for toxicity to grow”.
It's more easily expressed when people don't have to directly face the sensitivity of the other humans. For example, from inside a car, in an online competitive game or an online forum.
This will probably become an ever-worsening problem because there's no way to ban anyone from the fediverse entirely. We might someday need something like adblock or spam filters to reduce noise.
It took me a couple months to fully leave years of bad reddit habits behind. I didn’t realize how deeply ingrained they’d become. The toxicity had gradually snuck up on me.
To preface this I’m a lurker myself. I wonder what bad habits it left behind in you? After the whole API and 3rd Party Apps fiasco I just left it behind. But I wouldn’t say that I took the toxicity over from it to Lemmy. Especially wondering what exactly is ingrained in your soul that’s left behind from it. As far I know I’m still the same but as I’ve told just mostly lurking so don’t think it had much as an influence on me except the doom scrolling.
Defensiveness. Overexplaining myself because I didn’t expect people to give me the benefit of the doubt, and I knew that if I left any room for interpretation, people would assume the worst version possible. (I didn’t know what “sealioning” was.)
It’s important to remember that this had happened slowly, over a period of years. If it had been as bad as it is now back when I first signed up, I wouldn’t have put up with it. Initially, reddit just seemed like a bunch of normal (but sometimes weird) people. It wasn’t until I discovered Lemmy that I realized I wasn’t being myself, and that every time I posted, in the back of my mind, I was expecting the worst.
imagine an ai that takes you through your own post history like a therapist. like some moderator can sentence you to ai therapy before you are unbanned.
You seem to forget that reddit mods are nobodies, and have been compromised by for-profit and psychological warfare interests for over a decade.
I was on Reddit for 5 years before I ever got banned. I spread usage among 20 accounts since ~2010, mainly to group topics. Got banned from subs at least 10-20 times since 2015. Only a few were fair, where I was asking for it, just drunk or trying to be a dick. The rest were from conservative subs, and half of those were pre-emptive bans before I'd ever posted, commented, or referenced them — the snowflakes pre-banned me for wrong think, for calling out conservatism from afar.
So to me, it's far more concerning if you've been on Reddit in the last decade and haven't been "rejected" by fascist mods at least a few times. It's been a battlefield of bad-faithers for most of its existence.
NOTE: most lemmy mods are no different, and are far more compromised than early Reddit. Many are tankie keyword-squatters building their own propaganda networks from Reddits exodus.
I ended up getting permabanned from reddit for saying that Lebanese people don't blame all their problems on Israel, just the the problems they do deserve blame for.
I think any real user from Reddit that isn’t a bot is an asset these days. I hate Reddit as much as the next person, but giving people shit for coming from there to here feels hypocritical.
I think both can be true tbh. I welcome everyone from reddit and encourage us to grow. I also will say leave toxicity at the door, or sub to other instances/communities that enjoy it.
We should make sure toxicity remains unwelcome, but new users should be welcomed without negative expectations. Otherwise, we either make all newbies feel like they don't belong, or turn Lemmy into another Reddit, which would also alienate users since this is what they fled from.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats shows MAU (monthly active users) decreasing - we are now at 43k, last month was 45k, the month before 47k, etc. Total servers also decreasing - now 540, was 552, 579, etc. Overall posts and comments are slightly up though - so we're seeing increased activity from fewer users, rather than an increase in actual users. One could argue whether we're truly "decreasing" vs. merely flat, but either way I don't see us increasing.
And 3 of those users are myself, all active and only 2 of which I had a week ago, speaking to how alts are most definitely a thing. Also, federation issues especially staying in sync with Lemmy.World may be causing people to shift instances (or to leave entirely?). If so that would be a good thing bc 0.19.6 promises to help address that. (Although in my case, I wanted an instance that allows custom blocks of any instance I choose without needing to rely on an admin team, and that isn't dependent upon the Lemmy codebase.)
For one thing, people might be turning away due to the upcoming USA election, in which case depending on who survives that, they could return? But every person I've ever recommended to check out Lemmy has looked at me in disgust and actively chided me for having recommended it when they see some of the political extremism here. e.g.:
Whenever I go looking for examples of such I usually find it in 0-60 seconds, by going to Lemmy.ml and browsing by Local.
Your instance is doing wonderful work keeping such out - I wonder if that image will even render for you:-). But overall, across the wide Fediverse, people are not willing to put up with such, and seem to be leaving us overall rather than find some other way to deal with whatever it is that was bugging them.
And with such trends, and the way we treat normies, I don't see us ever going mainstream. Maybe PieFed and Sublinks, along with Mbin and ofc Tesseract on e.g. dubvee.org will help turn that around? That would be so nice?:-)
Btw what will we call ourselves then, if it does - will we still be "Lemmy"/Lemmings, or just general Fedizens? Either way there's great hope for the future, but also a lot of work to do to reach that point.
I wasn't really looking at the MAU stats when I made this; it just felt like it's been more actively lately (both good and bad). Unfortunate the numbers are actually trending downward.
For one thing, people might be turning away due to the upcoming USA election
Possibly. I've gone into self-imposed social media blackouts during election season many a time. Sometimes you just need a break.
Whenever I go looking for examples of such I usually find it in 0-60 seconds, by going to Lemmy.ml and browsing by Local ... people are not willing to put up with such, and seem to be leaving us
Yeah. I have felt for a while that ml being the official or at least de facto flagship instance is doing more harm than good. I'm not going to tell them how to run their instance, but I am sad and frustrated that it seems to turn so many people away under the impression the whole fediverse is like that.
Yeah like to label it as "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers" seems not entirely... complete in its description.
Blaze is doing amazing work advocating for Lemmy on r/RedditAlternatives etc., and these days recommends Lemm.ee, one of the largest instances that also defederates from virtually nothing so that very little to no content is missed by the user. On the other hand, some content users very much would rather have been presented to them as opt-in rather than have to opt-out of it. i.e. if one of the major things that instance does is to make fun of the capitalist democratic Western society, then it is perhaps understandable if - regardless of truth or falsehood - people, especially normies, living inside of that same capitalist democratic Western society do not appreciate the jokes? Especially those calling for literal murder, or when an admin there tells someone to kill themselves. Duh, of course people are going to be turned away by such.
At this point it's like a rite of passage, to learn how to become a responsible Fedizen: learn who and how to block (not necessarily in that order:-).
How do you see the past numbers there though, without conflating the Mastodon users that says that we have ~1 million MAUs?
This one likewise says 43k MAUs right now, though I don't recall how many we had in February. The other site only shows as far back as June, 48k MAUs. So that's a drop of 5k MAUs since June.
Assuming the numbers are comparable across the two sites like that - and they seem to agree as far as we can tell - it looks like the numbers went up sometime between February and June, but since then we've lost almost all that we gained.
i.e., the Reddit drama may have caused people to come check us out, but then the largest majority of people left, likely going right back to Reddit. Possibly bc of the deep (niche) content stores that they still have - e.g. if everyone else uses Windows, it's just easier for you to use it too, and it takes a special mindset to buck that trend.:-)
Welcome! In my biais view we're less toxic but still far from perfect.
Don't hesitate to post on smaller communities. People will be so happy to see a post they will forgot to be negative.
I look forward to read from you again (^_^)
Just the other day I had to block this idiot from harassing me, claiming I was faking ignorance about Trump's stance on Israel so I could "bait Americans into a discussion", for some reason. I'm European, I don't follow presidential candidate policies very closely at all. This tool was also European, and Palestinian. I don't know why they were insisting so hard I would do this inexplicably weird thing, but maybe their emotions were running high. I'm against genocide btw, of course. ✊
Please forgive them. Many people in the USA are going to literally die depending on what happens in the next month, so yes emotions are running quite high right now. You stepped into a VERY active minefield there:-).
Oh, but definitely block them - I mean forgive as in don't let it weight you down, but absolutely cut that noise out of your life.:-)
But they were European too so that's what baffled me a bit. And they were so adamant and stubborn about "calling me out" on pretending not to know Trump's stance on Israel lol. Such a random thing to pretend...
Yeah that person was pure and utter life noise. Begone!
Maybe, but you have better tools to deal with it. Filter out words most politics and your experience will improve a lot. For me, it isn't a 100% filter because I still want to be exposed to that, but I want less of it. Tag anyone that looks like they're operating in bad faith. If you see the tag again and they're still shitty, just block them. Block whole communities if you want or even entire instances. You're in control of what you see here.
My Lemmy experience has been perfectly cromulent since I started blocking and filtering.
You can do that on Reddit too. Obviously not at a federation level, but you can block subreddits and users. It doesn't stop the fact that even across many instances Lemmy is far more toxic - whether you're discussing Tech, Gaming, Politics, Sports, etc.
The truth of the matter is that you can get rejected and banned on Reddit for absolutely no serious reason, so I don't think reddit refugees are all toxic people
I for instance was permabanned from both my accounts because the mods on a subreddit I was banned reported me to reddit admins for ban evasion when I didn't even know something like this existed, when at the same time I was talking with the mods to lift the ban! I had both my accounts for at least a year so surely I didn't have any of them for evading any ban, reddit mods are arrogant and so full of themselves because there are millions of people there and at the same time they forget that the people made it what it is