Why do people on reddit seem to hate Lemmy/Mbin/other federated link aggregators?
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?
Honestly, in my experience since I fully moved to Lemmy:
Almost any subreddit is more mature than any Lemmy channel.
This isn't just number of users (but that's a huge problem that has been mentioned here a lot), it means that the chance you'll run into a mod who is a tinpot despot is pretty high, and there is nothing you can do about it if you're not willing to sit alone in a ghost town alternate community.
As someone who used to be vehemently anti-lemmy, it's a few different reasons.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[…] 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. [email protected] 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 [email protected] that cover those topics in more detail, if you want!:-)
just wanted to drop that for the selfhosters there is https://fediseer.com/ which provides an API (which makes getting a crowdsourced and up to date whitelist easy)
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
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.
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').
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Speaking from a third-world country, there are 2 main weaknesses the fediverse has for us:
selfhosting is not easy or cheap for us, so we can only use what it's already there... And it's basically all in english, so most people are out.
meta has everyone grabbed by the balls and people are happy like that (for some reason), anything new or different is met with endless excuses.
There used to be a mexican instance called Mujico, but they were forced to use a whitelist by constant troll attacks... But they also federated with grad so I can't feel bad about it. I don't know if it still exists but the last time I checked it had zero activity.
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
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.
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.
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.
Older userbase makes this place a lot more useful, outside of politcs and news subs you are dealing with who can provide good information, ie how reddit used to work.
Drama has its place... it is provocative and it gets people going... we need more engagement! We are deff getting there too, meme subs were spamming all 1 year ago, now there is enough threads to keep a reader busy without fluff memes.
I agree with you that both things have their upsides; and frankly, I don't even think that we should be pandering to the immigration leftover wallowing in Reddit. Growth is good, but growth should never come at the expense of the community that you're trying to grow.
However I feel like those points help to explain why the "lol lmao" crowds hate this place.
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.
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.
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.
Normie here, Lemmy is pretty easy to use imo. I think the transition is happening now kinda like the Internet in the 90s or online dating in the 10's.
Ofc I just got here and I'm using Voyager.
A theory I have is that everyone who hates reddit eventually left leaving the milk bags brains. I was mod of r/mapporncirclejerk and left when I saw my mod queue get exponentially worse. My friend told me it was because the decent people left for Lemmy.
secondary reason why i left reddit, they don't respect a person who respects him or her self... not long after i learned that's corpo's MO and that's how i become radicalized linux enjoyer haha
@secret300@sunzu2 Odd, I just use it from Firefox on my desktop. It does want me to accept cookies, that is how websites maintain a login session since otherwise http is a stateless protocol.
The feel of Lemmy communities is a little different than Reddit, even if the software features are mostly analogous and there are many Redditisms used.
Your average commentor/poster will stand out more in a small community, there's less of being able to post and then slink away.
People have gotten used to a lot more comforting features of modern Reddit, Lemmy in both the users and in the software has more of a "Reddit 10-15 years ago" feel to it.
The higher-score comments there don't seem to be particularly hostile to Lemmy. They talk about legitimate concerns like whether Lemmy as it exists now could deal with a Reddit-size volume of data, The top comment at this time speaks favorably of [email protected].
Of course people who are still using Reddit are more likely to view Reddit as favorable or acceptable and alternatives as problematic, or not quite there yet. I'm actively Fediverse-first in my use of social media, but I still end up on Reddit quite a bit for niche interests because that's where the most people are.
its a chicken and egg thing. the fediverse cant scale if we arent pressured to fix scaling issues. we need users to highlight the pain points so we can fix things that allow those users.
I would love to move away from reddit but it's hard when this is where the base of my favorite communities still exists.
further compounded by issues such as (a) overall lack of moderation, which further depends on (b) better development of moderation tools, and (c) guides explaining how things work, bc it can be fairly confusing, e.g.:
How do I find selfhosted communities on Lemmy? If I search for "selfhosted" I get one community (Run It Yourself) with around 3K subscribers and very little activity. Is that it?
Though someone answered (I think incorrectly):
I think the biggest one is 40k on lemmy.world and it's called "selfhosted". You must be on a Lemmy server that doesn't show that community for some reason. There are ideological rifts on Lemmy that can cause some servers to splinter like that.
Which is why things like Categories of Communities (already fully functional on PieFed) are so helpful to guide people to what they may be looking for.
And I haven't even begun on the whole tankies connotation of moving here.
I think it's clear-cut that the selfhosting community on Lemmy is a perfect alternative to reddit.
No - apparently not, it's only clear to you, not them, for all the reasons listed above and likely more besides. We would have to build it first, before they will come... and even then I would expect a long delay. In the meantime, Lemmy MAUs (Monthly Active Users) are actively declining, whether they are returning their traffic to Reddit or not.
Anyone still left on Reddit is either too ignorant about the alternatives to Reddit to even have an opinion or is actively trying to keep people on Reddit for Reddit.
I can conjecture some things, though I can't be 100% sure on either:
First, maybe it's fanatics/fanboys that don't like competition making their platform less relevant. Second, it's paid actors complaining. Third, it's robot accounts making posts. Fourth, as proposed in the OP, people are getting the wrong impression due to noisy and problematic bubbles. Fifth, people being scared of leaving their comfort zone. Sixth, a mix of either some or all the previous possibilities.
I was just thinking about this because I've been going through and blocking every political community. I've found that when that is gone, there's really not that much left aside from random technology focused stuff, some memes, asinine twitter screenshots, and a fuck ton of linux stuff. And the comments sections of seemingly unrelated posts often devolve into political shit slinging. I'm on an instance that blocks lemmygrad and hexbear so I can imagine it's far worse for the ones that don't. I'm starting to sour on lemmy too because there's basically nothing here of interest to me anymore.
Confirmed that the ones that don't block hexbear and lemmygrad.ml are significantly worse:-).
I like [email protected], but there's less than a post a day to it. At some point it's up to us to build what we want to see in the world, which is harder when there are fewer of us - so if becomes a cache-22 where we need more people to make new content but we would need more content to attract new people.
And apparently mod tools here are inadequate, though hopefully improving.
The biggest point is tankies and the toxic "left" people here and that Lemmy has some major problems regarding stability and the ability to effectively moderate.
Another point is that Lemmy has in may places worse moderation than reddit.
Yeah there are clearly some toxic people who won’t tolerate anything different than them. They can be leftists or rightists who are gonna hate you for whatever reason.
I didn’t have this feeling on reddit to be honest.
And it’s a shame because I’m censoring myself because of this on some subject where I could bring another point of view.
The people you are probably referring to exist on like, two instances. Everybody always ends up on the ".ml" ones for their first experience and is immediately horrified by the hardcore tankie content. That's because those specific instances are run by actual Marxist-Leninists.
Lemmy has in may places worse moderation than reddit.
yet this is exactly what the fediverse was designed to work around. giving the power back to the users. when .ml decides to block a bunch of shit due to butt-hurt mods, communities can be moved elsewhere without everyone having to make new accounts.
I am getting to know that lemmy.ml guys are bad, so do you all avoid subbing to lemmy.ml communities? I have bunch of their communities subbed so not sure if I should move away or not.
Some of the communities are fine, but make sure that you never EVER talk about politics in any way. And even then, why support such a place that has such a reputation? Most communities - though not all - have counterparts elsewhere. Judge for yourself, though it's nice to at least know that you have options:-).
In fairness, people outside of the instance may legit be receiving the brunt of their more extreme members coming out from the echo chamber and talking shit elsewhere. Then again, why choose to be inside that echo chamber, even if the toxicity is dialed way down?
And there are answers to that question that may depend on your circumstances: e.g. [email protected] is by far the largest Firefox community across the entire Fediverse. Also the ire of people inside Lemmy.ml is mostly directed at the primarily democratic capitalist Western society, but you may not feel impacted by such as much, as e.g. they make fun of the USA.
That was the first instance out there, so amany early adopter communities are hosted there. I've blocked a handful problematic users and all the communist stuff and other topics I don't agree with or care about, but by and large it's alright.
For some reason after reading this (because I'm very new to Lemmy), your post made me feel like that squiggly thing / slime inside the box that wanted freedom, then the moment it takes a step outside, got punched back in and now is happily being inside the box, even if its cramped.
I think it was a meme too.
Yeah, but I do feel that way (after taking a look there)
I block all .ml communities that pop up on my feed. Somewhere between 200-300 on my blocklist by now (not all exclusively from .ml of course, but most of them).
Most lemmy.ml users and communities are perfectly fine. I didnt notice a higher number of problematic users from ml than from other instances mine is federated to. I think hexbear and lemmygrad and a bunch of nazi instances are defederated.