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?
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.
I personally browse the Subscribed feed sorted by Top of the Day and my feed is memes free. I do have the problem though where half of my feed is news articles posted by bots even though I am subscribed to 40+ (non-news) communities
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.
I was mostly a lurker/content consumer. There was little incentive to actually post
This is me in almost every mayor social network I have an account, I like it here because it feels like the community is better even if it is smaller, but I have never been the type to make posts or comment (mostly I just browse and vote/like) outside the very few occasions there is a tech/programming question I need/can help with.
I'm trying to participate here a bit more than I'm used to, though.
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.
Unfortunately some communities don't seem to exist without the froth. The FIRE community seems difficult to recreate here, or local subs. But do you all remember when r/Bitcoin was mostly programmers?
The FIRE community could use the existing Mr. Money Mustache forums. Only hiccup is, I believe, that it is difficult to get a new account (not sure why that is, maybe that's an old problem and it's easier now). I've lurked that forum for years; they seem like a friendly, helpful, well regulated, un-frothy bunch.
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.
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.
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.
I've gotten to the habit of Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C my comments right before hitting Reply, just in case that happens. Luckily, it's been happening less and less, at least on desktop browser. Hopefully Jerboa gets to that point soon, too.
It's called the honeymoon effect. The sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can acknowledge that lemmy is vulnerable to all the same failings as reddit, and the sooner we can take steps to safeguard against those failings.
If we instead say "no no, lemmy is different, look at how much better things inherently are over here", then we're doomed to go down the same path.
I agree - what would you say those pitfalls are? Of course the decentralizing nature takes care of some problems - but the main thing that made me feel awful browsing reddit was the constant argumentative nature of every discussion. When I first discovered web forums 20 years ago it was the magical aspect of it that had me engaged. It was actually cool to be able to chat with other people online about anything - and that itself put everyone in a good mood; after all, why waste your time being really negative if you're doing something cool and interesting? Now, it's very common place. Added with people being more comfortable that they can remain anonymous, huge sites like Reddit are prone to a lot of....crap. That's what I can think of so far.
I both love and hate the upvote/downvote mechanic. I like seeing quality posts bubble to the top, I also like seeing the general consensus of lurkers, but I don't like circlejerk posts or that downvoted comments get dogpiled on, which often both result in a toxic, self-righteous flame war. And the solution is obviously not deleting the downvoted comments, because then you're just censoring unpopular opinions.
I think something worth trying would be not visually distinguishing between posts with no votes and posts with more negative than positive votes. I think an instance could enforce this on their own communities with only positive results.
The only counter argument is that dishonest arguments can't be "buried" by downvotes (hidden behind a "[show]" button). Another strategy would be to allow burying, but somehow throttle the responses to them; maybe limit the comment depth, or limit the number of responses per user, or allow users to flag flame war threads as "unproductive" which at some point would block further responses.
To be clear, I don't think the lemmy "spec" should adopt any of these measures, I think these regulations should be decided by instance/community mods, and up to the users to regulate and provide feedback on.
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.
Yeah, I loved the golden age. Back when everyone had a Geocities homepage and just linked to each other's sites. Back when getting a link to your homepage into the Yahoo index meant something.
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 don't have your post deleted for forgetting a minor rule and there's a chance that your post will be seen instead of hidden under countless new posts.
Even worse when you browse /r/all, find an interesting post about some topic, join the discussion, type out a long reply, hit send..
And 3 seconds later you get an automod message that your comment was removed. Because you aren't a subscriber to that (default!!!) sub, or you aren't verified, or you used a word they don't like.
And even worse: You join a discussion, got some good points back and forth, everything is great. You try to reply to the latest comment in that chain to keep the conversation up and suddenly your comments get blocked. Because it was a /r/blackpeopletwitter post (you didn't even notice as you found it on /r/all) and at some point they only locked it down for verified black users, kicking you out of the discussion.
I mean sure, have your own space on Reddit (even if it's basically racism), that's fine. But then subs like these shouldn't be default subs on /r/all when they constantly lock down threads.
Advantage is if this thing slides in a direction the majority disagrees with it can be forked. On reddit all changes had to be accepted or you could leave. With lemmy and ActivityPub it's easier to fork the service and have it run in semi parallel to the OG. (Granted forking should only really be done if shit goes sideways)
Edit: besides, due to the open source status the community has more of a say in where things go
I keep telling people who are intrigued by the Fediverse that so far it feels like Reddit back when I first joined. All the good and bad, but with this it feels like the bad stuff is much more easily avoidable. If any instance starts becoming annoying or trolly or does something I don't like I can just move on.
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.
I won't lie my first reaction when I figured that out was negative (oh my god but then how will I keep track of how much people love my comments..) but the more I think about it and use Lemmy the more I like it, like a weight lifted off my shoulders.
And what you said, no point to being a karma fiend when there's no counting, so a lot less easy karma grabs going around.
I got to agree. The first thing I did was looking for my karma on my profile but then noticed quickly that it actually doesn't matter. But has it the same addiction like effect in the long run? At least I can still see people enjoying a well though out comment, which is most of the joy.
Yeah to be honest I never even looked into my karma, I didn't even understand it my first few years on Reddit, so being that there's no karma here doesn't hurt my feelings at all. I kinda feel like it is a good thing actually.
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
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.
The type of people to leave reddit over the shenanigans going on are certain demographic. The crowd is different, here, bc we're more likely to deal with a new website that's not run by narcissistic sociopaths even if there's less content.
Not to pat ourselves on the back too much but right now it’s mainly the Reddit power users that are here. The normies are wondering why interesting as fuck was flooded with porn as of last night.
But that’s good, no? The power users are the minority that actually build the community. So we get the core base of Reddit without the problems you get from that site trying to become more like Facebook and TikTok
I would consider myself a normie, specifically regarding reddit, as I only spent my time lurking there and already have more comments on lemmy than on 7 years on reddit.
The current vibe and atmosphere just feels kind of special. Almost everyone is figuring stuff out, no one is down voted for asking some basic questions and I don't have the feeling that some grammar nazi is immediately around the corner to correct my many mistakes, just to get that sweet, sweet karma.
Thank you for this link, I'd read it once and I've been looking for it everywhere. It's a really astute and general interpretation of how subcultures work and applies to religion, politics, bands, innovation, etc.
I noticed two things, along with all the good answers in this thread:
There is no such thing as Karma, and I hope it will never be implemented into the fediverse. The reason is that on Reddit Karma was handled like a currency, an in order to obtain Karma, the general quality of the content declined, as a result of Karma-farming. Also it was used as a threshold for posting comments in certain communities. Imagine you could join an instance only when you have a certain ammount of a Karma equivalent. That is something I don't want to see.
At this moment there are mostly tech savvy users (former heavy Reddit users) here, who are interested in creating content and participation. Also these folks are helping each other. It feels like a little community. I think, the threshold to join the fediverse is still too high for the average mainstream user. Maybe it will be easier to get started when there are mobile apps.
Karma is useful on things like discourse or mattermost as a spam prevention feature, you gradually expose features to people who aren't being spammy.
The same thing is true of a user joining a new community on the same site.
I'm sure for many trolls the goal is mainly to cause a reaction, and I think the alt-right stuff is an easy way to do so. Maybe that's a better way to put it.
Then there's the crowd that populated r/the_donald back in the day. Not sure how much of that was just trolling, but I'm certainly glad not to see that activity here.
True, but there's also a lovely Venn diagram where a significant overlap exists. No one's perfect, but a certain mindset definitely leans more towards being a dick to people than not.
I've seen a few, but they were mostly contained to more random offshoot instances, and those stirring up bullshit were booted pretty quick.
I think the inherent instance ownership gives admins a greater sense of pride to keep their localities positive, and a lot off us are still feeling from what reddit became in the last 5ish years and there's a communal sense of keeping that outta here.
And yes, at least for now. Hopefully those marketing ploys are readily apparent and get kicked to the curb quickly.
I think it has people with above average reading comprehension because amount of people I saw that said opening a Lemmy account is too hard and they couldn't manage to do it is way too high
Early adopters of any innovation likely have certain personality traits that make them able and willing to assess a new technology and learn/overcome some obstacles to use it. Maybe those traits translate into pleasant, respectful online communication?
ETA: I need to see if I still have my old grad school copy of Diffusion of Innovation. It might have some answer in there.
My wife is a teacher at a small district. She's watched student's abilities drop over the past twenty years and the time of covid left them severely lacking. Yes. Their writing skills are practically not there. It's truly sad.
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.
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.
I'm realizing that a few weeks ago I wanted a lot of people to flock to Lemmy and away from Reddit. At this point I just don't think about Reddit anymore and find myself hoping Lemmy doesn't get too popular because of everything that comes with that (trolls, meme posters, bots)
We're not all trapped in the same building anymore. You can just move to a different instance and still have the same software experience but with the community you prefer.
I have been a user on Mastodon for quite some time but wasn't that active and felt it lacked some content for me. Now that I joined lemmy I learned that mastodon is federated and I learned about kbin! That's what makes it refreshing for me. A lot of new stuff and small communities emerging :)
The thing that I think makes lemmy more valuable than mastodon is the focus on content versus personality. With Twitter, you followed people because you were interested in what they had to say and share. With Reddit, you followed communities. So even if a lot of the people don’t move over, once enough of the community does, it’ll feel the same (or better). I was never super active in my various subreddits (although I did comment, I just never posted), but I’m making an effort to comment and vote a lot on here just to help build that sense of community
Really good summary. I think this is exactly why I never really took to Twitter and I never really realized why, but it's exactly that. I'm more interested in topics than specific people.
I think the biggest impact is that the early adopters that have left reddit are the heavy users that respected the flow and community of Reddit. So the good of Reddit has come here, but the general populace and the keyboard warriors haven't figured it out yet, fortunately.
It does feel fresh though, like Reddit did when Digg first ate shit and everyone left for Reddit
Ehh I just like people owned things vs corporate overlords dictating what I can do or see. Keyboard warriors are here tho, have seen many an argument around here about whether to defederated this or ban that or nuke some country.
Maybe to a lesser extent, since not every instance federates everything. If clusters start to form, you'd expect some in-jokes to be limited to certain communities / instances.
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!
This is absolutely true, and this is how the internet was back in the old days before Big tech and megaplatforms. People would set up little servers on their cable modems using spare laptops. It was experimental, it was imperfect, but it was ours.
One side effect of this, was that you had to be at least a little bit smart to get yourself connected to it. Even if that just meant knowing that connecting to it was something that you wanted to do. That weeded out a lot of idiots who contribute low quality discussion.
Also, because there is no giant company with a financial incentive to get everybody to use it as much as possible, things were built for raw functionality rather than trying to make them easy for people to get addicted to in 30 seconds. That naturally makes them more usable for anybody with an IQ over 90.
That last bit feels amazing. The big thing that was really grossing me out about Reddit was the three particularly egregious ad types I was getting. Using the official Reddit app, it took me a while to realize how bad the ads were.
I would get ads for "He gets us", which isn't directly incompatible with me being LGBT+, but... it definitely didn't leave me with warm and fuzzy feelings.
I'd get ads for alcohol. A lot. Which is atrocious, especially since I'm almost six years sober and have made repeated mention of that in my posts. It's pretty fucked up to do that imo.
In the same vein, I was getting sketchy ads for casinos and gambling. It's something I avoid because I know I have a problem with forming unhealthy habits and gambling can be just as habit forming as alcohol. Both of those last two were starting to feel... predatory.
It didn't take long for ads to come along. Remember the 90s banners where you would punch the monkey to win $20? Or the text links that were ads? Pop ups?
Okay that's fair- I'm sure some instances will choose to advertise in some way.
TBH I'm more concerned about spam. Reddit has an army of anti-spam stuff, and that's just one site. As Lemmy grows, it will become a spam target, which will be more challenging due to its open nature (IE spammers will spin up their own instances eventually). I suspect that much like e-mail, some kind of RBL list will emerge.
I see what you're doing there, but it caused me real pain on Reddit that no one could do effect/affect or reins/reigns or populace/populous or phenomenon/phenomena or you're/your or they're/their/there or lose/loose or who/whom or counsel/council or "she and I"/"her and me" or may/might or i.e./e.g. or its/it's or lay/lie or pique/peak or pore/pour or... sorry, I'm a bit anal and a bit traumatized. Anal trauma, if you will.
Agree completely. I thinkk my reddit account is 13 years old now. I got over the new reddit UI, took me a while.
Still the main thing is, the discussions are what made reddit. Right now, everybody seems to be jumping ship to lemmy/kbin, but most of the main topics are either crapping on reddit or trying to compare reddit with lemmy/kbin, instead of letting it be it's own thing.
My main site will still be reddit, if the quality of posts starts rising without bashing reddit on every 2nd one, then I might change completely.
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
Agree on all your points! Not trying to sound arrogant here but I think content gets a lot more "bland" with more users, or at least in communities without great passion. It's much more personal here and posts generally puts interesting thoughts in my head as opposed to reddit.
I felt like Reddit was plagued by the mainstream user during the pandemic. I used to go on Reddit to lurk subs like r/Carding to understand how people(criminals?) steal credit card credentials and dump the balances.
By reading them I change the way I manage my own OPSEC. I could read just about anything there. Now it's all banned or tightly moderated. Can't say this can't say that. Hope lemmy won't be the same.
Aside of people probably being a few years older.
Less bots and astroturfing and I bet most people who moved to Lemmy are not your average mainstream user, usually more informed than average. It's easier to talk to calm people instead of the "whoosh I got you buddy" person.
With fewer user the chance to get heard and not drowned by meme and joke replies is also much higher.
But when more user join this likely changes.
Other people have made good points, but one I've noticed is that there's no advertising or profit motive (so far) and there's also no leadership that encourages dark patterns like increasing negative engagement through encouraging stuff like doomscrolling or starting or continuing arguments.
I'm on Kbin, and I like how by default all the notifications are turned off. So people aren't automatically told to respond to every little thing they participate in. If they really care, they have to manually go back on check on things they wrote about or were engaged in. Makes it less likely that people will argue endlessly, lowering the quality of posts and replies, and derailing them with long subthreads of off topic discussions or arguments.
It's likely all this will change as the user base grows. However there are some distinct advantages.
Having instances focused purely on certain topics or ethics makes it so you can join the communities that align with your ideas. while all these communities federate having a home base that aligns with your ethics is important. Also if any particular instance becomes overly trollish there is the option that your instance can defederate from them. While this is not ideal having smaller instances with a more homogeneous community means that it will be easier to lobby for things like that than a monolithic service.
people at the moment are focused on building something that is community oriented and that people will want to use. Right now we have mods, power users, tech enthusiasts, and community leaders mostly. We don't have a ton of trolls yet. This will change but I think we can adapt to it.
There is a sense of comradery. People are dusting themselves off after the collapse of a former community of bolstering each other. This will wear off. however hopefully by then the service is robust enough that people will have found their new communities and groups that they jive with.
This is kinda random but till know i always saw "camaraderie" which i guess is more of a French influence spelling, but TIL comradery also an allowed way to spell it! Also ya I agree w you PLUS there seems to be less bots than Reddit atm
Thats a big one i think. Iirc people would use an extension (or maybe a 3rd party app?) to block those users that commonly repost things and for a period of time i saw people saying their feed changed a lot on Reddit just from that. Tho Idk if thatd change much lately bc a lot of reposts I saw before coming here were from new account that were bots tryna build karma :/
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.
I noticed the same, probably because reddit has become really bad in the last years but I didn't realize it until I joined here a couple of weeks ago.
It's indeed refreshing being able to have honest discussions on a platform that's not infested by bots, propaganda, disguised ads, mass shitposting, hidden agendas, etc.
If lemmy becomes wildly popular to the masses, it's possible things will change for the worse, who knows, but I'll enjoy it a lot in the meantime.
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.
The negativity is definitely less. Sure, out of say fifty comments to a post there's maybe two disgruntled souls. Overall it's conducive to discussion.
Over on reddit I kept to just hobby subreddits for the most part to make comments. Only way to not come across the trolls.
Yes, the clean UI is wonderful. It's good to have something simple. It's also fun to watch something grow.
The hobby subreddits and the smaller subs were the only ones I was sad to see go when moving to Lemmy, I was surprised by how much I didn't miss anything else at all .
Torn between replying with "this!" as a meme about how generic responses like that are used to farm karma and making a joke about how "of course someone with only 1 reputation point would say there's no karma equivalent." Idk how reputation works and if its only internal to instances or a shared across instances. But its possible it does become a karma equivalent in the future.
Lol, I think the first one would definitely have flown over my head without explanation. Also, I don't know if it's instance specific, but I can't seem to find my reputation on my profile, neither on feddit.de/lemmy-ui or Jerboa. Where do you get that information?
Maybe it could be useful for moderators or admins to access that information? But that also poses the risk of accounts "reputation-farming" like on reddit to sell the account to some bot-farm that uses it for astro-turfing or sth similar.
There is a thing called Reputation (IIRC) tucked away in your profile. Im not sure if that's a true karma equivalent. Also not sure what you can do with it.
Genuinely felt like filler most of the times, fast food comments, an AI would've generated something better etc. Mildly amusing things get beaten to death quickly.
I think there's many contributing factors. I actually was thinking about the same thing before I found your post, and the answer that came to mind outside of some of the ones people posted here was:
It feels like a breath of fresh air because we're outside the Walled Garden. We're not trapped on a platform who's soul has been crushed and wrung for every penny's worth like Reddit or Twitter. And we can see that there is a world on the Internet besides the Walled Garden and that fact is very liberating. It makes you feel like you don't have to go back.
It was honestly depressing to click into a thread and see responses recommending some app or site or movie or whatever and always wondering, is this just astroturfing or is this a legit answer by a helpful person?
Of course it feels new, because it is new to many people. :-)
I felt like people were seeing my Reddit posts and comments, and I feel like people are here, as well. As with any commenting website or service, as the numbers of commenters grow large you need to be relatively quick to reply if you want many people to see what you write. On Reddit, obviously that means it depended what subreddit you were commenting on. And surely it will be the same or already is the same here.
The UI all depends on what client you're using. In my mind it doesn't feel like the early Internet, but that probably depends on our relative ages.
Let's enjoy it while it lasts. This feels comfortable like the internet until the late 1990s. I didn't realize I missed that. And when it starts to be exploited for profit, trolled for whatever reason people troll things, and swamped by bots, let's sneak off somewhere else they don't know about and do it again.
Early adopters are mostly tech minded people, and the whole scene is rather respectful. I'm pretty sure the dicks will come in due time. Plenty of dormant accounts (future spammers) are registered already, solid indication that we are heading that way...
The community size thing is going to be interesting as the space grows. The fact that there are functionally infinite name spaces means that "politics" doesn't just get to become the default politics discussion space for everyone wandering into the place. Lemmy.ca/c/politics can be a very different place than Lemmy.ml/c/politics, which will be very different from lemmy.world/c/politics, which will be very different again from beehaw.org/c/politics.
And you can suppose that everyone will just use the biggest one by default, but I don't think that's necessarily true. The biggest subreddit got that way predominantly because of their name, and there's a good chance that people'll see their local one first, not the biggest. Or that they'll see multiple of them, and end up engaging with multiple communities before they realize what's going on and settle on the one that suits them best.
There will always be a biggest, but there can be a larger number of smaller, lively communities because they don't need to take on names like "r/truepolitics" or "r/onguardforthee" (which is a so very discoverable and intuitive r/Canada alternative).
We'll have to see how the dynamics play out over time.
I have noticed similar things, just like you. Here are mine:
More respectful, thought-provoking commenters
Being early on a fundamentally different site is cool (federated vs centralized)
In really small sublemmies (Less than 10 posters I guess) I kinda get the small village feeling, where eventually everyone will know eachother, which is kinda wholesome.
Oh, thank you for the compliment! I don't know if they are a specific character from a series or a video game, I just took them from Pinterest. With the banner, I specifically wanted to find a wallpaper that captures a bit of retrowave internet aesthetics.
I think it's partially attributable to Lemmy phone apps haven't taken off yet. Phone posting is a different medium than desktop posting with regards to McLuhans "the medium is the message" principle. Phone usage appeals to the lowest common denominator. People use it as a time waste to mindlessly scroll. The cognitive load is much lower. Thus shitty content bubbles to the top because that's all the brain power people are giving it. Phone usage is not conducive to consuming depth of content nor contributing it.
Additionally I think the lower cognitive engagement tends to lead people into greater fuckwad behavior. You aren't on a board with human beings on the other side of a keyboard. It's just a stupid app on your phone.
I think if I'm right then in time Lemmy with death spiral not unlike reddit if phone apps mature and Lemmy apps become a mainstream daily use type of affair. I doubt that will happen without the capitalist engine driving it though.
You're also forgetting that with a centralized platform everyone is stuck under the same roof. If we do reach that level of saturation then the communities can always splinter into a different instance or group of federated instances.
The problem with reddit was once we reached the point of everyone being there and the overall quality lowering, there was no refuge for the more engaged users to congregate and reform the communities that focus on quality over quantity. You could try and flee to more niche subreddits but it's really not the same, as demonstrated by OP making this post.
And then as you pointed out, the financial incentives are very different here, which will change how users engage with the platform and how the platform evolves as a result. Centralized platforms do everything to drive engagement to increase ad impressions and potential value to ad distributors. We have an opportunity to build communities with entirely different business models where growth is not an imperative.
I don't actually think it's got much to do with having a phone app or not. I see what you are saying with the medium being the message, but I don't think the "medium" is phones or computers.
You're right about the medium being the message though, it's just that the medium is a nerdy federated social media. Right now we are in the first or second big wave of new users. Not quite the nerdiest of the nerds who would have been using Lemmy since the beginning, but we are getting the "early adopters" and the people willing to go out on a limb to try something new. These are the kinds of people who are likely to interact with a community in a positive way, because they are already investing themselves into something before it is established.
I am using a phone app to write this message right now, it was really easy and accessible for me to login and get to grips with the UI. There are loads of people just like me, in fact I would be willing to bet Lenny is being used by 80% mobile users. It's just how we communicate with the world these days. Very few people browse social medias on a computer.
I think you've already nailed my feelings on it. The vote weighting algorithm prevents points from snowballing super hard on specific posts/comments, so I think it mitigates 3 a little bit even as we grow. I don't know if we can sustain that forever though.
I like the more mature user base and lack of redditisms. Whenever I see people try to post pun comments or useless fluff they're heavily downvoted. The lack of global account karma really limits the incentive to be a clown for farming upvotes.
And on the flipside, if I post a comment people hate, it doesn't matter because the downvotes stay on that comment only. I get why karma was a thing, but it was inevitable that it would become a net negative in the end.
Points 1 through 3 are all because there aren't that many of us here.
Reddit in general used to be fun as well, many years ago. Now it's just the smaller subreddits that remain cozy.
Because everything is small and manageable for mods right now, and everyone is talking to everyone else.
Lemmy also has the advantage that the default "hot" sort favors recency instead of upvotes so that you can get into a thread pretty late and still have your comments be seen.
I've had more traction on my posts and comments in the month or so I've been on lemmy than the entire 14 years I was on reddit. I'm glad I've moved, couldn't give two shits how it does from here out, I'm away.
I think right now, there are a lot of passionate old school reddit users on lemmy who are exited about it and eager to participate and who are finding a lot of things they were missing from reddit.
The community is a lot smaller and made up largely of enthusiasts.
Definitely this, Lemmy feels like the early days of Reddit. I wasn't a super early Reddit user as I came over just before the Digg migration (and mostly used Digg prior to the migration) but 2010 Reddit felt quite different to modern Reddit. Lemmy recaptures that smaller community feel, but I am excited to see it grow.
i joined reddit in 2015 when the site was already heaving with content and users. good for killing time and consuming, but not for engaging in the community. right now lemmy/kbin is in the sweet spot where there's enough people to talk to but not so many that i can't be heard.
The smaller overall population makes a pretty big difference in the feel. I think it would be quite a long time before population comes close to corporate platforms (The Fediverse covers all styles of social media). That being the case it should feel smaller and more homey for some time.
It's possible there is some filtration of the user base since there's more involved in getting on the Fediverse. Or it could be a different kind of user attracted to it to begin with. In any case I agree there's a better class of posts here.
The lack of advertising makes a big difference in the cleanliness of the interface. That's not going to change and the design will only improve over time. This is polar opposite of corporate entities where the interface tends to get more cluttered over time with ads and feature bloat.
I was on Mastodon and Lemmy roughly a year before the Twitter and Reddit fiascos. I never was active on Twitter, never even had an account, but I’ll admit Reddit was my jam. I didn’t even use any of the 3rd party apps, I actually did use their main app and had no issues with it (except for the occasional annoying ad on my mobile device…). But when the needless greed of Spez started to show at the seams and the communities there started to divide, I took an afternoon to delete everything from nearly 4 years of posts/comments.
Both Mastodon and Lemmy were FAR less active prior to these migrations, and so I honestly checked in once every couple months. But then Mastodon started showing up in my main news feeds due to Musk’s idiocy, and I knew it was time…
Similarly, when Spez started to make the same decisions, I already knew where the party was likely to move.
I only started using Lemmy again yesterday when Memmy came out as I dislike using social media from my desktop (though I do occasionally).
It’s nice to see so much more activity here now. It’ll probably never get to the levels of Reddit, but hey that can be a good thing in its own right.
can relate to that. I feel like the people who don't have the energy to be kind definitely don't have the energy to figure out the way Lemmy works. and for the ui, it depends on what app you're using. I switched from Jeroba to Connect, and it is a lot more polished, (judging by the 2 minutes I've used it), but missing some of Jeroba's features.