My Love-Hate Relationship With Lemmy – Gavi's Blog
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https://jewy.blog/2024/03/04/my-love-hate-relationship-with-lemmy
I made a blog post discussing my biggest issues with Lemmy and why I am kind of done with it as a software.
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👏👏👏👏👏
Well said. I don't disagree with a single point you made, and some of it echos concerns I've had since day 1. And extra points for calling out .ml as lemmygrad-lite. I think I've called it exactly that as well.
The only thing I really have to add is on the topic of toxicity. Like you, I'm an instance admin and have a bird's eye view of a lot of behavior patterns. I've recently started wondering how many people are here because they're too toxic for regular social media rather than because they want to be here. I won't guess an actual number, but I would say it's not insignificant.
I'm firmly the latter case: I want to be here, I want this to succeed, and I'm trying to put in the work toward that result. And I've interacted with lots and lots of people in the same boat. But, like you, I'm also growing disillusioned for many of the same reasons.
On the bright side, I've gotten much less rusty as a developer after having to write scrips and tools to fill in the massive gaps in moderation features.
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The only thing I really have to add is on the topic of toxicity. Like you, I’m an instance admin and have a bird’s eye view of a lot of behavior patterns. I’ve recently started wondering how many people are here because they’re too toxic for regular social media rather than because they want to be here. I won’t guess an actual number, but I would say it’s not insignificant.
That's unfortunately a big issue with alternative social media platforms and without tools to combat them it goes bad really bad. I agree completely.
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Honestly coming here and starting my own instance and providing help for other instances and stuff has reignited my long lost love of computers and open source stuff. The passion for it is thankfully coming back.
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That was me with developing. I used to do it as my day job before moving to infrastructure - now all I develop at work are scripts and the occasional lookup tool.
I do kinda wish I'd chosen something other than NodeJS to be my daily driver, lol, but it does what I need well enough. Haven't really had a base it can't cover (yet?).
I once wondered aloud here about if anybody else had noticed a lot of toxic members from certain communities, only to receive replies from members in those communities claiming that it was all fine and there wasn't any toxicity. Then I'd look at their history and notice they were a very toxic person. From my limited point of view I can say there might be some credence to your statement.
I’ve recently started wondering how many people are here because they’re too toxic for regular social media rather than because they want to be here.
Dude yes, I've been thinking the same thing. I worry that users curious to leave reddit are going to go to a big instance, see concentrated worst-parts-of-reddit, and decide it's not for them.
In theory, decentralization enables freedom from the average user being forced to put up with toxicity. But we don't really have that (yet) until the ratio of jerk to non-jerk improves.
In my experience lemmy has been very wholesome compared to reddit. Even in controversial posts.
I've recently started wondering how many people are here because they're too toxic for regular social media rather than because they want to be here.
This has largely been my operating assumption as well since day one when I came over during the Reddit API lockdown. I was fairly active on a NSFW alt up until recently and I've actually seen dozens of comments from new users mentioning that the only reason they were here on Lemmy was because they were banned from Reddit and had no other viable options. They were always an asshole to the posters and the reality is that with a lower population of users is that there aren't enough other voices to drown out these people yet and you end up with a feedback loop of toxicity.
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the reality is that with a lower population of users is that there aren't enough other voices to drown out these people
Yep. That, plus the jerks are always the loudest among any crowd.
That's one of the big perks of running my own instance. It's been a site rule from the start that it's absolutely not there to be a refuge because you're banned elsewhere. And I do ban toxic accounts (local and federated) very quickly. Lol, if .ml is "Lemmygrad-lite" mine can probably be described as "Beehaw-lite".
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There are a lot of good points here, I appreciate the time you put into it.
As an end user of both Lemmy and Mastodon, it's always an eye opener to see how developers greet user requests and suggestions with curt or snarky replies. Even "Why don't you open an issue on our source tracker" will often effectively shut down suggestions from less tech savvy newcomers.
My own concerns are more on my own level, though. It resonates with me when you write —
The Fediverse has its own existing cultures that thrive here. And when you enter a space that already exists you need to be mindful of that to prevent issues from occurring.
I've seen a few user migration waves, and I think your description of (some) Lemmy users who just want a drop-in Reddit replacement is on point. Mastodon has had its share of Twitterati who surged in trying to recreate their previous circles and tone. Obviously, it's a generalisation but we do need to face the problem.
The transition from a walled garden environment like Reddit or Twitter — moderated by professionals or enthusiasts, and algorithmically curated — to a federated space with carefully cultivated etiquettes will never be like simply picking up a conversation in another UI.
I'd be interested how a project like Sublinks would/could accommodate the existing fediverse cultures, and hopefully bridge the cognitive gap that seems to exist between threadiverse and fediverse?
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Even “Why don’t you open an issue on our source tracker” will often effectively shut down suggestions from less tech savvy newcomers.
How should developers handle feature requests? Keep in mind there is a need for the whole team to see the suggestion and it's also good to have a place to gather feedback and further discuss.
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No, that's fair. I meant to illustrate that there is also a technical gap between developers and especially the general users that come on board with mass adoption.
Community managers - sometimes just talking about your issue with someone will help tremendously in figuring out how to put it and they often can just do it for you. That said, Lemmy devs do not value work being put in the issue tracker - they have admitted to not reading it. People who cannot contribute code are just entirely ignored and have no power in the project's direction.
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I suspect the small size of the dev team and the general nature of an OSS project means there aren't swarms of people around volunteering to be community managers.
Small projects your sway with the project is directly proportional to your ability to submit pull requests. It's just a sad fact that it's easier to say "I wish we had feature X" vs. "Here is a pull request that implements feature X".
At least with OSS you are getting what you paid for (nothing!), vs commercial companies where you pay for the software and they STILL ignore you.
I mean, I essentially proposed to do this myself in private conversations with Dessalines but there was no willingness for a shared roadmap so it felt pretty pointless.
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If the developers' wants and needs don't intersect with a given user, there is no way forward for that user, community manager or not.
Does anyone know of any Sublinks instances? The main page for it speaks in present tense, but I haven't found any active instances. (aside from the demo, of course)
I apologize for my stupidity:
::: spoiler this is me
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It hasnt been released yet, still working towards parity (but getting there soon)
The first instance using it will likely be sublinks.art and some other instances will be switching over from lemmy when it hits parity like programming.dev and literature.cafe
Many users on Lemmy seem actively hostile to the idea of decentralization in a way that feels self defeating. They don’t want a better alternative to Reddit, they just want Reddit 2.0 and attempts to sway them towards something better feels like pulling teeth.
Yes! I don't think it bodes well for general adoption when so much of the Lemmyverse is hosted on two essentially "Reddit 2.0" (by that I mean loosely moderated) instances. Assuming half the population of the Lemmyverse are people banned from Reddit for poor socialization, it means new users considering switching are most likely to first encounter a pure concentrated form of the worst aspects of Reddit userbase.
Beehaw is the only "general" instance I know of who's mods and admins seem to be actually up to the task of keeping their communities from becoming wholly exhausting and it's because they didn't allow themselves to balloon up beyond their ability to self-moderate.
Beehaw defederating with the biggest open signups Lemmy instance has definitely kept it a lot nicer. There isn't as much content, but it's also a lot less toxic.
Domain blocks are always publicly visible.
Mod logs are always publicly visible in the public mod log.
What? It is crucial for the users, not a bug.
Censorship and targeted sliencing of users are the source of bad moderation. To top it off, the mod can target and harrass the banned user and we wouldn't know bc of censorship if allowed.
targeted harassment
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It is about the anonymity of moderator, not about modlog
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Quit this job as moderator if you can't take it
if the social prescription to harassment of moderators is "quit because you're a baby" then you're going to have many fewer pleasant spaces on the Fediverse in which to exist—because yeah, a lot of people will just quit. i am agnostic on the public modlog overall, but this is an obvious concern with it that i'm not convinced can just be dismissed idly. i obviously have better things to do than a thankless, payless job in which harassment would be dismissed like that.
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It especially leads to harassment of vulnerable people. There's many aspects of moderation that is done here that if implemented in other fediverse software would become a vector for Kiwifarms level harassment.
Yes, very well said. I think this form of checking out is what's happening to Reddit and why moderation there is increasingly just doing the bare minimum of spam removal and letting toxic users run roughshod. Why put effort in if it's just going to cause strife?
Maybe this is the syndicalist in me talking, but I think the problem is entirely pretending that Lemmy moderators and admins are and should be expected to work for free. It's just too much work, too much daily upkeep, to reasonably expect to be handled by a volunteer labor force forever.
That's obviously a whole other drama with FOSS as a whole but there's simply a different level of labor and difficulty inherent to running a large internet community than making a program and dumping it on a download site.
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These are some really good points. I’m personally more interested in the development of PieFed than SubLinks due to the focus on making it easy to contribute, the developer cares about usability and mod tools, its in Python, and the developer posts dev blogs and answers questions on mastodon https://join.piefed.social/blog/
I'm the founder of Sublinks. I'm happy to answer questions. You can find me on Mastodon @sublinks@utter.online. You're right about the dev blog. We have a weekly Sublinks team meeting, the results of that could go into a weekly dev update. I've just been more focused on coding than community stuff. I'll do better.
I joined the listed Matrix chat for sublinks to discuss and learn more about the platform; but it seems entirely dead. Is there another reasonable platform for discussion and beta testing/installation?
It's not dead, perhaps you joined at a slow time. We were just chatting a bunch in there about cursor pagination. There are several rooms if you didn't notice. General, Frontend, API, & Federation. Along with Announcements and Support.
Well maybe I joined the wrong room; I'm still in the one above, but there are no channels and no activity. Thanks though, I'll give it another look. EDIT: Yeah, I left and rejoined and all I see going back for weeks is leave/join messages for other user, no discussion. Weird
Perhaps it's your client or the server acting funny. Here are direct links to the open rooms:
- https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks-development-api:discuss.online
- https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks-off-topic:discuss.online
- https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks-development:discuss.online
- https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks-development-federation:discuss.online
- https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks-announcements:discuss.online
- https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks-support:discuss.online
- https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks-git:discuss.online
Thank you for sharing your experiences. I feel the same way about Lemmy software, instances, and the Fediverse as a whole. Appreciate your post and efforts.
Maybe Sublinks could be(come) that new platform you guys have been searching for, re: Beehaw thinking about leaving Lemmy? 🤔
I just hope it will be compatible with the available Lemmy apps (Voyager in particular) 😓
Edit: Or PieFed I guess 😊
This blog post by a Lemmy user who accidentally uploaded his ID and dealt with the nightmare after describes in great detail the ridiculous steps instance admins need to take to remove images from the backend image server that Lemmy depends on. (as well touches upon the developer behavior aspect I will highlight later.)
You misgendered the author of that post, they use they/them pronouns.
Edit: I was mistaken about who the author of that post was.
You’re right, my mistake! I think I assumed that @theyshane was the author of the post.
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I couldn't find their pronouns listed anywhere, but it was my bad to assume regardless. Fixed it, my apologies.
I'm relieved to hear you'll still be running your instance despite these issues! Are you thinking of potentially moving the Literature Cafe forums to Sublinks?
I definitely hear you on the moderation difficulties... with the Fediverse being as far-reaching as it is, good moderation tools are essential and it seems like Lemmy simply doesn't have these available.
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Yes! This blog post is fantastic. I read your article through this archive link (since my phone is being finicky with the direct site) and loved it and I'm glad you wrote it!
You totally nailed it on every point and voiced a lot of things I've noticed and concerns I've had.
On the topic of non-anonymous reports: I've definitely already found myself hesitating or declining to make reports I feel should be made purely because they're not anonymous. Sometimes because the people I want to report are admins. I've already had weird situations of people following me around to other posts because they disagree with me and I don't want to add to that type of thing. Although I can understand that there are some potential upsides to being able to tell who is making reports, like to prevent misuse or spam... I dunno.
Thanks a lot for sharing it with us here! and thank you for the warning at the top about mentioning CSAM - and for calling it CSAM and not the other, worse, seemingly more prevelent term. I appreciate it and I appreciate you! :)
On the topic of non-anonymous reports: I’ve definitely already found myself hesitating or declining to make reports I feel should be made purely because they’re not anonymous. Sometimes because the people I want to report are admins.
My instance had a similar situation where a user on a large instance (not beehaw) was reported, and the reports only encouraged the person, who posted the reports publicly and called upon others to join. The admins were slow to deliberate, ultimately took no action, and although I think they mean well, do not strike me as up to the task of running a large social media platform.
Requiring individual users to block the largest instances (and their communities) in order to peacefully use a platform is just Reddit with extra steps. Without decentralization we just have, as the author put it, Reddit 2.0.
Very interesting post, very long but also interesting. I also agree with most of the points.
But I wonder why there is no mention of /kbin which has been a compatible alternative to Lemmy even during the Reddit exodus. It's also written in PHP which many people should have a much easier time to contribute to than Lemmy's Rust.
I've heard Kbin has been having major issues lately, the single dev is not the most active. There is a fork called mbin which seems promising.
They are different from Lemmy, though, and not for everyone. But variety is good.
The link offers a download instead of serving an HTML? I'm on mobile Firefox (I doubt it matters).
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It might be an issue with the activitypub plugin, https://jewy.blog/b/1T try this shortlink version instead
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I'm still having the same issue with that link, as well, for whatever reason. If I go to jewy.blog, I see a regular webpage that shows properly and lists a link with the same title. When I click that link, it gives me the same .bin file. I'm on Android and tried Chrome, Firefox, and Firefox Focus.
*Editing to add that I tried viewing it through archive.org and it shows up properly that way. Weird!
Here is the link for anyone who may want it: https://web.archive.org/web/20240305150657/https://jewy.blog/2024/03/04/my-love-hate-relationship-with-lemmy/
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If by any chance there's any other information I can give you about my setup that may help you, or anything you'd like me to try or test, please feel free to let me know and I'd be happy to! :)
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I deleted the activitypub plugin because of how wonky it is, try again and let me know if you have any issue now
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Same here. Firefox offers a download of the .bin file, Chrome just displays a page with the code that I'm guessing is in the file. I'm glad it wasn't just me!
Many users on Lemmy seem actively hostile to the idea of decentralization in a way that feels self defeating. They don’t want a better alternative to Reddit, they just want Reddit 2.0 and attempts to sway them towards something better feels like pulling teeth.
I keep seeing this, and I don't really understand. Lemmy is a link aggregator that allows users to organize those links into categories/communities/etc, and lets people comment on the links and have discussions about them. From an end-user perspective, that's exactly what Reddit is. So I'm genuinely curious what's meant when people say they don't want Reddit 2.0 from a technical perspective. From a social perspective, the toxicity, brigading, shitposting, etc are definitely not desirable. But with shit moderation tools, those sort of things don't get sorted, and federation just magnifies all of those problems. Though I think disabling voting definitely helps discourage shitposting and low-effort responses.
But I genuinely do think a lot of problems really come down to the fundamentals of federation. And given how many downsides there are to it, I'm not convinced it's actually a benefit at all.
Do you mean disabling downvotes? That’s how it is on Blahaj. It definitely makes a difference to the amount of toxicity I think.
On Blahaj reports are the only way to express disapproval of content. So you could for example spread fascist dogwhistles about not liking politics, and if Ada doesn't understand the dogwhistle then your content doesn't get removed. That gives cryptofascists free reign
I've seen quotes directly lifted from fascist works upvoted by hundreds on Beehaw. The problem with only-positive user feedback is that as long as it seems like a positive statement that others support people will often grant it further support without thinking about what is actually being said.
Or at least that's what I hope was happening.
Would that actually violate the guidelines? This was around all the time of the defederation drama, so ages ago in internet time, and I recall looking at the guidelines and thinking "Well this isn't a bad faith argument, and it's not technically hateful unless you know where it leads."
Nah, there doesn't seem to be a problem simply writing nasty comments. Personally I'd prefer getting downvoted to hell than a 'pile-on' in the comments spewing bile.
Why a new software though? Why not fork lemmy? Might as well call it Kilmister too. I just don't see why reinvent the wheel, especially since the issue is that of management and not technical.
The codebase is remarkably not fun to work with according to everyone I've talked to. The language (rust) is also not common for web services so many have no experience with it. These things made people want to start from scratch.
@nutomic@lemmy.ml3•
I was a Java developer before starting to contribute to Lemmy. Didnt know anything about Rust, just wrote code and resolved compiler errors until things worked. Rust is definitely not as hard to learn as some people think.
Anyone who has worked in SE knows how massive of a red flag this is. Nutomic aint wrong on principle. But aint he massively wrong at the same time.
Kotlin is a replacement for Java. But boy oh boy are they different languages allowing different things in the same VM.
I don’t understand what’s happening in the chat, and people are super salty and not open to discussions so I see what you mean.
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I migrated over to writefreely, here's the new link. https://my.jewy.blog/my-love-hate-relationship-with-lemmy
This is the first time I heard of Sublinks, and honestly after a quick look through here in Lemmy I get the impression that main devs of Lemmy and Sublinks can work together to improve what it is currently the best option (Lemmy).
I honestly think it is way too early to have a Lemmy "replacement" even if it is all running in the Fediverse, I just think it is a split of efforts, granted, I don't know all the background that runs behind and it seems like Sublinks dev does it like a hobby too.
Regarding moving communities to Sublinks, yeah, it is up to instance maintainers, but that is a no for me, heck, I already had to recreate my stuff from the dead FMHY account I had (there was no account migration at the time), it seems like adding more decentralization to me, and we already had that with multiple repeated communities ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Finally, don't get me wrong, options and alternatives are always welcome in my book, but as I said before, it feels like way too early for me.
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The thing is, sublinks lead developer tried to work with development team of lemmy. It was like pulling teeth constantly and his experience was overall negative.
This is completely false. jgrim has never opened up a single issue or PR in lemmy, and we certainly wouldn't refuse any of either. These things are easily verifiable by anyone who wants to look, its all out in the open.