I imagine there's excitement for the increase of activity but worries about the potential toxic side of Reddit coming along too.
I'd especially be interested in the Lemmy devs' opinions.
I'm actually quite pleased at the new influx of users! There's finally a good amount of activity and real discussion going on here, instead of just posts with links to articles with zero comments and no real OC.
Aside from that, I have enough faith in the moderators and the structure of the platform itself that there shouldn't be too much of a toxicity problem. Honestly, my own biggest fear is just that a lot of the new users here lose interest and move on, returning the platform to its earlier days.
For now, I just hope that the servers don't go down in flames when the 12th comes around. I can't wait to see how this platform will look further down the road though!
I literally just signed up and this is the first comment I've read. I feared we might be seen as outsiders so thanks. I've been banned from Reddit for quite some time but lurked on RIF. Hopefully Lemmy can scale in time.
I hope you enjoy your stay here! And if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. We'll be more than happy to help.
I have enough faith in the moderators and the structure of the platform itself that there shouldn’t be too much of a toxicity problem.
My concern: Are there enough moderators for the deluge coming?
Maybe, maybe not, but the instances have the option of closing registrations for a bit if they get overwhelmed and need to regroup. This is why it's nice to see lots of other instances popping up across the fediverse
Maybe I'm missing something but how will that help the moderation, since users can visit/comment from any instance?
Yep - but each user needs to be approved by an admin. So if things started getting rowdy I'm sure admins would close things on the bigger instances to focus more on modding, and de-fed rowdy instances that can't keep up at least temporarily.
Maybe not for the initial deluge, but with sustained growth the number of mods will grow too
I'm in Lemmy for, like, two years? Mostly lurking. I've been looking for alternatives for longer than that though.
I feel like the monsoon is mostly welcome. Content quality may decrease a bit, but the quantity will make up for it. And quantity is what has been missing IMO.
In special I'm hoping for specialised instances about some subjects that I enjoy. I like the Lemmy instance but stuff like anime and conlanging "feels" off-topic here.
In special I’m hoping for specialised instances about some subjects that I enjoy. I like the Lemmy instance but stuff like anime and conlanging “feels” off-topic here.
Do you mean for subscribing to the communities of these new instances, or would you completely switch to that instance (create a new account there)?
I've noticed some lags/asyncronity with non-home instance content. I guess it would make sense to be home wherever is the most and best fitting communities. But that would also mean leaving behind the stuff of the current account.
I'd be using those instances alongside lemmy.ml. I want to talk about anime, but I don't want to just talk about anime; and here I get some nice tech-related content.
Hear hear!
I expect to be some bumps on the road, but the Lemmyverse was really quiet until recently. Now it's gaining so much life and shaping into an active and pleasant platform :3
Quantity has a quality all its own. I'm glad everyone here is so welcoming and looking forward to seeing how things develop.
Just to note, I just came from Reddit. I'm hoping for a critical mass of folks so we get those niche and specialty communities.
Yup. I got a few of them, although they're mostly too incomplete to use for conversation. Most of them for a constructed world.
In special I feel like I should be able to help newbies with phonetics and phonology. Not just "how to read the IPA", but also stuff like "how to choose phonemes and allophones that fit the goal of your conlang".
Let me clean my backlog of unfinished projects (now less with reddit API soon to be dead), learn rust and kotlin to start helping :)
I'm an ex Reddit user. It seems inevitable that the Reddit admins will lock out third party access - I could be wrong but based on recent years, Reddit doesn't like to listen to it's community.
I hope that the toxicity stays away, but it's likely there will be toxic users at some point. My main gripe with Reddit was the lack of actual reading. Most mainstream subs were just memes / circlejerks / pics. I'd much prefer to learn something or read something of value over "lol-ing" at a pic.
I'm keen to see how Lemmy grows.
Wanting to learn something hits the nail on the head. I recently came to the realization that I used to learn things on reddit, especially in the comments. Not sure when that stopped but it's why I had been wishing for an alternative for a while.
I still learn things there. I keep my subscriptions pretty clean and tailored to really interesting things, but have a mulrireddit called "fun" where I can browser brainlessly and have a laugh.
Yes, toxicity will inevitably appear more (it was already present in small amounts 🙃) but I'm hopeful the lack of a karma system may help to mitigate some of Reddit's typical "bad behavior".
Honestly, while most people here have been alright, toxic newcomers have been a problem and I consider this place ill-prepared to handle them in a bigger wave than this one.
There has already been an observable culture shift, and some nasty screaming when some newcomers used to being a majority are challenged in their views and shocked to find a nontrivial pushback. And I feel that lemmy.ml will undergo a similar event to /r/antiwork if there isn't staff action taken , where the place loses all its values and just becomes a sanewashed recuperated place that feels cheated when its founders keep saying what they said from the start. People largely just don't read rules or sidebars, it seems, and realize lemmy.ml explicitly says it isn't a general unthemed instance for everyone. It's broad, but not 'reddit' broad, nor (pretending to be) politically neutral. Relevant source
Edit: I realize this may come off as "why aren't other people doing more things!". I realize the staff/devs are overloaded, I'm not blaming them to telling them to drop things. But I regret how few moderating/admin staff were recruited, and we're seeing how many communities were made 4 years ago and have no active moderation, nor culture to avoid this becoming 'reddit but here'.
I don't know how to interpret "everyone should feel welcome here" other than it is for everyone. As far as culture shift, it really is impossible to maintain the more "fringe" leftist culture with an increase in users, marxist-leninist simply do not exist in large enough numbers. I don't really see why lemmy.ml shifting its majority political leaning would be something negative to you, since the only thing that would happen would be more discussion in the comments, and if discussion isn't something desirable, places like lemmygrad do exist
I'm not even talking about the M-Ls, I mean even as broad as anti-capitalism and tech/FOSS. There was a meta discussion a while back I started seeking clarification on what "leftist" in the lemmy.ml blurb means, suggesting something less vague. Because to the devs, it evidently doesn't mean 'progressive capitalists'.
This isn't just some preference, because these factors are precisely why Lemmy won't become another reddit disaster. And no, they're not niche groups. Even on reddit, these communities are substantial!
No, not you, you're fine. This main person I had in mind was an active (self-admitted) troll who was literally incapable of discussion.
Been here patiently waiting for quite a while... this is what i've been waiting for, for reddit to finally fuckup bad enough that people move over.
Reddit trying to go the slow route, removing one thing at a time, will make it easier for lemmy to scale and grow to accept all the users.
If they did API, old.reddit, and nsfw all at the same time it would be absolutely impossible to accommodate.
The API shenanigans (more like the IPO generally) finally gave me the nudge I was waiting for to actually give Lemmy a try after meaning to get around to it for a while. I have no fucking idea what I'm doing, but I'm glad I'm doing it somewhere new!
Well:
Hopefully it's moderated much less. Don't see how it wouldn't be since it would probably take more effort. The excessive, special interest driven moderation is what really killed reddit long before this api issue.
I agree. "Powermods" became a thing 10 years ago and it's been terrible for the site. Advertising companies pay teams of people to ensure subreddits remain advertiser friendly, and friendly to their portfolio of products. Reddit tolerates this because those moderators are free labour, keep the site clean, and post lots of "content." I'm hopeful that, if Lemmy takes off, federation will allow us to wall off obvious cases of abuse without administrators stepping in, as they have done again, and again, and again on Reddit.
Admins also strong armed mods/subs to enforce community guidelines and TOS that was clearly agenda driven
just to emphasize your point there about calling people refugees. I always lurked reddit to the point of using libreddit only lately, and never felt the drive to contribute
with reddit's shenanigans, I found out about this place in one of the posts asking for alternatives and it's a whole different atmosphere and I feel more comfortable not lurking anymore
all this to say that I am here because of reddit's actions, but I'm not a refugee
I'm new here from Reddit. I was a former Digg user. Over the past few years, Reddit has gotten swamped with spam and low quality content. I was most at home there on the niche subreddits that were still earnest and not spammy. I hope things stay that way over here.
I've made a small donation to help Lemmy grow. It's not much, but scaling up to handle the escapees is a big deal. Having the money to grow and build robust processes to keep content thoughtful and helpful is important. While I love the funny posts and memes sometimes on reddit, it's really infested the popular subreddits to the point of being excessive. Ergo, I tend to hang out in smaller spaces where the dialog is more "straight up".
I went here because I could do a one time donation. I plan to see how things go and eventually set up a recurring one though.
https://opencollective.com/lemmy
I found it on the main lemmy page where you sign up for a server. It probably needs to be posted in more places, like on the communities pages. (there's a patreon site too where you can donate)
On liberapay you can also donate any custom amount just once. It will simply calculate it as "$x/week", iirc.
Check near the bottom of https://join-lemmy.org/
There you can see the different options to support Lemmy.
Here is their donation page with all three currently supported options.
I don't know much about Open Collective, but LiberaPay does not take a cut (only the fees of the payment processors) so I would discourage you to choose Patreon.
Edit: Actually there are more options listed since you can also donate crypto.
I'm one of the new ones, but I've been aware of and interacted with Lemmy and Mastodon for at least a couple of years.
For me, I liked what I saw but felt like they lacked enough of the network effect to convince my nontechnical friends to make the jump with me. That made me concerned that they would shrivel up and die. I'd recently been interacting a bit more though, Mastodon especially, since I'd say its gained a good amount of traction given Twitter's...cancerous CEO. Every couple months I found myself downloading Tusky and Jerboa to mess around, but hadn't made it a habit.
Reddit's API changes were a line in the sand for me though. I decided I didn't care about my friends following anymore, and I was ready for a smaller community again, with less rage bait and predatory capitalism.
Does that make me the wrong sort of refugee?
I’m on the same boat as you. Especially being ready for a smaller community. Things will definitely be different but there might be a silver lining to how this all plays out.
I am also very similar to you. I just got my first lemmy instance running. I love the idea that I could have a reddit like tool that I can host myself and control. But I need active community and subs that I'm interested in.
I think the conventional way this is handled on Reddit is separating memes and fluff into one one community (subreddit) and more discussion based content into another community. It works on Reddit because even if the memes get more engagement in an absolute sense, each subreddit has it's own yard stick for what is doing well, so a discussion that makes it to the front page of its own subreddit will make it through to the front page of users who are subscribed, alongside the memes. I don't yet know enough about how Lemmy ranks posts to know if this will work, but hopefully it will.
This is what I am hoping will happen. With the current reddit structure, for each topic, you have multiple communities -
/r/gaming is garbage, /r/games is for discussion. /r/StardustCrusaders is a fan-art dump, /r/Shitpostcrusaders is a meme juggernaut The mods of the Game of Thrones subreddit wouldn't allow people to shit on the show, so /r/freefolk was formed, and that also served as a template for stuff like /r/titanfolk.
Anything that gains critical mass will break down into multiple sub communities. It's inevitable.
I like this model, although circlejerk can be the meme version too. Even a fairly quiet sub like /r/baduk/ begat /r/badukshitposting/ and it works well.
Can give you some examples? That is definitely not my experience, the few subreddits I visit often only have memes every once and while and they often get removed quickly by the mods redirecting them to dedicated meme subreddits.
Sure, when it's r/all by top. But a massive part of it is subreddits, which then constitute the front page. The majority of my Reddit front page isn't memes, because my main subscriptions are things like acting, patientgamers, askhistorians, piano, etc. Which don't have many, if any, memes posted.
Yeah I totally agree with that! I think it's a basic side effect of the way the voting algorithm works - namely that early votes count for a hell of a lot, and so memes/pictures get those early votes much earlier than discussion posts do - because it's much quicker to look at a picture, than it is to read a long text post.
So the good thing about smaller (especially smaller and well-moderated) communities, is that there's enough space for text posts to breathe, without competing with memes for vote ascension space. But that doesn't erase the problem of meme/image supremacy in r/all and r/popular.
This is where the duplicated communities in lemmy's federation works for you. As the big instances get flooded with content that is low quality but highly upvoted (as happens in big subreddits), you can also subscribe to communities about the same topic from smaller instances.
I think the nature of the fediverse ends up serving as a barrier to entry to the "average" social media user. This is probably why Mastodon hasn't replaced Twitter despite all the dumb things that they have done with the site. As much as people dislike the idea of gatekeeping, I think a moderate amount is necessary to prevent a lot of low effort content that gets promoted on other platforms.
As someone who has been on Reddit for the past 10 years or so, I noticed a dip in quality of r/all and a change in the community when new Reddit came out. Probably because the UI of new Reddit seemed to be geared toward a "feed" style of content consumption, similar to FB or Twitter, so people from those platforms started joining in large numbers and changing the culture. It seems like the recent migration/exodus from Reddit comes mainly from old.reddit users who value discussion and the "forum" style more (new.reddit users probably don't care about 3rd party apps since they just use the official app anyway), so hopefully the quality of content and discussions doesn't suffer too much.
I hope the reddit echo box 'our way or the highway', 'everything is a pun' mentality doesn't transfer over as well
When someone shares a personal story about his wife's struggle with cancer and the top reply is "I also choose this guy's dead wife"
To each his own I guess. To me it's too much of the same regurgitated over and over again like a meme that stopped being funny years ago
Yeah, when a simple bots can post most of the replies. E.g. if post.contains("r/theydidthemath") { post.reply("/r/theydidthemonstermath"); } then it's gone too far. There are some good, creative ones, like The Old Reddit Switch-a-roo, but they're too few and far between.
I imagine a non-zero number of walled off instances forming cause "they banned me for _____"
It's good. This place was pretty much a ghost town a few months ago with only a few users posting.
It's fricking amazing. There is regular conversation and places that have been dead for years are reviving themselves.
I'm just happy to see more users and more activity. I admin an instance, so I'm not too worried about toxicty, as I can dump any regular sources of trouble
I'm excited to see new communities, more communities, more participation. I'm dreading the inevitable periodic and maybe frequent drops of servers as they struggle to cope with the influx and admins learn how to scale.
EDIT: oh shit, my eyes just skipped right over the whole of "before" in the title
I joined the Beehaw instance a bit ago with a small exodus from Tildes, another Reddit alternative. It's been nice to see the community grow and grow steadily as time progressed, and seeing the Reddit refugees makes me hopeful for the platform's strength going into the future regardless of what Reddit does with its API (or other features).
As for the toxic side of Reddit, I'm more concerned for the devs in having to deal with the reports, but as a Reddit mod myself, I don't think it'll be too bad. At least on Beehaw we have a supportive community and I'm reminded of a video talking about the userbase of the early UseNet and how they dealt with the first spammer (not necessarily their methods, but the fact that they rose up as a community to enforce a community rule). Hopefully we can see that here (i.e. "the report button exists").
Edit: a detail
a small exodus from Tildes
I've seen Tildes being proposed as a Reddit alternative along Lemmy, what was the exodus about?
From what I remember, it had to do with the moderating decisions of the person behind Tildes.
I’m also wondering about this. I remember seeing Tildes promoted a few months ago but haven’t seen any mentions of it recently.
I'm a long time (mostly lurker) user on Tildes and I'm wondering this too. I just did a quick search over there and I don't see any mention of it, so it doesn't seem like the exodus was publicly advertised at first glance.
I'm a new user here and saw the influx of Digg users on Reddit. It did change the site and we got a mix of more less-thoughtful discussion but also a lot more content which was funny and interesting. I'm thinking Reddit might not survive this as a global forum, following in the footsteps of Digg
I've been thinking about the issue of less-thoughtful discussions from large numbers of users. I think the phenomenon is inevitable. I also think community topics being duplicated across the federation will help with this.
Let's take technology for example. So !technology@lemmy.ml might end up as the most reddit-front-page feeling, with !technology@lemmy.ml a little less comment-memey, then smaller instances having progressively smaller communities that better reflect the focus of the instance's overall slant.
The best analogy for communities and instances might be newspapers or TV channels. You're going to get a sports section on CBS, NBC, WaPo, whatever. They will largely publish the same stories, but with very slightly different feels. As you get into smaller publications, like say the regional publication from your state's sportshub city, they will tailor to the interests of that particular area.
As users, we not only get to choose how broad the interests of the communities we subscribe to but we also get to subscribe to communities that are redundant (for lack of better word) so that we can stay in touch with very broad looks across an interest while having more focused and perhaps higher-quality discussions at the same time.
I want more people.to.use federated social media. Lemmy and kbin are among the best federated social media they just need more users and content.