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?
Sunk Cost Fallacy
100%. That’s why it took me until the end of June to join Lemmy even though the blackout was on June 12th.
And I was already hating Reddit before the blackout. But FOMO made me stay and I feel bad about it.
Also; tribalism.
I completely forgot about this term. Sums up everything
we are like their penal colony in revolt, maybe
As someone who used to be vehemently anti-lemmy, it’s a few different reasons.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Star Trek.
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.
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I mean, read the post? They explain themselves pretty well there. Or are you linking it with hopes we’ll brigade or something?
Lemmy hate comes down to two or three things: they don’t like communists, or they’re confused by it. Or they’re waiting for it to be bigger.
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
We are having a great time over here in the Fediverse, and they are jealous. So we will continue to have a blast, just to piss them off.
Number 1 comment is
Reddit ain’t going anywhere fast.
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.
The irony of a self hosted community refusing to self host…
Honestly back during the API fiasco I was honestly expecting the mods their to make their own instance together. The fact they didn’t blew me away
We aren’t Russian bots?
Devs are allegedly Marxist-Leninists.
Redditors dont understand that devs dont exactly have full control of open source software, that different instances are not operated by the devs.
Edit: Lemmy devs to be specific
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.
Calling them “socialist digital creators” is misleading at best, if not an outright insult to socialism.
They are marxists-leninists who whitewash the crimes committed by the USSR and CCP. They support the genocidal invasion by Russia, a country that is neither socialist or democratic; it’s an authoritarian capitalist oligarchy.
There is no double standard. You don’t see the CTO of reddit running a subreddit dedicated to whitewashing the Pinochet regime and/or western colonialism in Africa or Asia.
Reddit is run by sketchy and corrupt individuals, it is possible that in a just world we would even call them criminals. Lemmy’s marxists-leninists are openly supportive of genocidal actions and brutal authoritarian leadership. There is no comparison.
Could provide a link to a comment or a quote where the devs whitewash the crimes or support genocides?
My man, the head developer of lemmy is the admin of lemmygrad. He has a fucking Mao picture in his profile!
Don’t even try to weasel your way around this. This is not going to work with me.
I hate these people. Pathetic larpers living in democratic countries while supporting authoritarianism and genocide. And when I say hate, I don’t mean it in the internet slang way (“hater”).
How should I put this without breaking any rules? I genuinely wish they meet the same fate as “Donbas Cowboy”, Russell Bentley:
Bentley, 64, was a fixture in the low-level Russian incursion in Ukraine dating back to 2014. Calling himself the Donbas Cowboy, Bentley became a popular figure on Russian propaganda networks for his criticism of the U.S. government.
Bentley’s wife, Lyudmila, then claimed that Russian soldiers from a tank battalion abducted him.
According to the Investigative Committee, Vansyatsky, Agaltsev, and Iordanov tortured Bentley on April 8, and he died shortly afterward.
Vansyatsky and Agaltsev are suspected of blowing up a car with Bentley’s body in it and ordering Bazhin to get rid of what was left of his remains.
My man, the head developer of lemmy is the admin of lemmygrad
No, he is not. Check admins section on lemmygrad.ml, which profile do you think belongs to dessalines? He is only admin of lemmy.ml.
He has a fucking Mao picture in his profile!
It’s a controversial figure, but it doesn’t mean that the dev supports crimes or genocides.
How should I put this without breaking any rules? …
You judge people who support genocide, I get it and I here with you. But wishing death upon others because of their opinions? That’s just hypocrisy.
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.
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.
Threadiverse
Fediverse
Threadiverse refers specifically to the subset of the Fediverse with threaded conversations, like Lemmy and Mbin.
Sounds too much like Threads, the invasive corporate thing which can get fucked. Never going to market for them.
Likewise the heroic nerds of the Threadiverse coined the term months before Threads was even announced, and they would be hard pressed to give it up to some scumbag billionaire.
It’s an epic culture war being fought between two largerly agreeing parties.
that is a personal problem, not a general protocol based one.
It is a marketing problem.
i agree. bending over for people butthurt about meta seems like a great way to limit your market artificially.
then again, i named my public instance moist
don’t let them change the meaning of our words then
In contrast to reddit, whos leadership never made any controversial decisions. /s
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.
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.
Just gonna put this out there. The devs push their stance plenty. Within their scope to do it from their echo chamber. Other than stopping development there’s little they could currently do to impact growth in any way. And there have been issues with their development focus that have negatively impacted growth. Recalcitrance to focus much on moderation tools for instance. As well as at least reported issues difficulty contributing to the project by others. Though that at least is hearsay.
I think it helps to think of it this way: WE are using THEIR platform.
They don’t need mod tools that work for communities and users located on a different instance as much as say Lemmy.World since the devs/admins simply use the instance-wide ban hammer for their own space. Hence that is not their focus. You can go to the trouble to learn Rust, and then fight with them to get your modifications accepted or…
Actually, I need to modify my statement above: YOU are using THEIR platform, but for those of us on Mbin, PieFed (which I’m on right now, and two new instances just opened up including one now in the USA), and soon Sublinks will come too (January was at some point a target iirc?), we have already moved on. None have reached feature parity yet tbh, though even so there are a lot of features that exist that Lemmy itself lacks, so there’s that, and being written in common languages should help enormously with them catching up.
So whether these are “as good as Reddit”, well, beauty is in the mind of the beholder. It’s not a clear win either way, but they are getting closer to being comparable.
soon Sublinks will come too (January was at some point a target iirc?)
I wouldn’t hold my breath. I keep an eye on the project Matrix, it’s pretty quiet.
Piefed is much more promising.
Thanks for the additional insight:-).
The PieFed devs indeed seem very responsive, and I have great hopes for it too.
Though I don’t know if e.g. Lemmy.World would consider switching to use it as they were hoping to do with Sublinks. For it providing a “social media platform” it is coming along nicely even if currently lacking polish, though from the perspective of migration of existing content into… well perhaps that’s doable as well but I definitely know far less about that:-).
Evan Prodromou and the Social Web Working Group (SocialWG) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are the creators of ActivityPub
Not desalines or any ML controlled group. All they did was create a Reddit like interface to the platform. After being driven from Reddit for their intolerance.
I sometimes post from Mastodon to servers running this and other software. In fact the reason I’m on world. Is specifically due to its relation to mastodon.social. one of the bigger Mastodon instances I use. It’s got nothing to do with a software. If Rud and the other admins decided tomorrow to migrate the database to a different backend. I don’t think there would be much outrage or many people would care. In fact I’m certainly probably will in the future. As soon as a back end is available that provides significantly better Community / magazine moderating tools. Since I will significantly whiten the load on server administrators. Since things can be done at the community level instead of at the server all the time.
You can go to the trouble to learn Rust, and then fight with them to get your modifications accepted or…
Can you actually point to any instances of the devs dragging their feet on accepting changes or is this just conjecture? I’ve contributed to Lemmy, and plan to do so in future, and my experience is that they’re fairly accepting of changes.
The instance I first chose straight up disappeared, so yeah. It wasn’t an easy migration.
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.
No idea, quit Reddit over a year ago for fedia/lemmy. Never used x/twitter either, i use mastodon.
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’.
And the default sort, kinda hard to dodge
That’s also reddit tho…
Yeah whatever, that’s a feature. Reddit became worse once it became a safe place for conservatives and center-right liberals to gather.
Conservative, TheDonald, KiA, red pill, et. all made Reddit worse.
I don’t want a second Reddit. Can better avoid eternal September issues if they self select to fuck off
But I guess that’s what .world is for.
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
I don’t quite understand your point. Do you maybe have some examples to understand better?
I actually blocked most of those groups but one was some climate community on another instance. There was a post where someone asked what they could do personally to help prevent climate change, and it was full of political theory as a response.
Someone said they actively boycott Starbucks because the CEO flies a jet in order to commute to Seattle to California, and if the government won’t do anything they felt like the least they can do is just commit to never giving them and their lobbyists a single penny ever again.
And they were downvoted to like -20 and had a dozen people attacking them over shifting the blame from the corporations to the working class by framing it in such a way that the working class should have any responsibility for the actions of the corporation. It was like watching a bunch of picketers calling someone a scab.
And I’m just reading it like “what the fuck guys, you’re sitting around discussing political strategies that have so far done absolutely nothing, they’re doing something, they have a point, the lobbyists make the laws, so defunding the lobbyists does make a lot of sense. He’s flying in a jet to work because people give him money, helllLLLOOOooo.”
Someone even went so far as to argue that a lot of people need to go to Starbucks because they might need a quiet space to study or hang out, so I jumped in pointing out that most municipalities have a library at the minimum, and people were fine before coffee shops were everywhere, and I got downvoted and jumped on by half a dozen people for not understanding the plight of others.
Homeless people need somewhere to go, so I’m an asshole for suggesting that other people could go to Starbucks less? Beats the hell out of me
In some climate forum, for no reason other than to win a stupid internet argument over the responsibility of emissions, everyone began defending the necessity of Starbucks of all things. Seriously. And at the same time, consumers shouldn’t have to endure hardships for the climate because they should instead focus on affecting policy, in order for places like Starbucks to change, because they’re fucking horrible. In my mind I was just like “well are corporations good or bad, or at the moment are they just convenient as both in order to use that person as a punching bag?” but noped right out.
It was basically a rat’s nest of tangled up incongruent statements that all led back to ‘fuck that person for saying they make a very small effort to do something towards a corporation as opposed to attempting to reshape politics’
So yeah, shit like that.
Maybe a simple “while I disagree with A due to B, it does have some merit because of C. But in my opinion I think D is more effective, and if you’d like to learn more about D, here are some resources! :)”
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.
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.
I saw that on ML you might get banned for stuff like calling Xi Jinping a Winnie. But not for an opinion. Especially about Russia.
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 left reddit after a cyberbully situation because I defended a nonbinary person in a post in the sega dreamcast subreddit.
Gender is not inherently sexual, you’re the one making this weird.
@ayyy Need to look up the term gender dysphoria in the DSM. Stop mutilating children so that they have no reproductive potential as adults.
What the fuck are you even talking about
Interesting choice of words…
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.
Hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml are instances I’ve blocked altogether.
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)
