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?
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.
- […] certain communities that were supportive of Lemmy suddenly got locked behind a NSFW curtain […]
You got that wrong. That was a measure taken by these communities to demonetize reddit. Reddit doesn’t put ads on NSFW subs. Any profile that posts on an NSFW sub also gets their profile switched to NSFW afaik. Moderators got banned for these NSFW tags.
r/PixelDungeon is the only sub that I’m aware of that completely moved to lemmy. Withe the main mod and developer of the most popular fork moving to lemmy. The sub is still open, but it has a “bookmark” called “Lemmy” and a “link” called “Lemmy Community” that directly links to the lemmy community. The sub is still open and automod responded to any new post that the sub moved to lemmy … at least for a year or so, it doesn’t post that any more.
And there are some obvious down sides. To my knowledge lemmy has not implemented flairs or post tags, which get used excessively by some communities to categories and sort their content. !pixeldungeon@lemmy.world fell back to putting text tags into titles like “[DEV]” and “[OC]” and then use the search for this. But that is merely a work around. The sidebar links to these searches, but since instance-relative links are not a thing they are fixed links to lemmy.world.
The search itself is still inconvenient, because you can just “search this community”. You always have to explicitly select a community to search it and have to enter the search term before selecting the community. Edit: that’s of course only true for the front-end (lemmy-ui) I use, dunno if all have that issue
I doubt regular end users will ever get warm with distributed federative networks. A lot of people already seem struggle with email. All tend to flock to a few big instances. For lemmy you also need some basic awareness of these systems. You can’t find everything and to expect that will always go wrong since you only search what your instance knows and never for everything. There are great projects like lemmyverse, but you need to know about them. People who don’t know about them will either just not find the communities they are looking for or they’ll start duplicate communities. The problem of not finding something is smaller on big instances but also more fatal, because their duplicate communities will displace the ones that were started on smaller instances but did not federate well yet.
And everything, the development and hosting, is solely carried on the shoulders of a few volunteers. That will always result in instances popping up and disappearing over time, with development speed varying depending on interest and free time the developers have.
The biggest selling point is not to replace reddit but to be connected with the rest of the activitypub fediverse. That you can see peertube channels as communities here. That mastodon users can comment on lemmy posts eggcetera
No, I do not have it wrong.
There was a protest to mark things NSFW, correct, but what I’m talking about was something else. Kbin and Lemmy communities were marked in such a way that it was impossible to look at unless logged in. While logged in it wasn’t marked as NSFW. It also wasn’t a choice of the subreddit moderators. They were blocked by reddit admin themselves to force people to be logged in to see information on how to transfer to Lemmy.
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Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views.
I mean that’s basically the crux of it. That, and some moderation drama, and the software being very buggy a year ago giving people a bad first impression, and Lemmy still being susceptible to spam.
It’ll take some time before Lemmy (and the Threadiverse as a whole) improves its reputation and moves on from the “it’s a tankie website” take. That said, a lot of people in that thread are making the case for Lemmy, so it’s mostly just people worried it’s not as popular.
I definitely avoided Lemmy the first go-round with the API fuckery because it seemed from the outside like basically just a tankie protest Reddit in a similar way to how Voat was just a neo-Nazi protest Reddit. To the Lemmy devs’ absolute credit, they don’t push new users toward any of those, though.
I thought one day after having had a Mastodon for some time that I might not have given Lemmy a fair shake, so I went back and ended up finding that most instances are basically normal Reddit fare but honestly less shitty than Reddit proper (there’s a trade-off that posts are less frequent and that small, niche communities can attract unwanted attention by having their posts almost immediately show up in ‘all’).
Yup, things have definitely improved, especially with more extremist instances like lemmygrad being defederated and phased out. I do also want to give a shoutout to the devs for not pushing their stance and letting the platform grow naturally.
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.
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.
I don’t know Rust or much about the Lemmy codebase. Possibly people were simply complaining about a time delay - a large part of that being understandable due to the nature of how Federation works, i.e. you don’t want to cause corruption even among servers running older versions of the software.
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.
Fair point about the ActivityPub protocol being an entirely different set of developers yet still the “Lemmy” software that you are currently using - both the backend Lemmy implementation of ActivityPub and also the web UI (unless you are using an alternate approach via an app, in which case that brings up a third in the API for Lemmy) - owes its ownership entirely to the same team that also administers the Lemmy.ML instance.
Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views
And the above quote I presumed to refer to lemmy.ml (and others like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net; though that is only the beginning of what some people might consider “problematic” e.g. beehaw has defederated from lemmy.world, and the midwest.social admin has been caught banning people merely for downvoting their comment), since I recalled several discussions on Reddit (before the Rexodus) about the “problematic devs” which referred to the “tankie admins” on lemmy.ml (and worse yet lemmygrad.ml). Ofc there were other issues with other instances such as exploding-heads, but that would not seem to intersect at all with the “devs”.
But yeah there could be problematic Mbin instances too? Though I don’t recall ever hearing any discussions of those.
And similarly with PieFed, or Sublinks.
Speaking of, several places have announced wanting to switch from Lemmy to Sublinks when it becomes available, due to the back-end compatibility that is expected to have, when/if-ever it is released (January was some kind of a target date at some point iirc?). That includes Tesseract on dubvee.org, beehaw, and even Lemmy.World.
In the meantime, I have not heard any updates about Sublinks for almost half a year now, though PieFed is entirely functional today - e.g. I am speaking to you from it now. Though it’s not terribly polished, e.g. I can no longer see your user- or instance name due to the way that comment replies are handled, nor any of the background context except your last reply to me and the OP, and quite often upvotes do not show in the proper color so I end up hitting it multiple times (upvote, oops the number went down, I must have already done it previously even though it wasn’t showing in the green indicator color, so hit upvote again, then repeat the next time again, and/or with other comments as well). Though it has some REALLY nice moderation enhancement abilities - caveat: I am not a mod so haven’t seen the actual tools, or even know if such exist. Nonetheless it is exciting to see those developments that have happened already:-).
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.
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.
don’t let them change the meaning of our words then
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
Wouldn’t it also cause confusion for some people to say Threadiverse while other people refuse to say that and instead use Fediverse?
Ofc strictly speaking both are true.
Hehe, Forumverse? :-)
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.
In contrast to reddit, whos leadership never made any controversial decisions. /s
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
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.
Doesn’t !selfhosted@lemmy.world have like 40k subscribers? Top ten Lemmy community by sub count, iirc.
Bingbingbing!
The people still exclusively on Reddit are on Reddit because they don’t like the Fediverse or they’re unwilling to change their habits. Had they liked it and been genuinely open for change they would have made the switch, or at least used both platforms.
This is not so much true for the average user, as they might not be aware of the federated alternatives at all, or they might think it sounds too hard. But it’s absolutely true for the self-hosting community.
Besides other factors mentioned in this thread, there’s also
- selection bias: people with a positive view of Lemmy already migrated, so the leftover is bound to have more negative views
- older userbase: older people use language in a different way, talk about different topics, and dig into those topics in a different way. That often makes younger people throw a tantrum.
- group identity: for those “AS A SNOO” we’re basically apostates.
- edit: personal drama between higher ups is more visible here than in Reddit.
Older userbase makes this place a lot more useful, outside of politcs and news subs you are dealing with who can provide good information, ie how reddit used to work.
Drama has its place… it is provocative and it gets people going… we need more engagement! We are deff getting there too, meme subs were spamming all 1 year ago, now there is enough threads to keep a reader busy without fluff memes.
I agree with you that both things have their upsides; and frankly, I don’t even think that we should be pandering to the immigration leftover wallowing in Reddit. Growth is good, but growth should never come at the expense of the community that you’re trying to grow.
However I feel like those points help to explain why the “lol lmao” crowds hate this place.
No idea, quit Reddit over a year ago for fedia/lemmy. Never used x/twitter either, i use mastodon.
Because people off Reddit hate everything that its not reddit
People on Reddit. We’re the people off Reddit :)
I was a redditor for 13 years, I now hate reddit. There is hope
we are like their penal colony in revolt, maybe
So are we going with Lem-stralia, Lem-Rok Nor, or Lem-giers as our colony name?
Seems to me most people in that thread seems relatively open minded? The people dismissing Lemmy completely appears to be downvoted, and people seem to have a nuanced understanding that it’s a better platform in theory but sadly less active.
I’m sure they’re right. I’m a slow person who thinks there’s plenty of activity over here, but if you’re used to the adrenaline of Reddit it must feel a little small town-y.
To be honest except on things like sports and politics, reddit kind of feels like a ghosttown too. So many posts with huge amounts of upvotes and like 2 bot generated comments. The power commenter types seem to have left after the exodus and been replaced by lots of people who scroll and like but don’t really venture much into comments.
Main reason is people are too lazy to change their ways and don’t want to feel like they’ve been making the wrong choice all along.
The feel of Lemmy communities is a little different than Reddit, even if the software features are mostly analogous and there are many Redditisms used.
Your average commentor/poster will stand out more in a small community, there’s less of being able to post and then slink away.
People have gotten used to a lot more comforting features of modern Reddit, Lemmy in both the users and in the software has more of a “Reddit 10-15 years ago” feel to it.
mbin is a bit less hostile (native reddit) looking than lemmy
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.
That would require making a reddit account. Ew.
I am pretty sure most people are here for idealogical reasons so lack of things is a nothing burger for them.
Normies only care about ease of use and network effect. Until fediverse brings usability, we aint even compete for the network.
Normie here, Lemmy is pretty easy to use imo. I think the transition is happening now kinda like the Internet in the 90s or online dating in the 10’s.
Ofc I just got here and I’m using Voyager.
A theory I have is that everyone who hates reddit eventually left leaving the milk bags brains. I was mod of r/mapporncirclejerk and left when I saw my mod queue get exponentially worse. My friend told me it was because the decent people left for Lemmy.
Now I’m mod of !cartographyanarchy@lemm.ee and it’s sooooo much easier.
I was mod of r/mapporncirclejerk
I used to lurk, thank you for your service 🫡
Idk I find Lemmy easier to use. I go to Lemmy site -> I use site
I go to reddit -> I get asked to turn of my VPN -> get asked to login -> get asked to download mobile app -> accept cookies -> I finally use site.
Damn reddit is so much easier
-> I get asked to turn of my VPN ->
Yes 🐸
secondary reason why i left reddit, they don’t respect a person who respects him or her self… not long after i learned that’s corpo’s MO and that’s how i become radicalized linux enjoyer haha
@secret300 @sunzu2 Odd, I just use it from Firefox on my desktop. It does want me to accept cookies, that is how websites maintain a login session since otherwise http is a stateless protocol.
well you need an account to shit post tho…
so you need to log in
if you want to login you will get in VPN bullshit or your browser is hardened. if they can’t track you, they essentially don’t want you to use their slopware.
but yes, you can read reddit old, that’s what people should use when they do research IMHO
@sunzu2 @secret300 @Yingwu Unfortunately, some people, if not held accountable, abuse things and other people.
