It’s been less “mechanistic” so far: fewer canned replies, fewer “oh this post again”. It’s partly because of there being very few bots and less astroturfing, but also I think it’s just the mindset, people here may be less likely to be passive consumers. On reddit I kept having the issue of people misreading everything I posted, because they barely cared about what they had on their screen and wanted everything on it to cater to their taste. Big social networks encourage a form of algorithmic solipsism.
Lemmy is WAY more left-leaning and instance/community mods are often more trigger-happy when removing comments/banning people.
To be honest, here’s the difference: Lemmy has fewer voices. That’s mostly it.
I think there’s less trolling and fewer bots, but it’s not by a lot and that’s just for now. If Lemmy gains popularity, it will get just as much negative attention, the main difference will be in moderation.
I never really commented on Reddit.
Here on Lemmy though, I feel like I should.
Also, it feels like that on Reddit, people were commenting and posting mostly to get karma, on Lemmy it’s more like people comment to actually say something or to express their opinions.
I feel like the lack of karma adds in to the civility, but I can’t say that for certain. On Reddit, seeing someone’s karma count seems to sway people’s opinions before even reading what that person says. But here, those votes don’t carry over. In other words, each comment offers a “clean slate.”
There are a few usernames I see and interact with here often. Sometimes I agree with a comment, sometimes I disagree with a comment, but without a total karma count tied to every user, each comment is free to stand on its own regardless of who said it. One bad take doesn’t spoil a person’s reputation. Vice versa, having one fantastic take doesn’t automatically elevate a user who might post something toxic in the future.
Most people are more polite here
Most of them are left leaning to various degrees so despite the infighting we’re all still on the same team.
fuck you and your opinion! /s
No real user complains about political leanings. Literally the only complaints i see in the most random places is “how liberal everyone is” which is objectively deranged. If anything this space is incredibly conservative and I’d like for you to prove me wrong
Lemmy.world ended up being the default instance for everyone hopping from reddit, so it’s quickly become more akin to reddit than other servers. Not to mention the tankies have migrated to lemmy.ml (developer run and explicitly marxist / tankie instance), lemmygrad.ml (marxist tankie 4chan instance), and hexbear (tankie communists that were isolated / defederated by choice for a while. They started federating and many instances blocked them for trolling. Full of trolls). I went to lemmy.ca but lemmy.world blocked me for being a bot, which I am not, so I had to make a new account because the admins never bothered to respond. Also lemmy.world admins have been going kinda crazy / heavy handed with the moderation and many people on other servers are rightfully upset with them
!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com for people curious
What a tragic tale of woe.
Tankies are basically conservatives, it’s easy to mix them up
People are more genuinely interested in actually contributing to a conversation here and likely to read through your stuff/reply. I feel more seen.
Reddit is a generic corporate algoritm flavored slop with LLMs with an agenda talking to human morons somehow dumber and less aware than the LLMs. Lemmy is at least mostly human but has a personality archetype bias that takes getting used to. Even on niche communities here theres a high likelyhood you’re talking to someone whos either a left leaning political activist, is really into alternative gender identity politics, knows a lot about information technology/STEM, has some serious kinky fetishes, is neurodivergent, or a mix of the above.
So you have the conversational pitfalls that come from talking to tech nerds, liberal arts students, the loud and proud members of lgbqt+, tankies, and all the in between relatively outcast groups that didn’t fit well on reddit in the first place. Every 1/10 post on all is going to be about how fucked the climate change is, lgbqt rights, femboys, trump/elon/conservative republicans doing something stupid or evil or facist, a really unfunny ‘meme’ thats really about spreading some message or showcasing how victimized X minority group is, why linux is good and windows/microsoft bad, some half baked plan by young political activist who think they can overthrow a global corporatocracy with some clever cordinated consumer protesting. At least the content is overall consistent.
As someone who doesn’t really identify with most of these im left feeling lemmy isn’t for me sometimes but its a decent enough social outlet that I can tune out the stuff I don’t care for while being involved with the niche communities im actually here to be part of.
It feels wrong to hit the “block” button for something I’m simply not interested in, but ever since I started using it to curate my home page, the content has become more relevant to me. Personally, I never had the patience to get into coding, so I block communities about it. I have nothing against it, and I love that coders have communities they can take part in, but blocking that topic means more space for things I like when scrolling through All.
I think Lemmy’s still in the process of maturing. I would love to see the kind of niche communities that Reddit has, where the topic of the sub is oddly specific yet not polarizing. I even have an idea for one that can provide some of that energy, but I’m trying to save up more content for potential posts before taking the leap to create it.
I know you’re complaining, but I think you just described a good chunk of the reasons why I like Lemmy and the fediverse in general.
It wasn’t really my intent to complain but rather inform the OP with how I see Lemmy and which kinds of people make up a good portion of the overall community that contribute to conversations after being here for quite some time. I dont think I whinged or went on a opinionated rant that really catagorizes as complaining.
Your presence here as someone who doesn’t identify with those groups brings tremendous value to this space. Your perspective is different and you might encourage others like you to join.
Thanks Feathercrown I greatly appreciate you for saying that! 😎
There are less women here and that’s really saying something
Technical spaces tend to be created and dominated by boys. Even now this is a nascent endeavor for nerdy people. Naturally there’s gonna be less girlies here.
Y’all are way nicer.
Not always; Fuck you. I wish you the best.
If this were Reddit, it would have been way worse. It’s all relative.
If this were reddit, they’d just be reported and banned.
Well, I’m a mod, so if this were reddit, anyone not laughing at the joke would be banned.
Not quite as many leading experts in their field.
The braintrust is starting to build, we can now have a whatisthisthing community, but you still don’t get to say “exoornithological engineers of Lemmy, in your opinion…”
If you’re used to the weird wackos being the gay hating bible thumping gun fucking Republicans, they’re basically not present here. They’re replaced with the “Mao did nothing wrong” crowd.
There is less bandwagon posting here. “this” chains and so forth.
Cross-posting or doing !example@whatever.lol doesn’t happen as often as it did on Reddit.
Oh here’s a big cultural difference: Lemmy mods tend not to be as anal about their community formats as Reddit mods are. I got a 14 day ban from r/whatisthisthing for telling an anecdote related to the thing in question, because it wasn’t STRICTLY about identifying what the thing was. “Which community is this, what are the norms, what is the expected format etc” is not as much of a concern here. Lemmy communities aren’t art projects.
No one here is important or official. There are no video game community managers or anything like that here. Lemmy is not used for interacting with anyone other than fellow idle nerds.
No one here is important or official. There are no video game community managers or anything like that here. Lemmy is not used for interacting with anyone other than fellow idle nerds.
This is how Reddit was before it exploded in popularity and companies and celebrities started taking it seriously. I don’t know if Lemmy will ever get to that point, especially seeing how much abuse people will endure before they change platforms.
Eh, on Lemmy, users can really easily switch to a home instance that isn’t doing that, so it’s a little more self-correcting.
You might need to be more specific, since there is a new wave of former redditors joining.
As a former redditor, who joined ~2 years ago, it was very friendly and wholesome when I joined, but has been getting more toxic in recent times.
The views expressed are more to the left and much more anti big-tech, which makes sense. Discussions are a bit more civil on average and there seems to be much less blatant karma-farming. At least that’s the case on my instance, which blocks some of the more… controversial ones. Speaking of which though, the differences between various instances do shape discussions on Lemmy quite a bit, which Reddit of course doesn’t have. You can often have a pretty good guess on a user’s attitudes, political views and demeanor just by looking at their instance.
Not like you can even farm “karma” here in the first place. Lemmy doesn’t have karma I’m pretty sure.
Don’t worry. Someone corrected me in the same fashion. I just don’t look or care and everything is fine.
To be fair you were correct, Lemmy doesn’t. That’s an mbin screenshot above and I’m not sure how they work out the numbers there.
Edit: it’s all nebulous anyway, it can only count things since the creation of their instance.
I was wondering. But does total up votes actually count for anything algorithmicalky like how it is on reddit? I don’t think so on Lemmy right?
For posts or comments? Or overall user aggregate? Lemmy isn’t counting beyond each post or comment.
its really only useful for spotting trolls/spam accounts quickly.
Ooo ooo do me next! I have zero idea how I’m doing, but I haven’t been banned anywhere. I think lol
Depends on the instance
deleted by creator
A lot less conversations about whether ChatGPT was an asshole at his cousin’s wedding
My mom is the target of a significantly smaller proportion of the community here. Maybe they’re younger here.
Here at Lemmy, we have respect for mothers.
I never comment on posts >100 comments. They’ll never get seen. Here? There’s a good chance to reply.
Agreed! I’m actually hoping no more people leave Reddit. I like the community here so much better. For sure, there’s some trolls and echo chambers, but it’s mostly a pretty good place.
It’s like Reddit from 18 years ago, if everyone then had kept expecting it to work like Reddit from 18 months ago.
Early Reddit had no subreddits, and then it just had a handful of major ones—it wasn’t until it got a much larger user base that all the thousands of niche subreddits became viable. (There were still plenty of conversations about niche topics—they just didn’t have dedicated forums with the associated infrastructure.) But ex-redditors on lemmy expect those fine-grained niche communities to work right from the start, before there are enough users to keep them all active.
(I wonder if one solution might be for every community to have a designated “parent” community, where if activity falls below a certain threshold posts and subscriptions get temporarily redirected to the parent community until activity picks up again.)
