I browse Lemmy occasionally and it’s nice having real engagement on my comments and posts. But, many of my favorite hobbies have zero traction here. The board game communities are basically Ghost towns, and god forbid if I mention on here that I own an AVP and enjoy it. Much less expecting a whole community about it. So mainly Lemmy is just memes and bullshit scrolling. That and the absurd confirmation bias here, as well as the outright violence towards other political parties is nuts. I regularly see highly upvoted comments about “let’s just kill them, etc”. It’s fucking insane. Every time I mention this there’s a string of comments saying “they deserve to die” etc
The only sub I would regularly discuss politics in was a sub that had a "Be civil" rule.
You could argue and say shit about politicians, but name-calling directed at another user would get the comment deleted.
Of course, even that wouldn't be enough for some people even here...I remember someone who was creating multiple posts about how bad Lemmy is because someone said they were "butthurt" about downvotes, lol
Lemmy has a fair number of loud, toxic instances, communities, and users. On the other hand, it's easy to block all of them, and it's practically a requirement to enjoy lemmy.
So block with zero hesitation -- the only people that will give you crap about it are the people that are the problem in the first place.
I still use reddit for Rimworld and Kenshi, but now that I've blocked most Tankie Instances and Users, Lemmy is where I spend most of my time wasting/reading. And I actually comment here far more than I ever did reddit
I wish there were more people here, but the slower pace of posts has helped me spend less time on my phone. It's not quite as good as reddit was for me when reddit was good. But Lemmy is easily good enough for my needs and is better than any alternative including the what is left of reddit.
being a smaller community, i feel like i'm actually contributing when i post something, instead of just adding to a sea of noise
it also helps that i've come up with this new "persona". i'm able to be more of the real me than i can with my main account.
it's like half way between anonimity and publicity. this account has very little connection to my meatspace existance, so i feel safe to say anything. but at the same time i'm not gonna act like some 4chan user. halfway_neko's a good girl lol
For the better :)
I haven't been active in online communities for over ten years. It's been fun to contribute with comments and posts and I feel like I'm finding my voice again.
Used to be a powermod on reddit. Got banned. Kinda miss fucking with shitters but beyond that I enjoy the extra time each day to do literally anything else.
Back when I was like 13 and on reddit, I posted what I thought was a good open question to askreddit, and it immediately got deleted with no stated reason. Now, I can ask any interesting question I have, and receive tons of interesting responses from people!
A lot of the same Reddit mods have transferred to other major communities. Unfortunately you'll likely still hit the same issue over here, I've already been banned by one outrageous mod for disagreeing with him.
Best part about lemmy, ban that user/community/instance and move on.
I’ve already been banned by one outrageous mod for disagreeing with him.
I rarely find it is as simple as this. There’s a remarkable number who had their post removed or that been banned from communities that “literally did nothing wrong.”
I’d be very curious to see what exactly led your being banned.
not too long ago i am having exchanges with people who wouldn't hesitate to use derogatory term to label me because i held a differing view on certain issues.
i thought it was reminiscent of earlier reddit days where overly woke individuals would abuse you on reddit and then abuse the report system to perma ban your account.
don't get me started on the mods who were power tripping and dishing out bans because they got offended over simple facts.
Probably because of the instance I happened to join (for entirely accidental reasons), I can feel myself being pulled in to an information bubble for sure and that is to a subtle extent influencing and perhaps hardening my pre-existing views about the world at large. I don't think that's a good thing exactly, though I'm not sure it's entirely bad as before I'd just kind of given up thinking about a lot of that stuff since my early 20s when I had to start focussing on other things and it's more like a return to form. I'm, perhaps misguidedly, okayish with this development because this bubble, this biased lens is so stark that I feel like it's hopefully less easy to end up being totally subsumed (maybe I'm just telling myself that). Of course, like everyone's favourite kind of bubbles, it's obviously one that's reinforcing of my own tendencies anyway, the folks here just take it a far greater extreme in rhetoric, to an extent seeing the kind of blind anger and mechanical doctrinaire response to even the most tangentially related of topics has kind helped me see where my stop is on that train of thought. Another way it's influenced me has been to strengthen my existing preference and respect for FOSS software and I think being here is gradually increasing this preference and will likely result in even greater adoption on my part.
I think it’s laudable to be aware of when we are only surrounding ourselves with like-minded people, but I also wouldn’t put too much stock in this Internet narrative that there is some morality to “avoiding echo chambers” or whatever.
You should always introduce yourself to a diverse range of (valid) opinions and ideas. But it is also OK to have spaces that are reserved for people that make you comfortable/are more like-minded. We do this in our daily lives too. The internet isn’t some sacrosanct space where we have to be engaged with people we disagree with constantly.
It’s the difference between a support community for LGBT people, and /r/conservative. The former is good and healthy, the latter is toxic and distorting.
Well it's been 10 months since I left redis and spun up my own instance. It's been a fun little ride with a very fast surge at the start and a bit of a plato. Lemmy seems to be gaining traction again, which is good.
How has it changed me? - I guess I actuall spend more time here than I did on reddit - as I find the quality of comments far better and more enjoyable
As an admin / owner I have had to see and deal with some stuff that I wish I hadn't had to see - there are some sick fucks out there
I dunno - at first it was promising, but today I was actually thinking of leaving Lemmy and trying to find a larger site.
I'm not sure if the entire Internet has somehow become addicted to groupthink or if this is just a symptom of Lemmy's smaller size and a selection bias, but it's been getting worse and worse over the past nine months and it's definitely turning me off to the community here.
What I loved about Reddit was that on any given story you saw a number of well informed opinions debating the nuances of those opinions. You'd learn so much more by engaging with the comments than just reading the article itself.
But here it seems more and more to be turning into a confirmation bias machine, where discourse and nuance takes a back seat to conformity to locally populist narratives. I can't tell you the number of times I've been downvoted for linking to multiple recent research papers (from places like Harvard and MIT) because the implication of those papers was contrary to popularly held beliefs here.
While I've had a few good interactions, it's become less and less of a signal to noise ratio on those interactions.
It's possible this is a larger trend, but I haven't noticed it to nearly the same degree on other less generalized forums I spend my time, so I suspect it's just a Lemmy thing.
A shame, as I think the tech is outstanding. But as is often the case, good tech is only part of a product, and in the case of social media it's the community too, and I've been growing increasingly disappointed in Lemmy's community who likes to pat themselves on the back for a welcoming spirit with the apparent unmentioned footnote in small print that it's a welcoming spirit that only extends to people regurgitating their own opinions back to them.
Redditors aren't used to communists not being actively suppressed while fascists get passively protected and it shows. All you're saying here is that you prefer the one narrative reddit forced onto everyone with their moderating and astrotruf, and being exposed to different ideas makes you feel uncomfortable. You're always welcome to go back to the race-baiting and fascist propaganda, sounds like you'd be happier there.
Lemmy is a collection of differing voices from all over the federation, so your "there's no diversity of thought" sounds like when conservatives mald that their terrible ideas aren't well received the moment they step out of their racist circlejerk. To the white, equality feels like oppression.
It's strange because that person's from lemmy.world? That seems like a pretty liberal/reddity instance from what I've seen. I was gonna tell them to go to another instance if they don't like .ml's politics but then I saw theyre not even from .ml lol
Yeah that's why I went as hard as I did. LW's somewhat of a nazi bar so that paints a picture of the kind of person we're dealing with here. I could just imagine their head popping like a gasket if they ever ran into a hexbear or lemmygrad user who could hard counter their shit.
EDIT: I looked into them and honestly not the worst i've seen. They're very reddit-poisoned but I bet a year or two off and they'll be fine.
the problem with lemmy is your either a communist or fascist, with no in-between. it's this rediculius polarisation that makes it not very fruitful to have actual conversations around here
It's the main reason I gravitate so much towards lemmygrad. Their zero-tolerance stance on fash shit (plus being defederated from literally every problem instance by dint of being openly communist) allows you to have actual conversations with people without having to explain basic morality every three seconds. They're pretty tolerant of differing ideas as long as you're not parroting fascist talking points and even then they'll usually put in a good faith attempt to explain why what you're saying is fucked up and give you a chance to self-correct.
Sadly a lot of the federation is a lot less good about this, where anything even remotely political turns into a debate/slapfight where nobody feels good at the end of it and nothing really gets done. Some people are just useless trolls who shouldn't be engaged; not to mention the groups actively trying to balkanize the federation.
Plus if you think this place is bad. Mastodon... I made a post about them earlier but if you respond to any post without heaping praise you just get instantly blocked. They're a great platform but good god is the culture there just obscenely toxic to conversation.
What I loved about Reddit was that on any given story you saw a number of well informed opinions debating the nuances of those opinions. You’d learn so much more by engaging with the comments than just reading the article itself.
Is there some other Reddit that I don't know about? Because the Reddit I know is about as far from this as it's possible to be.