I have noticed that I interact a lot more in Lemmy than I ever did in any social media. Let it be Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… I am used to be the lurker, but here for some reason things are different. Wonder if more people feel like I do.
I feel like you are more encouraged to interact here. Like you’re helping the fediverse grow. The other thing for me is that people seem to be much more civil then in other places. So yeah I feel the same.
Like you’re helping the fediverse grow.
It feels like a civic duty.
From what I see, Lemmy is just at the edge of “not enough content”. So many communities have one or two committed posters. So I comment as much as I can and post when I see something interesting.
For me it’s the gonewild subs… Once you start getting regular content there and they expand out to gonewildcurvy or bdsmgw or 30sgonewild etc you’ll really see lemmy take off.
They’ve had some issues with that though. lemmynsfw was heavily defederated from others over concerns about CSAM being federated, and after that lemmynsfw had much more mild porn.
Personally, I think that as long as porn is still freely available via old reddit without logging in, then it won’t take off much. Also, we’re in the post-Only Fans age, so it’s unlikely lemmy will ever get that “pure” gonewild feel that reddit had, as almost every user that posts their own porn is now doing it for money.
That’s the thing I find so surprising. There are so few NSFW posters. Porn pushed a lot of technical and economic innovation online. If Lemmy can’t get traction on adult content, we’re in bad shape.
/s (mostly)
If you build it (the porn) they will come
I’m doing my part. soldiers laugh
This is how I see it, and it seems like comments are better received here, too, which encourages me further.
Yea I’m pretty much of the same mind, anything that can encourage content on here the better
Exactly this. I never bothered to do much interacting on Reddit. Either comments were trolled or downvoted “just for shits and giggles” or they were buried in no time under all the snarky oh-so hilarious comments that instantly killed all real discussion.
With reddit having way more people and being only a casual browser, I would never make it early enough to a post to contribute in a meaningful way. Whatever I would have said would be commented dozens of times before I got to the thread. At best my comment wasn’t made yet, but I’d be sure someone with more knowledge on the subject would’ve contributed in greater depth soon.
Here I see plenty of posts hours old with no comments. There’s a greater chance whatever I might say won’t get buried or overshadowed.
Because a lot of stuff is fresh you get a lot less of “This was asked last week, next time use the search bar” kind of stuff too
Funny enough, this question is asked every few days it seems.
Oh yeah but I would rather have this versus condescending Redditers jerking each other off
Agreed. What you say matters here. Your post won’t be buried with only you for an upvote.
I do, and it’s not for entirely altruistic reasons either.
When I’d open a thread on reddit, if I wasn’t there within the first hour of being up or first dozen or so comments, it was almost guaranteed that whatever I said would get buried and the effort I spent formulating my comment would basically be wasted. So there was very little incentive to engage with meaningful discussion just for the sake of discussion. On Lemmy, most posts struggle to get over a hundred comments at most, and even more struggle to get past ten. So, if I spend time developing my reply, I have a higher chance of that comment getting seen and other people in the community engaging with me, which is the entire point of leaving comments, IMO.
Agreed. Comments here are more meaningful for being rare. Even comments disagreeing with OP or replying from a different point of view are often well thought out and meaningful.
On Lemmy, the algorithm is also more prone to show newer with less votes comments, when sorting by hot. So it gives more value to those low votes comments.
And also generally, with those 2000 comments threads, someone’s bound to already have said the same thing so you upvote it and move on.
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It certainly doesn’t help that Lemmy had and still has absolutely no sensible way to actually surface niche communities to its subscribers. Unlike Reddit, it doesn’t weigh posts by their relative popularity within the community but only by total popularity/popularity within the instance. There’s also zero form of community grouping (like Reddit’s multireddits) - all of which effectively eliminates all niche communities from any sensible main view mode and floods those with shitty memes and even shittier politics only. This pretty much suffocated the initially enthusiastic niche tech communities I had subscribed to. They stood no chance to thrive and their untimely death was inevitable.
There are some very tepid attempts to remedy this in upcoming Lemmy builds, but I fear it’s too little too late.
I fear that Lemmy was simply nowhere near mature enough when it mattered and it has been slowly bleeding users and content ever since. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, though.
Agree to everything but the doom. Yes, most people will only give 1 chance to a platform, but we haven’t churned through most people yet. Most people are yet to honor Lemmy with their first visit, at some point in the future. We will be better prepared than ever. This wil be true for a long while. So I think we should make (reasonable) haste, but nothing is lost yet. In the long run, we’re still growing.
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I agree. On Lemmy, saying the wrong thing on the wrong community is like stepping on a landmine. The ideological differences are wild. Maybe I just need to get used to this and block the worse communities. It certainly feels very hostile. Especially from leftwing users and communities.
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Well said. I suppose we can all be guilty of this, and this is why I try to engage with people of with many different ideological positions. It’s not always comfortable to confront out own beliefs and biases, but I do think it makes us more well-rounded.
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Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!
Is that how it is on .world?? On my instance and the ones I browse I find it to be ten times higher quality and massively less aggressive than Reddit.
Lord, you and I must have been on different forms of reddit if you think the users over here are more overly assured and aggressive than reddit. Personally, I find most conversations so much more productive here.
Yes I’m seeing the same sentiment bubble up in multiple comments here. I don’t relate at all…
It’s been a few years since I encountered any meaningful discussion on Reddit that wasn’t immediately polluted by screeching buffoons. I’ve yet to see that here.
I hope this trend personally experiencing continues!
Lemmy feels very different to me as well. People seem more mature, skeptical, genuinely left-leaning, interested in discussion, and the moderation isn’t totalitarian. Plus Reddit really seemed like it was controlled by moderators with an agenda. I’m not a flagrant asshole (I think), yet I was banned from a few subreddits for not following seemingly arbitrary rules. For example, I was banned from my city’s subreddit for making a post asking a question that wasn’t directly about the city, it was more about the state’s culture/history. I just wanted to know what my neighbors thought. Apparently someone decided that wasn’t what the subreddit was for.
People seem more mature, skeptical, genuinely left-leaning, interested in discussion, and the moderation isn’t totalitarian.
You’ve finally found the right echo chamber for you!
Kidding, kidding. But really, I don’t find people on Lemmy that much more mature or skeptical than Reddit, and I’ve had fewer productive discussions (though those have also been rare on Reddit for several years now). It’s definitely more left-leaning, though.
Moderation seems more friendly, though, I agree with that.
You’ve finally found the right echo chamber for you!
It’s been a very, very long search, lol
I also have found the discussions more mature, usually, even in some cases where the other person is to my right or left on the political spectrum (I am in the progressive / social democrat range). Of course there are always some that post in bad faith but it seems like the ratio of those to others is lower here, thankfully.
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You want an honest answer?
No. No I don’t.I comment and share links at about the same rate as I did when I was primarily on Reddit. I’m less interested in Reddit these days and probably split my time 50-50. I’m pissed at what they did and continue to do, and the quality of the content has clearly taken a hit across the broader Reddit community but it’s still SO MUCH BIGGER than the entire fediverse that there is hundreds if not thousands of times the people and content.
I’ve tried to get a couple of groups off the ground, but I’m just not that guy and wasn’t on Reddit either.
I am not commenting on Reddit much anymore tho, due to the aforementioned behavior by Spez et al.
that’s honest.
i miss reddit, too. been 3.5 months since leaving and i used to spend 12 hours or more at a time scrolling and reading. it was like a good friend or partner.
but i really NEVER posted there. and i do here, sometimes.
Hey, thanks for being honest about it.
You’re right, the sheer size of Reddit means it’s hard to deny that the variety of discussion topics is much greater than on Lemmy. The decentralized servers model also means it’s slightly more difficult to find and grow small communities.
What I like though is that in general, posters on Lemmy, even the ones that repost old memes from elsewhere, try to genuinely engage with other commentors.
I certainly do. Most social media algorithms feed you content that it thinks will generate interactions. Lemmy does not do that which results in whatever you decide to post having more meaning because there’s no stupid and/or manipulative machine deciding wheter your post is or isn’t worth seeing
I have read so many thoughtful comments on this thread that made me say to myself “Yes, that. Exactly that’s the reason I mostly rarely bothered formulating a comment or opinion on Reddit.” The whole atmosphere on Lemmy seems so much more mature, considerate and genuinely interesting to read. I really hope we can maintain this as Lemmy is (hopefully) growing.
I couldn’t have said it better! This is exactly how I feel
I’ve seen it fairly often by now; many people seem to enjoy posts with moderately long comment sections. I believe this is what contributes to a more wholesome experience.
Similar to how groups meet a natural breaking point when they grow too big and people cannot know each other anymore, I imagine huge comment sections create a sense of being meaningless and unheard. This discourages sensitive voices, and may appeal more to people who don’t care anyways, which isn’t exactly a great attitude for social encounters.
I can further imagine large comment sections create FOMO for the reader, and can overall be more stressful, which leads to aggression.
Just guesses and impressions. No idea if true. Also no clue how to foster that environment in a growing network.
That is probably a part of why I do comment more here, I would see comment sections on reddit sometimes already with hundreds of comments and just felt like I was trying to slip into a convo that had already been well established or whatever, here I feel more likely to comment because the sections will be sparser and my comments will actually get replies from the users in the thread.
I findyself upvoteing way more on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit.
Yes, definitely by a huge margin
Partially because I feel like people will actually notice, partially because I feel more a part of a community due to the smaller size and seeing the same people multiple times
On R×ddit, I wrote about a scary experience I had and posted, not thinking much of it. Weeks later, someone in a server I frequent sent me a YouTube link and asked “isn’t this you??”, as they recognized my R×ddit username. It was a video of someone reading out my post and giving it much more exposure than I would have ever wanted.
It spooked me to realize that R×ddit is now just a content farm. Posts will be picked up for videos, news articles, Facebook fodder, etc. Most of that shit is 20000% fake anyhow. What’s even the point?
Give me a smaller community any day. The moment people start farming Lemmy for content to read out in their YouTube videos? That’s the moment I bow out.
That’s an interesting perspective that I really hadn’t thought about much but you’re totally right. Glad I was always more of a lurker there.
Dp you think Lemmy would not be one if they were as popular as reddit.
How naive.
The best you can do is using different alts to avoid recognitions with your main username.
A LOT more. It’s also in part because I’m not being stalked by Nazis which I was on Reddit, but I feel so much more comfortable talking here in general.
Heeeey, nazi stalkers. Not bad bruh.
What did you do to get that kind of attention?
So I have a fake white supremacist Facebook account where I befriend white supremacists and then I would take their photos and put them on r/beholdthemasterrace. It was absolutely glorious to mock those inbred hooded motherfuckers, but then some of them found out their faces were put on Reddit, and they complained to the Reddit admins who opted to permanently ban me as a result. Yes, Reddit took the side of Nazis.
But before my ban they were all messaging me telling me why the white race was superb and all their usual kind of bullshit.
Not surprised at all. Hope you’re enjoying the fediverse.
Loving it! Firefish and Lemmy are my happy internet places.
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Well if you have swastikas tattooed on your face I don’t know what you expect.
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Why did it happen to you?
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Nope, I’m a lurker by nature. Back to my hideyhole I go.
I’m both. sometimes I comment alot, most of the time i lurk…there are some good contributions from some peeps that i like to keep encouraging them to post (pug jesus) because it is interesting content…thats what im here for anyway.
Absolutely! Less trolls, real people with real opinions make for a far more interesting community to be a part of.
And less people make it feel more comfy.
I was on Reddit yesterday to remind myself how bad it was. There’s no way I’m reading hundreds of comments especially when most are inane or insane or toxic.
Here, the comment quality is far better (higher signal to noise ratio so to say). And I finally recognize usernames that show up regularly. I feel most folks are commenting in good faith so I’m not constantly on alert looking for right-wing propaganda bots (or trolls or whatever they are). It’s all so much more relaxed and cordial. Hopefully we can keep it that way for a good long while.
I am interacting about the same amount but I am trying to comment with a little more thought and substance though it doesn’t always work out that way.
Agreed about the less people makes it more comfy. The whole instance is your community too, I guess being able to choose what you want from a instance makes everyone more comfortable. You don’t get overflown with people with different objectives when it comes to browsing Lemmy.
