I made a blog post discussing my biggest issues with Lemmy and why I am kind of done with it as a software.
👏👏👏👏👏
Well said. I don’t disagree with a single point you made, and some of it echos concerns I’ve had since day 1. And extra points for calling out
.mlas lemmygrad-lite. I think I’ve called it exactly that as well.The only thing I really have to add is on the topic of toxicity. Like you, I’m an instance admin and have a bird’s eye view of a lot of behavior patterns. I’ve recently started wondering how many people are here because they’re too toxic for regular social media rather than because they want to be here. I won’t guess an actual number, but I would say it’s not insignificant.
I’m firmly the latter case: I want to be here, I want this to succeed, and I’m trying to put in the work toward that result. And I’ve interacted with lots and lots of people in the same boat. But, like you, I’m also growing disillusioned for many of the same reasons.
On the bright side, I’ve gotten much less rusty as a developer after having to write scrips and tools to fill in the massive gaps in moderation features.
The only thing I really have to add is on the topic of toxicity. Like you, I’m an instance admin and have a bird’s eye view of a lot of behavior patterns. I’ve recently started wondering how many people are here because they’re too toxic for regular social media rather than because they want to be here. I won’t guess an actual number, but I would say it’s not insignificant.
That’s unfortunately a big issue with alternative social media platforms and without tools to combat them it goes bad really bad. I agree completely.
Honestly coming here and starting my own instance and providing help for other instances and stuff has reignited my long lost love of computers and open source stuff. The passion for it is thankfully coming back.
That was me with developing. I used to do it as my day job before moving to infrastructure - now all I develop at work are scripts and the occasional lookup tool.
I do kinda wish I’d chosen something other than NodeJS to be my daily driver, lol, but it does what I need well enough. Haven’t really had a base it can’t cover (yet?).
I’ve recently started wondering how many people are here because they’re too toxic for regular social media rather than because they want to be here.
Dude yes, I’ve been thinking the same thing. I worry that users curious to leave reddit are going to go to a big instance, see concentrated worst-parts-of-reddit, and decide it’s not for them.
In theory, decentralization enables freedom from the average user being forced to put up with toxicity. But we don’t really have that (yet) until the ratio of jerk to non-jerk improves.
In my experience lemmy has been very wholesome compared to reddit. Even in controversial posts.
I once wondered aloud here about if anybody else had noticed a lot of toxic members from certain communities, only to receive replies from members in those communities claiming that it was all fine and there wasn’t any toxicity. Then I’d look at their history and notice they were a very toxic person. From my limited point of view I can say there might be some credence to your statement.
I’ve recently started wondering how many people are here because they’re too toxic for regular social media rather than because they want to be here.
This has largely been my operating assumption as well since day one when I came over during the Reddit API lockdown. I was fairly active on a NSFW alt up until recently and I’ve actually seen dozens of comments from new users mentioning that the only reason they were here on Lemmy was because they were banned from Reddit and had no other viable options. They were always an asshole to the posters and the reality is that with a lower population of users is that there aren’t enough other voices to drown out these people yet and you end up with a feedback loop of toxicity.
These are some really good points. I’m personally more interested in the development of PieFed than SubLinks due to the focus on making it easy to contribute, the developer cares about usability and mod tools, its in Python, and the dev posts dev blogs and answers questions on mastodon https://join.piefed.social/blog/
I’m relieved to hear you’ll still be running your instance despite these issues! Are you thinking of potentially moving the Literature Cafe forums to Sublinks?
I definitely hear you on the moderation difficulties… with the Fediverse being as far-reaching as it is, good moderation tools are essential and it seems like Lemmy simply doesn’t have these available.
I will migrate it to sublinks as soon as I can.
OK, I’ll stay posted for the new site!
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The link offers a download instead of serving an HTML? I’m on mobile Firefox (I doubt it matters).
It might be an issue with the activitypub plugin, https://jewy.blog/b/1T try this shortlink version instead
That link had no issues loading the HTML
I’m getting the same
This post summarizes my thoughts on the issues with lemmy perfectly.
Thank you for sharing your experiences. I feel the same way about Lemmy software, instances, and the Fediverse as a whole. Appreciate your post and efforts.
Very interesting post, very long but also interesting. I also agree with most of the points.
But I wonder why there is no mention of /kbin which has been a compatible alternative to Lemmy even during the Reddit exodus. It’s also written in PHP which many people should have a much easier time to contribute to than Lemmy’s Rust.
I’ve heard Kbin has been having major issues lately, the single dev is not the most active. There is a fork called mbin which seems promising.
They are different from Lemmy, though, and not for everyone. But variety is good.
Does anyone know of any Sublinks instances? The main page for it speaks in present tense, but I haven’t found any active instances. (aside from the demo, of course)
I apologize for my stupidity:
this is me
It hasnt been released yet, still working towards parity (but getting there soon)
The first instance using it will likely be sublinks.art and some other instances will be switching over from lemmy when it hits parity like programming.dev and literature.cafe
Alright, thanks!
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Many users on Lemmy seem actively hostile to the idea of decentralization in a way that feels self defeating. They don’t want a better alternative to Reddit, they just want Reddit 2.0 and attempts to sway them towards something better feels like pulling teeth.
Yes! I don’t think it bodes well for general adoption when so much of the Lemmyverse is hosted on two essentially “Reddit 2.0” (by that I mean loosely moderated) instances. Assuming half the population of the Lemmyverse are people banned from Reddit for poor socialization, it means new users considering switching are most likely to first encounter a pure concentrated form of the worst aspects of Reddit userbase.
Beehaw is the only “general” instance I know of who’s mods and admins seem to be actually up to the task of keeping their communities from becoming wholly exhausting and it’s because they didn’t allow themselves to balloon up beyond their ability to self-moderate.
Beehaw defederating with the biggest open signups Lemmy instance has definitely kept it a lot nicer. There isn’t as much content, but it’s also a lot less toxic.
Many users on Lemmy seem actively hostile to the idea of decentralization in a way that feels self defeating. They don’t want a better alternative to Reddit, they just want Reddit 2.0 and attempts to sway them towards something better feels like pulling teeth.
I keep seeing this, and I don’t really understand. Lemmy is a link aggregator that allows users to organize those links into categories/communities/etc, and lets people comment on the links and have discussions about them. From an end-user perspective, that’s exactly what Reddit is. So I’m genuinely curious what’s meant when people say they don’t want Reddit 2.0 from a technical perspective. From a social perspective, the toxicity, brigading, shitposting, etc are definitely not desirable. But with shit moderation tools, those sort of things don’t get sorted, and federation just magnifies all of those problems. Though I think disabling voting definitely helps discourage shitposting and low-effort responses.
But I genuinely do think a lot of problems really come down to the fundamentals of federation. And given how many downsides there are to it, I’m not convinced it’s actually a benefit at all.
Do you mean disabling downvotes? That’s how it is on Blahaj. It definitely makes a difference to the amount of toxicity I think.
On Blahaj reports are the only way to express disapproval of content. So you could for example spread fascist dogwhistles about not liking politics, and if Ada doesn’t understand the dogwhistle then your content doesn’t get removed. That gives cryptofascists free reign
I’ve seen quotes directly lifted from fascist works upvoted by hundreds on Beehaw. The problem with only-positive user feedback is that as long as it seems like a positive statement that others support people will often grant it further support without thinking about what is actually being said.
Or at least that’s what I hope was happening.
If you can point me to any comments like these, I’d love to remove them fwiw.
Would that actually violate the guidelines? This was around all the time of the defederation drama, so ages ago in internet time, and I recall looking at the guidelines and thinking “Well this isn’t a bad faith argument, and it’s not technically hateful unless you know where it leads.”
Bad faith or not - Fascists are not accepted.
Domain blocks are always publicly visible.
Mod logs are always publicly visible in the public mod log.
What? It is crucial for the users, not a bug.
It can become a source of targeted harassment, as it has on the rest of the fediverse before.
Censorship and targeted sliencing of users are the source of bad moderation. To top it off, the mod can target and harrass the banned user and we wouldn’t know bc of censorship if allowed.
targeted harassment
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It is about the anonymity of moderator, not about modlog
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Quit this job as moderator if you can’t take it
if the social prescription to harassment of moderators is “quit because you’re a baby” then you’re going to have many fewer pleasant spaces on the Fediverse in which to exist—because yeah, a lot of people will just quit. i am agnostic on the public modlog overall, but this is an obvious concern with it that i’m not convinced can just be dismissed idly. i obviously have better things to do than a thankless, payless job in which harassment would be dismissed like that.
It especially leads to harassment of vulnerable people. There’s many aspects of moderation that is done here that if implemented in other fediverse software would become a vector for Kiwifarms level harassment.
Maybe this is the syndicalist in me talking, but I think the problem is entirely pretending that Lemmy moderators and admins are and should be expected to work for free. It’s just too much work, too much daily upkeep, to reasonably expect to be handled by a volunteer labor force forever.
That’s obviously a whole other drama with FOSS as a whole but there’s simply a different level of labor and difficulty inherent to running a large internet community than making a program and dumping it on a download site.
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This blog post by a Lemmy user who accidentally uploaded his ID and dealt with the nightmare after describes in great detail the ridiculous steps instance admins need to take to remove images from the backend image server that Lemmy depends on. (as well touches upon the developer behavior aspect I will highlight later.)
You misgendered the author of that post, they use they/them pronouns.Edit: I was mistaken about who the author of that post was.
it demands that I log in, to view the post??
I migrated over to writefreely, here’s the new link. https://my.jewy.blog/my-love-hate-relationship-with-lemmy
Cert expired yesterday (6/4/24) and needs to be renewed.
This is the first time I heard of Sublinks, and honestly after a quick look through here in Lemmy I get the impression that main devs of Lemmy and Sublinks can work together to improve what it is currently the best option (Lemmy).
I honestly think it is way too early to have a Lemmy “replacement” even if it is all running in the Fediverse, I just think it is a split of efforts, granted, I don’t know all the background that runs behind and it seems like Sublinks dev does it like a hobby too.
Regarding moving communities to Sublinks, yeah, it is up to instance maintainers, but that is a no for me, heck, I already had to recreate my stuff from the dead FMHY account I had (there was no account migration at the time), it seems like adding more decentralization to me, and we already had that with multiple repeated communities ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Finally, don’t get me wrong, options and alternatives are always welcome in my book, but as I said before, it feels like way too early for me.
The thing is, sublinks lead developer tried to work with development team of lemmy. It was like pulling teeth constantly and his experience was overall negative.
This is completely false. jgrim has never opened up a single issue or PR in lemmy, and we certainly wouldn’t refuse any of either. These things are easily verifiable by anyone who wants to look, its all out in the open.
