Warning: This is a rant.
I don’t really know how to describe it but the content isn’t quite where reddit had been for me. Also the comments are kind of weird at times, like they type of person here doesn’t quite seem as ‘normal’ as what I’m used to from reddit.
There’s a lot more open source and privacy focused people and conversations. A lot of people seem to hate on big tech and big companies in a sort of toxic-ish feeling way to me (not to say the other relationship isn’t toxic… just saying). Random conversations go into: “omg your privacy is lost cause you used a Google service.” Then we have the ‘if we don’t defederate with Meta the world ends’ conversations. I personally would like to see what Meta does in the fediverse… maybe it will make it more normalized…idk. Then the: “if your app isn’t open source its awful and terrible for the world” people.
Like that stuff is all fine, but it just isn’t quite my cup of tea.
These things remind me of that one person in my comp sci classes in college who I just couldn’t stand talking to. He would try to make you feel like an idiot by trying to sound all self righteous and smart. (Honestly he would fail and would generally look like a dingus).
The bulk of the content that gets comments seem to be mostly meme atm. At least on all (7/10 of the current top for me are memes). I like my memes, but would like some more breadth/depth.
Like I hope Lemmy continues to grow and hope it gets better, but it leaves me missing reddit at the moment.
In a perfect world I wish reddit corp wasn’t such assholes and this whole thing didn’t happen the way it did.
I’m completely skipping the UI and stuff not being as familiar and the various outages/bugs/etc since that’s to be expected with something at this stage.
Please don’t hate me :) Just sharing my unpopular opinion.
/Rant
It’s mostly the technically adept people here, we’re naturally more aware of security/privacy issues present in tech spaces and are angry that the masses are so oblivious or uncaring of the problem. Especially when that problem keeps ruining our online spaces or putting us at real world risk by letting apps use their cameras/mics/locations all the god damn time
Not everyone that is technically adept agree with your statements.
Not everyone but probably most people that are technically adept, and even more so those that have switched from reddit to lemmy
True. Not everyone agrees. Since I’m just me, I can only speak for myself.
With this in mind, I would like to hear reasons why you or others don’t agree. I ask in good faith.
Having an opinion is as natural as being human. I see the world through my eyes, think about in my brain, color it by my life experiences. So there’s always the possibility that I might be missing something important. Perhaps you were persuaded by some strong and much valid point or points.
If that’s the case, and if you’re willing, can you please share why you disagree?
To start with, I don’t think privacy is that important. I think that most open source end-products aren’t good and they are only made better when money gets involved.
Privacy is always a trade off. You have to find a sweet spot that fits your convenience and willingness to share.
A good example is home automation. I can get a camera from someone like Nest and it’s cheap, feature packed and simple to use. But it’s going to harvest all your data and videos.
Instead I could go with Logitech and Apple. Now the price is 4x higher but the videos only exist on my Apple cloud. This is more secure but still could have security concerns, and increased costs and effort.
Lastly I could go with something like ubiquity. Another drastic increase in cost, with less features for remote access. But you host your videos locally and are in complete control. This option is by far the most complex to set up as well.
None of these are inherently bad if you understand the trade off. I am accomplished in tech and I choose the middle option because it best fit my lifestyle even though I could have went with the last option.
Yup, the privacy-convenience trade off is the best explanation, and not everyone goes the extreme route. I too went the middle route with Apple.
I agree with this
Asshole about open source anti big tech here. Point taken. You can choose your communities you see on your home feed. Seriously, use the block user feature too. Block me if you want. It is not personal. I have a half dozen people blocked just because they have been negative and I don’t want to see it any more. With around 150k people here rn the total communities are still developing. There are several I miss but don’t want to mod or churn content by myself to get started. This is still mostly unsettled early adopters. Everyone here is going through the same series of breakup withdraw emotions, and everyone is a weird asshole user to someone. Most of us mean well. You are able to steer the conversation too. Post, and help making the conversation you want to participate in.
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I won’t miss the Redditisms, award speeches and lame unoriginal jokes (variations of “how can he walk with such huge balls hyuck hyuck”).
trailblazers are always ‘weird’. Open source and privacy people BUILD all this software for everyone. As soon as millions of people rush in, you won’t even notice the weirdos anymore
The weirdos… being us?
Excuse me I go by freak
call me a deviant
You’re a deviant!
that sounded weird.
This is a worthwhile rant. I believe as the masses divest themselves of centralized services the types of dialogue that take place on the fediverse will even out. Currently how the federated world stands is similar to the early days of reddit, which was a home for the tech crowd.
not to be a dick, but good riddance to anyone implying meta isn’t an unethical, monster of a corporation that is defined by it’s opportunism, serves only it’s own interests, and has forfeited any and all good faith it may once have had. trust them at your own peril, and go back to reddit.
See… this is the type of comment that cements my opinion. I don’t really care about the ‘meta’ of the platform at the moment. Most businesses tend to be this way in this world. There can be a separate conversation on that pitfalls of today’s capitalism. I just want a link aggregator with friendly people that is usable for all.
If those friendly people wind up coming from Threads or whatever, that’s ok with me. It doesn’t have to be ok with others though, I won’t push my opinion on others at least in this context.
I gave my opinion and you gave good riddance. That isn’t exactly welcoming.
I mean, there are dozens of rational and polite comments in this thread, and you’re choosing this one comment to ‘cement your opinion’. I’m a techie, but I don’t know if I’m one of those weird people you talk about, or just a normal person you want. I have noticed less hostility in the comments, and the hostile ones like this one stand out because the friendly ones are most prevalent. I also have been seeing more and more of the text based communities gain traction over the past week with more normal people stories, and hope they gain even more traction in the coming days.
As for Reddit, I have been occasionally visiting some of my niche communities that haven’t migrated over, but have decided not to participate in anything there. I have also noticed that the Reddit front page is now a lot similar to Lemmy, that I often can’t tell if I’m on Reddit or Lemmy. I saw a post there today about some guy playing a song on piano for 3 girls, and the top 10 comments with thousands of upvotes were all the same old Reddit tropes of panties down, floor wet, leave some pussy for us, and so on. I’m noticing them more and more because of how different the comment section on Lemmy is.
You don’t have to feel bad about staying here or visiting Reddit or doing them both at the same time. You have no obligation for either site.
That’s fair. I’m working through comments. Kind of got derailed by a trip to Grocery Outlet. Lots of positive comments in here as well.
Lots of nice response and good people. I guess I sort of made an example out of this one. Not everyone is like this. The idea of using possibly both this and Reddit isn’t really something I had considered since I wanted to protest them being dicks… but maybe that’s a good compromise till things get further along. 🤷
Reddit is somewhat known for being unwelcoming as well though?
For myself, honestly no I don’t miss it at all. But mostly b/c I’ll stay with Reddit, after a month’s hiatus for protest, and probably only check it once a week for an hour rather than multiple times a day as before. There’s a particular gaming community over there that doesn’t post much content here yet, and even while I’m trying to help do my part there, I still want to be informed… which means at least reading Reddit (probably via Teddit to deprive them of traffic). I’m also on Squabbles too. Some people also are saying that kbin.social is more welcoming than most Lemmy servers, especially sh.itjust.works - I don’t know about that b/c wouldn’t you see mostly the same content b/c of federation? - but in any case it could be a thought to try different instances, maybe especially smaller ones.
It depends on what you wanted it for tbh. If you can stand to be on Reddit, then go for it? Maybe also stay here too, if you like certain parts of it, and get the best of both worlds. You can’t force people to be welcoming, you can only find places where they hang out and then you hang out there too. Squabbles is fairly welcoming - it’s being described right now as something like toxically non-toxic, as in activist-level hunting down of toxic personality traits, I can’t really explain it but check it out if you are interested:-).
Good luck, and I hope that you find what you need. Also, please remember to use social media responsibly rather than let it use you: it is addictive regardless of what platform you find yourself on, and maybe you are awakening to that possibility b/c of the switch, i.e. if you moved back you would find that it was no longer “the same” as it was before, b/c of your new understanding of that fact? If so, hopefully these growing pains lead to something better:-).
Reddit wasn’t welcoming to opinions outside the hivemind either, you just didn’t notice because you were inside it.
You’re basically telling everyone to be nice and pretend these same kinds of people who killed reddit for us won’t kill the fediverse when we have every reason to believe they will, and you don’t want us to talk about it or do anything about it?
I don’t really get why you’re here in the first place. If you liked reddit and don’t hate modern social media why not just stay there? People came here to avoid what meta could do to the fediverse and avoid what reddit became. Why are you acting surprised that people are acting that way?
You’re basically telling everyone to be nice and pretend these same kinds of people who killed reddit for us won’t kill the fediverse when we have every reason to believe they will, and you don’t want us to talk about it or do anything about it?
Up to now, I’ve asked probably like 6 times in various different threads on kbin / lemmy / mastadon
Nobody has given a concrete mechanism by which federating with Meta will kill the Fediverse. At most people just parrot out the acronym “EEE” and link the singular article by Ploum and pretend like they’ve said something meaningful
Federation is like email. I’m not going to block Gmail off from my email server because there are millions of people who use Gmail. It would be a disservice to my open standard to be blocking off millions of people from communicating with me. Instance owners are not going to give them their admin passwords. The Lemmy devs aren’t going to close source Lemmy and license it to Meta.
It’s not even like federation is a permanent thing. Instance owners can federate and as soon as Meta brings negative consequences they can defederate. The main risk I see is a large influx of people… which is not a bad thing, especially once it stabilizes. It would mean more people make more subs and all sorts of niche things will start to pop up - the only really nice thing about reddit.
So tell me, what is the urgent crisis attitude for? How is this the end of the world? Why do we see post after post of people freaking out about this? Instance owners can’t even sign an NDA without getting death threats.
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I don’t think the point is to be welcoming to big tech messing up another platform. Seriously, which big tech platform hasn’t had a scandal around fucking over its users?
I understand the feeling of not having the kind of content you vibe with yet. There’s a lot of stuff on Reddit that I miss too. This is still primarily a Western audience, while Reddit was just starting to get popular in my country.
The insufferable people going on about open source and privacy is the reason we have Lemmy in the first place. If you don’t have strong opinions and a desire to get away from big corporations, why would you make Lemmy in the first place?
The algorithms big tech uses to boost engagement on their platforms is the reason things don’t stay friendly on their platforms. So, it’s fine if they come over but helping extend the reach of big tech over Lemmy is a serious no no.
Think of a union striking. Yes, it could impact your daily life and inconvenience you by making you late to your appointment. But, at the end of the day, they’re fighting for your right to reasonable working conditions just as much they are fighting for theirs. You don’t have to actively support them, just not oppose them for the slight benefit of your present convenience!
For example, the “normal” people are the ones who will complain about jobs going overseas but then not buy American because of minimal price differences! Here’s a link that talks about the case of American Apparel.
I guess for me its to protest reddit’s treatment of their community… not really to decentralize elsewhere. It can kind of be both though.
Reddit is part of the symptom. We need to treat the disease at its roots. And yes, that is going to take at least some amount of sacrifice/inconvenience on our part.
I think it makes more sense if you think of it like a system.
You gave your opinion and he did as well. I agree with becool, Meta has proven themselves to be an extremely unethical and untrustworthy company throughout the years. I believe it’s in the best interest of the fediverse for instances to distance themselves from Meta. That said, there’s nothing stopping you from using multiple platforms, or working to foster the type of community and culture you want here.
This is still the very early days of the fediverse and it will no doubt change a lot in the coming months and years. If there were things you liked about reddit then try to bring that culture here and you might attract more like minded people.
csm10495: Hey, guys. Can we not be assholes about why we are here?
becool: Not to say “fuck you and get out” but fuck you and get out.
Personally, I see both sides of this matter. As a long time redditor, I am seething at the thought spez is effectively claiming "We are entitled to all the free data users gave us over the years and to jack up our API prices which will make for a worse user experience. I also think there is a right way and a wrong way to discuss the overreach of some people, like spez, who have a pathological lack of awareness in a way which makes constructive resolution easier and more imminent.
For example, instead of what you wrote, I might have said something like “Fortunately, reddit is still a thing and we can work on showing the people over there just how shitty spez’s actions have been and how they will lead to a worsening experience for them while simultaneously encouraging them to join kbin”.
I’m not saying your position and its premises are necessarily wrong; I am saying time, place, and manner of communication often – if not always – matter.
not to be a dick
go back to reddit
Lemmy right now feels like reddit from the early 2010s. The community is still quite small, it’s mostly still early adopters and folks looking for an alternative to big social medias, which attracts a different crowd than the mainstream.
It’s actually a hit of nostalgia for me, I’m kind of into the weirdness and intimacy of a smaller community, but I certainly understand where you’re coming from.
One of my favorite niche subreddits has over 600k members, the biggest equivalent community has about 350ish users here, there’s a certain quality that comes with that quantity of users.
But if we stick with it more folks will join and we can make this place into what we want it to be, and that’s pretty cool imo. Lemmy is still in it’s infancy compared to reddit, and it’s not perfect, but I think we can build it into something even better, and missing the good parts of reddit can inspire us to make sure that we incorporate them into lemmy in the future.
I’ve been embracing the weirdness of multiple platforms with distinct cultures and equally enjoying going to different parts of the internet again after quite some time! I do miss the sense that in browsing Reddit you could sample the cultural pulse of a particular demographic cluster.
I really don’t mean to be offensive but if you miss it why don’t you go back? No one is forcing you to be here. If you don’t care about the concerns we have on this side then just go back, reddit is still there for you.
While I hear where you’re coming from, I would not chase away anyone just because they have a different world view or perspective, or wants to see something different than what’s here today (as long as it’s not toxic, of course). Having diverse opinions and experiences is what makes many conversations compelling, otherwise you end up in the same echo chambers that corporate owned social media have fostered.
OP, don’t go back, you came here for a reason. Have patience and understanding, and contribute to the areas you personally want to see grow, and it will come around.
I didn’t mean to say he MUST go back. All I’m saying is that if he likes something he doesn’t need to feel pressured by everyone else who thinks different. He likes reddit so why not use it? It is as if I stopped eating pineapple on pizza (yes I am one of those) just because a lot of people hate it.
Much thanks. I think my concerns just happen to be different from others. Hopefully we’re more accepting of that in the long run.
Obviously also new here. What you are seeing, honestly, is that the communities that have the most activity. This is what the majority of the users here want. Can you really blame them? You came to a preexisting community that had one thing in common. The federated social networks are explicitly anti-faang, that’s their reason for being. We’re just here because Reddit took away our stuff. It’s on us to make the content and the community we want. They welcomed us.
Yep. The reason the fediverse exists is to solve the ownership problem of big social network companies (ranging from privacy issues, to greed, to political influence), so naturally the group that uses the fediverse first are the ones that feel most strongly about that issue.
It really isn’t hostile here 95% of the time, but on the topic of Meta it’s like poking a hornets nest.
I know my family and most people don’t really care about the privacy settings of Meta and I don’t bother trying to convince them to change, but I will always enjoy shit talking them to like minded folk online.
I will reply as someone who in 2015 had 340,000 followers overall in the big social media of the time (tumblr, insta, fb, flickr etc). I was the world’s most popular collage artist at the time (not an exaggeration). I even got selected by NYTimes for having among the “best book covers of the year” in 2016, among other works for many magazines etc.
Long story short, for an artist to make it without a gallery (I despise the whole idea of galleries because they force you to make the same kind of art all the time), they must base their business via social media. There’s no other way. And so I did, and did well. Well, come 2017, the enshitification of these platforms started happening. Nothing was chronological anymore. And since I’m not a person who shows what they ate today, or making it all about myself (I was only posting art, not personal stuff), their new recommendation algorithms destroyed my business. I used to make thousands per year to sustain my life, because each time I’d have a sale, people would SEE my post about it and if they liked my art, they’d buy. Now, my posts are served to about 1/10th of my followers, and no new users find me, because hashtags aren’t embraced for finding new users anymore, everything’s just recommendations. Within 5 short years since the big algorithmic, I was now making only about $100/month via my art. And that was not just for me, but 95% of other artists and photographers out there too. The recommendation system of all social media (including youtube now) only promotes a few superstars in any given field, not everyone is getting their share fair of exposure based on chronology. Many online small businesses don’t work anymore because everything is not a fair field anymore. Even buying ads doesn’t make a difference.
So, I have no interest in using things like Threads, where you are literally bombarded with celebrity and brands content, but almost none of the people you follow.
Reddit has followed the same line, it’s just that we see it less, because it’s more discussion-driven. But similar changes have happened to it – in spirit. I still use reddit only for 3 sub-reddits that are too specific and don’t have enough people for here yet. I don’t use the rest of reddit.
On top of that, I’m not interested in trackers, ads, and everything that eventually lead to enshitification of these platforms. So now, I only use federated services. I have accounts with lemmy, mastodon, pixelfed, peertube, nostr, matrix, etc.
No, none of my friends are there (my husband has a mastodon account, and that’s it). And I don’t care if they aren’t. When I’m with my mom next time I’ll install a matrix client for her too, so she can call me for free (so we don’t have to use fb messenger, the only big app I still use, so I can talk to her in Greece for free). Then, I won’t need of these big social media apps.
As for my business, it will never come back (especially now with AI art). But at least, I have MORE eyes here on the fediverse than I have on the big social media. I posted a new painting on my pixelfed yesterday, and it got 17 likes, out of just 27 followers. On instagram I usually get 70 likes out of 3600 followers (that’s on my illustration account, my other, collage account, had nearly 170,000 followers in its hey day). And consider that Pixelfed only has 160,000 users (plus federated via mastodon by some instances). Given that amount of likes on the fediverse, if Instagram was still chronological and hashtags were still bearing importance as they did in the past, my posts there could have about 5,000 likes – given their 2+ bn users. Instead, with their recommendation engine, I get only 70 likes, and no new followers. So proportionally, I get more eyes on the fediverse, than I do on the big social media. So why would I want to go back to big social media? Just to be served Kim Kardashian content that I never asked for it? I won’t.
I do miss sequential feeds. … do also agree with the general shitification stuff.
Sorry about the loss in livelihood. That sucks.
I miss it too - the curated experience after years of filtering out the crap and muting the nonsense, the sleek UX in Apollo, and the many friendly and familiar voices left behind who didn’t make the switch.
My advice would be - don’t give up on the Fediverse just yet. It will take a bit of time for the dust to settle and these multiple federated communities to find their voice. Like on Reddit, don’t ever browse /all - it’s just a litany of low-effort memes. Be deliberate about which communities you sub to, and browse by /sub. There’s enough quality content here to fill a feed, though perhaps not in any single community where the critical mass has not yet been reached to offer fresh content throughout the day.
The memes are so stale here.
but some of them made me laugh, so I guess i like stale meme.
Fresh memes are bread, stale memes are croutons. There’s a time and place for each
It took me only half a day of never ending beans posts to filter out lemmyshitpost, I say good riddance.
I don’t feel the same as you feel, for two reasons:
- I feel myself at home with all those discussions about open source, privacy, and “shit corporations do”. I enjoy those things.
- I got so many bones to pick against Reddit, for years, that even without lemmy I wouldn’t miss that shithole.
However I can understand your feel. Those discussions are nice if you like them (like I do), but if you don’t, they feel like unprompted preaching about things that are contextually irrelevant. And since Reddit is bigger, for now it’s easier to find “your turf” there.
I think that it’ll get better over time; if you stick around, you’ll miss Reddit less and less. New comms will pop up, old comms about other topics will grow, and people will eventually distribute themselves better across instances, based on their likes/dislikes. It’ll become easier to avoid this talk about open source and privacy, or to embrace it if someone else so desires. And as the platform aggregates more content, other people will come in due to network effect, and those new people will probably talk more about other stuff than “we” older users do. Including the depth that you (and I) want for discussions.
“I personally would like to see what Meta does in the fediverse… maybe it will make it more normalized.idk.” Meta won’t normalize the fediverse, people educating themselves and understanding why we need the fediverse will normalize it. Meta/Threads will kill the fediverse, this is a known playbook companies use to kill things they can’t buy.
Even if and it’s a big if meta kills fediverse, privacy oriented people will just move on to other new thing as they are already used to packing up things and leaving no traces.
That’s a thing though: I’m not really a big fediverse person. I’m a person who wants a community, info, etc.
If Meta can bring that to me better than I might be ok with that. I wouldn’t want it to kill the fediverse by any means, but still I’m not talking about that.
Hopefully Lemmy will get better along with the mobile apps, making it more accessible to more people.
I’m decently happy with Wefwef! It’s very Apollo inspired.
I’m amazed by the speed at which Wefwef is being developed. It works better than Jerboa for me already. Still looking forward to Sync though :)
