Cause we’re small but mighty
It’s totally replaced reddit for me. Every community I’m interested is smaller than I’m used to, but much more positive. It’s cool even seeing a lot of the same names occasionally as I navigate around the site.
I hope it keeps this level of quality as it grows.
What’s really cool is seeing actual conversations taking place. I’m actually able to comment here and I’m not immediately being drowned out by being one of ten thousand comments or constant contrarian trolling.
It has also totally replaced Reddit for me. It reminds me a lot of the old internet and a bit of early Reddit. It’s a really cool experiment, and if it continues as-is I will be thrilled, and if not then I will forever have a sense of pride of what everyone here accomplished. It’s very cool.
Yeah, I never feel like I’m commenting/posting into the void. By my surprise, it has actually encouraged me to post more, which isn’t something I expected when I joined Lemmy, and definitely not something I ever did on reddit.
My dude, you and Stamets are my Lemmy heroes. I can’t imagine I’d spend that much time on Lemmy if you guys weren’t around.
I’ve always been such an admirer and peruser of such a classic and timeless dialectical format. Its like constantly examining knowledge and each other and being likewise cross-examined in all the best ways
I honestly believe it has made me a much better writer and thinker although I have no pretensions about how systematic any of it is.
Edit: it can compel me to be hilariously nitpicky sometimes
Anything that makes you think critically, ponder, analyse, or absorb knowledge is a grand thing.
I just had an idea: daily Lemmy debates. We pick a topic that is relevant to the day, and we engage in healthy, respectful debate, picking a side and exploring that stance until all points of logic are exhausted.
I really do hope Lemmy can become sufficiently populous to allow for revitalizing all the niche subreddits and perpetuate+encourage that knowledge dissemination and truth-seeking function that Reddit (the community of communities rather than RedditCo) tends to do stunningly well.
I made one of my favorite niche communities (on my Lemmy.world account), for the XCOM games. And I try to drop memes in a few other super niche communities that I’m interested in every so often.
Growth is slow, but a handful of very active users can contribute more than you’d think.
Its insane how responsive and quick rhe answers pile up, asklemmy is the shit. Just asked a life or death question and already got lke r organic answers
The gaming communities are the only negative ones I have. It’s really sad, because I really want to be in gaming communities, but I just can’t stand all the negativity all of the time.
I’ve found that communities that are both mainstream and related to technical subjects to always get filled by people who know just barely enough about the subject to spread self-assured disinformation.
You won’t really have this problem with super-niche stuff, or stuff that isn’t mainstream enough like a pilot community. Gaming in social media is definitely cursed.
That can also be regulated to a certain extent at the Federation/instance level so its very possible to have different conventions or varying levels of quality control for posting and commenting
We can even have communities on similar topics with different vibes, moderating styles, etc. It’s great.
I’ve been trying out the other fediverse platforms, based on how cool Lemmy is, and they all pale in comparison. It really is a neat little thing we’ve got going on.
I really do like Tildes for certain more predictably high-quality answers when its something serious or technical but it can seem a touch heavy-handed. Ultimately, I appreciate the rigor where its important to have that and filter the memes and general+local anaesthesia nonsense we all love and know Lemmy for ;)
Your post prompted me to have a look at Tildes. It looks alright, but a bit… dry.
Its not for everyone and that’s part of why its for me ;) Not that I’m elitist or anything, I just hate low-efforts and assholes, ne’r may the two meet here
It can be. Women or queer persons can potentially have a tough time there, too.
It’s only good because of all the hard work being put in by the moderators. Unfortunately, behind the scenes, Lemmy sucks and is severely lacking in moderation tools to deal with spammers, trolls and sick people who post illegal content.
See this post for instance, I feel pretty bad for the mods who have to deal with such stuff: https://beehaw.org/post/7943139
It’s not just the mods but the admins going to lengths to keep their instances clean. The awfulness outlined in that post means I’m not sure I should keep hosting my own instance.
Indeed, it’s not really a good idea to run your own instance if you’re not prepared to deal with such content. Many small instance admins have shutdown their instances for this very reason.
There was a patch merged recently which disabled caching of federated images, but I believe it still needs some work. Some discussion around that over here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/3962112 including an interesting comment suggesting rerouting /pictrs/ path to 404, so nginx won’t serve any images.
I am biased saying this, but I really don’t think Lemmy is bad behind the scenes. On the contrary, I think it’s revolutionary from a technological perspective, not only because of the Fediverse but because of the way it’s implemented and all the great new technologies used.
Keep in mind that this is a FOSS project, and there is obviously no budget to be hiring moderation teams for CSAM like software giants do.
CSAM was an obvious problem from the start, but when it comes down to it, it’s a moderator job and not a job for the actual software to do.
Thankfully there are new tools now to help moderators deal with CSAM that are possibly going to be incorporated to Lemmy afaik.
TLDR: Don’t blame the software for people being shit
Sorry, but I disagree. Note that I don’t disagree with the idea or the technology itself (and the concept of Fediverse), the problem is the current state of development. Saying that it’s the moderators job doesn’t absolve the responsibility of the software, when the software, in it’s current state, doesn’t really provide any decent tools for moderation and user access controls.
CSAM was never a problem on well-configured traditional forums, which were based on forum software such as Invision, vBulletin etc. To elaborate, in traditional forums, you’d get a LOT of controls for filtering out the kind of users who post such content. For instance, most forums won’t even let you post until you complete an interactive tutorial first (reading the rules and replying to a bot indicating you’ve understood them etc). On top of that, you can have various levels of restrictions, eg, someone with less than 100 posts, or an account less than a month old may not be able to post any links or images etc. Also, you can have a trust system on some forums, where a mod can mark your account as trusted or verified, granting you further rights. You can even make it so that a manual moderator approval is required before image posting rights are granted. In this instance, a mod would review your posting history and ensure that your posts genuinely contributed to the community and you’re unlikely to be a troll/karma farmer account etc.
So, short of accounts getting compromised/hacked, it’s very difficult to have this sort of stuff happen on a well-configured traditional forum.
I used to be a mod on a couple of popular forums back in the day, and I even ran my own server for a few years (using Invision Power Board), and never once have I had to deal with such content.
The fact is Lemmy, in it’s present state, is woefully inadequate to deal with such content. Dealing with CSAM should never be a volunteer mod’s job - that stuff can scar you for life, or even trigger PTSD/bad memories for those who might’ve suffered abuse in their forgotten past. If people are involved, it should be a job for professionals who’re trained to deal with this stuff.
Once again, I don’t disagree with the general idea or the concept of Lemmy, it’s just unfortunate timing the Reddit exodus happened when the software was essentially an alpha.
I agree that CSAM protection is lacking, but the software is not an alpha. As a platform I use it just as much as I used to use Reddit and usually it’s much faster, more enjoyable and not profit driven.
CSAM protection is essential, but it’s a very hard problem to solve and naturally it takes time. Feature wise though, it’s constantly improving and showing how powerful FOSS can be when enough people are interested in it.
I agree that CSAM needs to be fixed as soon as possible, I’m just pointing out that despite this huge problem, the software is otherwise doing very well and improving faster and faster as more people join in.
Yeah I agree. Lemmy obviously isn’t at the level reddit is, but reddit has had nearly 2 decades of development with a larger userbase.
I certainly would like to see Lemmy development happen a bit more quickly, and in particular better 3rd party/mod tools (I REALLY want a RES for Lemmy), but I don’t think we’re in a bad place on the Lemmy timeline.
I’m just missing a solid Eyeblech here. I miss that the most from Reddit.
Be the change you want to see!
It’s quick and easy to spin up a community/sub!
I think that’s a bit of a dangerous take we need to address. There seem to be very real legal and practical risks + obstacles to safetly and effectively running an instance. I don’t want to see people getting themselves hurt or disillusioned prematurely because they had rose colored glasses about this subject
Besides contributing actual code… not really. You can donate money which will help with the upkeep of servers, but that’s not really an issue with most instances. No amount of money can compensate someone (normal) for dealing with the trauma associated with such content. So yeah, the only thing that can really help right now is tools for moderation and user access controls.
Honestly I think lemmy is kinda meh but im just here cus fuck reddit…
I agree, but I sometimes check out reddit as well and it’s also been meh now. It seems that social media as a whole is in a steep decline. No good content anywhere. Or maybe I’m just getting old.
This is a transition period.
Reddit lost a lot of important contributors during its little krystalspez crackdown. The formula for a successful, self-propagating online community is: good moderation + posted content + interesting comments + lurkers = healthy community.
Reddit still maintains a lot of its heavy posters, but a lot of the interesting comment makers have drifted off… a lot of them moved here. The federated communities don’t have the continuous churning content creators en masse yet, but they do have interesting comments coming from the people that are here.
Reddit is somewhat the opposite. The content creators are churning away, but the interesting comments are dying off. There is more content being created on Reddit, but the comment that you will quote, or think about all day, is now slightly more likely to be made in a federated thread.
So Reddit feels hollow, and out here feels growing but still light on content. I predict that prolific posters prefer pointed ripostes to their posting, and will work their way here. That will be great, but it will also drag along a lot of the problem children of reddit as well. That will put a huge burden on the moderation here, as well as start piling on those server fees. I predict in a year or two, we will face the choice of doing zany pledge drives to protect our larger servers, or face some forms of blatant monetization. Also we’ll have to figure out how to avoid giving the hug of death to new federated servers with interesting content.
…and there will be hidden corporate shill servers trying to latch in. Another problem with federation we need to consider down the road.
But it’s worth it. Capitalism will always try to exploit community, but community is an important human experience. If we can keep the leeches down to a minimum, we can build great things together, and help each other in a world that increasingly only offers what profits most. That type of community is what Reddit pretended to be, and it’s what the Federated Communities can be.
This is honestly a great observation, I’ve noticed on those rare times I need to search for answers to specific questions on reddit, posts have fewer and generally less thorough/helpful comments. The biggest downside to reddit imploding has been the decrease in “real” posts and interactions when you’re trying to find genuine discussions or answers to niche questions.
That’s the biggest reason I still think Lemmy has a ways to go, there’s not really an efficient way for all these posts to be search-indexed for engines like Google, DDG, etc. If that problem can somehow be solved, it’d do wonders for Lemmy’s discoverability.
Like you said, there’s definitely flaws to this platform, and by nature of being a community center it’s likely to be targeted for corporate interests, but the architecture of this Federated platform makes it much easier to keep power in the hands of the community and keep things genuine and interesting over here. I’m just glad I have a place to scroll through where people’s comments are longer than a few words, and people seem genuinely interested in interacting.
I think at some point we are really going to need to look at success stories like Tildes and HackerNews and find the common strategies we can employ to sustain the viabillity and legitimacy of Lemmy.
Just a heads up, this is how early reddit was. People will argue that the larger the platform the more likely the community will deteriorate. I will argue that is partly true and does contribute to enshittification of social media, but I think the main factor is the corporate greedos trying to continuously increase profit. Reddit kept making new rules and policies that kept degrading the platform. They made a toxic environment where flaming and antagonistic content would be shown on people’s feed.
Am I saying Lemmy isn’t awesome? Not really. You guys can make that conclusion. But I have seen similar posts like this in the early days of reddit. Make do of this as you want. Ponder and ask what made reddit bad and if this is the path of lemmy or it is “naturally” immune to it.
