…sometimes it does feel like this.
You’ll find that anywhere. Not just on the Internet, either. Literally, everywhere.
True, but Reddit had the right conditions for toxicity to grow and begin to run rampant. Lemmy, with its decentralized nature, should limit the spread of any toxic communities.
I dont think it will limmits it at all it will spread so u end uo wirh multiple communities for the same thibg with different flavours of toxicity. We already have that with world news ie the .ml flavour of toxicity vs the other instances with differing flavours
You should check out Facebook, Twitter, IRC, NextDoor, 4chan, 9gag, or any other Internet forum (including comment sections of news articles). Reddit does not hold exclusive rights to any “right conditions for toxicity to grow”.
Yeah, there’s lots of places with rampant toxicity. I was just comparing reddit and lemmy, and I consider the Federated nature of lemmy to help prevent (not necessarily stop) toxicity from growing.
I’m not an expert on this whole Federated thing, but to me, it sounds like if one community is having problems with another, they can just disassociate and not have to deal with it anymore.
Hey, we left cause of the enshitification of Reddit itself, toxicity of the users was always part of the package deal.
As a Reddit refugee myself,I can’t disagree with that. But I will clarify that there’s generally two kinds of Reddit Refugees, though:
- The kind that got fed up with Reddit and wants to be part of something better
- The people who were banned from Reddit and think this is some kind of safe haven to continue acting on their worst impulses that got them banned elsewhere.
The meme is largely referencing the latter.
As do I, mind you my worse impulses are just me being bloodthirsty. But John Brown was also somewhat bloodthirsty and I dont see anyone of deserving of life criticizijg him.
I hope I’m in the first category. This place has less people but better engagement.
I came because Reddit’s a shitty company and due to the ban of 3rd party apps. Which group am I?
Meh. Maybe I’m just not in the wrong corners of the Lemmy fediverse, but honestly I’m not really seeing very many of the banned finding their way here. That was a huge problem in the cesspools like Voat, but for whatever reason it seems like Lemmy has mostly been spared, in my limited experience at least.
That said, yeah there’s a fair amount of blunt talking and general mild misanthropy, but frankly I almost welcome that as a change from the overmoderated sterility of corporate spaces like Reddit which have to think in terms of advertiser-friendliness.
Have you ever blocked anyone at all? Or a community, or perhaps your feed is always set to Subscribed? Most of us readily forget what Lemmy looks like to a day-1 account. It takes a bit of effort to clean it up, and if they don’t see the value in remaining then they won’t put in that effort to learn, rather than simply leave.
Yes exactly. When reddit pulled that api pricing shit, I just got up and left. I came here expecting shitposts, braindead “hot” takes, piss-poor reading comprehension, and americans acting like they’re the only country in the world. I got exactly what I expected and I couldn’t be more satisfied, 10/10 would nuke my reddit account again.
It took me a couple months to fully leave years of bad reddit habits behind. I didn’t realize how deeply ingrained they’d become. The toxicity had gradually snuck up on me.
To preface this I’m a lurker myself. I wonder what bad habits it left behind in you? After the whole API and 3rd Party Apps fiasco I just left it behind. But I wouldn’t say that I took the toxicity over from it to Lemmy. Especially wondering what exactly is ingrained in your soul that’s left behind from it. As far I know I’m still the same but as I’ve told just mostly lurking so don’t think it had much as an influence on me except the doom scrolling.
Defensiveness. Overexplaining myself because I didn’t expect people to give me the benefit of the doubt, and I knew that if I left any room for interpretation, people would assume the worst version possible. (I didn’t know what “sealioning” was.)
It’s important to remember that this had happened slowly, over a period of years. If it had been as bad as it is now back when I first signed up, I wouldn’t have put up with it. Initially, reddit just seemed like a bunch of normal (but sometimes weird) people. It wasn’t until I discovered Lemmy that I realized I wasn’t being myself, and that every time I posted, in the back of my mind, I was expecting the worst.
Good riddance.
Y’know, now that you mention it, the sealioning behaviour I’d been conditioned to expect is a big reason for why I spend so much time writing my comments and adding qualifying statements.
At least not everyone is toxic online.
Source: ex-Redditor of 16 years
Are we growing though?
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats shows MAU (monthly active users) decreasing - we are now at 43k, last month was 45k, the month before 47k, etc. Total servers also decreasing - now 540, was 552, 579, etc. Overall posts and comments are slightly up though - so we’re seeing increased activity from fewer users, rather than an increase in actual users. One could argue whether we’re truly “decreasing” vs. merely flat, but either way I don’t see us increasing.
And 3 of those users are myself, all active and only 2 of which I had a week ago, speaking to how alts are most definitely a thing. Also, federation issues especially staying in sync with Lemmy.World may be causing people to shift instances (or to leave entirely?). If so that would be a good thing bc 0.19.6 promises to help address that. (Although in my case, I wanted an instance that allows custom blocks of any instance I choose without needing to rely on an admin team, and that isn’t dependent upon the Lemmy codebase.)
For one thing, people might be turning away due to the upcoming USA election, in which case depending on who survives that, they could return? But every person I’ve ever recommended to check out Lemmy has looked at me in disgust and actively chided me for having recommended it when they see some of the political extremism here. e.g.:
Whenever I go looking for examples of such I usually find it in 0-60 seconds, by going to Lemmy.ml and browsing by Local.
Your instance is doing wonderful work keeping such out - I wonder if that image will even render for you:-). But overall, across the wide Fediverse, people are not willing to put up with such, and seem to be leaving us overall rather than find some other way to deal with whatever it is that was bugging them.
And with such trends, and the way we treat normies, I don’t see us ever going mainstream. Maybe PieFed and Sublinks, along with Mbin and ofc Tesseract on e.g. dubvee.org will help turn that around? That would be so nice?:-)
Btw what will we call ourselves then, if it does - will we still be “Lemmy”/Lemmings, or just general Fedizens? Either way there’s great hope for the future, but also a lot of work to do to reach that point.
I wasn’t really looking at the MAU stats when I made this; it just felt like it’s been more actively lately (both good and bad). Unfortunate the numbers are actually trending downward.
For one thing, people might be turning away due to the upcoming USA election
Possibly. I’ve gone into self-imposed social media blackouts during election season many a time. Sometimes you just need a break.
Whenever I go looking for examples of such I usually find it in 0-60 seconds, by going to Lemmy.ml and browsing by Local … people are not willing to put up with such, and seem to be leaving us
Yeah. I have felt for a while that ml being the official or at least de facto flagship instance is doing more harm than good. I’m not going to tell them how to run their instance, but I am sad and frustrated that it seems to turn so many people away under the impression the whole fediverse is like that.
I’m cool with Fedizens 😀.
Yeah like to label it as “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers” seems not entirely… complete in its description.
Blaze is doing amazing work advocating for Lemmy on r/RedditAlternatives etc., and these days recommends Lemm.ee, one of the largest instances that also defederates from virtually nothing so that very little to no content is missed by the user. On the other hand, some content users very much would rather have been presented to them as opt-in rather than have to opt-out of it. i.e. if one of the major things that instance does is to make fun of the capitalist democratic Western society, then it is perhaps understandable if - regardless of truth or falsehood - people, especially normies, living inside of that same capitalist democratic Western society do not appreciate the jokes? Especially those calling for literal murder, or when an admin there tells someone to kill themselves. Duh, of course people are going to be turned away by such.
At this point it’s like a rite of passage, to learn how to become a responsible Fedizen: learn who and how to block (not necessarily in that order:-).
In fairness, there’s still total net growth of some 6000 MAU since February
How do you see the past numbers there though, without conflating the Mastodon users that says that we have ~1 million MAUs?
This one likewise says 43k MAUs right now, though I don’t recall how many we had in February. The other site only shows as far back as June, 48k MAUs. So that’s a drop of 5k MAUs since June.
Assuming the numbers are comparable across the two sites like that - and they seem to agree as far as we can tell - it looks like the numbers went up sometime between February and June, but since then we’ve lost almost all that we gained.
i.e., the Reddit drama may have caused people to come check us out, but then the largest majority of people left, likely going right back to Reddit. Possibly bc of the deep (niche) content stores that they still have - e.g. if everyone else uses Windows, it’s just easier for you to use it too, and it takes a special mindset to buck that trend.:-)
The link should take you to the Lemmy page.
Some ~30% net MAU growth since December of last year is nothing to sniff at.
i.e., the Reddit drama may have caused people to come check us out, but then the largest majority of people left, likely going right back to Reddit. Possibly bc of the deep (niche) content stores that they still have - e.g. if everyone else uses Windows, it’s just easier for you to use it too, and it takes a special mindset to buck that trend.:-)
Most people who left from Reddit after The Great Exodus did so in the first 3-4 months, though.
So denouncing genocide is now “political extremism”? If posts like that are scaring people away, that’s good, we don’t need them here.
don’t offend the majority if you want guests to stick around. you can denounce genocide without convicting all of western civilization.
Exactly. The whole “everything the other side does is evil while my side can do no wrong btw” isn’t helpful or going to lead to any change at all. Worse, these attempts to “control the conversation” would (if paid attention to) actually lead to increasing those evil deeds, bc leopards always eat people’s faces off aka reveale their true spots… eventually. e.g. blaming liberals for genocide will only lead to Republicans winning who have actively and outright stated that they will do even more genocide, plus far more than that besides.
And I don’t blame normies - who wants to join a place that features such “alternative facts” and “alternative logic” on a daily basis? Yes you can go to some trouble to opt-out, but not easily, and they don’t know how, or even that it’s possible to do so.
I’m curious, where exactly do you draw the line with your reasoning? You can denounce dumping oil into the ocean without convicting all of Shell? You can denounce the invasion of Crimea without convicting all of the Russian military? You can denounce murder without convicting all murders? Why not skip this alltogether and denounce all bad things without convicting all good things, that makes the game of ethics a whole lot easier.
“western civilization” is not a majority. It’s a minority who has been dominating the discussion for way too long, and people are tired of listening to the hypocrisy.
None of the west’s enemies are afforded the same generosity. Maybe we don’t want the majority of guests to be a bunch of mindless parrots who only care about human rights when mainstream media from “their side” tell them to care (as an excuse to project power globally). It ends up permeating all discussions, even ones that aren’t directly about politics and you end up building an echo chamber. It shapes how you see the world, for example, you took a post talking specifically about western leadership to be about “convicting all of western civilization” as if the victim of the genocide is actually the west.
