Now that a lot of the commotion has subsided I’m just curious to know how y’all are finding the Lemmy experience in general and whether you use it regularly like you did reddit?
i moved to lemmy before the reddit api changes. in january 2023 i stopped using all proprietary software and was looking for alternetives. its way better than reddit, im never going back…
There’s good reason to love Lemmy, and since joining I’ve also gone very Foss and privacy centric but I just feel like it’s a bit quiet, maybe it’s just me
For me it seems to have wained a bit, I feel like a lot of casual users have gone silent recently, the content I’m seeing is more specific to niche topics and communities
Have you tried browsing another instance’s All feed to see if yours is missing any communities? I started using Lemmy on a really small instance but switched to lemmy.world as my main because it could see a lot more content. My new alt runs a federation helper to fix this too.
My only real complaint with Lemmy is that instances, by default, only know about their own communities and the remote communities that their users have specifically subscribed to. Some smaller instances run federation helpers that scan other instances for communities. Manually initiating a federation request is not intuitive either.
I’ve just made myself a hexbear account because of the mentions on here, looks interesting
Also, you can ask your instance admin to run this tool to have more communities in All: https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
So far so good. In a smaller community I feel more responsible for contributing to discussions. Others seem to be engaging too with thoughtful comments (not just karma-farming inside jokes).
This is helped by the fact that new interesting threads are not immediately buried in heaps of new content, so you actually have time to think of an answer that someone might actually read and reply to. I realize that this is mostly a function of the current scale of the Fediverse and that the more it grows, the more it might just turn into Reddit.
I’ve only been active on Hexbear really since the cth sub got banned and we built that space, but I really like how federation has gone and the influx of new slop and occasional lost libs/chuds.
Once you understand the kind of people who are on hexbear, things will become more clear. Just go to some of their profiles and have a look at what they post
Hexbear: the 3rd or so biggest instance on lemmy and by far the most active. It’s where all the people with pronouns next to their names come from. We’re a left unity trans positive community that’s been around for 3 years, mostly made up of Marxists and Anarchists. We were just recently federated with the rest of lemmy about a week ago.
slop: Food for the hogs. Content. Posts. Discussion. Drama. Romance. Danger!
cth: a podcast no one really cares about. A community of leftists outgrew a forum that used to be about them. It got banned from reddit and the refugees turned into Hexbear.
libs: Liberals. From our perspective this includes about 65-75% of the American political landscape. This includes all democrats and about half republicans. These are people who support capitalism. Bernie Sanders is a lib. They are annoying and will betray you in the end but they’re usually the people who can be reasoned with so it’s extra frustrating.
chuds: Fascists. The other 25-35%. Confederate flag waving people who eat burgers as a protest against global warming. Kyle Rittenhouse stans. Coal rollers. The people who will kill you first if you have good politics. They believe above all else in natural hierarchies so the capitalists will turn to them when the left challenges theirs. That’s how Hitler happened.
This post is making me want to add hexbear to a word filter. Specially the blatant 4chan lingo such as “slop”.
It’s their way of saying “low quality”, usually thrown at things they deem forced by a marketing team. Always gave me some anti-semitic vibes when I used to see it used in context but I’m not sure why off the top of my head.
“If I encounter a word I do not know used by communists, it must be from 4chan because I am the most highly educated and professional person ever to walk the Earth.” — liberals
(I am Jewish and have been terminally online for years and have never heard that ‘slop’ is anti-semitic. Sounds like libs are just using anti-semitism as an empty accusation to silence communists to me, especially heinous when you consider who funded the Nazis in the first place and who rescued the Nazis after the Soviets destroyed them.)
Pretty good, it’s my Reddit replacement (except for Google searches where I still put site:reddit.com, searching Lemmy doesn’t work that well…).
Choosing an instance sucked though.
I went like:
- sh.itjust.works: Found out they’re Canadian, the latency was too much for Europe
- lemmy.ml: Overall pretty good, I liked that NSFW instances were defederated, so I could browse All without seeing porn. Till I realized there is a slur filter that censors your comments and others. So if someone calls you a ‘bitch’ on the Fediverse everyone can read it, except you. You see ‘removed’
- lemmy.world: Largest instance, plenty of local content, good policies overall, but the stability was awful (due to DDOS)
- lemmy.zip: Smaller instance, full federation, super fast and in the EU, I’m staying there for now and moved all my subscriptions and blocked communities (mostly porn, again, I like to browse All) over
The problem with tiny instances is reliability and trust.
If you lose the motivation to run it tomorrow it’s gone. If you run out of money? Gone. If you’re the only admin and you die? Gone.
In addition to that you can read everything I do on your instance. Like all my “private” messages.
If an instance admin is scummy they could even modify the Lemmy code running and save away all passwords and emails in plaintext. Not an issue for me as I use a custom email and random passwords for every service, but it can fuck over random people.
So professional bigger instances do have their benefits too.
dude, all I ask for at registration time is a nickname and a captcha… reddit, twitter, fb and google all read your shit and train ai models and make billions of dollars every month
I’m sure your shitposts are top secret but idk, what’s your threat model?
