I don't get people that are here in the fediverse and *want to bring over* the content that is on FB, IG, TikTok, etc.

Rottcodd, 10 months ago

I agree completely.

I recently compared it to sitting in a comfortable little cafe that serves delicious food and looking around and saying, "Gee, I wish this was a McDonalds."

It just doesn't even begin to make sense to me.

And I'm with you - gatekeeping or no - anyone who wants Twitter or Reddit or Facebook content can already go to Twitter or Reddit or Facebook to get it, and that's exactly what they should do.

alertsleeper, 10 months ago

that’s a great analogy

CrazyEddie041, 10 months ago

It's appropriate because that kind of shit happens irl, too. Small city with a cool local vibe becomes popular, people move to the city because it's popular, all the popular stuff gets priced out and paved over to make room for more Starbucks. Then people whine about how cool the city used to be. Gee, I wonder what happened to it?!

PeleSpirit, 10 months ago

Having gone through that, there are also Starbucks suits and the owners of the buildings housing the Starbucks yelling at you that this is WHAT YOU NEED!

Tar_alcaran, 10 months ago

Just defederate the Meta instances, and your problem is solved, right?

It’s not like saying “I wish this awesome little bar is a McDonald’s” but “I don’t want to go to a bar in a city that also has a McDonalds”.

conciselyverbose, 10 months ago

More like a small town that used to have real restaurants that got driven out of business when McDonalds came to town selling shit on a plate so cheap it was impossible to be price competitive with food suitable for humans.

The mere existence of McDonalds dramatically hurt the options available.

Rottcodd, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Well... yes and no.

I'm not talking about any effect I think it might have on me, because yes - I can just avoid the instances favored by morons.

To belabor the analogy a bit more, it's not quite accurate to say that they want this neat little cafe to be McDonalds - they want the entire town to be McDonalds. They want to be able to open up their door snd see nothing but McDonalds, stretching to the horizon in all directions.

That that literally can't happen - that the decentralized nature of the ActivityPub means that the most anyone can ever do is turn instances into empty wastelands of brain-dead "content" one at a time - doesn't make their viewpoint any less perplexing to me.

Poggervania, 10 months ago

That’s what had me confused at first when people were leaving Reddit but going “bRiNg ReDdIt CoNtEnT oVeR aNd DeLeTe ReDdIt!” and using the whole “we need content” as a reason.

Like, if y’all want content from social media platforms… use those social media platforms. In my mind’s eye, I see the Fediverse as more of an old-school forum where people can make any forum for specific communities, not as a content-vomiting platform.

TwilightVulpine, 10 months ago

The issue I have with this analogy is that the food here isn't quite that great. Maybe the service is better and it's less crowded and more friendly, but the menu is pretty limited and not everything it serves even matches the fast food's quality. I guess there's merits from being loyal to your local cafeteria and its community even if it's not always the best, but lets not exaggerate the quality being delivered here.

I used to browse reddit for gaming news, especially indie games, and the communities I found for this on Lemmy didn't pick up any momentum yet.

Rottcodd, 10 months ago

Mm... you do have a point, but I would argue that the content is generally better at the very least to the degree that it's actual people sincerely posting things rather than bots, shills and karma farmers spamming and/or astroturfing.

And yes - niche communities are extremely underpopulated here.

I don't think the solution to that though is to aim for more generic "content" with the hope that it'll lead to broad growth and that a byproduct of that will be to bring more people who happen to share your interests. The solution IMO is to get on the communities you want to see grow and start contributing stuff, right now. Even if you're just posting to one person, keep at it, and pretty soon it'll be two, then three, then...

Odusei, 10 months ago

But I’m here because I can’t get reddit content anymore in the format I want to consume it. I didn’t have an issue with the content of reddit, just the owners.

SwallowsDick, 10 months ago

Same. Ideally, Lemmy would be a Reddit replacement for me.

Marxine, 10 months ago

But it can be a replacement with original content. Even if they have the same topics, it’s beneficial to let each community grow their own culture.

MeowdyPardner, 10 months ago

I don't necessarily disagree, I just think that the solution is to cultivate the content here. Not connect with the same old corporate platforms that caused the problems in the first place.

platypus_plumba, 10 months ago

I wouldn’t mind if someone stole and curated the top posts from certain subreddits I’m interested in.

I really don’t dislike reddit for their communities but for their CEO and corporate greed. The content is great.

I’m not there because I don’t want to give them money after they mistreated their users.

zeppo, 10 months ago

I got a tired of the cliched site culture and some people’s attitudes. I suppose it’s because it’s such a large slice of the public that you get more people being dicks and leaving drive-by jerky comments. The overdone in-jokes and pun threads got to be a bit much too. I needed something like Lemmy to demonstrate what I was missing on reddit.

tal, 10 months ago

Also, I don't think that the way to deal with "there is content on a platform that I don't like" is to run from it. It's to make better filtering systems to choose what I want. Two reasons:

• First, some people like different things. They shouldn't have to use different platforms just for that.

• Second, stuff like spam will show up anywhere that has decent size anyway eventually, once there are enough eyeballs for it.

I think that the goal should be to have plenty of content of all sorts on the Threadiverse, and then just have good filtering tools that are hard to subvert.

Reddit didn't let people build the filtering tools they wanted in and in some cases -- like when it came to their own ads -- were actively opposed to that. The Threadiverse solves that problem for me.

floofloof, 10 months ago

I thought I didn’t until I came here and realized how nasty Reddit has become. You can go days on Lemmy without encountering an angry asshole.

CthuluVoIP, 10 months ago

I’m in the same boat. I want Lemmy to be a firehose of content, the overwhelming majority of which I won’t ever want to interact with. I want that because different people are interested in different things, and that’s what allows for even the niche communities to find their footing with more than a small contingent of people.

I think the tools at our disposal as users and administrators of Fediverse systems are already good enough to manage and control your own experience, and I’m confident that they’ll continue to improve at a rapid click. The experience of using Lemmy as a Reddit replacement has already improved dramatically since June 12th, and it does so every day. I appreciate that others may feel much more strongly about the “dumbing down” of the overall content and community than I do, and for those folks joining an instance that outright defederates is a great option.

Folks are quick to tell people how they should be using Lemmy. “Don’t sign up for one of the big instances, you should use a small one instead because federation” is a big one - but there’s a lot of appeal in this model with being signed up to the instances generating the majority of the content the broader community is consuming because it makes finding that content easier than it otherwise would be. My hope is that the larger instances like lemmy.world will at least test the waters with Threads federation to see what it actually does to the community before taking the step of defederation, because right now those large instances are what’s feeding the rest of the rest of Lemmy.

As it stands, having those large instances federated with Threads and having smaller communities defederated seems like a best of both worlds scenario, because a small instance defederating with Threads won’t lose out on the other content being generated by those larger instances, but those who want to trudge through the mire of mass appeal can do so in one place.

agitatedpotato, 10 months ago

“can’t wait for all that meta content”

the content: someones racist uncle yelling at you in the comments

sadreality, 10 months ago

Get off my lawn, boy!

danhakimi, 10 months ago

I’m not here for mass-produced content, if I wanted that, I’d be in other platforms. The beauty of these communities is they are not filled with posts that are all the same, algorithms and bots. It’s just a community of real people having conversations.

The problem with the fediverse is that it's not really filled with posts at all. Maybe the Tech or Random magazines, if that's what you're looking for, but if you want to talk about cars or suits or model trains or whatever, you'll be lucky if you see one post across the fediverse in a month. Niches are empty, because most people here mostly have one interest in common, which is the fediverse itself.

Conversely, the value of large-scale social media, and the theoretical ideal of the fediverse, lies in positive network effects. You're into some obscure Japanese manga only four people who speak English have ever read? odds are, three of those people are on reddit, and you might find them. Looking for a review on a bootmaker you saw at the thrift store? Go to /r/goodyearwelt, there will be twelve threads about it, none of them sponsored or anything, diving way too deep into details you never could have imagined wanting to know.

But right now, look through lemmy.world or whatever, and tell me:

• What are some good anime? Some good Shonen anime? Some good non-Shonen anime? An anime that represents trans issues well?
• Where is a good place to get a suit under $400? In the US? In Europe? What's the difference between Huntsman and Edward Sexton's cuts?
• What's a good recipe for a cake? What about a salad? How do you deflame a red onion?
• Who is the vice president of the United States? Who is the secretary of state? Who is the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office?

Trivial questions, right? Most of them haven't come up here at all. Reddit is a massive corpus of knowledge, answering questions way more obscure than these, with enough people around to answer whatever question you might have in a variety of niche communities. People want that on a service they can trust.

I don't think many people want more tools to talk to strangers about nothing. Scale gives rise to better conversations and interactions in niche areas.

alertsleeper, 10 months ago

I totally get your point and agree that this is still the niche inside the niche, and growth would be good, I just don’t joining Meta is a good growing strategy

pavnilschanda, 10 months ago

This is a very good comment. I’m basically repeating what you said but the thing about Lemmy is that there aren’t as many people as there are in Reddit, and most Reddit users are lurkers who don’t have the awareness that Lemmy exists as a viable alternative. So it’s natural that Lemmy users will refer to Reddit content, and content from large social medias for that matter, when talking about the topics relevant in their communities.

janWilejan, 10 months ago

the things you like about Reddit didn't exist when Reddit was the new alternative to the enshittification of Digg. KBin is brand new and Lemmy was not much more than a tankie hub until recently.

KBin and Lemmy will build the communities you're looking for over time. The question is: do you want those communities to develop under the shadow of the same algorithms, bots, and content you see on corporate social media, or do you want something new?

Magiwarriorx, 10 months ago

I’ll take that a step further: the big default subs on Reddit were essentially worthless. Did anyone really use Reddit primarily for stuff like r/technology or r/news? You would have gotten almost the exact same, if not better, coverage of those two with a couple of tech Youtubers and AP News. Repeat for r/politics, r/worldnews, r/games… etc. Anything that was on there was mirrored elsewhere. If they had gotten Thanos snapped out of existence, it would have ultimately been a mild inconvenience at worst.

The real Library of Alexandria are the small subs. Those are the niches that need to be filled to make Lemmy a viable replacement, and we can’t get there without further growth.

rumckle, 10 months ago

Agreed, the main reason I use still use Facebook is that it is home to largest communities for by hobbies. The subreddits for those hobbies were practically graveyards and on lemmy it is no better.

Of course, this doesn’t mean it can’t change, but for some things other communities are better right now.

AnonymousLlama, 10 months ago

I do enjoy some random / silly content though, looking at sites like squabbles.io you can see how popular that can be. I'm pretty happy with the content coming through here, but some of the more light stuff is also very appealing

hetscop, 10 months ago

Right now fediverse is mostly made up of techy people - which is fine! But there are many other kinds of people you might potentially want to interact with online. Threads could bring in normies and celebs to the metaverse. Normies are a mixed bag - this includes your racist uncle but also your really cool and funny friend who can't be bothered to set up a mastodon account. Celebs are a source of real world influence (I'm including politicians and journalists for example in this category) which is obviously attractive. I'm gonna miss cyberbullying local politicians on twitter, and it would be nice to be able to continue doing so through the comfort of e.g. kbin.

I get your point and I largely agree but it isn't that hard to see the appeal of threads for me. I don't think it's gonna work out in the end though so I really hope they mostly stay of the broader fediverse.

SaltimusMaximus, 10 months ago

There are a lot of people on Threads who I’d be happy to follow, but the overall vibe there right now is too insane for my taste. Filtering through Mastodon would def be ideal.

ChildeRoland, 10 months ago

Normie here - Reddit refugee. Is mastodon better for someone like me vs Lemmy or is Lemmy the place to be?

AveragePigeon, 10 months ago

I'm also a reddit refugee (was on there almost 10 years) and tried out all the options (Lemmy, kbin, mastodon, squabbles) before finally settling on kbin as my new "home." Lemmy and Kbin are the most reddit-like, Mastodon is more like Twitter, and Squabbles is kind of a mash up of the two. So I'd say the "right" platform for someone like you is the one you personally prefer.

hetscop, 10 months ago

Lemmy is the most reddit like experience if that's what you're after, but I'd reccomend getting a couple different accounts, browsing around and seeing what works and then settling on what's most fun

alertsleeper, 10 months ago

Imma be honest here, I want exactly 0 celebrities. I mean, you could be LeBron James right now and I don’t really care, but celebrities for the sake of celebrities I don’t like, that’s just Twitter, the same simping and controversy as always.

As for the normies, I get your point

magic_lobster_party, 10 months ago

The pseudonymity of Reddit was appealing to me. It had more focus around the discussions rather than the people. If I want to follow celebrities I can do that on other social media.

Elkaki123, 10 months ago

I will just say, that image of what the fediverse is (or ought to be), while not rare, is not shared by everyone.

If you actually want gatekeep only high effort posta you might want to go to Tildes.

I don’t think gatekeeping is the answer, I mean I always wanted this platform yo grow horizontally unless there are many, many instances and a lot of people for variety. If you want to see only high effort content only join appropriate communities, it’s as easy as that. To justify blthr block because it will taint the space is just a bad arguments in my eyes.

kemal007, 10 months ago

If you want to see only high effort content only join appropriate communities, it’s as easy as that. To justify blthr block because it will taint the space is just a bad arguments in my eyes.

couldn’t agree more. there’s certainly plenty of ‘content’ on the fediverse that i have absolutely zero interest in and would rather not see - but i can control that pretty easily even as a new user so I don’t see the value in gatekeeping. maybe I dont care about linux but maybe both the linux user and I both like catswithjobs - that’s the beauty of diversity, of finding common bonds amidst the differences and celebrating together.

straF, 10 months ago

What will stop the bots? Were literally on a platform because the other one cut off moderation bots…

alertsleeper, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Bots are necessary. But having moderation bots and other useful ones like the one for reminders is one thing, and another one is bots posting spam 100 times a day.

How to stop it? No idea

Edit: typo

Nioxic, 10 months ago

i’ve seen quite a lot of content from tiktok, over on reddit (basically a repost?)

I refuse to go on tiktok myself

But i will gladly watch a 30 second clip if its funny or interesting, regardless of where it originally came from.

i’ve already seen older memes reposted here anyway. not like we can avoid it…

skullone, 10 months ago

The Eternal September begins again I guess

hitmyspot, 10 months ago

Especially given the armies of people who cross post any decent content to all networks. I hope that here, due to no monetary benefit and no karma, it is only for the love of sharing. All the good content will make it here, but rather than being a firehouse of crap, the community nature should make the relevant communities more focused.

I still use Facebook for local groups. I think even they realise that niche communities without outrage are where the growth will lie. That’s likely why they are scared of federated networks. It could easily kill them over time.

Jumpinship, 10 months ago

No karma? What are the little arrows for?

njtrafficsignshopper, 10 months ago

I think what it means is that it doesn’t add up all the little arrows across all posts and comments, by default. Although, I suppose an instance, external tool, or browser plugin could still do that.

anonymous_bot, 10 months ago

Thank you for explaining. I was wondering about all the talk of (lack of) karma.

SCB, 10 months ago

This site is an aggregator. I want to use it to aggregate content I want to see.

It’s trivially easy for you to not be exposed to things you don’t want to see here, so I’m not really understanding the issue

AeroBlue, 10 months ago

Yea, most content isn’t original anyways. If it’s actually good content I don’t care where it’s from

carbotect, 10 months ago

Federation with Meta will probably not have a huge effect on Lemmy. Threads has no communities after all.

It will probably be mostly a Mastodon thing.

ThunderTenTronckh, 10 months ago

That was my take as well but I’m also an ignorant slut so more than happy to hear reasons why I’m wrong

MrShankles, 10 months ago

I’m also an ignorant slut

Just wanted to say that ya made me laugh with that phrase lol. I too enjoy using “slut” in a myriad of fashions

njtrafficsignshopper, 10 months ago

Your username is a hell of a reference, haha

njtrafficsignshopper, 10 months ago

Personally, I am fresh enough to all this that I feel it’s prudent to kind of sit back on the discussion, and am leaning toward the “defederate” option.

However - I deleted my Facebook years ago, and never had Instagram or Twitter. It would be nice to interact with my own family and friends who do most of their online presence in places like that. So I kinda get it. I’m not after the mass-produced content but it would be cool to hear from people I know again that I’ve lost touch with because I’m stubborn about FB.

Just spitballing - and please consider that I haven’t been at Lemmy long enough to know if this is a terrible idea - but what about an instance that hasn’t blocked Facebook and other big corpos, but doesn’t raise their content by default? Like what if you have to actively connect with people on them? Seems like a decent middle ground, until Facebook decides to break it anyway.

TechnoBabble, 10 months ago

It would be nice to interact with my own family and friends

That’s a straight no from me.

We can already interact with our friends and family anywhere we choose, but Lemmy is one of the only general discussion areas left on the internet that isn’t full of the stupidest people on the planet.

Bringing our family here will just result in real identities taking over and limiting discussion to what’s acceptable in all our little social bubbles.

shadysus, 10 months ago

I don’t think this discussion is just about Lemmy

I agree that Lemmy (+ Reddit and other forums) by design are for anonymous accounts.

At the same time, things like Twitter / Facebook/ Instagram are more for personally identifiable accounts. I want to see photos from my friends on Instagram, not random people. I get the random people photos on Reddit/Lemmy

It’s different use cases. I use my real name on Mastodon and PixelFed, and I use this account on Lemmy.

anonymous_bot, 10 months ago

We can already interact with our friends and family anywhere we choose

Well not exactly. The person posting chooses the platform and then other people have to go to said platform. If someone doesn’t like platform X and prefers Y then they have to convince others to also switch to Y. This happened with instant messengers and it happens with chat applications.

hitstun, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I'm a Reddit refugee and I've been moving all the pictures and videos from my old niche subreddit to my new niche Kbin magazine. I'm afraid Reddit will collapse, and the collection of floaty things I've been building up will become lost media if it's not reposted somewhere else. I like the Fediverse's mission and I want to see how the Fediverse develops. Also, I want to have a complete and functional artsy magazine on Kbin to show the others back on Reddit that it can be done well.

For the past couple days, some of my posts have been making Fedia's home page and apparently other instances' home pages too. It's good to be seen, but I'm afraid I'm getting more attention than I actually deserve. I like seeing art of fantasy worlds and interactions, and I'm not alone in that. But, I'm afraid I'm corrupting your feeds with stuff you aren't looking for, just because I'm doing it first.

LemmyFeed, 10 months ago

Oh snap I saw a ton of floating is fun posts and wondered what was going on lol. Didn’t really bother me even though it’s not my thing, I’m just glad to see lemmy getting posted to so much.

Keep it up!

Madafacatl, 10 months ago

I agree, if i want to see memes o pure shitposts there are tons of alternatives