Lemmy is slowly getting better

Just a little rant. When I first visited Lemmy Sites a couple of months ago it felt empty. Besides the really mainstream community pretty much everything else just felt empty.

Meanwhile though traffic has increased a lot and I feel well entertained by the traffic in c/hfy c/noncredibledefence c/keepwriting c/worldbuilding and so on. It is certainly less than Reddit but often quality is substancially higher and is “enough” to keep me entertained.

Also I like that you can actually post something without running into a bazillion deletes, bans and moderator shitshat because your post was two words to short, not NCD enough and so on.

Sure, the C64 community on Lemmy is laughable. So is the ARMA community. I still use REddit for that. Also I often check up stuff on r/hfy and r/NCD but since one week I have been prefering Lemmy for that.

Also my longer posts don’t get eaten up any more. God, three weeks ago most posts with 3k an more just got lost without feed back. Nowadays I have even manges posts around 20k without breaking them up. Though the editor is still lacking for longer posts. On Reddit I can copy-paste pretty much anything from Libreoffice into Reddits Editor (which is also pretty lacking but differently lacking). On Lemmy I have to run most text through a little perl script to get them even using correct line breaks perl -pe ‘s/\n/\n\n/’ and different sizes for Headlines are much to few to select from.

Not perfect, not even very good but definitely promising.

MyOpinion,

Slowly? Lemmy is easily as entertaining as Reddit and it is just getting going.

deranger,

I’ve been spending a majority of my time on here when I do my “Redditing”. I only visit the old site for niche topics. I spend as little time as possible there, I don’t upvote or downvote anything, and I don’t comment either. It’s read-only for me out of principle. I save all interactions for the fediverse.

I doubt all the communities will rebuild elsewhere, but I’m okay with that. Some fragmentation is necessary. Smaller communities make individual voices louder, and you have less ugly “sidedness”. When humans get into a critical mass IRL they can start to do strange things, I think we see this in social media as well.

Eternity_html,

I agree. Both mastodon and Lemmy are far more entertaining than their corpo counterparts. People are more genuine and overall more intelligent on the fediverse. I feel that smarter folks care more about privacy and digital ethics lends itself more to foss and the fediverse in general.

danielton,

I agree. I can’t say I miss Reddit.

papajohn,

I have way more fun on Lemmy. I do need some of the more esoteric an vast archived content from reddit from time to time. For that I just google reddit and no longer sign in. Fedi will get there soon enough though.

ArcaneSlime,

Lol yeah, you guy’s should have been here 2y ago, this place is jumping now!

BuckRowdy,
@BuckRowdy@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t think people really understand that reddit is an 18 year old product. Their original site was iterated on for 10 years before they stopped building on it.

Lemmy will get there and beyond. As the fediverse attracts more users, it will also attract more contributors. I’m starting to learn Rust myself in hopes I can contribute to the project at some point down the line.

someguy3, (edited )

Yeah Reddit 10 years ago was very different than Reddit now. Too many people demand* a 1 for 1 replacement right now.

*You don’t even need all those people. It was plenty good 10 years ago.

redcalcium,

That was the best era. The source code was open sourced, subreddits members know each other pretty well, the most prolific reditors are not reposters or super-mods. Actually fun AMAs and community-initiated events (meetups, secret santa, etc). Now it’s all gone, replaced by a TikTok clone.

Riker_Maneuver,
@Riker_Maneuver@startrek.website avatar

I was on reddit before the digg exodus, and the current state of lemmy feels somewhat reminiscent of those times. When communities are smaller there is just a completely different feel than the 1 million+ subscriber goliaths some subreddits became.

devious,

Honestly, this is exactly how I feel too. I remember browsing Reddit when Digg was my primary source and Reddit felt so small and unpolished at the time! I don’t know if Lemmy will grow in the same way as Reddit did, but it is certainly on the right path.

Kikkertje,

That’s exactly what it feels like. It’s so refreshing and I like the fact I can scroll for about 30 mins, exhaust my feed and step away. I don’t get sucked in for most of the day like Reddit.

MarsAgainstVenus,
@MarsAgainstVenus@fedimav.win avatar

I completely agree. I’ve been hopping on in the morning and in the evening and I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything and I still feel like I’m contributing. The total opposite of how it was with Reddit.

DrQuint,

If there’s one place where I think the wrong Reddit attitude is starting to crop up is the anti/pro sync discourse that’s going on.

People are even outright lying about apps. Such as claiming other apps have toms of bugs, meanwhile, I’m trying out sync and there’s a comment sorting bug if you switch to top, some comments show up isolated when they’re a reply to something else, and even have several lines coming off from nowhere if you turn on colored indentations. Never seen this anywhere else, not even on Jerboa which is the oldest and generally least stable. Another bug, although this one I’ve seen, is that Sync doesn’t properly list all self-posts on the profile pages. Meanwhile, sync IS the most feature rich, and others are denying it. One example, Sync not just has an actual toggle for in-comment media preloading (they called them emotes for some reason), they even let you toggle specific services on generic link handling.

What I did here, is what those people don’t. Give specifics. This tribalism is peak upvote downvote fighting style characteristic of big /r/all communities on reddit and I hate it. Garbage threads.

Dark_Blade,
@Dark_Blade@lemmy.world avatar

The Sync drama truly is a Reddit moment.

tool,
@tool@lemmy.world avatar

I was on reddit before the digg exodus

Man, I remember when that shitshow happened. It was like reddit’s version of Eternal September.

SageWaterDragon,

Frankly, I really miss the Reddit of ten years ago, so this is great. Outside of fruitlessly pursuing infinite growth, none of the additions or changes to the site since then have improved it.

vamp07,

I also think you’re going to see Lemmy continue to grow overtime because it does not need to be a Comercial success. It doesn’t need to go through the new owners, whims or financial needs. It’ll just continue to slowly grow until someday it overtakes Reddit. The mere fact that it can’t be taken down is in itself a huge advantage/defense.

givesomefucks,

The flip side is there are some people who have been here a long time tho…

But they’re almost exclusively rightwingers who were ip banned from reddit. Like the exploding heads instance is/was over a year old, and those people were insanely annoying before everyone defederated.

The more time goes by, the more regular people join and water down that extremism

BuckRowdy,
@BuckRowdy@lemmy.world avatar

Yes it was interesting finding communities banned from Reddit who seemed like they had been here awhile.

o_oli,
@o_oli@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah I mean looking at the stats of new users, that watering down has already happened to the point where any extremeist shit is statistically insignificant by now. 99%+ of people here are just looking for a replacement reddit and that’s all, rather than some censorship haven where they can chat their extreme views.

Plopp,

I love how people have different opinions and value different things. Personally I so far find Lemmy very very very much not as entertaining as Reddit. The lack of comments in particular makes it way less enjoyable imho. But hopefully it’ll grow.

wth,

Its getting there, and there is some entertaining content on here (comments and posts). But I think we are still missing the super high end responses. No matter what the topic, one or two people would jump on and have deep specialised knowledge of the field - be it naming an insect from a blurry image or commenting on a geopolitical situation. I still see lots of posts that generate nothing more than “huh” or “wow” type comments.

When that starts appearing more broadly, I think the quality here is going to take another leap.

ADTJ,

I think that’ll only really start to happen once you start getting more of the general population on here.

Reddit always had a reputation for being dominated by techy people, that is significantly more so the case here.

Signing up for Lemmy, even knowing where to start is a bigger leap than it is over there. Personally I’m hoping third party apps will be able to help with that by offering some kind of setup wizard with easy options of suggested instances to join.

saltybrownsfan,

It genuinely is getting better. I like the kind of garage rebel feel of it, pretty fun- really reminds me of reddit’s early days, but all good things must come to an end, and even if Lemmy does take off, it will meet the same fate inevitably.

butterflyattack,

When you say C64 do you mean the old commadore? Me, I was always an Amiga / Sinclair spectrum guy. But I live with someone who has a working c64 and uses it for music so they are still around.

Crass_Spektakel,
@Crass_Spektakel@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, the C64 is so much fun because it is so different. Really something else. It feels so… raw and full of surprises. I did program a lot on it. I also own an Amiga (two actually, a 1000 and a 3000) but they are so far ahead of the C64 that you can not compare them. I have Web, Mail, a ton of Unix stuff and more on my 3000. It pretty much feels like a modern system just a really slow one. Loading a JPEG with 1024x768 in 24bits - the highest resolution my Amiga can display - takes like 30 seconds ;-)

butterflyattack,

Yeah, that’s about what my mate says, I’m no musician but he loves the C64 for making electronic music. He lives in a big truck which is also his studio, old computers and amps and synths all running off solar-fed batteries. I understand the C64 had its own compiler too? Yeah there was such diversity of machines back in the day. My first machine was a Tandy TRS-80. And an old ZX81, IIRC that little thing had 1k ram so you had to write tight code. My real love was the BBC B, though, you could do so much with it, learned assembly on it.

Haven’t done any coding now in years. Which is a shame, but mostly these days I don’t really need to. I kinda feel like maybe we’ve lost something though since back then when you really needed to learn to program to get a device to do anything cool. Even though the devices today seem like an exponential improvement. Comparing the phone I’m writing this on to that old ZX81, or even a C64 - just wow. I’m excited to see what comes next!

StoicLime,

Lemmy just needs to stop talking about itself so much. The only reason I still use Reddit is because I find fresher and more varied content there. Lemmy users need to provide more content than just the fact that they are on Lemmy.

Haha,

I am the content!

TrickDacy,

Lol it’s a new community. I actually find it interesting to see other people’s opinions about it. I don’t mind seeing every 15th post being about Lemmy itself. That won’t last for more than a few months at most…

StoicLime,

I hope so. I find some excellent content here but I still need to sift through tons of Lemmy circlejerk to find it.

RxBrad,

Hey now. They talk about how much they hate Reddit, too…

nga105,

Same thing on mastodon, most posts are about Twitter and how they hate it. Really annoying and not the reason I want to use the service

Zak,
@Zak@lemmy.world avatar

The best thing people who want Lemmy to succeed can do is post original, non-meta content to communities.

Of course !fediverse is inherently meta.

Forcedlurker,

I feel like I’m stuck between two times periods.

ittu,

I’ve been noticing the same thing.

fidodo,

I’m regularly seeing hundreds of comments on posts now and only a month ago it was rare to see a dozen comments on a post. I really don’t need more engagement on a post, that’s plenty. Lemmy still needs more users to sustain more niche communities, but in the places that people are it’s already great.

Zonetrooper,
@Zonetrooper@lemmy.world avatar

c/worldbuilding

Thanks for the shoutout! It’s going to be a slow climb up, but I’m looking forwards to growing this place as well.

Crass_Spektakel,
@Crass_Spektakel@lemmy.world avatar

I posted there already :-) because r/worldbuilding had his “thursday don’t post day” or something like that. I didn’t even consider Lemmy an alternative before.

yoz,

You know what will be even better. One instance for all communities. So everyone knows and subscribes to the same community.

Or if someone can come up with a better idea so that everyone doesn’t depend on one instance.

zelifcam,

deleted_by_author

    •
    Fract,

    Also, wouldn’t having a variety of instances essentially make it trickier to monetize? I’m still trying to understand the idea of instances myself, as it is new to me.

    assassin_aragorn,

    I’ve only seen one thread which felt completely like Reddit. The community was for the alien comics, and the comics were taking a dig at imperial units vs metric units. Nothing wrong with that, it was all in good fun and jest.

    The comments though were toxic frankly. If you said you liked both systems and provided reasons, you were buried in downvotes. If you discussed some upsides of the imperial system, you were ridiculed to be a child. Even if you were an engineer and you provided a lengthy explanation, it was met with derision. And then there were all the logically inconsistent arguments and the notion that Americans were simultaneously idiots but also apparently complete geniuses with how complex they made the imperial system out to be.

    I’m thankful it was just the one thread. All of the politics threads I’ve viewed have been more civil and open to discussion (and I consume a fair bit of political news). Lemmy, until that thread, felt like a place where nuanced opinions and discussions were encouraged and upvoted. I hope it’s just a one off.

    TrickDacy,

    I can imagine people who would get mad about imperial units are mad because that system already has had many people arguing for it. That’s how it still persists, despite causing problems. The fact is that metric is definitely more logical but that isn’t even its true strength. Its strength is in universal adoption, like all standards.

    I’m guessing from experience that most people on lemmy are more collectivist in nature. Most people here seem to be anti-apple, against big business, and pro Linux and other systems meant to empower the common person, the underdog.

    I have noticed repeatedly that people who seem hellbent on being “objective” rub me the wrong way. Not because I am against objectivity, but because they come across as condescending and in support of an argument I’ve heard a million times and I fully reject. So yeah, I’m guessing people might have thought you were in favor of the imperial system and just wanted to “seem” like you were being fair. /shrug

    Of course the rebuttal you have could include something like “I’m just trying to provide information and encourage people to think for themselves”. Sure, you might totally be doing that. But for people who already know what you’re talking about, they might think you’re being disingenuous. On reddit I felt like that constantly. So far I luckily don’t feel that much here. I hope that sort of feeling stays on reddit as it really sucks.

    assassin_aragorn,

    I think the metric argument can be a logical discussion, but it can also devolve into a cultural argument, which is what I think has happened here. I’m obviously biased towards the imperial system since I grew up with it, but not so much to call it superior by any means. I think there’s places where it adds value is all.

    I guess I could’ve said something about still liking the metric system and thinking it was perfect for science, but it honestly didn’t cross my mind to be that explicit. Since Lemmy is generally more intellectual and not as simplistic, I didn’t think I needed to be.

    Perhaps my real mistake here wasn’t recognizing just how passionate some people get about this haha

    TrickDacy,

    See this is what I like about Lemmy. People actually seem open to dialogue. I appreciate your response.

    I grew up with the imperial system, I just hate that it feels uselessly different to most of the world. I care more about interoperability. “What is that in Celsius?” Is a question I hate asking myself. “What’s the next larger size wrench to a 3/8 inch?” Is another. It’s not a huge deal, if I had to work with wrenches every day I’d get used to it… it’s the idea that standards have one job imo: making shit easier. Reducing cognitive load and communication issues. So since imperial is globally unpopular, I wish we’d just kill it. I am fine with people using it in niche cases they feel it makes sense, I just don’t enjoy it being everywhere in the US, it often feels like a barrier.

    assassin_aragorn,

    See this is what I like about Lemmy. People actually seem open to dialogue. I appreciate your response.

    Yes exactly!

    And I see what you mean, and it is a good point. I don’t see it as an important distinction in my field, so long as people label their units. But I can imagine in just common communication worldwide, it must be a pain point.

    If the US were going to change, I think we’d have to first accept that it’s going to be a long process. We’d need a generation or two to be fluent in both, and we make it a norm for everyone to provide both units in communication. That’ll get us enough people where for everyday use at least, we can just do metric. Industry would be more challenging to change, especially since so much equipment is designed for imperial.

    Edit: Oh and I just wanted to say, I really appreciate your open mind and politeness when it comes to discussing difference of opinion.

    CodeBlooded,
    @CodeBlooded@programming.dev avatar

    As of this last month, Lemmy is my new “go to” for scrolling social media. My Reddit usage is probably 20% or less of what it used to be.

    A part of this was Voyager’s Progressive Web App (vger.app), it made me feel right at home after Apollo shut down.

    infyrin,

    I’ve only had a very bad instance happen to me so far on Lemmy, but that was because I must’ve encountered some spiteful Reddit users that came over here to give those wanting escapism from the toxicity, a hard time so everyone was a target.

    The fediverse has a ways to go, this year has seen it’s biggest bump yet in the rise of Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon together. I can only hope for a snowball effect to happen in the oncoming months to years. All I can hope for, is for neither of those platforms to adopt anything that has made the bigger and more frequented social media platforms intolerable.

    Deftdrummer,

    They already are though with the Hexbear drama.

    MiddleWeigh,
    @MiddleWeigh@lemmy.world avatar

    Remember when all the discussions were happening in just a couple top posts, mostly meta posts? We’ve come a long way for sure and I’m proud of everyone.

    ancientwoodsy,

    Lemmy feels a lot like hackernews

    1984,
    @1984@lemmy.today avatar

    More fun here in my opinion. The HN discussions are very dry.

    lemann,

    And hostile ☹️

    sickmatter,

    With a bit less bigotry, but otherwise yes.

    DM_Gold,
    @DM_Gold@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

    hackernews is bigoted? Well that’s news. I had no idea.

    Mocheeze,

    Yeah, but it’s a really weird libertarian thing where everybody feels like they’re an expert in their field and also everyone else’s. It’s a lot more fun to have in my RSS feeds since I realized that.

    natanael,

    HN is to other forums what mathematicians are too the rest of science

    muad_dibber,
    @muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml avatar

    That’s giving them a biiit too much credit. More like,

    HN is to other forums what annoying 14 year olds h4cker script-kiddies are to computer scientists.

    HawlSera,

    Lot of empty communities still. Thinking about posting in writingprompts to try to get something rolling there.

    MargotRobbie,
    @MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

    If you like nosleep, check out !lemmyscareyou that I made a while back.

    I just didn’t have much energy to write recently, but I’m planning on getting back to it, so any contribution there is welcome.

    meisme,

    Omg its Margot Robbie from Oppenheimer

    MargotRobbie,
    @MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

    That’s Academy Award nominated esteemed character actress Margot Robbie (also occasional spooky story writer) to you!

    seacocker,
    @seacocker@lemmy.world avatar

    I started up !oldphotosinreallife and it’s basically just me posting. Not really much traction but who knows, maybe it’ll get going.

    SharingIsCaring,

    Same here with !moebius_art :-)

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