I was just reading this post https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1gmv76n/is_reddit_going_to_remain_the_primary_space_for/ and many barely see the fediverse as an alternative and they seem to have a negative bias towards it. Super ironic when it comes to the self-hosting community. Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views. But it doesn’t really matter when it’s federated and FOSS. I think it’s clear-cut that the selfhosting community on Lemmy is a perfect alternative to reddit. Why is there such a negative bias?
Honestly, in my experience since I fully moved to Lemmy:
Almost any subreddit is more mature than any Lemmy channel.
This isn’t just number of users (but that’s a huge problem that has been mentioned here a lot), it means that the chance you’ll run into a mod who is a tinpot despot is pretty high, and there is nothing you can do about it if you’re not willing to sit alone in aghost townalternate community.there is nothing you can do about it
You can just post from a different lemmy instance.
That doesn’t remove the toxic mod.
How many alts and sock puppets do you think the average person should have? This doesn’t sound healthy
That doesn’t remove the toxic mod.
There is no way to remove toxic mods. That’s why you have to work around them.
How many alts and sock puppets do you think the average person should have? This doesn’t sound healthy
You only need one at a time. I use to spin up an entirely new reddit account whenever I got a ban on any sub. That’s what you can do on Lemmy.
Yeah, like I said, that doesn’t sound healthy
It has nothing to do with health. It is literally impossible to use a system like reddit/lemmy over the long term and not get hit with rando-bans that come out of nowhere and are completely unavoidable.
I’m not talking about getting a legit ban where you break the rules of the sub. In that case it is pointless to do “ban evasion” because you will likely repeat the behavior that got you banned. I’m talking about when you get a completely unavoidable and random ban. You WILL get those if you use a system long term.
Almost everyone in the linked Reddit post seems to be supportive of Lemmy, or even Lemmy users. Even the people who tried it and stopped seem generally warm to the idea and just think it needs polish.
I’d say that this comment section is way more vitriolic than that one lol
I mean, read the post? They explain themselves pretty well there. Or are you linking it with hopes we’ll brigade or something?
Lemmy hate comes down to two or three things: they don’t like communists, or they’re confused by it. Or they’re waiting for it to be bigger.
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It’s very hard to convince people that fedi is a healthy place when the default servers are incredibly toxic. I wish they would at least advertise it as such, maybe hide the default from the number one spot. There are several servers up there that accept users that are way more chill.
Also for new selfhosters making it easier to say “these are some problem instances that are commonly blocked, if you want to start out with them”. I know that starts a new problem of “but then who decides” and it causes more splintering, but for a lot of posters it’s overwhelming the firehouse of vitriol that comes in at first.
just wanted to drop that for the selfhosters there is https://fediseer.com/ which provides an API (which makes getting a crowdsourced and up to date whitelist easy)
But https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.ml received 15 endorsements, from some major well-known/top instances, with such kind words as “popular with our users”, and one going so far as to state “friendly staff; well moderated” - WELL MODERATED!? Tbf it did receive a single censure, and 2 hesitations (from places that I’ve never heard of before).
I was not here prior to the Rexodus - maybe it was (more) true then? Even if so, that info seems out of date. And then even if it is the singular instance for which that is true, that is still a fairly major deviation - e.g. the graphic that I showed in my comment above this was shared to both lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml, while others are shared also with hexbear.net. Banning lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net thereby helps but does not eliminate the “leak” that occurs when that identical content spreads out to the entire Fediverse via lemmy.ml.
e.g. the #1 rule on https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/ states to not perform “Attacks on users or groups”, though I constantly see anti-Western nation attack wording and graphics posted on those 3 (maybe now after the USA elections it will suddenly cease, having already served its purpose?). For Lemmy.World to act as a delivery vector for that content, despite how it violates their ToS - how is that all that much different from allowing CSAM to spread, which likewise did not originate from Lemmy.World, yet if the latter chooses to allow itself to be the method of delivery to all of its users…?
Well anyway, thank you for your helpful addition of the link. Though I think there is more to the story as I outlined here.
Take a step back, you sound ridiculous. CSAM is not the same AT ALL as someone criticizing the west for letting Israel bomb the shit out of Gaza. If you are used to reddit, you are used to more conservative views. You have never experienced views that would be considered radical leftist. I am from the US, the republican and democrat parties are very conservative. Reddit only deals with these two parties’ views for the most part. I found nothing wrong with the screenshot you took. There is no leak that needs to be plugged, try experiencing more views to broaden your horizon. There is nothing wrong with saying the US is a fascist hellhole and is complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. Some of Europe is also heading that way too. It is not against TOS to point that out. You are being a “lib” which is really just saying you are being a reactionary. The big three you hate so much are not afraid of telling you when you have reactionary views and how dumb they are, if you want someone banned for being mean to you then go to beehaw, it is against their rules to say anything that doesn’t coddle you.
ARE we a healthy service though? Setting aside how any social media can be addictive, Lemmy in particular is incredibly toxic. It can be MADE into something that is far more tolerable, but it is not that way fresh out of the box, for a new user - particularly a mainstream one - who does not know what they are doing, e.g. how to block, what an “instance” even is (neither Reddit nor X has an equivalent), etc.
Blaze, when he preaches about the benefits of Lemmy on Reddit to entice new users to come here, mostly tells people to choose lemm.ee, and even specifically mentions the tankie issue for those who are worried about it, specifically regarding lemmy.ml. However, lemm.ee does not block e.g. hexbear.net’s ChapoTrapHouse, nor does it block even the incredibly offensive lemmygrad.ml. I almost left the Fediverse entirely when I commented in each of those, and received WEEKS and WEEKS of replies (EACH) to what I considered an innocuous comment (e.g. “at least Biden lowered gas prices, which is not nothing imho?”) - I could do nothing (that I knew of) to halt it. Nor, having arrived in them via All, did I have the first inkling of what those communities were all about, or those instances. I did not consent to that! Having read the rules of e.g. Lemmy.World, and coming as I had from Kbin.social, I was not expecting anything remotely close to… THAT!!!
So I understand why my irl friends have all absolutely refused to use Lemmy, and moreover give me a dirty look for even having suggested it. It’s nasty. WE (who use Linux btw) know how to manage software, and can make it into something beautiful. But a day-1 noob with a guest or fresh account, trying to compare this place to Reddit, will not likely stick around long enough to see what we do.
As for the rest, I most definitely get what you are saying, and there are a couple of recent(-ish) posts in [email protected] that cover those topics in more detail, if you want!:-)
hm, maybe lemmy needs the feature to disable response notifications for specific posts or threads. Though that’s the less problematic scenario. The biggest issue in federated networks is when somebody is determined to stalk and pester you, though I haven’t heard of that happening here so far. But you could comment under each and every post of another user, since you can see all posts. And there is no way to stop that if they are persistent as they can just create a new account on a new instance anytime they get blocked or banned.
Yeah whatever, that’s a feature. Reddit became worse once it became a safe place for conservatives and center-right liberals to gather.
Conservative, TheDonald, KiA, red pill, et. all made Reddit worse.
I don’t want a second Reddit. Can better avoid eternal September issues if they self select to fuck off
But I guess that’s what .world is for.
A lot of communities on Lemmy have a ‘scene kid’ subculture and they will just harass people right off the platform for not being true enough to the cause, despite being for the cause.
You got a bunch of raindrops. They want to become a hurricane. They simply need a warm breeze but shit blows sideways instead. The corners of Lemmy where movements could be happening are basically mosh pits
I’m not trying to argue with you or correct you or anything, just pointing out why this is bad, how it shouldn’t be as it is, but it’s on deaf ears to the people I’m lamenting about. And you’re correct, a 2nd Reddit would suck, but Lemmy could be better if those people were being better.
If there’s anything anyone mad about anything in the world should know, by know, don’t attack people on the same team, welcome them in
I don’t quite understand your point. Do you maybe have some examples to understand better?
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I’d argue that at this point, sticking to the collective vs individual dichotomy of climate attribution and action potential is climate action delayist. When your argument relies you or your group intentionally doing absolutely nothing to combat climate change, you don’t really have climate change in mind.
Leftism sometimes cares more about class than its very foundation, the environment, to understand why there is a problem with blame-shifting.
I’ve seen this in a similar fashion in relationship advice forums: Commenters not engaging with the issue or person, but knee-jerk reacting with advising instant breakup.
Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views.
I mean that’s basically the crux of it. That, and some moderation drama, and the software being very buggy a year ago giving people a bad first impression, and Lemmy still being susceptible to spam.
It’ll take some time before Lemmy (and the Threadiverse as a whole) improves its reputation and moves on from the “it’s a tankie website” take. That said, a lot of people in that thread are making the case for Lemmy, so it’s mostly just people worried it’s not as popular.
I definitely avoided Lemmy the first go-round with the API fuckery because it seemed from the outside like basically just a tankie protest Reddit in a similar way to how Voat was just a neo-Nazi protest Reddit. To the Lemmy devs’ absolute credit, they don’t push new users toward any of those, though.
I thought one day after having had a Mastodon for some time that I might not have given Lemmy a fair shake, so I went back and ended up finding that most instances are basically normal Reddit fare but honestly less shitty than Reddit proper (there’s a trade-off that posts are less frequent and that small, niche communities can attract unwanted attention by having their posts almost immediately show up in ‘all’).
Yup, things have definitely improved, especially with more extremist instances like lemmygrad being defederated and phased out. I do also want to give a shoutout to the devs for not pushing their stance and letting the platform grow naturally.
Just gonna put this out there. The devs push their stance plenty. Within their scope to do it from their echo chamber. Other than stopping development there’s little they could currently do to impact growth in any way. And there have been issues with their development focus that have negatively impacted growth. Recalcitrance to focus much on moderation tools for instance. As well as at least reported issues difficulty contributing to the project by others. Though that at least is hearsay.
I think it helps to think of it this way: WE are using THEIR platform.
They don’t need mod tools that work for communities and users located on a different instance as much as say Lemmy.World since the devs/admins simply use the instance-wide ban hammer for their own space. Hence that is not their focus. You can go to the trouble to learn Rust, and then fight with them to get your modifications accepted or…
Actually, I need to modify my statement above: YOU are using THEIR platform, but for those of us on Mbin, PieFed (which I’m on right now, and two new instances just opened up including one now in the USA), and soon Sublinks will come too (January was at some point a target iirc?), we have already moved on. None have reached feature parity yet tbh, though even so there are a lot of features that exist that Lemmy itself lacks, so there’s that, and being written in common languages should help enormously with them catching up.
So whether these are “as good as Reddit”, well, beauty is in the mind of the beholder. It’s not a clear win either way, but they are getting closer to being comparable.
You can go to the trouble to learn Rust, and then fight with them to get your modifications accepted or…
Can you actually point to any instances of the devs dragging their feet on accepting changes or is this just conjecture? I’ve contributed to Lemmy, and plan to do so in future, and my experience is that they’re fairly accepting of changes.
Threadiverse
Fediverse
Threadiverse refers specifically to the subset of the Fediverse with threaded conversations, like Lemmy and Mbin.
Sounds too much like Threads, the invasive corporate thing which can get fucked. Never going to market for them.
don’t let them change the meaning of our words then
As someone who used to be vehemently anti-lemmy, it’s a few different reasons.
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It’s something new. Honestly is as simple as that. Most redditors are straight up threatened by new features, new looks, new anything. New Reddit is an example of that. To be fair it is hideous but it’s also drastically underused according to reddits own metrics. This just stays consistently with everything. People prefer old subs to new, prefer old users to new, old memes to new. Why? Dunno. Could be as simple as just that they know it so it’s comforting.
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The propaganda that reddit put up against Lemmy was pretty insane. The first few mini-migrations set people up with weird expectations and a lot of them bounced back to reddit with weird notions. Some of it was based on shitty admins or shitty servers (cough lemmy.ml cough) but other things seemed to be almost coordinated against Lemmy. By the time that the big migration from Reddit killing off third party apps/API use a lot of people had heard one or two things and just started spreading it. Redditors often don’t source material and just kinda spread rumors or ‘feelings’ or upvote one idiot who seems like he knows what he’s talking about while blatantly lying. This has never gone away. The same idiots keep whining and being dismissive.
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Redditors are hateful. Not purely hateful people or anything but the atmosphere encourages hate and division. I still browse reddit occasionally and I’ll check the comments out about a post. It’s always so bitter and angry, snapping out at one another. When every crab in the bucket is pulling you down, you get stuck in that habit too. Until you break free of reddit you don’t realize just how bitter it’s making you. Lemmy doesn’t have those vibes and it can be really off putting to someone still in that bitterness. Kindness and people getting along almost comes off as stupid and naive so you just kinda dismiss the entirety of Lemmy as a whole.
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This is a conspiracy but I’m positive that Reddit admins are purging a lot of references to Lemmy that don’t show the site in a positive light. When the API shit was happening people kept pointing out that certain communities that were supportive of Lemmy suddenly got locked behind a NSFW curtain that forced users to be logged in to read the community. A lot of people talked about how certain posts and stuff were being removed, especially ones critical of Spez. I don’t think they stopped that campaign and I think they still try to demonize the hell out of Lemmy. Could be because China has a significant hand in reddit now or it could be because Spez has a tiny dick and a tinier ego. Dunno. But I think they’re weighting the scales.
Reddit 100% was censoring and shadow banning any kbin or lemmy mentions.
I wouldn’t even be surprised if reddit actively promoted or even creates negative comments. There was a precedent of people abandoning Digg so they were clearly very aware and afraid.
At the end of the day it’s impossible to tell with these incredibly opaque networks. It’s even hard to confirm comment visibility as Reddit employs data fudging and shadow banning.
Just another reminder that nothing any closed source social media says should be trusted, ever.
- […] certain communities that were supportive of Lemmy suddenly got locked behind a NSFW curtain […]
You got that wrong. That was a measure taken by these communities to demonetize reddit. Reddit doesn’t put ads on NSFW subs. Any profile that posts on an NSFW sub also gets their profile switched to NSFW afaik. Moderators got banned for these NSFW tags.
r/PixelDungeon is the only sub that I’m aware of that completely moved to lemmy. Withe the main mod and developer of the most popular fork moving to lemmy. The sub is still open, but it has a “bookmark” called “Lemmy” and a “link” called “Lemmy Community” that directly links to the lemmy community. The sub is still open and automod responded to any new post that the sub moved to lemmy … at least for a year or so, it doesn’t post that any more.
And there are some obvious down sides. To my knowledge lemmy has not implemented flairs or post tags, which get used excessively by some communities to categories and sort their content. [email protected] fell back to putting text tags into titles like “[DEV]” and “[OC]” and then use the search for this. But that is merely a work around. The sidebar links to these searches, but since instance-relative links are not a thing they are fixed links to lemmy.world.
The search itself is still inconvenient, because you can just “search this community”. You always have to explicitly select a community to search it and have to enter the search term before selecting the community. Edit: that’s of course only true for the front-end (lemmy-ui) I use, dunno if all have that issue
I doubt regular end users will ever get warm with distributed federative networks. A lot of people already seem struggle with email. All tend to flock to a few big instances. For lemmy you also need some basic awareness of these systems. You can’t find everything and to expect that will always go wrong since you only search what your instance knows and never for everything. There are great projects like lemmyverse, but you need to know about them. People who don’t know about them will either just not find the communities they are looking for or they’ll start duplicate communities. The problem of not finding something is smaller on big instances but also more fatal, because their duplicate communities will displace the ones that were started on smaller instances but did not federate well yet.
And everything, the development and hosting, is solely carried on the shoulders of a few volunteers. That will always result in instances popping up and disappearing over time, with development speed varying depending on interest and free time the developers have.
The biggest selling point is not to replace reddit but to be connected with the rest of the activitypub fediverse. That you can see peertube channels as communities here. That mastodon users can comment on lemmy posts eggcetera
No, I do not have it wrong.
There was a protest to mark things NSFW, correct, but what I’m talking about was something else. Kbin and Lemmy communities were marked in such a way that it was impossible to look at unless logged in. While logged in it wasn’t marked as NSFW. It also wasn’t a choice of the subreddit moderators. They were blocked by reddit admin themselves to force people to be logged in to see information on how to transfer to Lemmy.
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Devs are allegedly Marxist-Leninists.
Redditors dont understand that devs dont exactly have full control of open source software, that different instances are not operated by the devs.
Edit: Lemmy devs to be specific
I don’t get the hate against the lemmy devs tbh, they have their (perhaps controversial) political views but they leave everyone that’s not on their site alone and it feels like they develop lemmy pretty impartially
sure they might ban you off ml but that’s their site and they get to do whatever they want with it, just like every other instance
i mean network effect is a thing i guess but that’s not as important on lemmy where there are usually similarly large communities about generic things on most major instances
Exactly … it’s also a double standard because reddit is basically a capitalist model of the same digital system but no one ever complains or criticizes it.
The socialist digital creators built something and shared it freely with everyone and also don’t exert control over anyone.
The capitalist digital creatures built something and locked it up, monetized it and are using the user’s efforts as the basis for the business only the owners make money on and have complete control over everything.
It’s amazing because it’s a fantastic metaphor for the two platforms.
Calling them “socialist digital creators” is misleading at best, if not an outright insult to socialism.
They are marxists-leninists who whitewash the crimes committed by the USSR and CCP. They support the genocidal invasion by Russia, a country that is neither socialist or democratic; it’s an authoritarian capitalist oligarchy.
There is no double standard. You don’t see the CTO of reddit running a subreddit dedicated to whitewashing the Pinochet regime and/or western colonialism in Africa or Asia.
Reddit is run by sketchy and corrupt individuals, it is possible that in a just world we would even call them criminals. Lemmy’s marxists-leninists are openly supportive of genocidal actions and brutal authoritarian leadership. There is no comparison.
Could provide a link to a comment or a quote where the devs whitewash the crimes or support genocides?
My man, the head developer of lemmy is the admin of lemmygrad. He has a fucking Mao picture in his profile!
Don’t even try to weasel your way around this. This is not going to work with me.
I hate these people. Pathetic larpers living in democratic countries while supporting authoritarianism and genocide. And when I say hate, I don’t mean it in the internet slang way (“hater”).
How should I put this without breaking any rules? I genuinely wish they meet the same fate as “Donbas Cowboy”, Russell Bentley:
Bentley, 64, was a fixture in the low-level Russian incursion in Ukraine dating back to 2014. Calling himself the Donbas Cowboy, Bentley became a popular figure on Russian propaganda networks for his criticism of the U.S. government.
Bentley’s wife, Lyudmila, then claimed that Russian soldiers from a tank battalion abducted him.
According to the Investigative Committee, Vansyatsky, Agaltsev, and Iordanov tortured Bentley on April 8, and he died shortly afterward.
Vansyatsky and Agaltsev are suspected of blowing up a car with Bentley’s body in it and ordering Bazhin to get rid of what was left of his remains.
My man, the head developer of lemmy is the admin of lemmygrad
No, he is not. Check admins section on lemmygrad.ml, which profile do you think belongs to dessalines? He is only admin of lemmy.ml.
He has a fucking Mao picture in his profile!
It’s a controversial figure, but it doesn’t mean that the dev supports crimes or genocides.
How should I put this without breaking any rules? …
You judge people who support genocide, I get it and I here with you. But wishing death upon others because of their opinions? That’s just hypocrisy.
No, he is not. Check admins section on lemmygrad.ml, which profile do you think belongs to dessalines? He is only admin of lemmy.ml.
Are you sure about that? Why does this page state that:
Lemmygrad was created by dessalines and Farmer Heck.[a] It has over 34,000 posts and over 360 active users.[2]
With a further clarification that Muad’Dibber (who is currently an admin) is dessalines
Currently known as Muad’Dibber and Black Tulip, respectively, on Lemmygrad.’
Is Muad’Dibber not dessalines?
It’s a controversial figure, but it doesn’t mean that the dev supports crimes or genocides.
Controversial figure? Mao was a brutal dictator that directly caused an inordinate amount of deaths and suffering. He is no better than Stalin, Pinochet, Hitler or Pol Pot.
Since he runs lemmygrad, he most definitely supports the genocide of Ukrainians in the occupied territories. Before you start acting out, I’d like to see you and your family try and speak Ukrainian in the occupied and try and publicly oppose russian occupaiton. I think the example I provided with the “Donbas Cowboy”, Russell Bentley, should give you an idea of what life is like there.
And then there is also their support for the genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang.
For you this is just random internet drama. I am not going to tolerate any degenerate LARPer shilling for russia and the CCP.
You judge people who support genocide, I get it and I here with you. But wishing death upon others because of their opinions? That’s just hypocrisy.
These are not mere opinions. These scoundrels wish me, my family and my fellow citizens harm in the most pathetic way possible; by LARPing online as marxist-leninists. It is reasonable to want them to end up like “Donbas Cowboy”, Russell Bentley. This a just and fair end for Western LARPers who whitewash genocide.
we are like their penal colony in revolt, maybe
