When I first started using Lemmy it seemed like such a nice place with interesting discussions. It seemed like the first group of people to join after the app exodus were being quite careful to be respectful of the existing culture.
Now, it seems as though the culture from Reddit has completely replaced it. Toxicity and all. I will say I do follow a lot of communities from a wide range of instances so it’s clearly not everywhere.
Am I the only one who’s feeling like we’ve just stormed in and bulldozed Lemmy?
I came to Lemmy from reddit and I find it an incredibly nice place to be, full of polite discussions and fun posts. I haven’t seen any of what you’re saying.
When the rightwing communities started getting defederated, their users started making alts on the main instances.
Then you’ve got lemmy.grad which I still have trouble believing aren’t just all trolls.
I’ve never seen a logical comment from any of them. And they agree with the rightwingers waaaaay to often for it be a coincidence.
Like, there was a thread the other day filled with people saying Islam is a violent religion and no other religion encourages violence. And all 1.7 billion Muslims support terrorist extremists.
Maybe because China and Russia have also been oppressing them for centuries so lemmy.grad has to act like that’s the right move?
Like, there was a thread the other day filled with people saying Islam is a violent religion and no other religion encourages violence.
Any links for that one?
No idea how to link so other instances see it on theirs but:
https://lemmy.world/post/3293542?scrollToComments=true
There was like double the comments from last time I looked at it tho, it’s been a couple days
Thanks!!
I’m struggling to find any anti-Islamic sentiment in there from lemmygrad users?? (which is what I was interested in seeing … ordinary Christianity > Islam isn’t too surprising to see anywhere I’d say, however shallow it is).
EDIT: All I could find was this one comment from a lemmygrad user (along with a small exchange afterwards) that seemed to me entirely sympathetic to the Afghans and not at all anti-islamic.
Internet leftist gets spooked when they see comments that don’t perfectly subscribe to their cult. Their brains don’t know what to do but call them right-wingers and Nazis. This really is reddit.
I’m honestly not sure what you’re talking about, but I think you could work on being respectful and sincerely engaging.
No kidding. Talk about toxicity.
Aaaaand there’s the troll we were talking about
No idea how to link so other instances see it on theirs but:
I’m not sure there is a way right now.
lemmygrad existed before all the reddit people
Just like the rightwingers instances…
They never federated each other, so they were nice to their own in their safe spaces.
Then normal people started joining on “mainstream” instances. And both groups don’t tend to do well with an average person. Because they’ve had their echo chambers so long, they’re usually the ones complaining that Lemmy has “changed” when they venture out of their own instances.
Their safe spaces are still the same, they just want all the new instances to conform to what their Lemmy experience has been instead of just sticking to their safe space where it’s still like what they remember.
People I disagree with all around me!! Oh the horror!!
Seen this. I commented on the lemm.ee meta discussion about considering defederating from Hexbear. I mentioned some of the things I’ve seen from Hexbear users and that I wish they’d just take a chill pill. Cue Hexbears (I assume), refusing to take chill pills.
I guess I’m just not seeing that part. Hopefully the admins do something.
I don’t feel like I see that many people from the alt right or tankies with my instance being defederated from theirs, so I don’t think them creating alts is that much of an issue, but maybe it’s because I don’t see that much political content on All/top 6h 🤔
Ha same. When I first started lemmy, every time I would accidentally stumble upon a lemmy.grad post I would be so confused. At first I thought it was trolls, i thought it was satire.
And yeah I also remember that post from yesterday, all the comments underneath were people telling eachother to fuck off and that every single Muslim was a violent terrorist who wants to oppress woman. I think these people probably don’t get outside much is my best guess . I have noticed quite the lack of civility in some of the threads here…
I agree. Came from reddit in June. Lemmy has been a very friendly place. I just posted for advice with a typo in the title. Noone even mentioned it. No belittling advice or bickering. Just kindness and helpfulness.
Did the same and was helpfully informed that unlike Reddit, you can edit the title if there’s a typo in it :)
Firefish is also incredibly sweet. Honestly the fediverse makes me feel good about the Internet for the first time in years.
It’s difficult to have a respectful discussion of disagreements on lemmy.world and sometimes even lemmy.ml, especially since a lot of the users I try to engage with start of with “ewww lemmygrad” and I tend to disengage there. It’s just not productive nor is it anything worth my time.
If both parties already agree on a line you won’t find any disrespect. And this kind of interaction is one I see most often, especially when it comes down to politics over on lemmy.world…
I think Hexbear has a posting startegy, that I’ve seen countlessly now, which works well. Start of with good faith discussion, if it goes well continue on the same path, if the other party decides to be a shitty person then post PPB, troll or disengage.
I don’t see any of that but maybe I’m in the wrong places. I’m actually really happy to be here because it’s nice and people are friendly.
More luck to ya, I wish I could say the same outside of Hexbear and Lemmygrad. Either way, I’m happy lemmy is working out, at least for others.
same i suppose
I did see some anti Islam memes on the atheist community but that’s not really unexpected, they’re anti all religion.
“We’re egalitarians, we hate all of you equally!”
I disagree with you in a snide and condescending tone while missapropriating your argument.
Let’s fight.
:(
It’s scale.
Scale is the enemy of social networks. All of them, including Lemmy.
Let’s say 0.1% of the population are just straight up assholes who ruin everything.
If you only got 100 people on a site, no one is an asshole.
1000 people? Well now you got that asshole Andy in the group. Fucking Andy. But we can deal with him.
But we scale up to 1,000,000? Well now you got 1000 fucking assholes to deal with!
If my math is right, it should be 1,000 assholes at the end.
Stop being an asshole Andy!
Yeah. Morning math got me stupid. lol. Edited!
I don’t want to be that asshole Andy. But 0.1% of 1,000,000 is 1000. :P
Derp! Thanks!!
Well, thanks a bunch, Andy.
So you’re saying it’s proportional all the way up and not a big deal, or people love assholes and upvote all their material and comments for greater proportional impact?
If anything I would argue that the first and early adopters are less likely to be assholes, to where eventually you reach that tipping point and move back towards the average, which feels worse in what is a collection of niche communities, because the average engages slightly different content than early adopters.
Moreso, I think it’s just confirmation bias. OP is hyper sensitive to a change in the culture so every example of it weighs a little more.
To be clear, like most things, I don’t think it’s one thing or another; a little from A, a little from B, and probably a slew of other factors.
The bigger an asshole someone is, the more theyre going to comment…
One asshole is just one asshole, but 100 assholes are going to make more comments than 1,000 normal users.
Which makes it look like there are 10x as many assholes as there really is.
I want to jump in and say that people do love assholes. You need look no further than celebrities and the people that hang on their every word.
It makes sense.
Most people who came here two months ago did so because they explicitly wanted to leave Reddit, but not because of Reddit content or the site culture. It was because admin decisions on third party apps and the API.
They still wanted Reddit, just with different Admins and different apps. Ideally, they’d have wanted communities to fully migrate over.
lemmy.world specifically became basically a lifeboat, having been linked to from original third party apps.
Yes, it was created and had the technical and resource requirements to keep up with the new influx of users without constantly crashing (in the beginning), but nonetheless, that meant it got the largest influx of the migration.
It’s honestly a bit strange for me to see people in here with two month old accounts saying “oh yeah the culture has just changed so much”.
You all were the change. It’s that influx of users that basically brought Reddit here.
Anyone who came here before the API changes did so either because they had some kind of issues with Reddit, whether it was the dominant culture or what, and wanted an alternative or because they were interested in the open source and federated nature of the project regardless of Reddit’s own decisions.
Though tbf, pre migration, this place was basically dead. Posts would have a handful of comments at best and it was mostly Lemmygrad users and also FOSS enthusiasts. Hexbear was the most active Lemmy instance and was a chapotraphouse lifeboat formed in 2020 but it didn’t federate so it was really mostly just Lemmy.ml as a general instance and Lemmygrad unless you explicitly knew and cared for Hexbear. Neither was very “toxic” in their own communities and there really wasn’t much inter instance fighting, even if there still were people on lemmy.ml who didn’t care for grad, as far as I remember. I honestly mostly lurked and didn’t participate often.
The apps also were much worse.
Things started picking up as the API announcement happened. That’s probably when we had the best balance of positivity and user growth.
It exploded when the API changes went into effect and voila.
Still, I would say it’s mostly still a bit better than Reddit and there’s more effort in commenting for the most part.
I don’t think I’ve seen a pun chain or a “he’s not your buddy, guy” or anything like that.
And that’s only the first migration. Expect a way bigger one once Reddit sunsets the old reddit interface.
This is exactly what happened to Reddit with the Digg shitshow and then gradual public adoption. Reddit used to have thoughtful conversation and was where I could go to get interesting perspectives. Eventually enough people joined that the quality went way down.
Always depends on the community/sub though. Niche subs specific to the subject will have good discussion. Big subs that tend to be a bit more generic content will have the generic subs.
I don’t think it’s a Lemmy/Reddit thing and more of a small/large community thing.
Oh, I agree completely. As the masses arrive conversation generally gets less nuanced and less thoughtful. Group think becomes more obvious too.
Tbf many of us, myself included, had had a problem with the general reddit culture for a very long time (in my case dating back to 2011)
The API change and Sp*z’s libelous lies (egregious even by his abysmally low standards) finally gave me the motivation to leave, and I’m genuinely happy that I’ve never checked back on my old account (which is still up, but has been mostly scrubbed of content)
I didn’t come here to find more reddit. In fact, I tried switching back to tumblr at first before learning more about the potential of the fediverse
I don’t think I’ve seen a pun chain or a “he’s not your buddy, guy” or anything like that.
And no Schnoodle guy either! No more annoying pseudo-emotional poems followed by celebrity worship, which didn’t add anything to the conversation, except for making threads long and wasting screen space on mobile devices.
I changed my account to reduce traffic on my my former server when the Reddit refugees came
This is such an “us vs them” mindset and it just doesn’t work that way.
Reddit dominated internet culture for ~15 years. Reddit culture is just what internet culture is now. Any internet community that grows to a sufficient size will begin to exhibit the dominant internet culture.
Things aren’t black and white.
Reddit used to be “nice”. Then it became toxic. And now the toxic asshats are here and the moderators do nothing.
Feel free to report toxic behaviour. I do, and usually see toxicity removed and/or banned
Yup, moderators need to know!
After blocking most of the meme subs, I find it a pretty nice place.
Could you share that list by chance?
Just browse lemmy on all and block community which you don’t like i have blocked 526
Ive been thinking about doing just that. Its just the ratio of memes to news to interesting stuff is so bad on here. To many memes man.
I’m one of those Reddit refugees. I can’t say anything about how things were before I got here, but I would like to add that I treat Lemmy a whole lot different from Reddit. When I joined there was plenty of talk about the lack of content, people only upvoting but not commenting, that kind of thing.
So I took this as a sign that I should be more of a participant and not the three-posts-to-my-name lurker that I was at Reddit. And I saw similar motivations with other users. So I do hope that at least part of the refugees have added a positive influence, and more so than they ever did when they were still using Reddit.Also, to add to this: culture is a living thing, like people and ecosystems. Change is inherent and healthy.
It’s totally reasonable to debate whether an event brings good change or bad change, but complaining about a community being different is, imo, not healthy or rational.
We can, through collective effort, precipitate change away from or reverse negative change, and the first step to that is complaining about it.
Same here. I vote on almost every post I see, even if I’m not interested, based on if I think it’s a good fit for the community. On Reddit I just upvoted things I liked
I meant more like writing comments and posting things, but I like that you’re making a conscious effort to do better so do whatever you feel comfortable with :)
Votes don’t matter much here, because there isn’t enough content in the first place. Votes mattered on Reddit because there was too much content, and small posts would never be seen unless you’re browsing by new. Also, people farmed karma so that they could resell their accounts, or access karma-restricted subs. No such incentives here.
Lemmy doesn’t have a collective culture. Each instance has it’s own culture or will develop it over time, even though a lot of reddit vestige remains. (It’s only been like 2 months)
I don’t think toxicity ever will get too bad here, for the simple fact that if you don’t like the say, c/politics of one instance, you are always free to go to the c/politics of another instance or even start your own.
Eventually, the toxic instances/community will bleed users and die out, defed is a factor but doesn’t have too much to do with this.
As communities grow from obscurity to populated change is inevitable. I used to use reddit and the #1 thing I hated was the condescending, holier than thou attitude that was rampant. I have seen it occasionally on here but for the most part Lemmy is a breath of fresh air, so I personally don’t think reddit culture has replaced it. I can definitely see a strong cultural influence from reddit but I personally think Lemmy culture is significantly different, in a good way.
Yes!
I’ve noticed it in political discussions especially. I often find the nitty gritty of my political opinions at odds with much of the apparent consensus on both Reddit and Lemmy. But on Lemmy I generally find people to be a lot less dogmatic, and more open to constructive discussion, rather than repeating the same slogans over and over. Not that it doesn’t happen on Lemmy, but I can’t really remember the last time I heard someone say “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature” unironically.(I have heard “orphan crushing machine” thrown around a bit, but at least that one is kinda funny.)
Overall, the mainstream on Lemmy feels like an upgrade from Reddit, though I do miss more niche communities catering toward my interest.
As a Digg migrant now Reddit migrant, the “has \ killed our culture?” thing is a heavy dose of deja vu. No mockery intended; I think it’s a reasonable question.
Can you link to a few comments or posts that you think represent this nasty reddit culture?
lemmy.ml on a good day had like 15 to 30 upvotes on the front page. There wasn’t much of a culture before.
See the traffic in April this year, a little over 4 months ago. Lemmy.world only been around for like 2 and a half months now. That’s the most active it’s been since before the exodus. The exodus definitely helped jumpstart the site.
Yeah, my answer to “has the Reddit exodus killed the former Lemmy culture” is “what culture lmao”
Not that i was on Lemmy before, but i was on Mastodon before Elon bought Twitter and it was a ghost town.
It’s quickly getting more toxic and aggressive. But we’re not counting karma, so as soon as you recognize that someone is arguing with you in bad faith just block them.
It’s quickly getting more toxic and aggressive.
Exactly. About a month ago your most likely negative reaction would be I’m not sure if I would agree with that because of x and y but I could see why you would say that. Maybe you get ± 2 votes
Now they have to die on every hill to prove you wrong no matter what you bring to the table and magically it’s -10
And you go through their history and they have a two week old account with 27 fights picked.
Hopefully they’ll get bored of making new accounts and the block lists stay strong.
The important thing to understand is that Lemmy doesn’t have an inherent culture. Nor does Reddit, or Twitter, or Mastodon, or any other platform.
They are communities, and communities naturally change as they scale.
So yes, of course Lemmy had changed. But I’d argue that the inherent strength of the whole concept of “federation” is that any one particular instance only has to witness as much or as little of that change as they want to.
If you don’t like where Lemmy as a whole is going, find (or create) an instance that agrees with you and de-federates from most others. win-win.
The point is that you are responsible for your own particular Lemmy experience in ways that you never were on Reddit.
Hexbear and lemmy.grad were there before and are as toxic as any reddit sub I’ve ever been in.
Nice. Lemmy is finally big enough for “Lemmy sucks now, the old days were better” posts 🥲
I thought the point of Lemmy was that people could make their own instance if they don’t like what’s on offer. It can be whatever people want it to be, and none of those are mutually exclusive.
