Hey everyone, I’m new here and just testing the waters. I’ve been on Reddit for years, but lately it feels like a mix of heavy-handed moderation and echo chambers where any dissenting opinion gets buried.
For those of you who’ve spent real time on Lemmy: • What do you like better here than on Reddit? • What do you miss from Reddit? • Do you feel the culture here is genuinely different, or does it eventually drift the same way?
I’m curious how people see it — especially those who made the switch after the API drama.
What do you like better here than on Reddit?
The interfaces are better, and being able to integrate with mastodon is interesting.
What do you miss from Reddit?
The size of the communities, really. On Reddit, a lot of the subs have grown big enough that they can maintain themselves, whereas here, they’re pretty much dead without input. A few of the more interesting counterpart communities that I would frequent a tonne on Reddit are dead now, and if you’re just one user, it does feel like spam to try and contribute to it constantly.
It’s really only a limit subset of communities that seem very active at all, and they are generally news or politics based.
Do you feel the culture here is genuinely different, or does it eventually drift the same way?
Bit of both. The culture in the larger communities would drift the way of Reddit just by volume, but the smaller ones are a bit more unique, and not always in a good way. Because Lemmy is a bit more tech-focused, I find a lot of the main medium-sized communities tend to have similar abrasiveness you see a bit in tech, though it can depend on both community and server.
What do you like better here than on Reddit?
You won’t get banned for speaking your mind, even if that includes talking shit to bad actors who argue in bad faith. Reddit effectively protects and cultivates bad actors acting in bad faith. They can spread their misinformation. When you point out that they are dipshits and why, complete with sources, you get banned while they continue to spread their misinformation.
Threads also stay active longer on Lemmy. If you’re a few hours late to a Reddit post, too late. No one will see or interact with your comment. On Lemmy a thread can stay active for a few days.
What do you miss from Reddit?
The more nuanced subs. That’s literally it. Lemmy doesn’t have a lot of the subs I had on Reddit…yet. Mostly art subs dedicated to very specific forms of art. There’s nothing else to miss. Reddit is quickly becoming a cesspool that is losing what worth it once had.
Do you feel the culture here is genuinely different
Yes. There are notably less dipshit conservatives on here than on Reddit. I don’t care if that makes me sound like a partisan asshole. I am partisan when it comes to modern American conservatives. They are shitstain fascists and I don’t want them to be anywhere near me. I don’t view them as good people and I’ve never met one that argued in good faith. I respect and desire alternate viewpoints, but I don’t respect or desire conservative viewpoints, because they’re always in bad faith, if not outright racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or xenophobic. To give you an idea, Lemmy users ran the conservatives out of the actual conservative sub and it’s effectively used for mocking conservatives now. So yeah, Lemmy isn’t a big fan of shitstain conservatives. Which means on an average day, I’m reading a lot less filth than I was on Reddit.
It’s great I come here to argue with people until I am forced to assign myself homework. Reddit just bans you over and over unless you are 100% chungus at all times.
Well thats fantastic to hear. It’s my biggest issue with Reddit. I’m big into debating. Don’t mind being wrong, but I sure as hell don’t want to be be banned for trying to create dialogue.
Oh I missed which instance you’re on. World is basically for people who miss reddit. I only vouch for the rules on this particular instance. Which are stict, but fair. Lemmygrad and Hexbear will ban you no matter what if you disagree with a regular or mod. Same with World or the 500 other liberal ones. Good luck. ☺️
I used to look down on the whole debate & logic thing since I flirted with American policy debate in high school, which is disgusting game for charlatans. However eventually I realized that the issue was bad premises, me being too rude to people, and that nobody explained logic to me until I was studying comp eng 🫠
Be passionate about logic, self-critical, and kind. Then you never have to hesitate before striking a man down.
There are exceptions to all of the points below, but generally:
What do you like better here than on Reddit?
Everyone is here trying to build something better. The developers making the software are actually prioritizing transparency and user choice. Since the instances aren’t after profit, there’s no financial conflict of interest. It’s actually possible to prioritize a healthy community and user experience instead of making a profit.
What do you miss from Reddit?
Activity in niche communities, but that’s changing slowly.
Also, as a mod, we could still use better moderation tooling.
Do you feel the culture here is genuinely different, or does it eventually drift the same way?
I think over time it will become similar, and at the end of the day, a number of the issues are because of how groups of humans interact and not the platform itself.
However, the reason I’m here instead of the many other Reddit alternatives is because of federation. I believe that as long as we maintain a healthy balance in the fediverse (and not let one entity control too much), we can avoid the enshitification while centralized social media becomes unbearable for more and more people.
What do you miss from Reddit?
Activity in niche communities, but that’s changing slowly.
Actually, two other things I do miss from Reddit: In the heyday (and even still to some extent now), it was so massive that you could have whole communities of types of real-world people you would never interact with. There is a subreddit for cops, one for air traffic controllers, one for sex workers, one for working historians to answer the general public’s questions, and so on. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ghislaine Maxwell had active Reddit accounts. You could come into contact (in their weird text-box-only way) with people you would never come in contact with, and more to the point you could see what their hivemind looked like and their consensus on public issues. I always liked Reddit’s community model better than the twitter “everything goes on the pile” model, because you could have these for-real communities develop, and it was fascinating sometimes to see what they thought of things or watch them in action.
Edit: Oh, the other thing, AMAs of real public figures, similar idea
That’s a really good point, I hadn’t thought about the AMA angle or how unique those niche pro communities were. Thanks for sharing that, definitely gives me a better picture of what people feel is missing.
Lemmy is what you make it. If you join the biggest and busiest communities, your experience won’t be as good as if you joined smaller more quality communities.
Something that’s a little different compared to other social media platforms (and isn’t on your list of thought/questions) is being able to judge books by their covers.
Since you can choose which is your home instance is based on the rules, moderation, and general vibe, the instance someone is from can tell you A LOT about them. There are some users who just mute all users from certain instances, because of this.
If you’re on Lemmy.world (which is based on the Netherlands, but everyone just assumes is from the USA), you likely won’t be muted because of your home instance since it’s basically the default.
If you wouldn’t mind helping me out here, am I getting this right? I signed up on Lemmy.world, so while I can still access other instances, people can see that I’m from Lemmy.world and kind of make assumptions about me based on that?
Yes. Although lemmy.world is broadly the “normie” instance, so they won’t make many assumptions.
Ok sweet. Are there any instances you’d recommend to a newbie? Totally open to see whats around. Also, are there any perks to being signed up to one instance versus another?
Yes. Some instances will block (known as defederate) other instances, so you won’t see any users or posts from those instances. Some instances disable downvoting. Many are similar to each other.
Lemmy.world is the everyman instance though, so you will get the broadest look at the fediverse.
Some instances will be topical themed, such as mander.xyz (science), or programming.dev. others have political and aesthetic leanings: lemmy.dbzer0.com (Anarchism, AI and cyberpunk aesthetics).
Oh whoa sick. Reckon I’m about to nerd out on this for a bit. Thanks for the starter points.
There are also regional and national communities too like lemmy.ca, feddit.uk, quokk.au, feddit.org
Ok wow, I’ve got a lot to learn about Lemmy. Gotta learn what these instances are. haha, Thanks for your thoughts.
Some instances are kinda obvious to figure out what they have in common, like the now-extinct VeganTheoryClub, but some are a little harder to figure out, like the ml in Lemmy.ml is for Marxist-Leninists.
heavy-handed moderation and echo chambers where any dissenting opinion gets buried
I have bad news for you lol
It is fine, Lemmy is far superior. But, their baffling decision to copy Reddit’s “lords and peasants” model of moderation has led to a lot of the same moderation rot on Lemmy I am sad to say. It’s just in less of a late stage terminal form as it was on Reddit. At least the echo chambers are separate echo chambers, and they can yell across the void at each other. lemmy.ml is pretty much the only community that is severely balkanized to its own isolated community where politics / geopolitics are concerned.
In general, Lemmy is nice because it is more varied. lemmy.world is the most Reddit-like in terms of having a “hivemind,” then there are particular smaller servers with their own cultures going on. It is more quiet but a lot more human in my opinion.
Enjoy.
How would you redesign the moderating system on lemmy?
Make it pull instead of push. Each user has way too little control over their own experience in my opinion. To me from an old-school-internet background, it’s very weird that a moderator can override what comments you’re allowed to see or not allowed to see. I much prefer Bluesky’s model, where you pick your moderators, and someone can’t override you and decide that certain comments you’re not allowed to read just because those comments happened to land within that person’s little domain after they were the first to claim the “worldnews” name for their community or whatever.
How to graft that onto Lemmy is a little bit difficult. It’s just a different model. I mean you could have a list of moderators whose decisions you want to block (similar to your list of users you want to block) – if any of those moderators removed a comment, you can still read it, their decisions just don’t affect your feed in any way. That would be a simple hack, sort of a useful check on their “power” if you want to say it that way, although it’s definitely a little bit rough approach. Probably a more holistic way would be to restructure how content even gets shared around. I haven’t looked at how Piefed does “feeds,” but that might be one good approach; let someone create or share a “politics” feed for example, and it can be a modification of someone else’s feed (“!news@lemmy.world but take out the Trump stuff” or “block these specific annoying users” or “ignore decisions by these two moderators”), so that it’s not a monopoly in terms of who gets to curate and control the content. You could subscribe to !betterpolitics@lemmy.world for example, and it’s just the identical posts sourced from !politics@lemmy.world, but with some users that are widely disliked banned, and then also with certain moderators who consistently make bad decisions disabled. That’s a lot harder to implement of course… IDK, this is just me thinking out loud about solutions I could see, but hopefully it makes some kind of sense.
Make it pull instead of push. Each user has way too little control over their own experience in my opinion. To me from an old-school-internet background, it’s very weird that a moderator can override what comments you’re allowed to see or not allowed to see. I much prefer Bluesky’s model, where you pick your moderators, and someone can’t override you and decide that certain comments you’re not allowed to read just because those comments happened to land within that person’s little domain after they were the first to claim the “worldnews” name for their community or whatever.
I feel like we’ve had a debate on this before. This would just negate the concept of communities built up by moderators. Also, in many case, instances have rules before communities. How does that system work here?
I haven’t looked at how Piefed does “feeds,” but that might be one good approach; let someone create or share a “politics” feed for example, and it can be a modification of someone else’s feed (”!news@lemmy.world but take out the Trump stuff” or “block these specific annoying users” or “ignore decisions by these two moderators"), so that it’s not a monopoly in terms of who gets to curate and control the content. You could subscribe to !betterpolitics@lemmy.world for example, and it’s just the identical posts sourced from !politics@lemmy.world, but with some users that are widely disliked banned, and then also with certain moderators who consistently make bad decisions disabled. That’s a lot harder to implement of course… IDK, this is just me thinking out loud about solutions I could see, but hopefully it makes some kind of sense.
Feeds are just made and maintained by one person that draw from a pool of selected communities. You can subscribe to a feed or follow new posts made in it. The creator doesn’t curate it beyond curating what communities are visible in it. Piefeds word filters already work to mitigate content users don’t want to see.
I feel like we’ve had a debate on this before.
Are we having a debate? I honestly was not aware if so lol
This would just negate the concept of communities built up by moderators.
Correct. Moderators should not “own” the communication that goes on in “their” communities, they definitely shouldn’t look at people as “their” users as I’ve heard some of them say before. We are just people. We are allowed to say things. The fact that letting people say things even if the moderators don’t want them to, would do damage to their concept, is a flaw with their concept.
Also, in many case, instances have rules before communities. How does that system work here?
To a certain extent, it is cultural. At the end of the day, the instance admins can physically control whatever passes through their server. In the old school Usenet sense, someone who was in that role would never modify someone else’s message. It just was this kind of wild fascism that would never be done except in the most dire circumstances (there were actually arguments about it when spam started cropping up, some people felt like even removing spam was going too far). Now, even someone who doesn’t own the server hardware feels empowered to set “rules” as you say for what people are allowed to say to each other, sometimes very arbitrary and clearly self-serving or etc. In my opinion, success lies somewhere between those two extremes: People generally being able to talk to one another (and the architecture being designed where it’s assumed that they’re allowed to) even if someone else doesn’t like it and wants to make rules against it, but still moderation set up for people who want it to the extent that they want it.
There’s obviously still a need for someone to take responsibility for deleting spam, harassment, or abusive content, and there’s going to be a grey area. I feel like, generally, you can let people control their own feeds and moderation that applies to them, and they will probably decide to configure it in a way where the anti-spam protection is applied to their feed and their weird additional arbitrary rules are not. That’s what I was saying.
The creator doesn’t curate it beyond curating what communities are visible in it.
Yes, I’m aware. I was proposing a new way in which it could work, I know that currently it doesn’t work that way. I don’t even know that the thing I spitballed is the way to do it, just someone asked how it could work, so I spitballed one possible way.
Moderators don’t literally “own” the communities they run now. They steward them. They can power-trip, but they can also be supplanted and replaced much easier on the Fediverse than they are on Reddit.
As for being able to “ignore” specific community moderators decisions, that’s a recipe that doesn’t scale well. In more active communities, that would mean that you would end up consistently seeing a lot of spam and abuse and nonsense because even a poor moderator will do the janitorial work that all communities do.
In terms of instances, there simply isn’t any appetite for the type of instances and community culture you want. You are simply in a minority here.
In terms of instances, there simply isn’t any appetite for the type of instances and community culture you want. You are simply in a minority here.
Severely tempted to code it up and see what the interest level is. IDK, I am lazy also, so let’s see. In any case thank you for your constructive input lol.
has led to a lot of the same moderation rot on Lemmy
Almost as if the platform wasn’t the problem.
People. What a bunch of bastards.
amen.
More chill here
