Now that a lot of the commotion has subsided I’m just curious to know how y’all are finding the Lemmy experience in general and whether you use it regularly like you did reddit?
I love beehaw but I’m starting to feel disconnected from the community. I feel like overall beehaw and lemmy are creating this echo chamber that is repeating the same talking points over and over again. Reddit and Twitter both offered insight from industry leaders or at least those in the industry in question. Lemmy seems to lack those type of folks. I’m also noticing an abundance of opinionated folks. This is good and bad. It feels like sometimes there isn’t any worth from engaging in a conversation. Sometimes there is, but a good bit of time I end up regretting it.
Overall it’s like the Linux version of Reddit. It’s not great but you can feel slightly more ethical using it.
The echo chamber is pretty bad here. I also don’t like that people here downvote opinions they don’t agree with, Reddit did this too though. I don’t think opinions should ever be voted on, up or down. People see which types of opinions get the most upvotes and it causes them to not express their true opinions for fear of being downvoted.
There are instances that disable downvotes, you may want to migrate to one that does. github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances#all-… has a column that indicates if an instance has them turned on or off.
reddit has the ability to hide post vote counts for a certain time to mitigate this. It's a feature that's worth bringing across.
(I also think it's worth capping the number of upvotes and downvotes a post/comment can get - and to do so asymmetrically, eg no more than 10 downvotes and 100 upvotes.)
I like not having to scroll through the same standard comments on every post. There might be fewer comments here, but they’re higher quality. I mostly used reddit for news which Lemmy covers just as well. Regardless of the API changes and enshitification Reddit simply got too big. Between the marketing and other sorts of vote manipulation, reddit basically stopped providing a useful overview of even news. The hivemind pushed the same dead horse to the front every day.
In general, it’s been pretty good. Stuff is a bit unstable every now and then, but most of that changed when I switched away from lemmy.world.
There’s a couple of things to contend with though. There’s less content than there was on Reddit. This ultimately doesn’t matter that much for general browsing, as there is still plenty. But for more niche communities it now means barely any content. Even with larger topics like Formula 1 it’s quite noticeable that there’s a lot less people in there. It’s great during big discussions, but any smaller links or discussions often only have like 1 or 2 responses. For other communities it’s even worse. Some of the genres I listen to have basically nothing going on, while on Reddit the community was at least large enough to have a few nice discussions every moe and then. The same with many games that I really liked.
Another problem is federation with more (politically) extreme instances like lemmygrad, hexbear, and some right wing crap that was luckily defederated before I could remember their names. On the one hand, I don’t want defederation based on political opinion alone to be the norm. But neither do I particularly like getting constantly called a “lib” (even though I’m quite left wing compared to the national average) or get to read constant discussions on these topics wherever I go. I come here to read about fun stuff, unwind a bit, not to constantly read about people defending dictatorships. Hexbear is especially interesting, since their users also add a lot of fun memes and good content. But then equally they brigade comment sections and overwhelm anyone who disagrees with them.
Ending on a positive note: the software (apps, backend, frontend, etc) have really gotten a lot better over the past months. I’m using Connect at the moment and I really enjoy it. Bugs keep disappearing, to the point where I now have very few complaints. Apps is why I left Reddit, so seeing that we’re now (imo) in a better place than Reddit is a good thing.
On the one hand, I don’t want defederation based on political opinion alone to be the norm. But . . .
I come here to read about fun stuff, unwind a bit, not to constantly read about people defending dictatorships.
Just thought it was worth highlighting. Obviously, the view of Hexbear is that the people you are here calling autocratic aren’t autocratic, but that gets into discussion of political opinions and my point is that this is a political opinion.
My main problem with hexbear people (or at least the annoying ones) is that imo they’re a bit too vocal about it. I’m not browsing Lemmy for political content most of the time, yet it seems like some hexbear people feel the need to turn everything into a political discussion. That kinda content is fine in some places, but less welcome in others. In my personal life I interact with people all across the political spectum, and with most people I can totally have a normal chat. That works because we bond over shared intrests. It’s very annoying when people constantly try to start discussions, whether I agree with them or not. There’s a time and place for everything.
I don’t think it’s the majority of hexbear, I see plenty of good content from them. But there does appear to be a (relatively to all of Lemmy) quite large group of aggressively political people in there, to the point of trying to spread their ideology everywhere.
I would never deny that the Hexbear people have been overly aggressive and operating on a hair trigger, but it’s not like they are coming into a thread on Right to Repair and saying “let me tell you about the Korean War!” They are nearly-always responding to topics that other people bring up.
I’m only just starting the last week or so, but I feel like because it’s a bit smaller there’s better discussion. Most minor annoyance with it though is some quality of life things not being there like RES (browsing everything with J + K etc.) and that multiple times a day it gives me Server Error / Cloudflare error pages.
Lemmy is great and all. Love it more then I ever did reddit. But it seems like instances are more politically polarized than your average subreddit. It kinda harshes my mellow.
I do like that people feel more genuine as opposed to just broken records repeating overused talking points.
When I sort by All I see 90% of what I would be looking for on other sites, so it’s a drop in replacement (at least for now). I spend less time overall on lemmy, but the time I do spend is less mindless scrolling, and more actually interesting posts.
I do miss some of the more specialist communities on reddit but honestly this is great for just scrolling stuff, and it’s completely replaced reddit for that.
Reddit had some great aspects. Niche communities about hobbies I might be interested in had wikis with intros on how to get started being something I miss.
My biggest issue with the Lemmy community is we seem to have brought the thirst-communities and the meme communities in great numbers but the hobby communities are really lacking.
Generally speaking I’m not interested in pics of attractive celeb number 7864 and while memes are fun their over abundance was why I was looking for a new content aggregator before the API changes.
Browsing Lemmy’s front page has replaced reddit’s r/all for me, usually checking top of 12 hours from all instances.
But I still use reddit for specific forums of certain things, because it’s just the biggest community for the particular subject. I usually try to check if I can find the particular subject from Lemmy and check that out first though.
I’m more of a commenter/lurker and I quite rarely make new posts, but when I do make one:
If it’s a question about something I need help with, I’ll start with a Lemmy post and then possibly also make one on Reddit - more readers, more answers.
If it’s just a shitpost/meme/“content”, I only post it on Lemmy.
I am liking it, community is friendly. I am slowly replacing my reddit addiction with lemmy. everyday I am finding new instances/communities to join. all in all, this journey so far has been exciting
I enjoy it so far. But I wish more stuff was tagged as NSFW and filtered out. Often I get girls in bikinis in my feed and I don’t want to know about that. I’ve been banning endless communities from my feed but it seems new ones pop up daily.
All in all Ok. There still some toxicity, not enough types of people to dilute some of the fringe or hardcore groups at times. Things like circlejerks seem to have more power outside of their own realm at times, anecdotally at least. Having to swap instances because DDoS or federation policy or the like and then having to reblock the same furry or anime or trans or random niche comic porn sites is a bit tiresome too. I get that the makeup of the users skews towards these groups and their supporters more, it’s just taking more curation I guess.edit: and duplicate posts from multiple instances. Another thing I imagine will be resolved in future.
Those negatives aside it’s been an interesting experience. I feel that I’m getting a broader sense of what’s going on, things that would have been drowned out before now appear to get at least a decent chance if not equal billing in my feed. The new forums have been really good, a very wide range of topics and articles from all around and some properly interesting discussions going on.
It definitely feels more like the earlier internet days at times which can be good as well as bad. I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops
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