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?
So far so good. In a smaller community I feel more responsible for contributing to discussions. Others seem to be engaging too with thoughtful comments (not just karma-farming inside jokes).
This is helped by the fact that new interesting threads are not immediately buried in heaps of new content, so you actually have time to think of an answer that someone might actually read and reply to. I realize that this is mostly a function of the current scale of the Fediverse and that the more it grows, the more it might just turn into Reddit.
It’s the Fediverse that I have been searching for.
Somebody on Lemmy made this quote I really like:
Twitter is people you care about posting content you don’t care about. Reddit is people you don’t care about posting content that you do care about
Twitter-like Fedi never clicked for me. I made a bunch of accounts over the course of two, maybe three years, each starting with the intention of maybe making new friends and having a good time. I met a ton of cool people but we never became good friends because I never got really invested into it, simply because my feed was never something I hoped it would be, something exciting.
Lemmy gives me exactly what I was searching for. I didn’t use it prior to thr Reddit migration because there were too few people but now I am very happy
In my experience, no. I’m not a fan of the microblogging style of discussion as well. I never had a personal twitter account, only my artist account I use to post once a week. I thought I’d try Mastodon, and while it’s nice to be in the fediverse and there a lot of interesting people and posts there, the microblogging format still doesn’t work for me and I basically stopped using my account after 2 weeks. I feel more at home with Lemmy.
Sounds like me. I signed up to Twitter in 2010 but practically never used it. The short message format never appealed to me and I always thought it was dumb. The heavy focus on politics also put me off.
However if Mastodon is interesting I’m willing to give it a try! Do most people use it anonymously or with their real names?
There are instances that bump up the max length. The word you’re generally looking for is “glitch” (instances will say they’re running “the glitch fork” or “glitch edition” or will have version numbers ending in +glitch, which has a few features on top of regular Mastodon), although some regular Mastodon instances may also increase the char count the hard way.
Alternatively, Firefish/Misskey by default has ~3000 characters but it’s a completely different experience altogether (although it still federates with Mastodon (like kbin and Lemmy)). I’m not exactly sure on how Akkoma instances are usually set up but that’s worth taking a peek as well.
Of course this doesn’t address the politics stuff but that’s more on you to curate your own experience.
It’s a give an take. I do miss some of the communities but at this time lemmy is more intimate. Some of my favorite communities are so big, being a part of the discussion is like pissing in the wind. As an early adopter on lemmy you can help build and participate more readily. Nothing like having a comment on a thread with 1,000 comments and thinking ‘fuck it no one cares.’ Or worse trying to hamstring your comment into the top 6 or 7 threads for visablity alone.
It scratches my reddit itch. Only thing that’s bothering me is the lack of non-tech-related content.
For a while I tried to block every new Linux, IT tech, gaming and social media drama community that popped up on my feed.
But I had to do it daily cause more kept popping up, and even the memes, news and askquestions communities are mostly tech-related.
I miss diversity in topics (and before you ask, yes I understand the reason and I’m doing my part in posting original content).
It's also really hard to block everything because there isn't a simple block button available, you have to go into the message and then scroll all the way to the bottom (which is fun when infinite scrolling is switched on).
i moved to lemmy before the reddit api changes. in january 2023 i stopped using all proprietary software and was looking for alternetives. its way better than reddit, im never going back…
There’s good reason to love Lemmy, and since joining I’ve also gone very Foss and privacy centric but I just feel like it’s a bit quiet, maybe it’s just me
I’ve only been active on Hexbear really since the cth sub got banned and we built that space, but I really like how federation has gone and the influx of new slop and occasional lost libs/chuds.
Once you understand the kind of people who are on hexbear, things will become more clear. Just go to some of their profiles and have a look at what they post
Hexbear: the 3rd or so biggest instance on lemmy and by far the most active. It’s where all the people with pronouns next to their names come from. We’re a left unity trans positive community that’s been around for 3 years, mostly made up of Marxists and Anarchists. We were just recently federated with the rest of lemmy about a week ago.
slop: Food for the hogs. Content. Posts. Discussion. Drama. Romance. Danger! Hoggers
cth: a podcast no one really cares about. A community of leftists outgrew a forum that used to be about them. It got banned from reddit and the refugees turned into Hexbear.
libs: Liberals. From our perspective this includes about 65-75% of the American political landscape. This includes all democrats and about half republicans. These are people who support capitalism. Bernie Sanders is a lib. They are annoying and will betray you in the end but they’re usually the people who can be reasoned with so it’s extra frustrating.
chuds: Fascists. The other 25-35%. Confederate flag waving people who eat burgers as a protest against global warming. Kyle Rittenhouse stans. Coal rollers. The people who will kill you first if you have good politics. They believe above all else in natural hierarchies so the capitalists will turn to them when the left challenges theirs. That’s how Hitler happened.
cth: a podcast no one really cares about. A community of leftists outgrew a forum that used to be about them. It got banned from reddit and the refugees turned into Hexbear.
what do you mean? people definitely care about citations needed.
It’s their way of saying “low quality”, usually thrown at things they deem forced by a marketing team. Always gave me some anti-semitic vibes when I used to see it used in context but I’m not sure why off the top of my head.
That’s gross (thank you for sharing the link, I haven’t heard of that one) but it is 100% not what hexbears mean as they refer to their own forum posts as “slop”. They just mean low effort “content” in the more generic English slang sense.
Yes you’re right (though I am not familiar with hexbear). The chan slang was just derived from the standard slang and once you learn about them it can taint your interpretation of it because dogwhistles can sometimes be subtle.
“If I encounter a word I do not know used by communists, it must be from 4chan because I am the most highly educated and professional person ever to walk the Earth.” — liberals
(I am Jewish and have been terminally online for years and have never heard that ‘slop’ is anti-semitic. Sounds like libs are just using anti-semitism as an empty accusation to silence communists to me, especially heinous when you consider who funded the Nazis in the first place and who rescued the Nazis after the Soviets destroyed them.)
Eh, it scratches the itch. I don’t touch reddit anymore, outside of web searches. Still, I miss the niche communities that only a massive site like reddit can give life.
Same, I do all of my browsing here but still look up things like “baldurs gate 3 quest/item/enemybugged reddit” because it’s the only place I can find answers, outside of the occasional steam forum post.
Yeah I completely agree, even though I’m subscribed to my favourite communities, they are nowhere near big enough to even fill 5 minutes of scrolling a day
Back before Hexbear re-federated we used to have a sorting algorithm that was a bit better for smaller communities. Right now, Active posts stay for too long and Hot posts don’t yet have enough engagement to encourage people clicking through. I believe there’s talks of adjusting the sorting algorithms, hopefully soon.
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.
I’m struggling to find niche communities but overall the comments are more human and not just saying what everyone wants to hear for Internet points. I still plan on hosting my own instance soon and I’m excited for that. I do find it annoying as well when I sort by new and it’s just thousands of repost from reddit.
I dunno, there always seems to be a dog pile of people ready to be outraged. The LTT stuff, especially the un-verified, tweets from the disgruntled ex employee.
People are ready to string up Linus and torch his community even though the response video today is all you could ask for. Then she piles on and somehow her word is not inpugnable.
Any voice of reason is down voted and dumb hot takes and up voted.it feels worse than reddit tbh.
Yeah been noticing it can be pretty hit or miss, the vibe is pretty chill here but people still come out of the woodwork to dog-pile on people. The unverified allegations with LLT / Madison are a perfect example of that
Pretty good, it’s my Reddit replacement (except for Google searches where I still put site:reddit.com, searching Lemmy doesn’t work that well…).
Choosing an instance sucked though.
I went like:
sh.itjust.works: Found out they’re Canadian, the latency was too much for Europe
lemmy.ml: Overall pretty good, I liked that NSFW instances were defederated, so I could browse All without seeing porn. Till I realized there is a slur filter that censors your comments and others. So if someone calls you a ‘bitch’ on the Fediverse everyone can read it, except you. You see 'removed’
lemmy.world: Largest instance, plenty of local content, good policies overall, but the stability was awful (due to DDOS)
lemmy.zip: Smaller instance, full federation, super fast and in the EU, I’m staying there for now and moved all my subscriptions and blocked communities (mostly porn, again, I like to browse All) over
The problem with tiny instances is reliability and trust.
If you lose the motivation to run it tomorrow it’s gone. If you run out of money? Gone. If you’re the only admin and you die? Gone.
In addition to that you can read everything I do on your instance. Like all my “private” messages.
If an instance admin is scummy they could even modify the Lemmy code running and save away all passwords and emails in plaintext. Not an issue for me as I use a custom email and random passwords for every service, but it can fuck over random people.
So professional bigger instances do have their benefits too.
I own a domain, for example xyz.com, which means I can create whatever email I want, like [email protected].
The mail server I set up forwards all emails to one inbox. Which means I still get an email if you send it to [email protected] or [email protected] and so on, you get the idea.
So when I sign up for an account I don’t use a general email (except for banking stuff, taxes, etc.). If I sign up for Facebook (good riddance) I’d use [email protected]. That way I also know when I suddenly get a lot of spam who lost my email or sold it off :)
In my case it’s self-hosted, but maybe there are email providers where you can use your own domain that enable the same feature (it’s called wildcard usually).
dude, all I ask for at registration time is a nickname and a captcha… reddit, twitter, fb and google all read your shit and train ai models and make billions of dollars every month
I’m sure your shitposts are top secret but idk, what’s your threat model?
I do use it regularly, but I miss some of the niche gaming communities. You can definitely tell there’s a lot less activity on here, but hopefully it keeps growing with time.
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