Has the Reddit exodus killed the former Lemmy culture?

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?

silvercove,

Yes it has. You can see this in political discussions very easily. There are too many people (mostly Americans) who are accusing everyone of being a Russian bot. This did not exist a year ago.

FrostyCaveman,

When I see the term “Russian bot” I can’t help but think of en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEDOR and that video of it awkwardly and inflexibly shooting guns

Fizz,
@Fizz@lemmy.nz avatar

I haven’t seen a platform that can have political discussions in good faith.

Maeve,

American here and I’ve seen it. The biggest turnoff is “tankie” bashing.

squiblet,
@squiblet@kbin.social avatar

I had heard the term before, but I never figured out wtf a “tankie” was supposed to be until about a month ago when I joined Lemmy. It seems to be part of the Europification of US politics, which is interesting but perhaps not a positive trend.

Maeve,

My point is, you don’t have to accept an idea to consider it. I’ve heard good and bad from them. You know, like most people.

squiblet, (edited )
@squiblet@kbin.social avatar

People very often decide and insist that someone is a “repost bot!” with absolutely no evidence, as if someone couldn’t do that manually. Repost? Sure. Automated? Not necessarily.

Adderbox76,

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.

danhakimi,
@danhakimi@kbin.social avatar

You mean the circle-jerk of six tankies talking about how the West is the definition of evil? Is that the former Lemmy culture you're talking about? I don't remember there being anything worth mourning.

postmeridiem,

🤓

TORFdot0,

I came at the beginning of the Reddit exodus in June and I haven’t noticed necessarily a shift to Reddit’s culture as it’s grown but more of just the general toxicity that comes along with a platform growing to a certain size.

There is a lot more trolls and likewise people who won’t engage civilly with someone who has an opposing view (because why would you when there is a good chance the other person is just a troll?). I feel like the reaction to Lemmy.world blocking piracy communities or most instances degenerating from Hexbear have shown me that.

Lemmy culture still seems to be intact. A lot of posting is still tech focused and the is still a lot of good discussion. It just seems like a lot of posts that make “Hot” on the All feed tend to be more combative or politically charged.

Karmmah,
@Karmmah@lemmy.world avatar

I read that some people on here go about it by blocking accounts that are repeatedly toxic. I like this approach since it directly improves your own feed and if a lot of people do it with time the reduced exposure these accounts get could improve the platform as a whole.

notfromhere,

I, myself, have a blocklist a mile long. Communities as well as users. It’s made my mental health go way up. Some may argue I’m in an echo chamber but I much prefer conversations with pleasant and/or likeminded people to getting verbally shat all over.

thoro,

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.

AlexisFR,
@AlexisFR@jlai.lu avatar

And that’s only the first migration. Expect a way bigger one once Reddit sunsets the old reddit interface.

MaybeItWorks,

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.

thetreesaysbark,

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.

MaybeItWorks,

Oh, I agree completely. As the masses arrive conversation generally gets less nuanced and less thoughtful. Group think becomes more obvious too.

idiomaddict,

I changed my account to reduce traffic on my my former server when the Reddit refugees came

LinkOpensChest_wav,
@LinkOpensChest_wav@beehaw.org avatar

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

d3Xt3r,

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.

Driftking,

deleted_by_moderator

    •
    Black_Gulaman,
    @Black_Gulaman@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

    !lostlemming

    rufus,

    Yes. The old culture has completely been replaced. I still haven’t formed an 100% opinion on whether that’s good or bad. Maybe it’s neither.

    foggy,

    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.

    starlinguk,
    @starlinguk@kbin.social avatar

    Reddit used to be "nice". Then it became toxic. And now the toxic asshats are here and the moderators do nothing.

    Blaze,
    @Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    Feel free to report toxic behaviour. I do, and usually see toxicity removed and/or banned

    Dark_Arc,
    @Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

    Yup, moderators need to know!

    sexy_peach,
    @sexy_peach@feddit.de avatar

    I don’t think so. I used to post every day so there would at least be some content. Now I don’t feel like that’s necessary anymore. I like it more now.

    amio,

    No. Apart from the relentless political posting, you-know-what-instance and a small handful of other people being obviously bad faith actors, I actually think it's a chill, relatively nice little place. A bunch of people will have Opinions and not be too shy about them, I figure that's fine as long as they're not aggressively off-topic, offputtingly angry or shared in a douchebaggy way. I haven't seen much outright incivility so far, whereas Reddit is a fucking constant shit blizzard.

    I do hope we'll stay vigilant about astroturfing and bad faith participation, though, because it wouldn't take much to ruin the whole thing. "Redditism" is a natural-ish development for any large website if there's not a strong culture for resisting it, but it did become abruptly and noticeably worse once it turned into a pawn in the 2016 US election. Politics, as always, is the mind killer.

    atlasraven31,

    The Reddit refugees came to Lemmy and made content. And everyone had a good time, except the occasional people that bitch about toxicity.

    rusticus,

    Hexbear and lemmy.grad were there before and are as toxic as any reddit sub I’ve ever been in.

    maegul,
    @maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

    From what I can gather it isn’t true that Reddit culture has completely supplanted what came before, but it has definitely shifted things overall, both mixing to some extent. Scale is part of that though, as is the filtering mechanisms provided by a relatively niche platform.

    Antagonistic downvoting (I’m now basically against downvoting I think), superficial statements, especially those that are dismissively in disagreement to the point of unpleasantness or abusiveness … I’d say I’ve seen more of all these things.

    One effect, I think, is the establishment of Reddit replacement communities and their gaining large membership which has shifted the centre of gravity here. The whole of lemmy.world being an example.

    Besides all of that, I’d say I’ve seen the generally or more frequently presumed set of “obvious” opinions shift toward the mainstream, which isn’t surprising at all, but with a slightly ruder and superficial form of engagement (at times at least), it’s rather tiring.

    BruceTwarzen,

    I love when people say they are glad they are bot on reddit anymore and create a new one. Suddenly everything sounds like reddit again. Artporn, foodporn, earthporn we get it you are 16

    cedarmesa, (edited )
    @cedarmesa@lemmy.world avatar

    💀

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