The front page of reddit is so bad now. It’s a few 1/4 feel good memes, 1/4 variations of rate my pic subs, 1/4 ask reddit questions with the same answers I’ve seen a ton of times before, and 1/4 news and reviews.
I can get the first and last 1/4 from Lemmy now and the other stuff I don’t care about, so I get through the Reddit first few pages way faster than I used to now (when I’m browsing bored at work).
Lemmy and Lemmygrad were originally run by the same team on the same server. They’ve moved to different hosting providers these days, but I guess the tankies are crossing the boundary.
.ml is fine for shitposts, but don’t trust them on things like news and discussions if there’s even a remote risk of (anti)communism being brought up.
Like you, I'm a passionate user of K.Bin but lately, I'm noticing that things are getting kinda stale around here. The most recent thread in this, the top-level magazine on K.Bin, is 4 days old. Many other top 25 magazines are also suffering from a similar lack of fresh content. I run /m/scifi and it's been continuing to grow...
Yes I always thought Reddit’s rules against self promotion were pretty dumb. Like how did Reddit want people to find out about cool new things that Redditors make? From other news sources and then post to Reddit afterwards? That makes no sense and just means Reddit is the last place to find out about the cool thing that the Redditor made.
Now with Lemmy and KBin we have the chance to self promote again, and we need more posts anyways.
I think at least some of the complaining about politics on Lemmy is being misinterpreted.
As to my personal opinion: I really don’t mind political memes, polotical news articles posted and discussed, political discussion threads, etc. I like to participate in those every now and again. What I don’t really like (but tastes may differ on this one) is that sometimes posts that are just silly/funny/weird/beautiful/entertaining get highjacked or derailed in the comments section when out of nowhere a (to me mostly unrelated) libs vs tankies or left vs right discussion appear.
A lot of us are well aware that there are A LOT of real world problems, but we come to these internet forums to blow off some steam and just to have a chill time. To have a break from it all, if you will.
I’ve made the following point in another post: yes, in a way everything is politics. But some of these lemmings are capable of (and this is an illustration, not a particular situation I witnessed) highjacking a post with a picture of a beautiful sunrise and say “if it were up to politician A from party X we would never again have a sunrise in country Z…”.
Politics are important. And the day we stop talking about it is a very bad day for democracy, I think most - if not all - of us will agree. But maybe just let us have some lighthearted non-divisive topics as well?
I don’t understand the logic behind this. If it’s your job to analyze and deduce whether certain content is or is not acceptable, why shouldn’t you make assessments on a case by case basis?
The bit about “ignoring it” was more in jest. We do review each report and handle it in a case by case basis, my point with this statement is that someone hosting questionable content is going to generate alot of reports, regardless of whether it is illegal or not, and we won’t take an operating loss and let them keep hosting with us.
Usually we try and determine if it was intentional or not, if someone is hosting CSAM and is quick and responsive with resolving the issue, we generally won’t immediately terminate them for it. But even if they (our client) is a victim, we are not required to host for them and after a certain point we will terminate them.
So when we receive a complaint about a user hosting CSAM, we review it and see they are hosting a site advertising itself as intended to allow users to distribute AI generated CP, we aren’t going to let him continue hosting with us.
Even if you remove CSAM from the equation you still have to continuously sift through content and report any and all illegal activities - regardless of its frequency.
This is not an accurate statement, at least in the U.S. where we are based. We are not (yet) required to sift through any and all content uploaded on our servers (not to mention the complexity of such an undertaking making it virtually impossible at our level). There have been a few laws proposed that would have changed that, as we’ve seen in the news from time to time. We are required to handle reports we receive about our clients.
Keep in mind when I say we are a hosting provider, I’m referring to pretty high up the chain - we provide hosting to clients that would say, host a Lemmy instance, or a Discord bot, or a personal NextCloud server, to name a few examples. A common dynamic is how much abuse is your hosting provider willing to put up with, and if you recall with the CSAM attacks on Lemmy instances part of the discussion was risking getting their servers shutdown.
Which is valid, hosting providers will only put up with so much risk to their infrastructure, reputation, and / or staff. Which is why people who run sites like Lemmy or image hosting services do usually want to take an active role in preventing abuse - whether or not they are legally liable won’t matter when we pull the plug because they are causing us an operating loss.
And it’s the right of any … [continued]
I’m just going to reply to the rest of your statement down here, I think I did not make my intent/purpose clear enough. I originally replied to your statement talking about AI being used to make CP in the future by providing a personal anecdote about it already happening. To which you asked a question as to why I defined AI generated CP as CSAM, and I clarified. I wasn’t actually responding to the rest of that message. I was not touching the topic or discussion of what impact it might have on the actual abuse of children, merely providing my opinion as to why, whether legal or not, hosting providers aren’t ever going to host that content.
The content will be hosted either way, but whether it is merely relegated to “offshore” providers but still accessible via normal means and not criminal content, or becomes another part of the dark web, will be determine at some point in the future. It hasn’t become a huge issue yet but it is rapidly approaching that point.
This new community is primarily for keeping up to date with news about Apple and Apple devices and software. But instead of simply posting a link to an article on another website (anyone can do that) all the news content posted by the mods will be entirely readable on Lemmy....
I prefer Kbin the most, but Ernest has been slow to update the main site and the mobile API is missing (meaning it’s quite bad on mobile, even with the PWA).
Sync works great with Lemmy, so on mobile I use Sync (hello from my phone).
Historically, I’ve used Relay for Reddit for many years at this point. Relay is the one third-party app that didn’t leave. So far, I haven’t had to pay anything either, and nothing has broken.
While my Reddit usage is down, I still occasionally go on Reddit both in my browser and via Relay (while it still works). I usually go to Reddit for the WorldNews live threads and to check the Baldur’s Gate 3 subreddit.
I do find myself missing out on news I would otherwise have known about. I don’t see dev diaries for Paradox Interactive games here on Lemmy/Kbin, for example. This makes me surprised when a patch comes out (since I don’t see the dev diaries in my feed). Likewise, there are other niche things that I only find out about way later than I used to, and that kind of makes me miss Reddit.
I also find myself engaging more with other social media. I watch a lot more YouTube and TikTok. My Google Pixel has a “for you” article feed as part of the launcher itself; I used to ignore that but find myself browsing it now. I play more games on my phone than I used to.
It’s sort of plugged the hole, but not really. Even when I’m on Reddit nowadays it’s simply not the same.
edit: I ain’t complaining. If reddit engagement is dying and forums are taking it’s place, https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/9a0ca86e-fa21-49bc-bb1c-537f6aa7acd7.png Forums are more private and I generally hate reddit :)...
Or anyone else who is part of a niche community I guess. One popular example is xda-developers.com - even in 2023, it’s forums remain relatively popular, and there’s no real replacement for it. Reddit had several Android-related subs, but they don’t see the kind of discussions that XDA sees.
One big difference is that traditional forums are more suited for long-term and lengthy discussions. Reddit, Lemmy and similar sites primarily revolve around the “now” - posting or discussing the latest news and trends. Once a post falls off the front page, no one cares about it any more - whereas on a forum, a single thread can have a lifetime of many years.
Also, the fact that there is no points/karma system means every comment and post gets equal visibility, and there’s less chances of an echo-chamber forming / ass-kissing / meme / low-effort posting. Like look at SchnoodleDoodleDoo on Reddit - every single comment of their’s is a lame poem that adds no value and wastes screen space - basically spam - yet every time they post, they get a flood of replies from people like “Schnoodle you’re the GOAT, marry me xoxo” etc. Honestly, it gets very annoying seeing such ass-kissing and useless comments on every single thread.
And same with posts - because there’s no points system in a traditional forum, you get equal visibility over every post. Whereas on sites like Reddit, you’d have to pray that your post gets enough upvotes so that people will see it (or alternatively, buy upvotes), AND you’d have to also make sure you post at the right time so they people will see it, otherwise your post will quickly dissappear from the page. Lemmy, since it’s till fairly niche, doesn’t have that issue right now, but once it’s popularity grows, it’ll suffer from the same issues associated with votes and timing. Which is not very ideal for someone posting a question wanting help with something.
I like Lemmy for the communities it has. But the problem is that it doesn’t have the communities that I like most. I liked Reddit most for the hobby communities that aren’t all necessarily programming or gaming related. Lemmy is fantastic for memes and news and programming and gaming. But those are a small portion of what I used Reddit for. And they aren’t even my favorite part. Look at true guitar communities. Or astronomy, or any other hobby. It’s extremely inactive here.
So I found myself using Lemmy a lot. And then I realized that I was only using Lemmy for the things I don’t actually care about and the things I do care about aren’t here.
If you think the only topics of conversation we need are Politics, World News, & Technology, then we don’t need more people here.
Personally, I don’t like having to keep going back to Reddit for everything else. For other communities to be successful on Lemmy, we need about 2 orders of magnitude more users.
Are you content to have meaningful activity in just a small handful of generic topics? I’m not.
So, yes, we really do need more people here. A LOT more.
I’m here only a week or so, subscribed to about 100 communities that look interesting, but most have enough good posts yet very little discussion. Yet the top ‘world news’ and foss/fedi/prog topics get all the attention, it’s not balanced. I hope the new ‘scaled/best’ ranking algorithm will help, if I understand correctly this is ready but not yet released? People should make more effort to find, upvote, comment on smaller communities (note- to find communities I recommend search-lemmy.com - you find more than from own instance).
Regarding Mastodon - as there are many more users there, it could be a gateway to Lemmy (that’s how I got here). Now Mastodon 4.2 has better search, if you follow a lemmy community or account from mastodon, it may show up in such search. However Mastodon new search is opt-in for non-hashtag text, so I suppose Lemmy has to specify whether our posts / replies are searchable - anybody know how this works ?
Think about it; instead of those in charge or the instances deciding who they don’t want to be federated with and thus restricting content for the users, it would be better if users were able to block entire instances instead....
I have deliberately sought out an instance that only defederates illegal content and meta, so that I wouldn’t end up in some admin’s filter bubble.
Naturally this means my instance is also federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, and while I manually blocked some of their more obnoxious propaganda communities I haven’t found either of their instance’s users overly combative or brigading in random comment sections like others here are claiming.
Though I must concede that most news relating to Russia or China usually have a good handful of their tankies defending them in the comments, which can be a bit annoying at times. Having the instance of accounts shown is very helpful in those situations to know if they are someone arguing in good faith or just spewing propaganda.
Overall I much prefer my Lemmy experience this way though. It makes for more varied discussion and points of view and helps to avoid getting stuck in an echo chamber.
I don’t know exactly the correlation, since it seems to be all over. News, entertainment, and other even niche communities have a lot of politically motivated content that gets posted that is not just silly memes or factual reporting, or on-topic discussion.
Yeah, I saw the communist stuff too. But I set filters early on that hide content by keyword in Connect for Lemmy, which is what I typically use for browsing. I filter all content mentioning pretty much anything political and a few other subjects, but a lot of content still gets through because it doesnt trigger the keyword detection. The filters really helped to hide all that stuff early on, so it hasnt been as bad as when I first joined, but things still get through pretty often. So now I just block users that post that stuff, since users will typically post more similar content.
tl;dr: let’s stop the generic and almost-irrelevant-doom-and-gloom karma-harvesting one-liners that can be copy-pasted between any two articles written in the last century...
That description of online news is good, applies not just to news on Lemmy. I check out some news portals irregularly, and I frequently wonder if I’m out of the loop because I might be missing some context for the given article that I finally clicked on. A lot of news content should ideally be turned into a weekly digest, that filters out what’s relevant, gives context and wider considerations, etc. (e.g. instead of immediately informing us that the Ukrainian army has just captured a street in a village, just let me know when they’ve captured the whole village several weeks later, and explain if that village is strategically relevant). But that’s contrary to how both news portals and sites like reddit and Lemmy work, with the demand for a constant stream of small excitements.
I really hate seeing hacker news all over lemmy. Stop telling me to go there. Stop telling me they’re better than me. If you like another site so much, use it. You will like me less.
OP if you want better comments, try asking better questions.
As I said, this isn’t just “the wrong communities”, this is endemic to any sizable community here on a topic worth subscribing to.
If the basically-tiny technology, news, and politics communities are the wrong communities at this stage of adoption, Lemmy has no chance in hell of being anything better than a substandard Reddit.
This is, for sure, an issue carried over from Reddit, but it’s also a byproduct of another issue we carried over from Reddit: Most posts have a substantive issue.
Obviously not every community has this issue, but so many of them seemingly serve as nothing but news aggregators and do absolutely nothing to promote engagement or discussion. It is no surprise that the quality of comments has dropped when there are entire communities that are just copy-pasted news sludge with no other sense of community or engagement.
When the content on your website feels disposable then people will treat it as such. Lemmy as a whole has this exact same issue as Reddit does, which is not surprising because Lemmy is basically a clone of Reddit. I made a post on Beehaw a while ago about how the instance lacked any sense of community and I’ve seen similar sentiments expressed in other instances here and there. People, such as myself, who expected something better from Lemmy and getting frustrated when we can’t find it. There was a supreme opportunity presented to us when the Reddit migration began, to make new communities and spaces for discussion of a higher quality than Reddit could ever provide but Lemmy completely squandered that. Lemmy sucks - and that’s because it clones so much of Reddit… which also sucks.
Game Club is intended to be a community where anyone can post without feeling like they have to meet an importance threshold. There are many fantastic gaming communities on Lemmy, but the general ones seems to be focused on game release news and not so much generic gamer posts. I want this to be place for people to share...
President Joe Biden will announce the creation of the first-ever federal office of gun violence prevention on Friday, fulfilling a key demand of gun safety activists as legislation remains stalled in Congress, according to two people with direct knowledge of the White House’s plans....
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I was a… shall we say precocious, child. I made a lot of bombs in my back yard lol, started when I was like 11. Illegal as fuck but really fun, only made small firecracker type stuff but all I needed to do to scale that up was math and use metal instead of cardboard, I had already learned you needed a bit of air in the tube for the mix to ignite, etc. And all of this was before the Boston Marathon bombing showed us the power of a pressure cooker from Kohls, some nails from Home Depot, and a few chemicals I won’t list here but that can be easily found online/purchased in stores. Not gonna give out recipes on lemmy though lol, just saying, it isn’t as hard as you think, and as long as you aren’t Jack Parsons you’ll be ok.
(Warning: do not attempt at home, I am not responsible for your mistakes or actions, nor the government’s in arresting you for this illegal shit. And it goes without saying but if you do look any of this shit up, don’t use it to harm stuff, even “for the greater good,” just have fun with small booms, they’re fun enough on their own! Science!)
Same here. I am interested in stuff people talk here but it gets boring when everything is about FOSS, privacy and news. The comment threads on Reddit felt endless but here they are much shorter which I would guess is better for having an actual discussion. So Lemmy is interesting but I don’t spend much time on it.
Russia’s sprawling wartime fake news machine: The organization behind the Kremlin’s disinformation about Ukraine - [Long read] (meduza.io)
What brought you to Lemmy?
Is lemmy.ml turn into authoritarian?
I just realised, I can’t post anything on lemmy.ml...
"It's the content, stupid." - Quick Notes to Supercharge K.Bin (kbin.social)
Like you, I'm a passionate user of K.Bin but lately, I'm noticing that things are getting kinda stale around here. The most recent thread in this, the top-level magazine on K.Bin, is 4 days old. Many other top 25 magazines are also suffering from a similar lack of fresh content. I run /m/scifi and it's been continuing to grow...
Title (lemmy.world)
Labor has the power they want us to forget. (lemmy.ml)
400x not 400%
Are We Ready For This Site's Endless Feed of AI-Generated Porn? (futurism.com)
A very NSFW website called Pornpen.ai is churning out an endless stream of graphic, AI-generated porn. We have mixed feelings.
Introducing the lemmy.zip Apple community. For all your Apple news. (i.imgur.com)
This new community is primarily for keeping up to date with news about Apple and Apple devices and software. But instead of simply posting a link to an article on another website (anyone can do that) all the news content posted by the mods will be entirely readable on Lemmy....
Hello Lemmy, how do you feel about the Reddit migration? (forms.gle)
Hello everyone!...
What kind of people frequent on forums?
edit: I ain’t complaining. If reddit engagement is dying and forums are taking it’s place, https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/9a0ca86e-fa21-49bc-bb1c-537f6aa7acd7.png Forums are more private and I generally hate reddit :)...
deleted_by_author
Instance blocking should replace defederation
Think about it; instead of those in charge or the instances deciding who they don’t want to be federated with and thus restricting content for the users, it would be better if users were able to block entire instances instead....
An interesting title (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Collectively, Lemmy has a substantive comment issue
tl;dr: let’s stop the generic and almost-irrelevant-doom-and-gloom karma-harvesting one-liners that can be copy-pasted between any two articles written in the last century...
Reproducible builds, signing keys, and binary repos | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository (f-droid.org)
I know some people here distrust F-droid for some reason. Here is a blog post explaining how they are working on improving security
GameClub - a casual gaming community not focused on news
Game Club is intended to be a community where anyone can post without feeling like they have to meet an importance threshold. There are many fantastic gaming communities on Lemmy, but the general ones seems to be focused on game release news and not so much generic gamer posts. I want this to be place for people to share...
Biden to announce first-ever federal office of gun violence prevention (www.politico.com)
President Joe Biden will announce the creation of the first-ever federal office of gun violence prevention on Friday, fulfilling a key demand of gun safety activists as legislation remains stalled in Congress, according to two people with direct knowledge of the White House’s plans....
Elon Musk Says He Might Put X/Twitter Behind A Paywall (www.forbes.com)
What do you think about Lemmy, so far?
I happen to like it very much.