I imagine there’s excitement for the increase of activity but worries about the potential toxic side of Reddit coming along too.
I’d especially be interested in the Lemmy devs’ opinions.
My biggest concern with the increasing number of people is that any interesting threads will be buried beneath memes, pictures, and similar content, like it happens on Reddit.
You are correct in that people moving over from Reddit are accustomed to using the platform as an entertainment provider and not as an RSS aggregator. Memes are entertaining to most, so you can expect them to rise naturally. Reddit uses that specifically to attract/retain people, and most of us have gotten used to it over the years; I personally enjoy it, even.
However, this doesn’t mean you can’t use Lemmy as an RSS aggregator anymore. But we would need extra features for that, such as tags, so you can filter content out based on them. If tags existed, you could trivially filter the “meme” tag out, and it would then be up to moderators (and their bots, and the users, to report content) to make people in a community actually tag their content properly.
I think the conventional way this is handled on Reddit is separating memes and fluff into one one community (subreddit) and more discussion based content into another community. It works on Reddit because even if the memes get more engagement in an absolute sense, each subreddit has it’s own yard stick for what is doing well, so a discussion that makes it to the front page of its own subreddit will make it through to the front page of users who are subscribed, alongside the memes. I don’t yet know enough about how Lemmy ranks posts to know if this will work, but hopefully it will.
Nah, most subreddits are the same. All the top threads in each community are usually pictures, memes, or news. It’s hard to find discussions unless you specifically search for not so popular posts.
Can give you some examples? That is definitely not my experience, the few subreddits I visit often only have memes every once and while and they often get removed quickly by the mods redirecting them to dedicated meme subreddits.
Sure, when it’s r/all by top. But a massive part of it is subreddits, which then constitute the front page. The majority of my Reddit front page isn’t memes, because my main subscriptions are things like acting, patientgamers, askhistorians, piano, etc. Which don’t have many, if any, memes posted.
Subs that regularly hit /r/all kind of lose their own identity
This is what I am hoping will happen. With the current reddit structure, for each topic, you have multiple communities -
- The noob-friendly one that is not actively moderated and has a lot of reposts and garbage content
- The offshoot that was created because the main sub went downhill. Has stricter moderation and content policies.
- The meme offshoot that was created because the main sub banned memes.
- The circlejerk version.
/r/gaming is garbage, /r/games is for discussion. /r/StardustCrusaders is a fan-art dump, /r/Shitpostcrusaders is a meme juggernaut The mods of the Game of Thrones subreddit wouldn’t allow people to shit on the show, so /r/freefolk was formed, and that also served as a template for stuff like /r/titanfolk.
Anything that gains critical mass will break down into multiple sub communities. It’s inevitable.
I’m a lemmygrad user, so it’s been a little annoying dealing with people who wander in to troll but it’s not too bad
I’m all about it! Great to see a platform take off when it’s centered around being ad free and open sourced.
Well:
- I’m annoyed at calling people who dislike an app and choose another website “refugees”
- I’m happy that we’re going to have more activity
- I hope more instances will be built and maintained, because I don’t think the large number of new members can be moderated effectively if they keep flocking to the same handful of instances
- When in doubt, I hope moderators will be too strict rather than not enough, especially in the beginning to make sure the behavioural expectations are very clear
I agree with all of this, except the first point, and that’s the reason I’m leaving a comment rather than a vote:
I’m annoyed at calling people who dislike an app and choose another website “refugees”
“Refugees” aren’t people who “do not like the app”. I agree that the term is poorly chosen, and offensive to actual refugees who had to leave their lives, home, and a good part of their identity behind, because of a traumatic, catastrophic event; and that “explat” (for “ex-platform”, a play on words with “expatriates”) would be a more fitting term, but the “explat” actually came over because they have never liked the app, except now, it is forced onto them. Moving over isn’t a choice for many, the choice is actually between “not using any reddit-like service at all anymore” or “using what exists aside from reddit”. And in that context, I think you can clearly see why the “refugee” term came to mind (of privileged people who failed to see the humanitarian implications and the belittling of dramatic experiences and suffering of others).
Sensitivity aside, “explat” is a more clever name.
just to emphasize your point there about calling people refugees. I always lurked reddit to the point of using libreddit only lately, and never felt the drive to contribute
with reddit’s shenanigans, I found out about this place in one of the posts asking for alternatives and it’s a whole different atmosphere and I feel more comfortable not lurking anymore
all this to say that I am here because of reddit’s actions, but I’m not a refugee
Hopefully it’s moderated much less. Don’t see how it wouldn’t be since it would probably take more effort. The excessive, special interest driven moderation is what really killed reddit long before this api issue.
Mods should have never been allowed to moderate more than like 3 subs at most.
I hope the reddit echo box ‘our way or the highway’, ‘everything is a pun’ mentality doesn’t transfer over as well
Aww, but Reddit pun threads are fun.
Agreed, I hope there is room for pun threads here too.
Once you’ve seen the Anne Frankly one more than a few times, you’ll have had enough
They’re fine when appropriate. It’s nauseating how they’re inserted everywhere.
Yeah, when a simple bots can post most of the replies. E.g.
if post.contains("r/theydidthemath") { post.reply("/r/theydidthemonstermath"); }then it’s gone too far. There are some good, creative ones, like The Old Reddit Switch-a-roo, but they’re too few and far between.
To each his own I guess. To me it’s too much of the same regurgitated over and over again like a meme that stopped being funny years ago
When someone shares a personal story about his wife’s struggle with cancer and the top reply is “I also choose this guy’s dead wife”
I’m actually quite pleased at the new influx of users! There’s finally a good amount of activity and real discussion going on here, instead of just posts with links to articles with zero comments and no real OC.
Aside from that, I have enough faith in the moderators and the structure of the platform itself that there shouldn’t be too much of a toxicity problem. Honestly, my own biggest fear is just that a lot of the new users here lose interest and move on, returning the platform to its earlier days.
For now, I just hope that the servers don’t go down in flames when the 12th comes around. I can’t wait to see how this platform will look further down the road though!
I literally just signed up and this is the first comment I’ve read. I feared we might be seen as outsiders so thanks. I’ve been banned from Reddit for quite some time but lurked on RIF. Hopefully Lemmy can scale in time.
I have enough faith in the moderators and the structure of the platform itself that there shouldn’t be too much of a toxicity problem.
My concern: Are there enough moderators for the deluge coming?
Maybe not for the initial deluge, but with sustained growth the number of mods will grow too
Maybe, maybe not, but the instances have the option of closing registrations for a bit if they get overwhelmed and need to regroup. This is why it’s nice to see lots of other instances popping up across the fediverse
Maybe I’m missing something but how will that help the moderation, since users can visit/comment from any instance?
Pretty happy.
The place and platform is capable of growth and diversity … on which, many should consider starting their own instances just to spread the load and allow people to find their moderation homes.
I’ve been wanting the fediverse to be more topic/group/community based than a twitter clone since I got here, so it makes sense to see some interest in these “Threadiverse” style platforms.
There’ll be growing pains, and the current admins and devs are probably going through some pain now. Sorry! I just hope enough community leaders, former sub-reddit mods and future admins will see the value in distributing social media and help pick up the slack.
More broadly, for those who don’t know, IMO, the fediverse has been suffering from an essentially oppressive dominance by Mastodon. Everyone thinks the fediverse is just Mastodon. Though that’s completely untrue, as there are a number of alternative platforms, some of which are rather novel and interesting, it is numerically very true with Mastodon comprising
80%of fediverse users.Generally, this amount of dominance is almost certainly bad for the future health of the fediverse and the values it seeks to promote (ie, interconnected platform and community diversity). Mastodon, at the moment, is creeping towards being just another centralised platform … essentially an OSS non-profit Twitter in its own right, which isn’t a bad thing at all, but not what the fediverse is about.
Enter the Threadiverse! Lemmy, /kbin (and even calckey a little with what will hopefully become its federated channels), and others. Not just platform diversity, but medium or format diversity.
At this moment, IMO, it is very valuable to the fediverse at large, that lemmy, /kbin etc grow and do well.
Honestly, while most people here have been alright, toxic newcomers have been a problem and I consider this place ill-prepared to handle them in a bigger wave than this one.
There has already been an observable culture shift, and some nasty screaming when some newcomers used to being a majority are challenged in their views and shocked to find a nontrivial pushback. And I feel that lemmy.ml will undergo a similar event to /r/antiwork if there isn’t staff action taken , where the place loses all its values and just becomes a sanewashed recuperated place that feels cheated when its founders keep saying what they said from the start. People largely just don’t read rules or sidebars, it seems, and realize lemmy.ml explicitly says it isn’t a general unthemed instance for everyone. It’s broad, but not ‘reddit’ broad, nor (pretending to be) politically neutral. Relevant source
Edit: I realize this may come off as “why aren’t other people doing more things!”. I realize the staff/devs are overloaded, I’m not blaming them to telling them to drop things. But I regret how few moderating/admin staff were recruited, and we’re seeing how many communities were made 4 years ago and have no active moderation, nor culture to avoid this becoming ‘reddit but here’.
I don’t know how to interpret “everyone should feel welcome here” other than it is for everyone. As far as culture shift, it really is impossible to maintain the more “fringe” leftist culture with an increase in users, marxist-leninist simply do not exist in large enough numbers. I don’t really see why lemmy.ml shifting its majority political leaning would be something negative to you, since the only thing that would happen would be more discussion in the comments, and if discussion isn’t something desirable, places like lemmygrad do exist
Been here patiently waiting for quite a while… this is what i’ve been waiting for, for reddit to finally fuckup bad enough that people move over.
If reddit deletes NSFW content, we can expect a third exodus of users
Reddit trying to go the slow route, removing one thing at a time, will make it easier for lemmy to scale and grow to accept all the users.
If they did API, old.reddit, and nsfw all at the same time it would be absolutely impossible to accommodate.
I’m an ex Reddit user. It seems inevitable that the Reddit admins will lock out third party access - I could be wrong but based on recent years, Reddit doesn’t like to listen to it’s community.
I hope that the toxicity stays away, but it’s likely there will be toxic users at some point. My main gripe with Reddit was the lack of actual reading. Most mainstream subs were just memes / circlejerks / pics. I’d much prefer to learn something or read something of value over “lol-ing” at a pic.
I’m keen to see how Lemmy grows.
COMMUNISM IS BACK!
spoiler
Then, lemmy will KILL (BAN) users for some reason as the nature of communists. :D
