The lemmings are a squeaky bunch.
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I kind of feel like Reddit is the biggest bar in the world and having a conversation there feels like it. If you aren’t loud and early, you can’t really participate in a meaningful way. The smaller crowd of Lemmy is a sweet spot for me. Enough people that it’s not dead, but small enough that I can still participate in conversations.
Also, on Reddit I felt dread seeing that there was something in my inbox. On Lemmy, I’m excited to see what someone wrote. Just a very different experience overall.
Well well well, look what you have waiting for you. A nice blip of free dopamine. You’re welcome and have a lovely evening.
I hope you have a wonderful day my friend ❤️
you are neat =) take that!
Get blooped, hope you have a wonderful day
Fuck you, I can’t believe you would even write something like that, much less put it on the internet. Dumb fuck
!^(Jk I hope that didn’t make you feel some type of way, ily)!<
Pretty much…
Especially when you comment anything remotely social or political. The mouth breathers clamor to project their personal war on the nearest comment that vaguely resembles some words they can latch on to.
Agreed, and it’s kinda neat to start recognizing people’s names across different communities. Really feels like old-school internet forums in that way.
I love the modern retro internet vibe.
Humans work better on the tribe model. Having diverse communities and even fractured topics covered by multiple communities on different instances promotes this model.
It feels like a properly social media that isn’t trying to exploit me, and I think that’s something special.
I don’t disagree with you on the scale/tribe point, but I do question if the larger factor at play isn’t the invisible hand of advertisers and corporate interests guiding and manipulating the landscape for their benefit rather than ours (which you touch on, I just think it’s a point worth really hammering)
Hint: it very much is - all the way up and down the scale, from why Reddit’s search function sucks ass and subs are only allowed to have 2 pinned posts that cannot be edited by a mod team - why promote listening when talking is what makes more ad revenue? - to making it harder to read a sub’s ruleset prior to posting, anything that would be a barrier to showing another advertisement to a lager group of people gets smoothed over, while things that promote human interaction and peace of mind get forgotten along the way :-(.
Yeah, the Picard maneuver once replied to me and I honestly felt a little star struck.
I once got into a brief disagreement with Flying Squid and to their credit they didn’t stoop to any kind of personal attacks, didn’t behave or speak unreasonably, didn’t flex or mention their mod status, and didn’t penalize me for disagreeing with them with their mod powers in any way. And yes of course all of these very reasonable normal behaviors should be a given, but just fucking try disagreeing with a power mod on Reddit and see what happens.
Lemmy; even our powermods are better.
Isn’t it crazy how we’re able to connect with each other when our activity isn’t guided and filtered to serve the interests of advertisers? It’s almost like we’re all real human beings with the capacity to relate and connect… What a concept!
Hmm just what a robot would say.
Beep boop robots deserve love too, bigot
/s
You can always be heard on Reddit. Reply to the top level comment with a sex related joke or the popular meme trend and upvotes will roll I’m fast. You could also make a post that allows others to be judgemental, like relationship advice or am I the asshole; and again you’ll get lots of attention. Or pretend to be a girl and comment of weed and sexuality. There are lots of ways to get attention.
All of those ways get you attention, yes, but they’re all vapid dopamine hits. Which is probably a positive for the right person I suppose.
If you want meaningful engagement you will never find it in the larger subs, only in the super niche interest subs. We don’t really have many niche anything here on Lemmy save for a few vocal minority communities but the great thing is the engagement with the larger community is a real draw for a lot of us.
they’re all vapid
Yup. That’s what I mean to say.
It’s small enough to recognize names. Big enough where running into a furry with an unreasonably flashy emojis in their name, or someone from some place you never
herdhad the knowledge of its presence forcefully injected into your brain through an unspecified method of perception is common place.Edit: Typo.
I dont know how ya herd a place, but ive played enough paradox games to have heard of a lot of places.
Fixed and improved.
Most popular english communities are already too big though. They’re always flooded with comments, and sometimes everyone says exactly the same, such as if they didn’t read through the comments before commenting themselves. Discussions on, e.g., c/ich_iel@feddit.org are much more fun.
Hipster dive bars have always been cooler than the “hip spots” anyway.
Agreed. On Reddit, if you weren’t there in the first hour of a rising post, your comment won’t be seen by many.
I love that Lemmy posts have a longer “shelf life,” so to speak. I can see something posted days ago and still find fresh comments, which in turn encourages me to add something if it feels relevant. If I had scrolled a two day old post on Reddit, any comment I add would be rarely seen, or at most responded to with “Why are you commenting on a dead post?”
anyone else remember 2010/2011 reddit? Just me? Feels like that tbh back when everyone was fleeing from slashdot and digg. 31yo millenial since I’ve already dated myself lol
Same. Grew out of 4 Chan when it was about rage comics and anonymous (before the fascist takeover). This feels like vising a familiar place.
It was always incredibly racist, but it seemed like a joke.
Yes I know. But it was mostly “edgy turned to eleven” which escalated faster and faster hence me leaving (I thought I got too old for those “deep fried” low effort memes aside from the obvious stuff).
Man I feel old… like a grandpa talking about the old times.
I remember when the pool was closed. I’m ancient.
Damn i still say that to this day because of my autistic ass holding onto weird lines like that lol
I never understood how people would complain that a site with thousands or tens of thousands of users is “too small”. I feel like that is a real sweet spot, you can have actual conversations and interactions that matter a bit more. Meanwhile, the constant flood of posts, comments and spam on the top social media sites made me feel like nothing I write will even matter, since all the posts will be buried under the information flood in the matter of minutes.
There’s definitely a difference with scale.
On reddit, I was never on the default front page or /r/all. I was subbed to a hundred niche communities.
On lemmy that’s harder in 2 ways. The first is the critical mass you need to keep a community active, and the second is fragmentation.
For instance, I was super active in the scuba and underway photography subreddits. Not only is the community tiny here, but which scuba sub do i go to? With multiple instances, there’s no default community named “scuba.”
https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=scuba
All of them are inactive, seems like it’s not a very discussed topic here
Yeah.
I miss it.
It would be neat if same-topic communities somehow could somehow merge into a single community view via federation. There are probably some downsides to what I’m considering, but it seems like it could help alleviate fragmentation while allowing the “same” communities to be hosted across multiple instances. If one instance defederated from another, the community posts in that instance would be excluded from the combined view.
Maybe even a simple opt-in/out of a combined view for communities that truly want or need to stand alone. Not sure if this goes against the core concepts of federation or not. It seems like a nice compromise at a glance, if it could be implemented well.
PieFed already has such Categories of Communities, it’s a really nice feature. PieFed has a lot of such things actually - like hashtags, the ability to block all users from an instance without requiring admin approval, YouTube embeds, etc.
Unfortunately PieFed is not quite ready for the masses as its more foundational features aren’t finished yet, like much of the times a Notification won’t point to whatever caused it for whatever reason, and it lacks user tagging, and search options.
But it’s nice to see these kinds of features functional already!:-)
Communities should just consolidate. Happens regularly, the electric vehicle did recently, you can see it on !fedigrow@lemm.ee
If you just want to look at and respond to anything there is enough people. If you want to find specific, niche communities then it’s still pretty small.
I would say the population size makes it a little easier to recognize the more friendly responses too. I feel on Reddit the friendly responses are quickly buried by the more spiteful ones.
Yeah sometimes even parts of mastodon feel like they’re getting too impersonal. Like I’ll be in a conversation and realise I don’t any of these people
Yup.
Reddit is so big 95% of your comments get buried with no replies. There’s no conversation most of the time. You’re just reading the conversations of others who got in on the post really early and got upvoted to the top.
I’m also of the opinion that the average IQ on Lemmy is notably higher than the average IQ on Reddit, so the discussions tend to be less clownish.
This is the opinion of someone that finally got tired of Reddit and jumped to Lemmy just over a month ago. I also feel like I’m seeing more activity on Lemmy just over the last few weeks. So there’s probably others like me that just got fed up and made the switch.
I’m kind of crossing my fingers that Lemmy doesn’t get too popular. It’ll ruin this like it ruins every social media site.
Reddit has a follow bias. Lemmy has a rebel bias. IQ tests aside, I know where I’d rather be.
Lemmy is a great place to BS about whatever is going on with the world at any given moment. I think the “small” size of the user base increases the quality of the discussions. You have to jump through some hoops just to get here.
But that small overall population and the barriers to entry mean we don’t have a busy community for almost any hobby or topic you’d like to discuss. And that’s fine, there are still websites and forums and search engines.
I think the fediverse should replace the corporate internet long term, of course. For what it is right now though, and especially Lemmy in particular, I’m not complaining.
One thing I really like about Lemmys small size is how posts can remain relevant for some time. It’s very laid back for a social media. You can have discussions that last for days on Lemmy, and there’s no need to constantly update or FOMO if you don’t check in for awhile.
Reddit is far too busy. There’s just a constant sea of noise. It’s practically pure luck if a post gets noticed, and if you don’t comment early then you comment is basically lost. For the most part content on reddit loses all relivence within 12-24 hours, and having any real place within the community requires constant engagement.
Me hanging out on !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone
196 is great
How come it’s on my block list then?
what are you trying to say?
Turns out mindlessly scrolling through 10 000 comments isn’t actually a great experience.
I’ll take a meaningful comment from one human being over 10,000 bots any day.
True, but reddit is better for niche interests. For example, we don’t seem to have any serious philosophy or history communities here. (I am happy to be wrong here, someone please let me know.) On the other hand, r/askphilosophy and r/askhistorians regularly get interesting questions answered by actual professionals.
It’s still better for everything honestly.
I feel like I’m even starting to recognize user names throughout the platform
Yup. A certain flying squid comes to mind.
There have been so many times I’m in a conversation , and then boom realize it’s FlyingSquid
They are my homie at this point
Yeah, but smaller communities mean it’s harder to keep distance from certain users, FlyingSquid being one of those that I’d rather not interact with.
…you could just block them if you feel that way?
Don’t block posts and comments that you find in threads for as I know. At least I can still see them…
Weird. It hides them for me on Sync for Lemmy
Ohh yes… But it also shows how small Lemmy still I.
It feels much more human on Lemmy. Reddit was mostly bots and training models. Do we have any statistics for Lemmy on percentage of bot users posting to the platform, who pretend to be human?
Sometimes I miss chatting with the bots on Reddit. The platform always kept you emotional and scrolling. All the gore, violence and other sensationalistic content. All the arguments arguments arguments always against you. It was a plastic experience.
Reddit gets a lot more votes and comments… but I think the number of people actually talking to each other is about the same. Most the comments are just noise.
My last year of Reddit (prior to the API purge) was very much filled with low effort comments. You get a lot of votes and comments but the votes don’t matter and the comments are largely empty one-liners. I doubt it’s gotten better since I left.
I’d say even the assholes on Lemmy put more effort into the comments than Redditors do. Except tankies who just love to flood the comments with their copy paste list of sources for “everything”.
You get a lot of votes and comments but the votes don’t matter and the comments are largely empty one-liners.
The votes matter even less here, so there’s no reason to drop empty one liners you think might get karma.
I would deny that. From my experience you’re having much more conversations on Lemmy. If I posted a meme on Reddit I regularly got like 200 Upvotes and 0 comments. On Lemmy I usually get around 100 Upvotes and around 15 comments or so. This is a comparison between the same community on Reddit/Lemmy.
I think you are mostly right, but sometimes I am missing the high quality answers here. You know, the ones where someone really puts in thought or seems to be an expert. Or maybe I haven’t found the right communities yet.
We have a toxicity problem here. Reddit’s is far worse but it’s also a far larger platform, which compensates somewhat. Enhancing the effectiveness of moderation tools may help.
SO MANY people comment here sth like “I’d post that but people are so mean”. It’s really hard to please everyone, especially those who love and those who despise toxicity in the same space, and all the more so with tools that barely function.
I think that depends highly on the sub. I made mostly positive experiences, but the negative one was something else. There are definitely some crazy people here.
For me, the highs are higher here. The lows are lower, but also they are “labelled” i.e. if you block the big 3 tankie instances then your experiences on the Fediverse are improved >99%. That in turn affects the average person’s experience - depending on which of these have been defederated already or not yet, from a particular instance (e.g. Lemmy.World defederated from hexbear early on, but neither StarTrek.Website nor Discuss.Online that I have been on did so, until very recently).
On Reddit, my every experience was one of snarky comebacks as if attempting to talk with a(n emotional) toddler. I’m not kidding when I say that I simply gave up, and after reading this essay that put into words the thoughts I had already started thinking on my own, I made the decision to leave. Not to come to Lemmy mind you, but to leave Reddit, even if that meant not using any social media at all. I’m sure there are good, solid subs there. But browsing by r/popular and a few more niche subs like r/OnePlus and some gaming ones, I wasn’t enjoying my time.
Here I at least enjoy !TenForward@lemmy.world :-). And there are a few people who are actually nice here, who I stick around in order to converse with occasionally. I never found that happening on Reddit (earlier Reddit was different, but towards the end it had managed to chase away so very many, and/or convert most people into mere lurkers - including many of us here who have gone from lurking on Reddit to posting or at least commenting here), but the fact that that happens sometimes here is a huge bonus, IMHO.
And again, the tankie instances can be filtered, making the overall average experience much more pleasant. It does generally take some effort to curate your experience though - e.g. I can only name 3 instances that are defederated from lemmy.ml. Anyway, importantly, when I say that the average experience is better here than Reddit, I mean having excluded that one. Otherwise… the comparison is not nearly so simple (but probably involves higher highs, higher lows, and an overall similar experience to Reddit, unless you include also hexbear or Lemmygrad and then it’s MUCH worse here - e.g. they constantly make fun of Western nations, and who enjoys being made fun of?).
!bestoflemmy@lemmy.world tries to compile those
Thank you for linking this. I’m always looking for something interesting on here to scroll through on my lunch break.
Fr. I’d say a comment I leave on reddit has like a 3% chance of meaningful response that might turn into even a brief meaningful interaction.
I think that conversion rate is vastly higher on Lemmy, much closer to like 30-40%.
That’s a difference so profound so as to be nearly incomparable.
So do I wish Lemmy was a bit more active so the front page was always fresh? Sure. Is it a very small price that I am enormously willing to pay for the significantly better experience here? Yeah, abso-fucking-lutely.
When you get tired of Hot or Scaled sort, try switching to New, especially of All - it has many additional benefits like discovering new communities to join. You can find things there that you may really enjoy, yet receive barely any attention - e.g. poetry - so that you would basically have never seen it while sorting by Hot.
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Lemmy is my doom scroll and I feel like its much healthier. Took my time to build a decent plock list and functionally I get 2 long lists of stuff per day. If you want more, get people talkin or get back to work. Reddit on the otherhand will go on forever. Plus the lack of global updoots score makes all the conversations have actual opinions instead of chasing imaginary internet points.
it’s as varied as it is big, though
because of that, naturally, people share the same communities
I see the same person everywhere, and I bet there are some that may even recognise me
Mostly lord of the ring memes and saddam hussein
I have had good conversations about fastener heads (screw driver bits) and getting rid of timezones recently, my people
I didn’t expect to like square heads as much as I’ve enjoyed using them. But coming from Philips it’s hard for something not to be an improvement
Feel ya there!
Did I have that conversation with you?
If not, there are dozens of us against timezones!
Lol maybe! Either way, convince your friends and family and it will spread!
It’s a common topic that comes up around DST/ends. And whenever people complain about early or late meetings at work.
I learned Torx is the best for specialized instances and Phillips head is why I hate screwing things sometimes.
Yep, better quality engagement all around. I still visit reddit for some niche communities that aren’t represented here but I always come back and I’m spend an increasing amount of time here. People are smarter and nicer in these parts.
Same, though I primarily just lurk on Reddit, I got tired of the hive mentality and the bots. Lemmy has grown quite a bit since I joined, which makes me come back for more
Come on down to !dull_mens_club@lemmy.world
The fediverse doesn’t need perpetual growth. That’s VC investor bullshit. You don’t need to be posting on a platform where the whole world is present. Again more corporate bullshit. As is the “digital town square” thing. It sounds profound but it’s pompous.
What made the internet so good was variety. Which is what reddit seemed to offer in a time when the older paradigms namely message boards were becoming antiquated.
What we got with the oligopoly of social platforms is watered down to memes and politics. It’s right wing cultural imperialism quite frankly. People have been battered into fear of being who they are online because in this age of centralized internet has made it a war to remove anything unacceptable (aka “woke”). There’s no variety. There’s nobody being themselves.
The fedeverse will have arrived if it manages to achieve distinct varieties. On a technical basis it’s perfectly positioned to achieve this. Right now it’s largely just reddit clones offering little more than an extension of the cultural/political wars embroiling the handful of centralized social media platforms.
The fediverse doesn’t need perpetual growth. That’s VC investor bullshit.
I reckon this is key. So many people seem to take the view that since such-and-such site is very small compared to Facebook or Twitter or whatever, then it must be failing; As if maximising the number of users is the ultimate goal.
Maximising users might be the goal for investors, so that they can monetise and maximise profits. But for people actually using the service, it’s totally beside the point. We don’t need to be in conversation with 100,000,000 people at once. More people doesn’t always make it better. In many cases it actually makes it worse.
Having the giant userbase does make it more likely there are enough people into whatever weird niche you are to have a reasonable community though. I mean, how else are you going to get a community going for, I don’t know, hyper-realistic simulations of underwater basketweaving or w/e?
The only thing I miss about the sprawl of reddit is the activity in niche subreddits. Hopefully, the variety implicit to the fediverse enables us to toe the line between VC expansionism and rich communities for obscure interests.
