45

I don't know if you've noticed this, but threads or comments about Lemmy or the Fediverse get downvoted a lot on Reddit and trolls who claim that it's "dogshit" and "not going anywhere" get systematically upvoted.

Some of those trolls get then exposed when you ask them what Lemmy instance they tried and one of them with whom I had a surreal exchange answered with something like "yeah ofc I used Lemmy, this is the instance: join-lemmy.org" 🤦‍♂️

It's frustrating that these trolls keep contributing to the big lie that "Lemmy is not ready yet" and that there's "no viable alternative to Reddit".

This and the overwhelming number of comments being "against the mod protests" just prompts me to question whether there isn't some brigading being organized straight from the Reddit HQ.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] Zebov@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

Probably bots. Reddit has been using them for some time, but recently got caught using chat gpt or something similar to argue against the blackouts.

[-] Monkeyhog@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

I haven't noticed that because I no longer look at reddit. I suggest you do the same.

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] smokinjoe@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

Lmao, who cares what they think?

But also, Lemmy isn't ready, which isn't a bad thing at all.

What it is, is viable. And that should scare the shit out of reddit

load more comments (10 replies)
[-] XanXic@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

It's sort of an asshole problem. All the cool people are walking away from Reddit, or at the very least trying to support the blackout/boycott. So all that's left are the chronically online people, apathetic lurkers, and assholes who purposefully don't care. The assholes are now seeming more vocal because all the logical voices are burned out or gone. Provided the good contributors/commenters stay away. Eventually lurkers won't enjoy a ton of pissy comments on everything and look for more interesting discussion to peruse. Then the assholes will just be being assholes to each other, then be like man this place is full of assholes, and go look for a healthier community to be an asshole too because they don't want people who fight back like they do lol.

[-] ShortPants@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

Lemmy isn’t ready yet to completely replace Reddit for most people, and that’s part of the fun!!

[-] Something_Complex@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

We are pretty of the first migration, one the land is settled more will come

[-] SterlingVapor@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Here's the thing - we've been raised from birth to think "people don't make things, companies do".

Most people have never used software that isn't company branded, they've never sat in a chair made by someone they know, they've never pulled food out of the ground. Almost all jobs set someone up doing a service with a supply chain behind them or doing one small step of something bigger.

It's learned helplessness. They don't have the concept of how they could do things outside of the hierarchy - solid chance they've tried, and since their skills are hyper-specialized and rely on big, expensive tools, they found they had a lot of gaps.

Anything you do outside of a company is a hobby to most people. And even then, people organize into sports leagues and buy fancy toys instead of just meeting up in the park with a ball... Do you really need to play by professional rulesets when you're just trying to exercise?

This time around, I didn't bother to explain why the decentralization is so important to my friends and family - even the technical ones are almost afraid of the idea of it.

Instead, I told them about the ways Reddit has picked up the harmful strategy that Facebook used, and that makes mobile gaming so addicting yet so unfulfilling: show them less of the content they want to change the reward schedule, training you to use the app longer for a smaller dopamine hit. Show you content that will make you feel angry, driving up engagement. And most importantly, always wave the promise of another dopamine hit.

The app is eggregious - it sprinkles in stuff from top communities I left a long time ago because they suck, it gives you suggestions for new communities and presents them like interaction from other users, and it sends you notifications to tempt you back in all the time.

And this is just the beginning, it's going to get a lot worse With all the other social networks eyeing their own strategies to squeeze their users, it's going to suck across the board, and good luck trying to build relationships outside these platforms

I think it's important to remember we're animals, and we're not just trainable, we're the most trainable by a large margin. The best of us have just a handful of moments where we see beyond our instincts and conditioning, and decide to train ourselves

This project is important, because it can give us back communities small enough to get to know each other, while providing a larger forum for ideas, and with a design that can shrug off attempts to control it.

It's going to fragment. Sections of it will break off into echo chambers, admins will sell out their users, and parts will offer a curated walked garden hosted. But it can survive all that because of one simple truth - unless one person captures the majority of the network, they're going to have to cut off the best part of the network. Social media can be profitable without sucking, but to rake in profits it has to suck - and even then, we can start up servers for friends and family, and rebuild the network organically

I'm working for an app streamlined enough I can send it to my mom and have her sign up without getting scared off, and I think I've got a solid idea of how to improve discovery of communities without becoming distributed rather than decentralized. Other people are building their own visions of what this can become, and a lot of people are writing impressive code (Lemmy has no business scaling as well as it has), and the beauty of it is that it all competes while adding to the whole.

I've been at it for 30 hours now, but I can't shake the feeling that me getting this out this out in the next few days is going to matter if this is going to become what I hope instead of another shard of Reddit.

But every time I step away to take a breather, I end up back on here and see a glimpse of what this could be

The only way to change the world is to release something self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing and intrinsically positive, and hope it grows

[-] illumrial@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Little pockets of culture can exist in the cracks of society. Kudos to all involved. I'm not sure I can meaningfully contribute as of yet due to family/time constraints but I'm here to comment and upvote.

load more comments (3 replies)
[-] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

Neoliberals and saying "there is no alternative", name a more iconic duo

[-] NotSpez@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

The wheel of history will succumb redditors who refuse to accept that their system will pass just as all other before it have.

load more comments (3 replies)
[-] croobat@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Dude, you are recommending Pepsi in a Coca-Cola forum.

[-] Wander@yiffit.net 4 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately there's probably a large amount of users who simply don't care.

But that's okay. What matters is content creators, not content consumers. Anyone with half a gram of decency and self integrity will have realized that they need to take steps to move away from Reddit.

[-] Houdini@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Exactly. Let the milquetoast mouth-breathers stay behind. With sufficient brain-drain, Reddit will eventually look like Quora.

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] bigbox@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

It's too tiring going back and forth with these types of Reddit users. I gave up and just chill here

[-] forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Years ago reddit put aside a cardinal rule of the internet: Don't feed the trolls.

It was worse off for it from a user perspective. It's been great for investors though.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] lachjeff@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I reckon it's mostly bots set up by Reddit admins and sad-sack mods who consider Reddit moderation to be a full-time job

[-] hihusio@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

I wouldn't be surprised if reddit admin are inflating upvotes on pro reddit comments or have an army of bots defending reddit.

[-] _haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There's definitely corpo sockpuppets and bots involved, some of which have even straight up posted AI bot warnings about not being able to generate offensive content (oops!) but there's plenty of ignorant people too.

That said, I'm kind of OK with them staying on reddit because people like that had been making reddit progressively worse for years and years at it gained popularity. Hopefully the relative obscurity of Lemmy will prevent that from happening for a while yet.

[-] Liempong_pagong@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Let them stay there then. We can't force people to join us here. If they choose to believe those kind of brigading comments then they do not have the level of critical thinking to become a meaningful contributor to any site. Those who wanted to move have already moved. Those remaining there are those who chose to ignore the issue, or support reddit.

[-] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 2 points 1 year ago

I think there's truth to some of the "not ready" claims... and this is coming from someone who really tried to get into Lemmy, ended up creating their own instance (as demonstrated by my user handle).

A few issues I think Lemmy dev team really need to address ASAP, from least technical (thus affecting most users) to more technical (this affecting less users) are:

1. UX/Discoverability -- Finding communities are a huge pain in the backend right now, and with multiple communities on different instances serving same purpose (i.e.: !reddit@lemmy.ml and !reddit@lemmy.world). Sure, Reddit had same issues (the example I've heard is /r/meirl and /r/me_irl), but Reddit offered solution (multi on old reddit, community+community on new reddit). There must be a way to streamline it with meta-communities or lists on Lemmy such that the contents can be viewed in a unified fashion. I recommended !community@ (note the lack of domain) to streamline all of user's subscriptions with same name on different instances as an example; and perhaps we can use #list$user@lemmy.domain for users's maintained lists to unify [!homelab@lemmy.ml](/c/homelab@lemmy.ml), [!datahoarder@lemmy.ml](/c/datahoarder@lemmy.ml), [!homelab@lemmy.world](/c/homelab@lemmy.world), etc.).

2. Trigger happy defederation hubs -- a certain instance has unceremoniously de-federated a couple of other larger instances. This is not the way, but here we are, with users on those instances not able to access the broader Fediverse, and vice versa. Until discoverability gets taken care of, it will be challenging for users to find a good home -- this leads to next point:

3. Authentication -- The Fediverse at large needs to separate authentication out from instances. Instances may provide their own authentication, fine, but there needs to be better way to authenticate against something else other than an entire new instance of Lemmy. The ActivityPub protocol has clear definitions on what is an actor, and users shouldn't need to deploy a Lemmy instance to identify themselves, separately from a Mastadon instance to identify themselves, separately from a... etc. This is because frankly...

4. Deployment of Lemmy is utter garbage. The official documentation's getting started guide gets users setup with an instance where the UI container cannot talk to public, but the lemmy backend can? Why bother shipping an nginx container if the backend will just expose itself to the whole wide net? Also, let's just pretend postgres container isn't open to the whole world with a basic password... Trying to get it up and running with Traefik was a pain, just do a quick Google and see how many people have asked and gave up, as well as how many different ways people have tried to go at it (something something xkcd 927; I've contributed to a new one of my own per linked post on top!), and the dev basically just straight up going 'we don't support traefik'... also, each approach is not without problems...

5. Federation is a bitch. I am pretty proud of the way I've used override to not edit original docker compose, and locked my setup down a little. But, I'm not ready to have the instance open to the whole wide web without CloudFlare in front... but allegedly, Federation doesn't work with CloudFlare... why? Good luck trying to get to even a popular sub's scale without getting hit with DDOS when someone disagrees with something someone else posted.

There's many more problems, and I genuinely want Lemmy to work. But, Lemmy is, lack of better words, "not yet ready" for prime time. It is thrown into the spotlight with Mastadon (which feels a bit more mature, at least from reading the docs) because of bad leadership at mega techs... It will take a lot of work for Lemmy to evolve and mature, before it can be "ready" to really absorb the mass of Redditors leaving Reddit.

load more comments (4 replies)

First, they ignore me...
Then they laugh at me...
Then they try to fight me...
And then I win.

[-] BackOnMyBS@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

My two cents: good! Let the shitty people stay on reddit. I'm loving the respectful communities here on lemmy, and don't really want those clowns coming over and messing it up for us.

[-] ono@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Some subreddits are also using automod to remove comments linking to Lemmy.

I hope journalists will put a spotlight on the deceptive tactics Reddit is using.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] joshthetechie@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I think the majority of those people just don't care and are against change.

I can say that to the non-technical person, Lemmy would be a bit confusing due to having to pick a server. However, once you get past that point, Lemmy is a perfectly viable alternative to Reddit, as long as the user base remains active.

[-] JWBananas@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

The people who like it are here. The people that don't are still there. Not that complicated.

[-] FaceDeer@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Also, people have a natural tendency to form "teams." Even if they don't particularly like what Reddit's admins have been doing they may identify as part of "team Reddit" and so see other teams as the enemy.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[-] DragonB2@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

It wouldn't surprise me, a lot of people don't care or just aren't interested in change.

[-] ilickfrogs@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Honestly I'm quite alright with that. If we can get a good core user base on here it'll feel like reddit did earlier in it's life. Once the masses came and posts regularly had over 10k upvotes the content began feeling more and more soulless.

[-] NRVulture@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Of course there’s no viable alternatives to Reddit. Why would someone create another dumpster fire?

[-] ElmiHalt@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

So what are the odds those are spez-trained bots?

[-] LoafyLemon@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Spez-naz lol

[-] Raveena@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

redditors always find another way to disappoint. whether it's going back to use the site after 2 days of "protest", or the moderators giving in to reddit admin pressure instead of resigning.

[-] Extra_Cucumber_2979@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Once - unfortunately - Apollo app will be down, in less than 2 weeks, I’m pretty sure Lemmy will surge and they will come complaining here 😅

load more comments (7 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
45 points (100.0% liked)

Reddit

13591 readers
2 users here now

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS