OK, let’s try this again. My post got auto-filtered. Maybe the image triggered something? Anyways, apologies if this isn’t the right sub for this. I wanted to get an outsider’s perspective on my experience on Lemmy.
Every. Single. Thread. has the word “capitalism” or “Trump” in it somewhere. I’m sick to death of it. Even though I agree with a lot of the sentiment, the erosion of the middle class, the concentration of wealth, the consolidation of media, the “you will own nothing and be happy” mentality permeating the consumer space. In many ways that’s why I joined Lemmy, but dang it that doesn’t mean I want to talk about absolutely nothing else. Someone once defined a fanatic as “Someone who won’t change their mind and won’t change the subject” and that fits the average Lemming to a T.
And the only communities devoid of politics are also devoid of content. I do a lot of worldbuilding stuff, and I’ve tried to make the worldbuilding community there more active, but sometimes I feel like I’m the only poster. Then I look at r/worldbuilding, and there’s a glut of really interesting posts showcasing people’s imagination and creativity, and nary a mention of Musk or Epstein in sight.
I understand that people’s political opinions are bound to show up obliquely in even unrelated communities, but I can’t overstate how monomaniacal Lemmings are about it. The pic I originally tried to post was a screenshot of a completely non sequitur post in an unrelated community (sorry for the vagueness I think the specifics may have also tripped the auto filter). And Lemmings are always “on”. If you go to mildlyinteresting on lemmy.world right now, you’ll see maybe one or two posts about things like yellow stop signs or three-chambered peanuts, you know, stuff that’s actually mildly interesting, and every other post is stuff like “French president explains the political consequences of AI”. Is that important and worth discussing? Absolutely. What it isn’t is mildly interesting.
When I bring this up on Lemmy, the response is always “Politics is everything and we should never shut up ever!” But even Anne Frank wrote about other stuff in her diary sometimes.
And then there’s the tech side of things. Hope you like Linux, cuz that’s all you’re going to see. And if you dare suggest that Linux may not be the right choice for your blind grandmother, you get eviscerated in the comments.
Granted, Reddit itself used to have a similar problem. It attracted a very specific type of user (neckbeards) and the experience wasn’t great if you weren’t one, but ironically the same popularization of Reddit that lead to its platform decay also solved this homogeneity problem. Similarly, Tankies and their ilk seem to flock to Lemmy, explaining the tone of the discourse.
Others have pointed out that Reddit alternatives tend to attract people who were banned from Reddit (remember Voat?) and I think that explains a lot.
In summary, Lemmy seems great if you’re a Marxist who uses Linux, but pretty much nobody else. Am I crazy? Should I try to stick with it in the hope it gets better?
so how do we get this guy on Linux? lol
Find a Lemmy instance that heavily moderates political speech, then. That may be hard to find since Lemmy is full of people who expressed their political opinions on reddit and were banned.
The people coming here after the third party API shutdown, I’m sorry, but you made a political protest. You are doing the politics. If you don’t like what Reddit is doing as a company, you are engaging in politics. You need to stop expressing your personal opinions and views for Reddit if you want to claim political apathy. Otherwise, you are engaging in political speech, and that’s “bad” apparently, so stop it!
Seems right, except I don’t think that it’s mostly people who were banned from Reddit.
There’s too few users here to keep the niche communities alive. That’s why only politics gets discussed, because that’s something affecting everyone regardless of interest.
We also don’t have a lot of original content. Neither did Reddit originally, but they managed to get a massive userbase through the AMA subreddit giving users the possibility to ask celebrities questions. This often got picked up by the tabloid news which spread the word of it’s existence. It turned out that their AMAs was basically a one person job anyway. I don’t think they’ve done anything remotely useful since that to justify their userbase.
Anyway. I kind of like the slower pace here. I went to Reddit the other day after years of hiatus. I don’t know why anyone would want to sign up for that site anymore. Everything there seems to drown in advertising and generic shit. Even if Lemmy should shut down for some reason, I would not go back to the garbage piles on Reddit.
I use a local instance and I think they do a good job of facilitating debate and local insights on local news. I suppose that’s the main purpose of this kind of forum. All the other larger and more international instances are just entertainment to me. I could get by just fine without seeing another Trump meme ever again. Unless it’s really funny.
I’m pretty sure Lemmy does have potential to use these communities better. It’s a lot of clever people. I think if anyone can and wants to make more original content with Lemmy as a base, just for the sake of it, they should just go ahead do it. The admins and mods are too busy running the sites, so we shouldn’t expect them to it.
Understandably, artists probably want a larger market exposure for a start, but other kinds of projects might be suitable. I remember someone have tried making a group for game development on Reddit several times. It always fails, because they’re too big and not committed. I also participated in a sub for random users writing on the same book. That was mildly succesful, and a lot easier to do. Stuff like that might make sense to try.
I mean, he’s not too far off. Lemmy is not big enough to support the same amount of communities as reddit does. Right now Lemmy can support tabletop RPG but not world building
He isn’t wrong, but you also need to block/filter out the tankie instances.
Also there is a lot of trans persons content. I didn’t see thr OP mention that.
Fair in many respects but also I think he may be unaware of the ideologies that go unchallenged and invisibly by in his “non political” communities. Sorry we’re woke and notice things??
… if you dare suggest that Linux may not be the right choice for your blind grandmother, you get eviscerated in the comments.
Stopped reading here, this is just the view of someone who isn’t used to being in a community that treats windows as the few facto choice.
in reddit ALL on old.reddit you can filter all the subs you dont wan to see.
Erosion of the middle class is a bad thing? What’s the class in the middle of 🤔
Whenever I recommend Lemmy/Piefed to a friend, I point them to a feed with low/no politics and low/no tech:
- memes/humor: https://piefed.social/f/highmemecontent
- fewer memes: https://piefed.social/f/highsignal
Thank god and thank you, I dunno why the spam of politics is there. I go to protests every time, vote every election, etc. but it’s mentally exhausting I just want to chill.
The way I’ve done it is instead of blocks I just heavily curate my subscriptions, have /Subscribed as default and almost never browse /All. The politics and news are all there if I want them, but my main experience is free of them.
It does require some effort to build your subscriptions, though.
I dunno why the spam of politics is there
I think it’s a combination of:
- people on Lemmy/Piefed tend to be more politically engaged, so political posts tend to be more active
- corporate platforms push inoffensive lowest-common-denominator mush in their default feed. But on Lemmy/Piefed it’s the user’s job to curate their feed.
Original OP here. They muted and permabanned me from the sub. If I came off dismissive or angry it’s because I’m frustrated with the state of the fediverse. I want Lemmy et al. to succeed despite its issues. If I thought it was utter crap I’d just ignore it. I was trying to present my subjective experience in good faith and I hope it came out that way.
so how do we get this guy on Linux? lol
Make a screen reader and magnifier that actually work.
Might I offer you
an eggtrying piefed instances in these trying times?Sorry for assuming but if you don’t know Lemmy is just but one way to wrangle together the fediverse into a link aggregator style website. Piefed is another one.
What I like about piefed, and what made me stick, is the on boarding for new users. At least in the flagship instance, piefed.social, new users, up front, would have the option to choose topics you’d like to see, terms you’d like to block and then you’ll have a curated feed ready to go. And at least in piefed.social they keep updating the topics. I’ll say that in comparison, topics is llike multireddits. You can use the instance’s topics, and can make more yourself. IIRC. It works in lieu of the algorithm reddit has. Practically for me it is the algorithm for me.
Also don’t hesitate blocking communities and users. I just started blasting anything I am not interested into my block list.
Edit: another tip. I find using “Scaled” sorting will bump up the smaller, lesser active comms’ posts more in your feed. Whether that be All, Local or Subscribed.
If you want technical niche comms, it’s dead. Or it’s overrun with people performatively whinging about AI.
In the last month I’ve just about had enough of it. I’m 3 years into the fediverse and I’m done with the drama.
Yeah, technical niches are what dragged me back to Reddit. I’ve been struggling with a very specific issue at work for months. The entire time I was like “You know you couldjust ask on the right subreddit and get an answer in 5 minutes.” But no. I stubbornly refused to make a new account. Two weeks ago I caved. Made an account and asked my question. Got an answer in 5 minutes.
The fediverse simply can’t achieve that depth of community knowledge if it refuses to let “normies” in.
They muted and permabanned me from the sub.
In my response to this post earlier, I mentioned that one of the problems (which unfortunately reddit shares too) is hostility to other viewpoints, and this is a good example of how that is perpetuated. When a culture on a platform is too homogeneous, disagreement becomes so shocking that it’s seen as “trolling”, “bad faith”, “offensive”, etc. I think it’s partially a symptom of the reddit-like structure of voting + active moderation, but it’s also very much the culture.
You presented your points well and fairly, and even if you hadn’t, I think we all need to get comfortable with the fact that normal humans sometimes interact in a manner that doesn’t sound like an HR mediation session, and that’s ok too.
A lot of the issues you have with Lemmy is in large part because there’s less people here than Reddit. You really have to curate your subscriptions page to get that kind of algorithm treatment you’re used to from Reddit. There’s a lot of communities here that don’t hit the top posts in all but are still active.
You also kinda have to be the change you want to see and be stubborn about it. Keep posting things you find interesting, throw out those comments on posts even if there’s no other comments or motion. A new community isn’t going to get built up overnight.
lemmy lacks the niche content that reddit has, and people on reddit are unlikely to subscribe to here anytime soon, since most dont even known lemmy exist. often time when they get banned they look for ways to evade those bans instead.
I was trying to present my subjective experience in good faith and I hope it came out that way
It didn’t, it just sounds like astroturfing and/or being lazy.
If a completely new person went to reddit for the first time (before all the corporate sanitization that has happened in the last couple of years) they were going to see shit they didn’t want to see. They were going to have to put in some effort telling “the system” what they like and what they don’t. After you’ve done that, it was an interesting way to spend your downtime. Without it, it was just the void yelling back. Same is pretty true for Lemmy. If you don’t put in any effort to block the stuff you don’t like and/or subscribe to the stuff you do, you aren’t going to see any value. Yes, it is smaller than reddit - that’s how social media starts. There isn’t going to be 21 years of content chilling out on a platform that is 6 years old.
Also, bitching about hearing about Linux is just lazy. You’re on FOSS social media and get surprised when people there mostly don’t use corporate slop closed source OS’s on their personal machines? Okie Dokie.
Also, bitching about hearing about Linux is just lazy. You’re on FOSS social media and get surprised when people there mostly don’t use corporate slop closed source OS’s on their personal machines? Okie Dokie.
I want you to do me a favor. Any other Linux user reading this, I want you to try this, too. Turn on Orca and unplug your monitor. No, don’t just close your eyes, don’t just turn your monitor off, actually unplug it. Remove your monitor from your desk if applicable. Now, try to do the following:
- browse Lemmy using Firefox, chrome, or a derivative of either. Make a comment, post something, and vote on someone else’s post or comment
- check your email, and respond to any if warranted
- watch a few YouTube videos using Firefox, Chrome, or a derivative of either (yes we still say “watch” even if we can’t see it)
- write a document using LibreOffice Writer. Include formatting like headings and style changes. Be sure to check your spelling
- check the time, the status of your network connection, your battery percentage, etc.
- copy a file from one place to another
- Insert a USB device and verify its contents
- check the weather in your area using Firefox, Chrome, or a derivative of either.
- Using Firefox, Chrome, or a derivative of either, find the closest transit stop to you, how to get there by foot, and what buses/trains/etc depart
- Using Firefox, Chrome, or a derivative of either, read the wikipedia article on accessibility and bookmark it
- Do anything required by your job: write and debug code, print reports, research business cases, update documentation, use whatever tools your job would require you to use.
Once you’ve done all that, and before plugging your monitor back in, send me a PM detailing your experience. How many of the tasks did you successfully complete? Were you able to complete them in a timely manner and with a comparable amount of cognitive burden compared to doing it sighted? Were you able to perform your job duties? If so, would you be able to continue doing them this way for the remainder of your career? If you were in charge of hiring someone for your position, would you accept the level of work you did? For the more leisurely tasks like watching YT or using Lemmy, did you enjoy your experience? Was it relaxing? Would you willingly consume content this way.
Alas, you’re responding to something they didn’t say. You quoted something they said, then switched the topic to why you can’t use Linux instead of what was quoted.
Your complaint is totally valid, but the quote you uses add the springboard for it was not a good choice.
Yes, I realize it was a non sequitur, and I’m sorry. But it was kinda the straw that broke the camel’s back. Quoting from a comment I left on the original reddit post:
Honestly the militant Linux stuff is what really gets me. I’m legally blind, and rely on various assistive technologies like screen readers and magnifiers that simply do not exist on Linux or aren’t fit for use. I’ve been trying Linux on and off for sixteen years now. Mostly various *buntus but also things like CentOS (RIP) and Archbtw. Accessibility has only gotten worse with the transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 and from X to Wayland. It’s nonexistent on KDE. A11Y is an afterthought even for billion dollar companies with the resources to devote to it, so I’m pessimistic that a loosely organized group of devs all working independently on their own little corners of the larger project that is desktop Linux will ever measure up to even that afterthought. But whenever I say that I’ve repeatedly tried Linux in good faith for over a decade and a half, that I will continue doing so, and that I envy those whose needs are met by Linux and other FOSS software but I simply can’t switch, I get downvoted to oblivion and told I’m the problem.
The magnifier valve developed for the steamdeck probably works ok? I am not sure if that can be ripped out though.
Screenreader you’re on your own unless you want to run everything through emacs (you should, it’s cool and can do everything they needed to get to the moon and also play tetris)
This person is 100% about the relentless usaian political whinging. It’s so hard to find anything cool and fun on here.
Slrpnk had more but got blown up and unrelenting drama seeking “power users” (lmao) drove off most of the interesting people.
Same thing happened to masto
Slrpnk had more but got blown up and unrelenting drama seeking “power users” (lmao) drove off most of the interesting people.
Could you elaborate what you mean? I’ve been a slrpnk admin for near 3 years, and I haven’t seen any power user drama addicts on the instance. I’m also not sure what you mean by blown up (too popular? We’re still a smallish instance with 380 monthly users).
Personally I think we still have quite a lot of interesting posts and discussions in our communities.
Bad phrasing, me ahh culp ah :p
-loads of downtime and unreliable access caused pop to drop (only unique problem)
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slrpnk suffers from the same problem as the rest of lemmy with posts being drowned out by like 5 people posting 20 things a day to low effort communities.
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The harrassing coms on lemmy (I don’t think there are any on slrpnk to your credit) like shitXssay and stuff drove off users that didn’t want to get recruited into useless conflict.
Ah, I see.
Slrpnk went down only twice for an extended period in the 4 years its been up, each time only for about a week before it was fixed and back online. Both times were due to unforeseen hardware issues (since it’s self-hosted and running on solar power, in-line with our ideals). Without trying to offend, I think you may have an exaggerated view of how unreliable our server has been. Our uptime over 4 years is 98.91%.
We also didn’t see any lengthy drop of our active monthly users. Once they discovered we were back up, our numbers returned to normal, and we’ve continued to see steady growth, with a consistent active monthly userbase, per our fediverse observer stats:
To your second point, I believe it is relatively easy for a user to block those more active communities if they dislike them.
I’m not the person you have to convince lol. Also around half of every day I try I can’t hit slrpnk.
Reacting to criticism of lemmy by getting defensive is part of why lemmy continues to suck.
Just look at the instance’s front page atm. When a user logs in they see a lot of reposted news and posts by like 5 different people.
One discussion about foraging, nothing creative or original. These are hard problems to address but they’re why people bounce.
Also around half of every day I try I can’t hit slrpnk.
I obviously visit Slrpnk very often each day, and I do not have that problem despite being halfway around the globe from where the server is located, and none of our users have reported issues accessing the site. If you cannot access slrpnk, I do not believe the issue is on our end. Do you get any sort of error when you can’t access it?
I am not trying to be defensive, but I am going to push back slightly on your framing of our instance if it contains misleading or incorrect information of our server that could unintentionally harm our reputation.
One discussion about foraging, nothing creative or original.
I also see a post from our zine, self-hosting, vegan, BIFL, Green energy, and Nolawns communities, as well as a fantastic post with imaginative original content in our Solarpunk Art community.
To maybe be more constructive something you might want to consider is fostering people sharing stuff communally. Lemmy will never beat reddit at being reddit and a lot of reddit is awful anyway.
Something vegantheoryclub used to do was a chat thread each week with a topic to discuss and to just share what’s going on or talk in an unstructured way. You could consider something weekly to support community formation, something that makes someone go “oh! this is why you start using lemmy. This is what you can’t get on reddit!”
We create a pinned community discussion thread each month, and invite our users to participate in the comments with any ideas, happenings in their lives, introductions, etc. We consider it, and call it, the instance’s town square.
The moderator of our writing community also creates a monthly discussion inviting people to discuss the projects they’ve been working on.
I wouldn’t be opposed to more of our moderators creating monthly or weekly threads in their communities, it’s a good suggestion.
Just timeouts, slrpnk isn’t alone many lemmy instances have issues with loads. While writing the following list I had to wait about 5 seconds for a page load and often refresh or wait a long time for images to load. Users won’t do this.
Let’s go through the list:
- Low effort image screenshot from user track_shovel, 3 comments
- news from major news outlet nytimes, user silence7, 3 comments
- Link to a pdf download about “ai” (presumably llms) sucking, user foxymochakitten, 2 comment
- news from major news outlet, user Haraldvonblauzahn, 64 comments
- news from niche news site, user schizoidman, 0 comments
- news from major news outlet, user silence7, 11 comments
- news from major news outlet, user schizoidman, 0 comments
- Low effort image screenshot from user track_shovel, 2 comments
- A video link about finding cheap hardware for hosting, user prodigal frog, 14 comments
- news specific to a small area of the world, user silence7, 4 comments
- A contextless photograph of a plant and a lament about the lack thereof, user durian, 2 comments
- post about some very specific product, user xcel, 1 comment
- A not topical film on youtube, user cm0002, 0 comments
- A photo of food not bombs, user prodigalfrog, 0 comments
- news from major news outlet, user silence7, 0 comments
- link to a youtube video about a new kind of powerplant, user povoq, 7 comments
- A photo of a river, user jacobcoffinwrites, 2 comments
- A video link about no lawns, user greatwhitebuffalo41, 4 comments
- A post about foraging nettles, user korhaka, 3 comments
Many of these posts are hours or days old, niche, and all the news has probably already been seen by a potential new user.
This doesn’t look like a place someone could jump in or post their own stuff, it looks like a place that people post news and nobody reacts to it.
I don’t know how to do better but a lot of lemmy looks like this. Just reposts from other more popular social media sites and US news (often sad).
I like slrpnk, after the reddit flood it was one of the most chill places on lemmy with a lot of exposure to niche news/hobbies/resources. The problems aren’t unique to slrpnk, but you’ve gotta understand why when seeing something like that and already worried about technical burden a user is just going to bounce off because it looks like a worse reddit.
Just timeouts, slrpnk isn’t alone many lemmy instances have issues with loads. While writing the following list I had to wait about 5 seconds for a page load and often refresh or wait a long time for images to load. Users won’t do this.
I’m not experiencing that, personally. When I visit slrpnk it loads pretty much instantly, and I don’t have to wait for images to load at all, they appear as I scroll. I haven’t experienced any timeouts. You are currently the only person who has reported any sort of issue along those lines, and without more information it will be difficult to diagnose.
Is this occurring from visiting the page on a desktop browser? I have had issues with comments or images not displaying without a refresh when using the Summit app, but regular browsers and every other app I’ve tried has worked as expected.
There was a bug in older versions of Lemmy that would cause a browser to cache potentially gigabytes of data, causing the site to slow to a crawl. Does performance improve if you delete all data/cookies associated with slrpnk from your browser?
Many of these posts are hours or days old, niche,
The default sort is Active, those old posts are still getting comments, otherwise they wouldn’t show up as active. If sorting by New, only the very last post on the front page is over 24h old. However, much of the appeal of reddit was the comments, so I don’t think switching to New being the default would be ideal, since newer posts tend to have less comments.
and all the news has probably already been seen by a potential new user.
Can’t say I agree with that assessment. Many people are not chronically online or already have good news sources for the topics posted about on slrpnk.
If you feel that the type of content posted on slrpnk isn’t appealing, then there’s not much I can say against that, as that is your subjective feeling. However, I think your own bias against the content posted there, such as news, may be leading you to conclude that it won’t appeal to anyone else.
Even during its best days, Reddit was still ultimately a link aggregator with a forum attached below with most of it being news, and some smaller communities having more of a focus on original content, just as slrpnk does.
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deleted by creator
They are far from the first person who has bailed on Lemmy because of the culture, and their characterization of it isn’t far off. I keep saying that Lemmy needs normies for longevity, because most people find constantly on politics incredibly exhausting and won’t want to join if they think it’s the lefty version of Truth Social.
I’m not saying people should avoid talking about stuff they care about, just that the platform could benefit from everyone being less hostile to wider perspectives and maybe also working on building up more content without a heavy political focus.
I keep saying that Lemmy needs normies for longevity,
Because if there’s anything the left should learn from the past 60 years, it’s to cater more to the normies…
as a long time lemming i will respond with the standard lemmy response:
go back to reddit you fascist, child murdering, genocide supporter
i wonder why people get put off. when your active population might be up to 20% of rabid radicalized leftists how do you expect anything to do with current affairs to go
I mean… it also sounds like someone browsing ALL or similar, without having taken the time to curate their personal feed. I don’t see that as a Fediverse-issue really, but a characteristic of most social media platforms, including Reddit.
Do zero work to set your account up (or don’t even have one), and you’ll pretty much get the shittiest browsing experience out of all possibilities.
I don’t even remember how I started browsing reddit, and later on participate. But I do know that somewhere down the line I subscribe to subreddots that I like and don’t ever browse all. So on my third attempt in Lemmy, I did the same thing I’m used to on reddit, and use piefed instead. Can’t stress enough piefed is really the concrete of my foundation staying here. The topics really do make it a bit less stale
OOP still has a good point about being the only poster of smaller less active comms though. I do sometimes comment but yeah I am not a really poster.
Being less hostile overall would be a huge plus.
And I don’t mean that people can’t criticize or provide constructive feedback. But it can be disheartening to see an interesting thread, sometimes a “normie” thread, and every comment is just negative.
It’s fun to talk about stuff you like. It keeps people coming back.
Absolutely correct, no notes
You have to start out with the whole feed and then just block things until it becomes your home feed.
This sounds like a technical problem to solve, rather than “it is what it is”
Yes it is a “technical problem” solved by the user. The user gets to pick what they want to see. That is the beauty of the fediverse - a higher degree of control. That is what all of us here signed up for. The user does have to click buttons from time to time.
The only “solution” on the platform side would be it trying to figure out what you would like to see, through statistics and guesswork on ingestion of our personal data. We’ve already seen how that turns out. Those kinds of machines are never satiated and cause orders of magnitude more harm than good. We don’t like it, and that’s why we’re here.
Or you could just have publicly curated blocklists that new users could enable.
This is a solution piefed offers. They have curated topics
Just pick any of the piefed based instances. I love their on boarding, at least in piefed.social
Choose topics you want and/or like, choose terms you want blocked, and off to the races to further trim and curate.
Sure! Crowdsource the button clicking! Make it meta!
The people who expect a fediverse site to deliver everything they like, none of what they don’t like, and with zero effort on their end are… frustrating. Big social media really did a number on the internet.
The funny thing is, the beginning of the web was also a bunch of nerds talking mostly about politics and free software.
True, a sports, AI, and porn blocker would have saved me a lot of time
Pitch in, however you can! 🤘🏼
Skill issue. To be less flippant, you have to do some work up front and there is no algorithm to do it for you. I have an account on a few instances and between them I have plenty of variety and activity in spaces that are not just politically focused. Try other strategies if the one you’re using doesn’t yield the results you want.
The person who typed this out has definitely been putting in the effort in worldbuilding.
Happy cake day!
yes but we need to make this stuff require 0 skill
Hard disagree. That’s how “brain rot” has become an actual thing and not just a meme phrase. Putting effort into something is good for your brain.
Its also how you consistently turn people off your platform until it becomes irrelivant.
I don’t think it really takes significant “skill” to tell the systems in place what you want to see and what you don’t. Blocking the bad and subscribing to the good. It is basically how all of “the algorithms” worked 15-ish years ago.
Now they buy/sell/trade your data so much they know what your first significant other’s crotch smells like even though you forgot and they use that to tease your subconscious into remembering what it was like to feel loved so long as you keep scrolling the platform.
I don’t think it is definitely a bad thing to not do exactly the thing that is getting world governments to start considering legislating access to social media because of how toxic it is.
Skill isnt the issue. The issue is the boring, never ending grind of unsubbing from all communities and users that are communist, socialist, assholes, doomers, gaming-related, or in a language I don’t speak
