For me it feels like breaking up with someone after many years. At the same time, I feel a bit dirty mentioning the name in the post title.
For me it feels like breaking up with someone after many years. At the same time, I feel a bit dirty mentioning the name in the post title.
I actually feel more relieved. It has become toxic and dominated by bots. As soon as a real person posts anything, it’s immediately down voted
I’m enjoying Lemmy much more. Reminds me of the internet of old.
Reddit was always at its best in the smaller communities that were focused on a more narrow interest. Eg. The ones dedicated to a particular TV show, a particular type of humour, a particular game, a particular fandom, etc.
I think it will take time for Lemmy to develop enough that those sorts of communities can succeed.
It’s interesting, too, to see how small the subreddits need to be to maintain that community feeling. I helped found a political subreddit 9yrs ago; a non-partisan US state news & discussion subreddit. Political communities tend to be pretty spicy for obvious reasons, but when we had like maybe less than 500 sub (so maybe like <100 actually active users), there was a nice sense of community, even though people of different political persuasions would argue and debate. I’d see people tend to have fairly civil discussions. They’d chit chat and joke around in less controversial threads. It wasn’t always rainbow and unicorns of course, but for the most part, the active users played nicely together. We rarely had to bring out formal moderation tools. A simple “Hey, you two, chill out,” was usually enough to settle things. And it was like that for a few years.
As the number of subscribers and active users increased over the years, that sense of community started getting away from us. There was a lot more dogpiling. A lot more incivility. A lot more of the typical rPolitics style low-effort comments. The older active users started dropping off. Reddit tends to lean left, so the left-leaning majority started drowning out the right-leaning users. And my state is solidly right-leaning these days. Not that our sub had to be representative of the state political demographics, of course.
Today, the sub is like under 7,000 users, which is still a smaller subreddit, relatively speaking, but any sense of community is long gone.
I’ll admit, we – and especially me as head mod for most of our existence – could’ve done better to tamp down on that stuff. But I also think that that kinda thing is a natural part of growth of a community. That the sense of community tends to disappear. People can’t individually recognize and emotionally connect with that many people. It’s so easy, especially on the Internet, to simply say something mean-spirited to someone and metaphorically walk away. They may never see or interact with that person again. And if they do, do they really remember who they are?
Obviously my experience is just anecdotal. But it still makes me wonder how Lemmy (and similar sites) will deal with that. How can we maintain a sense of community, while also wanting to allow people in and grow communities?
I think the lack of sense of community occurring from both the increased size of the group and how long it’s been around lead to folks taking it for granted as a resource rather than a personal space they’re invested and involved in.
I think the same thing happened to Reddit overall - it reached a mass of size and establishment whereby the owners/admins were disconnected to the personal, special aspect of it and took it and the people for granted.
I think the federated nature of Lemmy will be beneficial in maintaining the integrity of communities. Unlike reddit, where everyone jumps in the same massive pool together, on Lemmy you have to pass through the filter of having a home instance. Hopefully the home instances/servers can help keep in check the behavior of their own users. After all, if any instance is a haven for toxicity/spam/bad behavior, other instances always have the option to defederate from them. So I think there is a natural incentive for instances to police their own user base, which hopefully translates to better behavior in larger communities as well.
I feel the same. Just releif. Since the redesign and official app, deep down I knew where it was heading. It’s different this time (vs voat) where there is an alternative that has the spirit of why we all enjoyed reddit to begin with and without the commercialism that reddit has become. It’s early, surely lots of challenges ahead for this idea but the decentralized nature I think will be very interesting and will allow for the more mainstream community to create a pleasant experience for those that wish it. Also, Lemmy is need of some technical polishing and ease of use, bug fixes, etc. Instances will also need funding by providing transparency and decent moderation. It’s like reddit but without trying to monetize your content. Lol
It’s all very exciting!