Gonna just say it. As a longtime Lemmy user I’m really not a fan of a lot of the people coming over from Reddit. It’s probably just a small but vocal minority and confirmation bias on my part, but I get the impression that they are trying to turn Lemmy into Reddit, toxicity, entitlement, stupid challenges and all.
When we’ve had two major debacles before Reddit even opened back up, one about “how dare these unpaid admins try to lessen their workload with sign up questions”, and the other about “how dare instances block other instances that are being used as proxies for forwarding spam and bot content into their own instances.” The people from reddit seem to still think they’re on Reddit and any perceived inferiority that Lemmy has compared to Reddit is seen as just as bad as Reddit’s corporate decisions. A few people even trying to go to an instance with the intent of “converting” the existing users who may be socialist or communist, by commenting abuse on their posts of course, just like how they presumably do it on Reddit.
People also seem to be refusing to learn what federation is and how that works, despite it being literally the most important aspects of Lemmy. This is evident in people telling instances who block spam or troll ridden instances to “mind their own business” as if that content doesn’t get forwarded over to and show up on the main pages of other instances, you know, what the fediverse was designed to do.
FYI, Reddit has opened back up. Spez has made it clear that he will never tolerate subreddits shutting down and inconveniencing you again. If you’re so unwilling to even adopt a different mindset and perspective when coming to Lemmy, I think it’s best if you went back. Plenty of us came here because we didn’t want to be on Reddit.
Last thing and a pet peeve of mine: stop calling yourself a refugee. You left a meme website for another meme website because you didn’t like one aspect of the management, the entire decision and migration probably took less than an hour of you sitting in your comfortable house in front of a computer. To compare that to being a refugee speaks volumes about your entitlement and privilege. And it’s especially ironic considering what real refugees go through to save themselves and their families, that you won’t even answer a few registration questions.
People have to come from somewhere. Since Lemmy is “Reddit like” and Reddit is the biggest of its type, well that’s what’s where people are going to come from. I mean if you don’t new get users you’re not going to have a community.
I first took a look at Lemmy some time ago and honestly is was like, “hey man, this party is dead.” It wasn’t until the recent influx of users that Lemmy got active enough to keep my attention.
There’s always going to be clueless people that don’t understand how things work. Rather than complain about them I’d rather try to be positive and help them. Though some people just can’t be helped and you have to let them slide.
Another issue is the more people you get into a community the wider the range of attitudes. You will get people that don’t have nice things to say and there’s no avoiding that. It’s something that has to tolerated. Of course moderation can help a lot, but it’s not going to preclude anybody from ever getting offended.