…sometimes it does feel like this.
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Hey, we left cause of the enshitification of Reddit itself, toxicity of the users was always part of the package deal.
As a Reddit refugee myself,I can’t disagree with that. But I will clarify that there’s generally two kinds of Reddit Refugees, though:
- The kind that got fed up with Reddit and wants to be part of something better
- The people who were banned from Reddit and think this is some kind of safe haven to continue acting on their worst impulses that got them banned elsewhere.
The meme is largely referencing the latter.
to continue acting on their worst impulses
I feel seen.
As do I, mind you my worse impulses are just me being bloodthirsty. But John Brown was also somewhat bloodthirsty and I dont see anyone of deserving of life criticizijg him.
Idk who downvoted that initially for it’s just a little random moment to share that. Probably, it was them being impulsive too.
It’s not a big part of me, but I struggle to contain critique of something and it leads to both actual fixes\solutions for some things and bad things happening to me for speaking out in harsh and uncultured manner.
I hope I’m in the first category. This place has less people but better engagement.
You should know what category you fall into… It’s not like getting banned and going somewhere else is an event chain you wouldn’t know about.
I came because Reddit’s a shitty company and due to the ban of 3rd party apps. Which group am I?
Mine apparently. Sup, mate!
Samesies. Ex 13-year account and a Digg refugee before that. Very new here.
Got along for a while by running a zombie 3rd party app and decided to bail before they ruined that too.
Much to learn.
Welcome Mate! Beside the search engine you can check for communities and instances on these sites:
https://lemmyverse.net/communities
https://join-lemmy.org/instances
https://fedidb.org/popular-fediverse-accounts
https://www.quippd.com/writing/2023/06/15/unofficial-subreddit-migration-list-lemmy-kbin-etc.html
https://fediverse.observer/list
Guide to Finding Lemmy Communities (Subreddits)
Check my account if you like horror stuff ✌️
Cheers, appreciate it!
Meh. Maybe I’m just not in the wrong corners of the Lemmy fediverse, but honestly I’m not really seeing very many of the banned finding their way here. That was a huge problem in the cesspools like Voat, but for whatever reason it seems like Lemmy has mostly been spared, in my limited experience at least.
That said, yeah there’s a fair amount of blunt talking and general mild misanthropy, but frankly I almost welcome that as a change from the overmoderated sterility of corporate spaces like Reddit which have to think in terms of advertiser-friendliness.
Have you ever blocked anyone at all? Or a community, or perhaps your feed is always set to Subscribed? Most of us readily forget what Lemmy looks like to a day-1 account. It takes a bit of effort to clean it up, and if they don’t see the value in remaining then they won’t put in that effort to learn, rather than simply leave.
I have 9 users blocked, 10 communities blocked (mostly based on taste, not due to toxicity though), and 0 blocked instances.
Rawdogging Lemmy without blocking hexbear and the .ml instances… good luck!
You know, I’m well aware of their reputations and I’ve had a small number of encounters with users from those instances that I’ll charitably leave at “bad faith,” but by and large I don’t really bump into communities hosted on their instances or see overtly bad behavior from their users often.
I’m not trying to defend them or say it doesn’t happen (largely because frankly, I just don’t care one way or the other), but I can only be honest and speak to my individual experience.
That’s great! I really hope the fediverse can replace corporate slop social media, and I think people coming here and not getting turned off by those bad instances is key.
Yes exactly. When reddit pulled that api pricing shit, I just got up and left. I came here expecting shitposts, braindead “hot” takes, piss-poor reading comprehension, and americans acting like they’re the only country in the world. I got exactly what I expected and I couldn’t be more satisfied, 10/10 would nuke my reddit account again.
Don’t you mean 5/7?
They’ve started putting multiple adds in the middle of comment sections now
Toxic users lead to greater engagement and line go up.
You’ll find that anywhere. Not just on the Internet, either. Literally, everywhere.
High school never ends.
True, but Reddit had the right conditions for toxicity to grow and begin to run rampant. Lemmy, with its decentralized nature, should limit the spread of any toxic communities.
I dont think it will limmits it at all it will spread so u end uo wirh multiple communities for the same thibg with different flavours of toxicity. We already have that with world news ie the .ml flavour of toxicity vs the other instances with differing flavours
The .ml situation predates the whole reddit thing, no?
Correct
You should check out Facebook, Twitter, IRC, NextDoor, 4chan, 9gag, or any other Internet forum (including comment sections of news articles). Reddit does not hold exclusive rights to any “right conditions for toxicity to grow”.
Yeah, there’s lots of places with rampant toxicity. I was just comparing reddit and lemmy, and I consider the Federated nature of lemmy to help prevent (not necessarily stop) toxicity from growing.
I’m not an expert on this whole Federated thing, but to me, it sounds like if one community is having problems with another, they can just disassociate and not have to deal with it anymore.
I think the difficulty will be the slippery and nebulous definition of “toxic”
It’s more easily expressed when people don’t have to directly face the sensitivity of the other humans. For example, from inside a car, in an online competitive game or an online forum.
looks at pot plant
😠
Yea no. Try having a nuanced discussion on any (insert heated topic here) on Lemmy and watch the labels fly out faster than the ejaculate of a post pubescent 15 year old.
Don’t worry. We’ll make butter milk out of it lol
It seriously cannot get any worse. Bring on users from any platform. Lemmy sucks and i thank the mods of smaller subs that post diligently about enthusiast topics to add content that isnt dystopian sad sack circlejerk
Honestly I’d rather be called a lib tankie 100x than get banned because I said the wrong thing to an actual fascist. Leftists infight, none of us are above that, so one always has to remember that the vegan prick you’re arguing with will still eat the rich with you.
I think I agree but part of me wonders when the purity testing actually stops…
Like we’ll be eating some rich people and suddenly the rich guy I’m eating is not lefty halal because they aren’t organic or grass fed or some shit.
most of the toxicity I’ve experienced on lemmy has been from established users so idk… but I should add that it’s way less toxic than reddit so far
It’s gotten pretty bad on the politics front lately. It’s like an entirely different community now compared to last year
I hope it dies down after the election but I’m not getting hopes up
The election was going to make the Russian bots start shit stirring, but what really got Lemmings at each others’ throats was the Palestinian genocide.
It kinda depends on the outcome. If Trump wins it’ll get substantially worse.
I make a point to just not open any thread that mentions US Politics.
Me trying to explain that I couldn’t care less about how much they hate fascism:
Impossible
Couldn’t
Overall it’s less toxic than Reddit, as evidenced by how many people were lurkers there but here actually feel comfortable enough to open up and contribute.
I note that you are on Lemmy.World, which blocks some of the most well-known trolling instances. That indeeds helps a ton, though means that the experiences of someone who joined e.g. lemm.ee instead are going to be quite different.
Blocking is key. Once I started blocking some communities, my Lemmy experience got a lot better.
It’s just less people. People will always be people wtv they are.
Less focus by Russian bot farms to steer the discussion.
Indeed, fuck Russia.
Well, most users here are former/current Reddit users, but somehow a lot of them think that it’s less toxic here.
It’s worth noting that some users might be attracted to Lemmy due to its smaller, more niche communities and the sense of belonging that comes with being part of a smaller, specialized group. Others might be drawn to Lemmy’s technical aspects, such as its use of ActivityPub and its potential for customization and modification.
Some users might also be deterred from Lemmy, but please do not let this distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.
I haven’t seen this shit in years. I used to browse reddit and that shit would always crack me up. This one time I was browsing at like 3AM and everyone was asleep. I laughed so hard I woke my little brother up. My dad came out of his room super pissed off. He just glared at me and walked straight out to the garage. When he came back he beat living shit out of me with a set jumper cables. Anyway, I stopped browsing reddit late at night after that.
Found you Roger Simon.
Thanks for the blast from the past lol.
Fucking hell that escalated quickly
sniff… the good ol’ Lemmy switcheroo
It took me a couple months to fully leave years of bad reddit habits behind. I didn’t realize how deeply ingrained they’d become. The toxicity had gradually snuck up on me.
this
Shit! Still happening to me.
Yeah, well, fuck you too.
Aww man, it’s still happening to me!
(this is, itself, a redditism)
As you see, we’re among grownups, you can say fuck.
To preface this I’m a lurker myself. I wonder what bad habits it left behind in you? After the whole API and 3rd Party Apps fiasco I just left it behind. But I wouldn’t say that I took the toxicity over from it to Lemmy. Especially wondering what exactly is ingrained in your soul that’s left behind from it. As far I know I’m still the same but as I’ve told just mostly lurking so don’t think it had much as an influence on me except the doom scrolling.
Defensiveness. Overexplaining myself because I didn’t expect people to give me the benefit of the doubt, and I knew that if I left any room for interpretation, people would assume the worst version possible. (I didn’t know what “sealioning” was.)
It’s important to remember that this had happened slowly, over a period of years. If it had been as bad as it is now back when I first signed up, I wouldn’t have put up with it. Initially, reddit just seemed like a bunch of normal (but sometimes weird) people. It wasn’t until I discovered Lemmy that I realized I wasn’t being myself, and that every time I posted, in the back of my mind, I was expecting the worst.
Good riddance.
Y’know, now that you mention it, the sealioning behaviour I’d been conditioned to expect is a big reason for why I spend so much time writing my comments and adding qualifying statements.
Well, it hasn’t been entirely bad. Constantly reminding myself to add qualifying statements is something I don’t miss, but rewriting my comments for improved clarity is good. It’s easy to forget that English isn’t the first language of many Lemmy users, so I’m in favor of being more specific about the subject, instead of using words like “they” or “it” too much.
Also, there’s a good chance that people are reading my comments while they’re on the toilet or watching TV. Maybe they’re not paying 100% attention lol. A little extra specificity doesn’t hurt!
Happens to the best of us.
We should come up with a detox program
I wonder how many go back when they don’t see a karma score here.
If that’s all it takes to drive them away, then we’re probably better off without them. We don’t need people who post with the sole purpose of “earning” karma.
imagine an ai that takes you through your own post history like a therapist. like some moderator can sentence you to ai therapy before you are unbanned.
It all started back in 1998, when the Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell in a Cell, and plummeted 16 feet through an announcers table.
Hopefully the absence of an algorithm pushing engagement at all costs will dispel some of it.
Would you like to be the moderator of Pyongyang?
You just got banned from EU
We often talk about toxic newbies, but sometimes we don’t pay enough attention to how we ourselves changed as a result. Make them feel welcome, and see how much Lemmy changes back.
If you (yes, you, reader) are new to Lemmy, have my wholehearted “Welcome”! Hugs on demand, cookies right there, make yourself comfy :)
Avoid politics-oriented communities unless toxicity is your thing. Start with any instance (most likely you chose lemmy.world as your starting point?), but explore others and what they have to offer. You can even be on several of them if that’s your thing! Enjoy!
I was here 2y before the exodus, it’s absolutely not just the newbies. Maybe some other -ies…
I for one welcome the shit out of the newbies, I’m thankful to have them and want more, and for them to bring their niche interests with them. They help filter some of the toxicity out.
yay cookie, thanks, i moved away because anytime i asked a question on any reddit subreddit by posting the question (as i should) it got spam downvoted to the point i became unable to make posts anywhere due to “low karma” : , ) (it was just a basic question and every comment under it and the post got spam downvoted for nor reason)
Luckily, here, while admins can see how many up- and downvotes you have, it doesn’t influence anything, and that’s by design; besides, it’s unlikely that any proper implementation of karma system is possible in a federated network for individual users.
I think any real user from Reddit that isn’t a bot is an asset these days. I hate Reddit as much as the next person, but giving people shit for coming from there to here feels hypocritical.
I think both can be true tbh. I welcome everyone from reddit and encourage us to grow. I also will say leave toxicity at the door, or sub to other instances/communities that enjoy it.
A lot of users here are not Reddit refugees, they are Reddit rejects.
You seem to forget that reddit mods are nobodies, and have been compromised by for-profit and psychological warfare interests for over a decade.
I was on Reddit for 5 years before I ever got banned. I spread usage among 20 accounts since ~2010, mainly to group topics. Got banned from subs at least 10-20 times since 2015. Only a few were fair, where I was asking for it, just drunk or trying to be a dick. The rest were from conservative subs, and half of those were pre-emptive bans before I’d ever posted, commented, or referenced them — the snowflakes pre-banned me for wrong think, for calling out conservatism from afar.
So to me, it’s far more concerning if you’ve been on Reddit in the last decade and haven’t been “rejected” by fascist mods at least a few times. It’s been a battlefield of bad-faithers for most of its existence.
NOTE: most lemmy mods are no different, and are far more compromised than early Reddit. Many are tankie keyword-squatters building their own propaganda networks from Reddits exodus.
Feddit.uk admins are pretty sound fwiw.
Bro I’m not toxic fuck you
Fight me
Imma put my foot up yer turd pocket
Stop flirting with me
Yeah? Yeah? I can take you on! 👊
Block instance and block community buttons are your friends.
This will probably become an ever-worsening problem because there’s no way to ban anyone from the fediverse entirely. We might someday need something like adblock or spam filters to reduce noise.
There’s an xkcd for that.:-)
I ended up getting permabanned from reddit for saying that Lebanese people don’t blame all their problems on Israel, just the the problems they do deserve blame for.
I got banned a few years ago for criticising Israel’s genocidal rhetoric.
Are we growing though?
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats shows MAU (monthly active users) decreasing - we are now at 43k, last month was 45k, the month before 47k, etc. Total servers also decreasing - now 540, was 552, 579, etc. Overall posts and comments are slightly up though - so we’re seeing increased activity from fewer users, rather than an increase in actual users. One could argue whether we’re truly “decreasing” vs. merely flat, but either way I don’t see us increasing.
And 3 of those users are myself, all active and only 2 of which I had a week ago, speaking to how alts are most definitely a thing. Also, federation issues especially staying in sync with Lemmy.World may be causing people to shift instances (or to leave entirely?). If so that would be a good thing bc 0.19.6 promises to help address that. (Although in my case, I wanted an instance that allows custom blocks of any instance I choose without needing to rely on an admin team, and that isn’t dependent upon the Lemmy codebase.)
For one thing, people might be turning away due to the upcoming USA election, in which case depending on who survives that, they could return? But every person I’ve ever recommended to check out Lemmy has looked at me in disgust and actively chided me for having recommended it when they see some of the political extremism here. e.g.:
Whenever I go looking for examples of such I usually find it in 0-60 seconds, by going to Lemmy.ml and browsing by Local.
Your instance is doing wonderful work keeping such out - I wonder if that image will even render for you:-). But overall, across the wide Fediverse, people are not willing to put up with such, and seem to be leaving us overall rather than find some other way to deal with whatever it is that was bugging them.
And with such trends, and the way we treat normies, I don’t see us ever going mainstream. Maybe PieFed and Sublinks, along with Mbin and ofc Tesseract on e.g. dubvee.org will help turn that around? That would be so nice?:-)
Btw what will we call ourselves then, if it does - will we still be “Lemmy”/Lemmings, or just general Fedizens? Either way there’s great hope for the future, but also a lot of work to do to reach that point.
I wasn’t really looking at the MAU stats when I made this; it just felt like it’s been more actively lately (both good and bad). Unfortunate the numbers are actually trending downward.
For one thing, people might be turning away due to the upcoming USA election
Possibly. I’ve gone into self-imposed
socialmedia blackouts during election season many a time. Sometimes you just need a break.Whenever I go looking for examples of such I usually find it in 0-60 seconds, by going to Lemmy.ml and browsing by Local … people are not willing to put up with such, and seem to be leaving us
Yeah. I have felt for a while that
mlbeing the official or at least de facto flagship instance is doing more harm than good. I’m not going to tell them how to run their instance, but I am sad and frustrated that it seems to turn so many people away under the impression the whole fediverse is like that.I’m cool with Fedizens 😀.
Yeah like to label it as “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers” seems not entirely… complete in its description.
Blaze is doing amazing work advocating for Lemmy on r/RedditAlternatives etc., and these days recommends Lemm.ee, one of the largest instances that also defederates from virtually nothing so that very little to no content is missed by the user. On the other hand, some content users very much would rather have been presented to them as opt-in rather than have to opt-out of it. i.e. if one of the major things that instance does is to make fun of the capitalist democratic Western society, then it is perhaps understandable if - regardless of truth or falsehood - people, especially normies, living inside of that same capitalist democratic Western society do not appreciate the jokes? Especially those calling for literal murder, or when an admin there tells someone to kill themselves. Duh, of course people are going to be turned away by such.
At this point it’s like a rite of passage, to learn how to become a responsible Fedizen: learn who and how to block (not necessarily in that order:-).
We’re doing our part!
And that’s important, plus all that anyone can ever do:-).
In fairness, there’s still total net growth of some 6000 MAU since February
How do you see the past numbers there though, without conflating the Mastodon users that says that we have ~1 million MAUs?
This one likewise says 43k MAUs right now, though I don’t recall how many we had in February. The other site only shows as far back as June, 48k MAUs. So that’s a drop of 5k MAUs since June.
Assuming the numbers are comparable across the two sites like that - and they seem to agree as far as we can tell - it looks like the numbers went up sometime between February and June, but since then we’ve lost almost all that we gained.
i.e., the Reddit drama may have caused people to come check us out, but then the largest majority of people left, likely going right back to Reddit. Possibly bc of the deep (niche) content stores that they still have - e.g. if everyone else uses Windows, it’s just easier for you to use it too, and it takes a special mindset to buck that trend.:-)
The link should take you to the Lemmy page.
Some ~30% net MAU growth since December of last year is nothing to sniff at.
i.e., the Reddit drama may have caused people to come check us out, but then the largest majority of people left, likely going right back to Reddit. Possibly bc of the deep (niche) content stores that they still have - e.g. if everyone else uses Windows, it’s just easier for you to use it too, and it takes a special mindset to buck that trend.:-)
Most people who left from Reddit after The Great Exodus did so in the first 3-4 months, though.
Thanks, that longer view does change the narrative a bit. Yeah the Rexodus was the big influx, maybe if they finally kill off old-reddit there could be another but who knows. Then again in the OP it describes “growing”, whereas the reality seems more like at one point almost a year ago we grew, especially that sharp spike between February and March, but ever since and currently we are actively shrinking. I guess both are true, depending on whether you take the yearly or half-yearly POV.
Yeah, there’s definitely no explosive growth currently. Might be that some communities here are getting more ‘solid’, though, and feel more active.
“More activity” rather than “more users” - yeah, not explosive but definitely growth I like how you phrased that. I think it means that niche interests are not more likely to happen - that needs more users in particular - but browsing here may be more enjoyable with the higher level of engagement.
So denouncing genocide is now “political extremism”? If posts like that are scaring people away, that’s good, we don’t need them here.
don’t offend the majority if you want guests to stick around. you can denounce genocide without convicting all of western civilization.
Exactly. The whole “everything the other side does is evil while my side can do no wrong btw” isn’t helpful or going to lead to any change at all. Worse, these attempts to “control the conversation” would (if paid attention to) actually lead to increasing those evil deeds, bc leopards always eat people’s faces off aka reveale their true spots… eventually. e.g. blaming liberals for genocide will only lead to Republicans winning who have actively and outright stated that they will do even more genocide, plus far more than that besides.
And I don’t blame normies - who wants to join a place that features such “alternative facts” and “alternative logic” on a daily basis? Yes you can go to some trouble to opt-out, but not easily, and they don’t know how, or even that it’s possible to do so.
None of the west’s enemies are afforded the same generosity. Maybe we don’t want the majority of guests to be a bunch of mindless parrots who only care about human rights when mainstream media from “their side” tell them to care (as an excuse to project power globally). It ends up permeating all discussions, even ones that aren’t directly about politics and you end up building an echo chamber. It shapes how you see the world, for example, you took a post talking specifically about western leadership to be about “convicting all of western civilization” as if the victim of the genocide is actually the west.
I’m curious, where exactly do you draw the line with your reasoning? You can denounce dumping oil into the ocean without convicting all of Shell? You can denounce the invasion of Crimea without convicting all of the Russian military? You can denounce murder without convicting all murders? Why not skip this alltogether and denounce all bad things without convicting all good things, that makes the game of ethics a whole lot easier.
“western civilization” is not a majority. It’s a minority who has been dominating the discussion for way too long, and people are tired of listening to the hypocrisy.
Tact for Propagandaist Dummies is not a book I’m inspired to devote investing time into.
It’s easy to forget how bad it can get.
One day I wandered into /r/kotakuinaction over some linked comment on the Tomb Raider animation, and the Fallout TV series, and… yeah. I remembered.
And that’s a pretty mild example.
