This will take place ~24 hours from now. Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.
This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @[email protected] , SleeplessOne , or @[email protected] about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
Firstly, thank you so much for providing the means for me to cut Reddit out of my life, I feel like I’m engaging with content in a much more deliberate way since, and honestly it’s been a massive improvement to my mental health in a way that I was completely oblivious to there even being a problem before.
Anyway, the question—regarding things happening entirely out of your control, what would be the best and worst things that could happen to lemmy from your perspectives? And as an extension, what are your goals for it?
The best thing would be if Reddit goes the way of Digg. Seems that will happen sooner or later. The worst thing, maybe if funding stops and we are unable to keep working on Lemmy. But even then admins could still host Lemmy instances.
Well, it has already. The only reason it hasn’t fully imploded & all the users deserted for another site, is because there wasn’t an equivalent place to go to.
They were sort of parallel in development but digg blew up and Reddit didn’t then Digg took a quick hard turn towards enshitification.
Reddit has done the enshitification but like a parasitic infected spider, it’s wandering about and most of the users haven’t realised yet that it’s an empty shell.
It’s slow demise would be better in the long run than a quick collapse like Diggs so it’s now putrid culture is not transmitted with an enmass exodus.
Thx! Its pretty wild to me how much these algorithms, and formats, affect our mental well-being. Those giant US tech companies employing Psychology PhDs to figure out how to keep people angry, engaged, and watching ads, is doing so much harm to so many people, not just in the US, but the whole world, and unfortunately very few countries are doing enough to protect their people from these companies (who also act as surveillance arms of the US state) by blocking facebook and the rest.
I’ve seen two professors I respected turn into angry children on twitter, in a way that would never happen in real life. Reddit, twitter, and Youtube platform reactionary rage-bait to get people trapped in a downward spiral of negativity. These companies do not care how much damage they do; all that matters to them is their profits.
We don’t have those same incentive structures, so we can and should be doing everything we can to make this a positive and enjoyable experience, not about arguing constantly, but about learning, laughing, and understanding.
The best thing would be that we continue our slow and steady growth. Every user that migrates away from big tech to the fediverse is victory, so while we shouldn’t emphasize growth at any cost, its still a good thing when we can get people away from all that negativity.
The biggest concern for me about Lemmy, would be a centralization onto one big server, that tries to replicate all the worst things and behaviors about reddit: its combativeness, xenophobia, bigotry, pro-US-foreign policy agendas, and advertising. There is a noticeable chunk of Lemmy’s users who don’t really see any problem with those things, they just want a reddit that lets them use 3rd party apps again.