I come on here every so often to see what’s going on, and every time I leave disappointed. This is my top 3 grievances at the moment:
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This place feels dead. It’s usually quite, but lately it really feels like a ghost town. Idk what the actual stats say, but I feel like the amount of comments, posts, and variety seem to have gone down quite a bit over the past few months.
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The amount of genuinely hateful content has gone up. I feel like Lemmy as a whole used to have better moderation even just last year compared to now. Every time I get on here, I’m seeing more and more gross content that’s either racist or bigoted or just downright gross. This content doesn’t get taken down even when reported. As horrid as Reddit’s moderation is, it’s still not this bad.
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Outside of the tech communities, there’s no information hygiene anywhere in sight. The news subs publish the most questionable of sources, sometimes outright misinformation… and nobody cares? People don’t criticize weak sources or call out false claims or even value accuracy. I’ve seen multiple instances of users saying something false and getting upvoted for it and a person correcting them getting downvoted for it. Like, what’s even happening?
I don’t know, I feel like when I joined a couple of years ago Lemmy was so much better. It felt more active, the community felt more down to earth, kind, and friendly, and the content was higher in quality. There was much optimism surrounding the Fediverse that’s not there anymore. Now it feels like a more left wing version of Voat than a genuine Reddit alternative. Am I the only one feeling this way or do other people feel the same?
I want to see more micro-communities. I want to read about how passionate people are about niche hobbies or interests that appeal them.
I’m tired of the staple stuff like, we always have to have politics, memes, news, games .etc We already have an abundance of those.
I just came from Reddit, so I am still in my honeymoon period. Feels like a breathe of fresh air to me.
Tech communities make sense. That’s where a lot of it started on other sites (Slashdot, Digg, Reddit) and the first user-base I’d expect to move. The rest will likely stay where they’re “comfortable” until the water gets too hot
I think it’s in a great position and only needs more instances that respect freedom of speech.
Probably my biggest complaint is users saying there should be more censorship. You have the block button, use it.
It’s like Reddit a long, long time ago before it started going to absolute shit.
So I’m liking it.
Personally, I’m experiencing the opposite as far as activity. I joined about 1.5 years ago and there’s definitely been a noticable increase in activity in that time. I’m seeing more upvotes and comments than when I joined.
First of all, no, does not feel dead to me at all.
Secondly, be the change you want to see. You’ve been here 2 years and 8 months and according to your stats you do not even make a comment a day. The more people like this, the more dead the place feels.
OP has commented 800+ times though, which, is modders of magnitude more than 99% of people in the world.
Maybe there was a less spiky way of making your point?
be the change you want to see
I’m absolutely guilty of it too so this as much for me as you but if we want more folks to engage, maybe we ought to try to be kinder to those who actually do.
That’s not how I experience it. A few key blocks and I’m not seeing a bunch of assholery. Content isn’t endless, but there’s almost always something to talk about.
I suspect it depends a great deal on subs, interests, and sort order.
My two main issues are that I don’t want to keep seeing the same post repeated again and again as I scroll, and I want to be able to find a topic and not have to wrestle with all the different communities around the same thing. I just search for a simple topic and often there’s 20 with the same name and I have to find the one that everyone’s using.
There are too many unhinged nut jobs who are only here to cause drama and stir controversy, and way too much emphasis on their pet issues. They suck and if you get in their cross hairs they will harass you for days due to their intensive sense of personal victimhood and moral righteousness.
I want more reasonable laid back people with interesting things to say who are decent to each other. But it doesn’t seem like the numbers of those folks are growing, more just a consistent number who probably have massive block lists or have de-federated from the problematic/extremist instances.
There is also a new influx of really really dumb people who spam stupid content, who on the surface seem to be teenagers? I don’t know what is up with that. I have blocked a bunch of accounts that are doing this, who ask this community and others like it, really dumb stuff like ‘why doesn’t my poop smell?’ 6x a day.
I basically feel the same. Not sure if it’s just a side effect of how scary things are in the world right now, but I feel like the amount of escapist content has dropped a lot lately. By escapist I mean enjoyable things that aren’t focused on the real issues of the day. We all need that kind of thing to stay sane, and it’s in shorter and shorter supply on here I find.
The amount of politics leaking into every sub is also increasing rapidly it feels like. I block accounts that only ever post doom scroll content, but some of the bigger meme/entertainment posters have also started to mix in more politics and doom scroll lately.
I’d love to see more regular people on here with diverse interests, but I imagine it’s not going to increase due to the prevailing types of posts these days. I’ve honestly considered stepping away from here myself, but I don’t have another place in mind to go to yet.
It’s an affect of people’s warped social media brains that think nobody else can be different than them or think different than them. Who read everything through a distorted lens due to their anger issues.
I mean, I can’t even say ‘The Jewish population of the USA is 7.5 million’. Without random people telling me that is anti-semantic, and others saying it’s pro-genocide, and both groups reporting the comment until it gets removed. That’s how messed up these folks are, that they can’t even allow statements of basic facts.
Or they will say it’s ‘fake’ or ‘conspiracy’ information… lol
It’s an affect of people’s warped social media brains that think nobody else can be different than them or think different than them. Who read everything through a distorted lens due to their anger issues.
The bad news is this predates social media. The even worse news is social media makes it louder.
Eh, in my 20s in the 2000s it was surprisingly chill in my life experience. People didn’t really care about politics or your skin color or any of the shit they freak out about today. But it was brief and it came roaring back in the mid 2010s.
The oligarchs freaked the fuck out after OWS and ruined everything with an insane brainwashing campaign.
I think it’s a reaction to feelings of powerlessness and frustration at the world. Social media is an easy way to get that energy out, even if it’s a very toxic way of doing it.
Major issues and inequality aren’t new, but our ability to get a 24/7 fire hose of info about it is. I don’t think anyone’s figured out how to healthily handle it yet. Consuming it all the time destroys our mental, but hiding under a rock isn’t great either I feel. I’ve been struggling to find that balance more and more these days.
the irony is you can 24/7 fill your life with stuff that isn’t that, but people choose to do so.
Just like you can be informed with a quick google query, but people totally ignore that option and embrace ignorance.
I think you’re right, but it’s also true that it’s much easier to find the bad stuff. News in general reports bad news much much more frequently than good news, even though good news is happening too.
There’s a newsletter I subscribe to called Fix the News that only reports good news, and it’s kind of startling how major some of the stuff on there is each edition, things I don’t hear about at all outside of it.
So I think you’re right that people should try and seek out better stuff, but also I have a lot of empathy for not doing so because the machine wants us to be sad and hopeless, and you really have to try to avoid that trap.
It’s fine. There’s enough activity to keep me in content (as much as I need content), and I don’t see the hate as much as you report.
The only thing wrong with it from my perspective is that Trump and American politics is poisoning it, but they’re poisoning the entire world so…
It’s not bad! But it requires a learning curve to actually find stuff vs having the algorithm find stuff for you.
But without active community posts and stuff, it does feel more slower paced. But the price of no corporations and ad free experience is hard to beat.
I’m surprised there aren’t more links to substacks. I don’t expect lemmy to be a news aggregator but to be more like a source of opinions instead.
Cant expect a reddit alternative without corporate interests involved.
This place feels dead. It’s usually quite, but lately it really feels like a ghost town.
The place has a much smaller population, of which an even tinier amount is active. So there is much less content published. One solution is to participate more but too few people seem willing to do it. An other solution would be to make the space more attractive to more users but, like you noticed…
The amount of genuinely hateful content has gone up.
I’ve been saying it since I first joined the Fediverse: default experience is… trash, unless you’re looking for some echo chamber for your pre-existing biases that is. Some may enjoy that experience, I certainly did not, and most people won’t either.
- New/default experience should be an empty feed, with a few limited broad suggestions allowing them to slowly get in whatever they’re interested and willing to read (even trash content if that’s their thing).
- Learning to use the filtering tools is key and should be encouraged.
Personally, I have had a real nice and pleasant experience browsing Piefed because I learned to use those tools: 1) limiting my home page to ‘Subscribed’ only (filtering out all political/memes/low effort content, because 2) I carefully select the communities I’m subscribed to, 3) Piefed making it so simple to filter out keywords and annoying users alike, I never hesitate to use that and, no, I don’t care to block them even if we’re already short on users: my time is too precious to waste it with serial haters and complainers, or self-proclaimed white knights for such or such ‘noble cause’.
Outside of the tech communities, there’s no information hygiene anywhere in sight.
I’ve never seen much of any kind of (an information) hygiene, anywhere online. Certainly not on Reddit… save on very few selected subs… exactly like I can see here.
But once again, one can easily filter the worst offenders in a matter of seconds. Then, it’s up to anyone to stick to it: once I blocked them, I certainly don’t ‘check from time to time’ to see if they’re getting any better. I let them play in their shit pool to their heart’s content, throwing more of it at one another: it doesn’t concern me anymore. And for that I must say I quite like the filtering tools piefed gives us.
the community felt more down to earth, kind, and friendly,
It depends where you look at. When I joined (two or three years ago? I was on Lemmy, before switching to Piefed) the amount of sheer hate that was expressed and that I witnessed was… disturbing, to say the least. I don’t think it has become worse but I could not tell since I learned to filter the sources out.
I wish for the devs to more seriously consider the out of the box experience for a new user and, maybe, consider that not all new users will share their political/personal/philosophical values or biases. I certainly don’t agree with many of the ideas I can see expressed around here, but I’m also old enough to be fine with people having different opinions, and patient enough to see if I can make the tool work more like I want it to and reduce what I consider noise.
edit: typos.
Genuine question: is there a moderation or federation difference between Lemmy and PieFed? Because I don’t feel like Lemmy is dead or racist. Idk maybe I just blocked a bunch of communities and forgot. I think it probably because discuss.online is doing it right.
Yes there is. Check this out - https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
It’s up to the instance admins to make use of those but I certainly have on https://piefed.social/. I have no qualms about banning negative, bad-faith or douchy losers to save people from blocking them. And if a community is bad enough, I’ll ban the whole community.
Also by deciding what to include in the starter-packs used during onboarding the admin can encourage people to join good communities while leaving toxic ones harder to find.
Thousands of disinfo websites are blocked out of the box and I’ve manually added warnings onto dozens more that are frequently posted on Lemmy.
There’s more, way more. But you get the idea.
Will I get a warning if I mention the Hannibal Directive?
I have no qualms about banning negative, bad-faith or douchy losers to save people from blocking them. And if a community is bad enough, I’ll ban the whole community.
This is excellent. I’ve never understood the attitude that people should tolerate arseholes, because of what, free speech? Nah, bugger off with that silliness. I’ve moderated some places over the years and I’ve been told that I ban people too easily, but I’ve also been told how nice and wholesome the places were. Its pretty clear to me that having a low tolerance to arseholes is positive for the community.
Because people are different and enjoy different things.
I like to ride my bike. Lots of people think I’m an asshole for doing that. I don’t drive around in a giant 3 row SUV, I think people who do that are assholes.
Who is is positive/negative in this dispute? Nobody, it’s just two opposing viewpoints that are mutually hostile.
Lots of people will think your an asshole for doing or thinking or talking differently than they do. Personally I find people who are ‘nice and wholesome’ to be really offputting and downright creepy, and largely a facade in my life experience, and if you look beyond the facade a lot of ‘wholesome’ people are anything but.
If I were a moderator and saw someone call you an asshole for riding bikes, I’d ban that person. They can argue that cars are better, bicycling is stupid but if they attack you personally, they are getting a ban.
Same goes for you, if you call someone an asshole for driving a car, I don’t need that in my space either. You can tell them why you think its not good to drive that car, but just calling them an asshole for driving a car is not good.
However, if they are being an asshole about it and you call them an asshole. Thats fine.
this is an interesting point, I think my /all was much better before cm0002 made an account on my instance an pulled in a lot of marginal communities
discuss.online is doing it right. There is a significant overlap between discuss.online and lemmy.world’s admin teams, and I generally think they handle it about as well as could be expected of a general-purpose instance of their scale.
As for piefed, I think the primary things that help users filter their experience are the additional blocks that are at their disposal; blocking communities with a word in their name, blocking posts that match keywords, blocking posts that point to certain domains, etc. However, it can only help if a user actually goes through the effort of setting them up.
Genuine question: is there a moderation or federation difference between Lemmy and PieFed?
I could not tell. For me Piefed is just an entry point to the Fediverse, the same Fediverse with the same users we’re all part of. What I can say is that, back then at least, Piefed seemed more intuitive to use the way I wanted to.
Because I don’t feel like Lemmy is dead or racist.
I don’t either. Like I said, I filter out the noise and crap and have a nice experience. The sad thing being that I first had to learn to filter that noise out which, based on what I can hear, does turn off quite a few new users.
My issue is not just with racists or the right, or the fascists (if that was what you meant to say). I consider the most excited leftists around here at least as toxic (and stupid), and as… fascists, btw. No matter how hard some are trying to convince us of the contrary, fascism was never limited to right/racism. And fascism should always be opposed, no matter the flag its waving.
Sounds like you should adjust your subscriptions?
I see this thread has many people saying that they don’t see a problem and it must be because of the local and personal blocklists.
I see comments saying it’s because they are using Lemmy or Piefed.
I’ve blocked nothing. I scroll through /c/all every day and I don’t feel like there is a hate or dodgy content problem.
Likewise. I think people are forgetting what it was like on reddit. Shits kind of popping here now and running into the odd tankie or chudd is nothing like having them in a full brigade or admin team like reddit
I’ve actually been having a pretty good time lately. I like that the communities are smaller and more personal (especially compared to coming from reddit where some of the communities I was in were massive).
