[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation

More depressing news and Linux enthusiasts.

I miss the content and niche communities of Reddit. Remember you can still be in both as long as you'd like. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Edit: I also am sad that big news events like the Superbowl don't have nice vibrant live threads. Hopefully we have more good content for non Linux peeps.

I like it. It's a bit smaller, but that means I can actually read through most of the comments. It's very slightly left of me, which creates good food for thought as well.

It does run of the issue of having a heavier tankie and "both sides bad" presence, but that's preferable to the alternative. I also like that I recognize some users.

Most importantly? I feel like I'm contributing to a conversation here. On Reddit it was just like shouting my opinion into the void.

Compared to Reddit

• too small. Most communities I’m interested in have too little activity
• more wholesome. More than once I’ve been shocked at answers that were nice instead of snarky
• too many UI bugs and unstable, yet somehow much less buggy and more stable than Reddit ever was
• if you don’t feed the trolls, they go away quickly

Actually, reading these comments, this place is starting to feel like reddit.

There's absolutely nothing more Reddit than people on Reddit complaining about Reddit and how everyone else on Reddit is shitty and unreasonable (without supplying any context).

So yeah, it seems Lemmy is right on track.

I have ended up in a "view all and block" mode rather than a "subscribe to a curated list" mode because of the smaller community. That means I need to block a lot more communities I am not interested in and users that are just... Outside my window of civility or politics that I can handle. Raging tankies, for example.

My impression is it's got promise but there are a lot of issues that aren't being acknowledged.

The way the federation works on Lemmy has some serious flaws that, until they're addressed, Lemmy will never work nearly as well as reddit did at aggregating content and cultivating a shared community.

That said, it's working fairly well for what it is, it just needs to grow.

Maybe it’s because there’s less comments, but it’s felt needlessly hostile. Even a small disagreement leads to this weird ‘well you’re obviously a fucking idiot that has nothing worthwhile to say’. I didn’t have that impression when I joined post API BS, but now that I’ve noticed it it’s hard to ignore. A lot of people just reading what they want to read, and drawing conclusions that don’t relate to the immediate action.

I feel like half of the people on here are 45yo Linux sysadmins, and the other half are Germans

Very few women

I find it more neckbeard than Reddit, and I mean that in the most offensive way. Reddit was big enough that there were lots of places they either didn’t participate or were so rare as to not be annoying. They’re everywhere here on the big, fully federated servers.

By the same token, the semi-federated, more restrictive instances (yes, I mean beehaw) are actually quite nice places and really does feel like a mature place to casually discuss things.

In general, though, lemmy is a desert or ghost town of vibrant niche, non-IT focused communities with regular participation.

It feels like 20 year olds.

It’s a bit like you read a news story about something that happened in Australia, and all the comments are about second amendment rights and the Supreme Court. So pretty much normal Internet.

My overall analysis is positive. Not a full perfect score, but better than Reddit. (Note: ++/+/=/-/-- indicated in comparison with Reddit, not in absolute terms.)

• [++] Migrating to avoid bad admins works great in practice. And it imposes a limit on how shitty any admin team can be, as nobody wants to see mass exodus from their instances.
• [=] Your typical Lemmy moderator is as clueless as the Reddit one on things like transparency and nurturing a good relationship with the other users.
• [--] Mod tools? Which mod tools?
• [-] Overall less content, even if you're in an instance that doesn't defed other instances willy-nilly. It's still enough to keep you entertained across the day, as casually glancing across threads.
• [++] The userbase used to be better, but it's still leagues above the one in Reddit. Your typical Lemmy user seems way more eager to understand what others say, abler to follow a simple reasoning without "I dun unrurrstand" tier idiocy, and less eager to boss you around with uncalled advice.
• [=] Same fucking love for genetic fallacies here as in Reddit.
• [-] Witch hunting is actually worse here than it is in Reddit.
• [-] As well as intrusive political discussion in non-political posts and communities.

I'm still put off by the sheer lack of comments on some communities like the main videos community on lemmy.world, where videos that'll have tens of thousands of comments on Reddit will have 100 votes, but 1-2 comments.

I miss a lot of niche subreddits like /r/HajimeNoIppo, /r/BJJ, and /r/IBS, but I can live without. What would be great is if the big communities had more engagement.

There also seems to be a lot of duplication of communities across instances. While I get the whole decentralised thing, it's pretty pointless to not have a mechanism to merge/join communities across instances that have the same topic. Why should lemmy.world and kbin have two competing pro-wrestling communities when neither gets a lot of posts/comments?

Overall it's ok. The quality of the comments on articles is way better.

The worst part for me as I've detailed in similar threads is that the goldrush to claim all the popular subreddit names makes all those places feel hollow. Most have very little in common with their namesakes and are "anything goes!" communities which leads to homogeny. This is made worse by the internet's apparent need to copy every post from reddit

The other "issue" I have is that with federation comes cross posts and that means seeing the same thing 5 times in a row while browsing All. I don't blame the posters here but it feels like a missed opportunity to properly implement crossposting (like....one post, multiple comment sections)